Absentee voting has already begun in Nebraska. And it turns out there are more names on the ballot than just the presidential candidates.  If you live in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district then you also get to vote for your representative to the US House! Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight polls-only forecast has the district as a dead heat between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump which could translate to a contested race for the House. Below I have some SparkNotes™ from the congressional debate so all of us in NE02 can get informed together. But first some formalities:
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Brad Ashford was elected to represent the NE02 in 2014, the first Democrat to hold the seat since 1995.  Before that he served in Nebraska Unicameral (District 20) from 1987-1994 and from 2006-2015. You can read more about Brad Ashford at Ballotpedia or on his campaign website.

Don Bacon is a retired US Air Force brigadier general from Papillion. He is currently an assistant professor in leadership at Bellevue University. You can read more about Don Bacon at Ballotpedia or on his campaign website.

You can watch the debate and read the transcript on CSPAN here. Some questions below only have answers from one candidate; those are questions that they asked each other (how cute). The notes get longer as the debate progresses as the candidates begin having more of an open dialogue.

Some final thoughts: Mike’l Severe and Craig Nigrelli did an excellent job of moderating this (amazingly) civilized debate. Don clearly had some talking points that he wanted to squeeze in that took him off topic on occasion. Brad was very polished at the beginning of the debate, but while he maintained his substance, he lost some of that polish later on.  Brad also thanked Don for his service on multiple occasions while Don attacked Brad as a career politician while he himself was an outsider. Obviously this is not comprehensive and I would encourage you to look further into these candidates, but if you do not have time I hope this helped to inform your decision. Or it did not and you are still going to vote along party lines. That’s cool too just don’t forget to register to vote!
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Online voter registration in NE ends at 5:00pm on October 21st. You can register here.

It’s possible to find play-by-play win probability graphs for every NFL game, but that does not tell me much about how the game itself was played. Additionally, I only sporadically have time to actually WATCH a game so using play-by-play data, R, and Inkscape I threw together this visualization of every play in this past Sunday’s game between the Kansas City Chiefs and New Orleans Saints. Why isn’t this done more often?  ​