I’m as enraptured by the US presidential lottery as the next red blooded European (yes, we’re watching, don’t stuff it up), but I reserve my most fevered adulation for FiveThirtyEight.com. It’s the election poll aggregation, analysis and discussion blog to end all election poll aggregation, analysis and discussion blogs.

Oh dear god(s), is it good. The discussion of the latest polls has brains, which is a nice change from the non-analysis of most regular news outlets; e.g. from today:

The best number for McCain comes from the daily sample in the Research 2000 tracking poll, which showed McCain down by just 6 points in interviewing conducted yesterday. I say ‘just’ because the R2K poll has generally had pretty good numbers for Obama and it’s been a couple of weeks since McCain was as close as 6 points. Small sample size caveats apply.

There are also summaries of polls, simulations of election outcomes and probabilities of Obama or McCain wins. Currently FiveThirtyEight.com has the election going to Obama in 94.3% of simulations; it hardly seems possible that McCain’s chances are only about 1-in-20, but what do I know? Another brilliant regular feature is the “On the Road” series of posts about each of the states and the activities of the candidates campaigns in each state. The small but detectable pro-Obama bias doesn’t hurt, and if it’s not for you then at least it doesn’t obviously creep into their poll analysis.

I’ve got FiveThirtyEight.com in my news aggregator and will be watching it like a hawk ’til November 4, and probably a while longer.