Last cycle, the Swing State Project kicked off what seemed at the time to be an ambitious project: creating a community-powered wiki to track the various comings and goings of incumbents and candidates for 2008’s congressional and gubernatorial elections. The wiki we produced turned out to be a great success thanks to the contributions by members of the SSP community and other blogs around the ‘net (especially Daily Kos). As the cycle progressed, it became clear that there was no greater resource for candidate tracking than the 2008 Race Tracker wiki.
After a few months of hard work, I’m very pleased to announce that the RaceTracker project is making a return for the 2010 cycle — but this time it’s bigger, badder, and better than ever. Thanks to the generosity and technical support of the Sunlight Foundation’s OpenCongress.org team, the RaceTracker project has a new home, a new look, and a big upgrade in terms of its functionality and user friendliness.
Over at OpenCongress, Conor has more:
RaceTracker is the next-generation version of the SwingStateProject’s 2008 RaceTracker and Congresspedia’s WikiTheVote project. We’re taking a cue from Joe Friday and keeping it a “just the facts” operation so its non-partisan nature is clear, regardless of the partisan motivations a participant might have in watching any particular race. Besides, we’re practicing transparency at home by requiring each piece of information to be referenced to an outside source, so there’s no need to take the word of “some guy on the Internet;” anyone can join the wiki community in checking the facts of each submission.
RaceTracker will be your one-stop source for information on all 435 House races, every Senate seat, and every gubernatorial contest in the country. We’ve already filled in the basics for each race (see IL-Sen Class III and CO-04 for good examples), but it’s up to you to keep everything up to date (and, judging by how well the RaceTracker performed last cycle, I know you guys are more than up to the challenge).
So please, go over to the new and improved RaceTracker wiki now, sign up for an account, and get busy adding what you know to our master database. After you’ve signed up for an account, click on the Edit With Form tab on each race page for the smoothest editing experience. More information on how to participate is available here. The new RaceTracker wiki also now has a permanent home on our sidebar under our “Resources” column.
Let us know what you think!