shouting loudly

Last night, a friend of mine claimed that blogs have no redeeming value. (He’d had a few beers, so the claim was a bit less, um, polite and articulate; he didn’t know I’m a blogger, so it may have been a good thing I was sober.)

While I’ll grant that many blogs do not have much to say, a good many do, and the very exceptional blogs break news stories by original reporting. Some bloggers actually go out into the field and conduct interviews, take pictures, and make observations. Others break stories by sifting through mountains of data (government documents, corporate reports, congressional hearings, etc.) for otherwise unseen patterns or unexpected tidbits.

FiveThirtyEight.com is the best campaign blog of the season, and it’s because they’ve done an outstanding job of both sifting through mountains of data (polls and demographic variables) and hitting the road to do original reporting. While the statistical analysis is what brought most of the readers to fivethirtyeight, the original reporting from the field is perhaps even more valuable.

Nate Silver, the number-crunching genius who built his reputation on inventive work with Baseball Prospectus, got millions of political junkies hooked with his superior statistical analysis–complete with “win percentages” based on ten thousand daily election simulations. While most news outlets will report their own episodic or tracking poll results, or cherry pick results based on their news value (often placing undue emphasis on outliers), Silver’s steady hand combines demographic data with a thoughtful, detailed poll of polls, at both the state and the national level, to give readers a solid understanding of the state of the election.

The addition of demographic data to the soup has made the site somewhat more sophisticated than simple poll-of-polls sites like Pollster and RealClearPolitics. The “win percentage” numbers are also quite helpful, providing a realistic understanding of what it really means to have an average polling lead of, say, 1.4% in North Carolina (Obama wins 65% of simulations), or a 4.9% lead in Georgia (McCain wins 91%). Silver also deserves much credit for total transparency as to his methods.

While Silver’s number-crunching has been the very best of the season, perhaps the site’s most important contribution has come in the site’s original on-the-ground reporting of both presidential campaigns’ ground games. It doesn’t take a statistical genius–indeed, it takes no genius at all–to know that the ground games make all the difference in close elections.

Here, 538′s On the Road series has been just about the only game in town. Reporter Sean Quinn and photographer Brett Marty simply got in a car and drove across the country, hitting swing state after swing state.

The result? Well, they’ve reported on explosive excitement and volunteer efforts at every Obama field office across the country. And in contrast:

But the other story, the story on which we’ve had a running eight-week exclusive in 36 separate On the Road pieces and counting, is that John McCain’s ground campaign is just not happening. It hasn’t been happening, without Sarah Palin there might be four or five volunteers across the entire nation left, and now, per Mosk’s piece at WaPo, it looks like it will be happening even less.

That a 3-person blog that didn’t exist until this March has this exclusive is amazing–and outrageous. It’s amazing that such a small operation can provide such important insights into what may be the story of the presidential election–the complete reversal of the major parties’ abilities to mobilize supporters on the ground. And it’s outrageous that not a single mainstream news outlet has covered this story, even when it’s been handed to them on a Silver platter. (Wokka.)

If that doesn’t illustrate the power of blogging–the awesome reporting and analysis that occasionally sprouts forth from motivated outsiders–then I don’t know what could.