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Political data analysis nonprofit State Navigate recently debuted its new “state legislative compass,” choosing South Carolina to pilot a new program the company hopes to implement nationwide.
State Navigate is the brainchild of Chaz Nuttycombe, a 25-year-old Virginia Tech graduate who founded the election prediction website CNalysis.com in 2020.
While CNalysis ventured into forecasting partisan state legislatures and gubernatorial seats, State Navigate delves deeper by providing users with raw data down to the precinct level.
Rather than exclusively focusing on forecasting, State Navigate serves as an aggregator of much of the same data used to project elections.
Nuttycombe sat down with FITSNews recently to discuss his new venture.
“We do a lot of data aggregation, curation and creation,” Nuttycombe said.
State Navigate obtains its data from multiple sources ranging from state ethics filings to U.S. Census reports and even local news outlets.
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While seasoned political operatives and hard boiled journalists understand the value of these pieces of information – and where to find them – State Navigate is unique in pulling so many figures from disparate sources into one easily accessible website.
“That’s one of the many reasons why I wanted to start up State Navigate. I’ve been doing state legislative election predictions since I was a senior in high school and you have to dig for the data … it’s been a pain to do that,” Nuttycombe said.
“I wanted, after graduating from Virginia Tech, to start up something that was going to have all of this data aggregation, curation and whatnot in one simple, easy to access place, a catch-all for anything and everything state legislatures in each state,” Nuttycombe added.
According to Nuttycombe, the project has been coming along well so far – and he anticipates having South Carolina “finished in full by the end of the month.”
While the site already offers a number of vectors of analysis, more features are coming before developers move onto other states.
“There’s a few final touches,” Nuttycombe said.
For example, he is hopeful that “by next week, we should have the roll-call database and ideology calculation finished out, and then after that, it’s going to be bill tracking, list of committees and who’s on those committees, legislative profiles, that sort of thing.”
The site’s eventual inclusion of a feature that tracks – and quantifies – a legislator’s partisan bona fides is sure to rankle some lawmakers.
“I would say it’s a double-edged sword engraved into a Pandora’s box,” Nuttycombe said of the site’s ideological tracker. “The reason why it’s a double edged sword is (that) people may have a kind of simple reading of… the methodology for calculating it.”
The NOMINATE scaling method (an acronym for nominal three-step estimation) was developed by political scientists in the 1980s to visualize preferential choice data, particularly roll call votes in legislative bodies, and has been used to visualize congressional votes ever since.
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“I got into this ideology stuff when I working on my political science degree at Virginia Tech,” Nuttycome recalled, saying he became interested in the subject while writing his senior thesis studying the Freedom Caucus.
“It wasn’t the Freedom Caucus here, it was Freedom Caucus out west, because I mean, what you have in the divide between the Freedom Caucus and non-Freedom Caucus Republicans here in South Carolina is, of course, not just not unique, but it’s not that big compared to somewhere like Wyoming,” he said.
“You can say, ‘oh, this, this person is the most liberal’ or ‘most conservative’ person in the legislature,” Nuttycombe added. “But that’s not saying that they are a liberal, right? It’s all in relation to one-another within that chamber.”
In Wyoming, “non-Freedom Caucus Republicans… pretty much look like Democrats,” according to Nuttycombe.
“That’s not to say they’re liberal by any means,” he added. “It’s just relative.”
Nuttycombe noted that while these analyses have been performed for decades at the federal level, his site is one of the first to apply the method to state legislative bodies.
When asked why he chose South Carolina to debut his new website, he pointed towards the relative abundance of publicly available data to draw from.
“South Carolina is one of the easiest states for trying to get specifically campaign finance data,” Nuttycombe said, although he did lament the difficulty of securing independent expenditure information.
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“Unfortunately… we aren’t going to be able to get independent expenditures,” Nuttycombe said, citing the way the data is filed.
State Navigate also wanted to balance blue and red states among it’s initial cohort, which already included New Jersey and Virginia.
“I wanted a state that didn’t have any more than one legislator that has followed our work,” he said, singling out state senator Matt Leber as the one lawmaker in South Carolina who is a fan of the site.
“If you start using this site, you will not be able to live without it,” Leber told FITSNews.
Those interested in State Navigate’s work can visit their website and browse their features now, with more coming later in the year. Additionally, keep your eyes peeled as we plan on embedding State Navigate graphics into forthcoming FITSNews stories.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR …
(Via: Travis Bell)
Dylan Nolan is the director of special projects at FITSNews. He graduated from the Darla Moore school of business in 2021 with an accounting degree. Got a tip or story idea for Dylan? Email him here. You can also engage him socially @DNolan2000.
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