State Navigate April Progress Report
Weeks after launching the pre-alpha version of our pilot state, we've been hard at work at what comes out next month.
We’re approaching the finish line for the completion of our pilot state here at State Navigate, South Carolina. In our March Progress Report, we announced that the pre-alpha version of South Carolina went live. Since then, we’ve been working toward the Beta version of the state, as well as the other two states in our pilot triumvirate of Utah and Virginia.
We’re aiming to finish out South Carolina for Beta testing by May 16th. That includes most of the “legislature” feature of the website (including bill tracking, list of legislators and committees, W-NOMINATE rollcall vote database) and the deep campaign finance data (list of donors, amounts and dates, etc.) for candidates; non-candidate committees to be added later on.
In a couple of days, we’ll have our campaign finance and W-NOMINATE content for South Carolina out.
Here’s all of what we’ve been doing since South Carolina pre-Alpha released.
Organizational
The Board of Directors held a meeting to discuss paths forward related to officer structure, duties, and responsibilities, as well as the latest development updates.
Jack Kersting was hired as the first-ever staffer of State Navigate, becoming the Development Director of the organization. As Development Director, Jack is responsible for designing the look of how we display all data on to our website before styling done by WhichSide Digital.
We’ve put together a formula and sent out a survey to determine where we will launch after we finish our core three states. The formula uses four factors to create the priority launch plan, which will be concrete by sometime in June.
Percentage of incumbent legislators following State Navigate on Twitter/X (Weighed at 33%), Ease of campaign finance data scraping as determined by Data Science Vice Chair Charlie Kramer (Weighed at 33%), Unique in-state website visitors as a percentage of July 2024 population estimates (Weighed at 16.5%), and survey votes (Weighed at 16.5%)
To qualify for work toward a 2025 launch, a state must have at least 1 survey vote and one incumbent legislator following the State Navigate Twitter/X account. Currently, only 20 states beyond our core 3 qualify for a total of 23 states to work on this year.
State Navigate Priority Order as of 4/30/25
Fundraising
A fundraiser for State Navigate has been organized for June 29th in the Richmond, VA area to celebrate its forecast launch for the Virginia statewide and House of Delegates elections. Ticket-goers will have an early look at the forecast before it goes live a month later. The full details can be found by clicking the button below, we hope you’ll join us and get a head start in the Virginia elections!
Invites for the fundraiser were sent out to most members of the Virginia General Assembly and candidates running in competitive districts ahead of the public sale of tickets to give them an opportunity to learn more about the election they’re running in.
State Navigate raised $1,057 in the month of April.
Our list of donors has been separated by year.
Website: Minor
The About Us page was given a breath of fresh air by WhichSide Digital to be more in line with our altered website theme since our announcement launch in June 2024.
WhichSide Digital is preparing a new version of the Our Goals page with fewer accordions while easily summarizing our current work and development plan.
Topic tags have been added to posts so that users can know what type of post they’re reading; as we build out written content on our state-specific sites, we’ll eventually change the layout for the “From Us” section to break down articles by type.
Legislature
W-NOMINATE data for South Carolina has been organized. We’ve been using Utah and Virginia rollcalls to help us build our pages and get a head start on launching in the state by May or June. This part of the Legislature data is nearly done: roll calls and overall ideology placements are completed, there are just some minor features to be added and styling to be done. Below is a run-through video of what we have for this in under a minute.
State Navigate is a nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Our goal is to build a compass, and home, for state legislatures, but we can’t do it alone. We need to raise enough money by the end of June to be able to pay staff and expenses for our first full six months of operations from July through December 2025.
If you can chip in, whether it’s a one-time donation or monthly, we’d greatly appreciate your support. Your donation will be tax-deductible and go to a good cause for promoting accountability in state governance. You can donate by clicking the button below.
Campaign Finance
The team has created the campaign finance pages for candidates, which will show all donations and expenses throughout the candidate’s campaign, with the option to organize by date and amount. Later, we aim to expand our campaign finance database and its features, but we are extremely excited with what we have as we work to launch in many states this year.
State Navigate received campaign finance data from the Virginia Public Access Project that it will hand over to perhaps the foremost political science expert, Dr. Steven Rogers of Saint Louis University. In 2024, Dr. Rogers published “Accountability in State Legislatures,” a book dedicated to using existing political science research as well as his own to determine whether there is accountability in a level of government that is constantly overlooked. Dr. Rogers will begin researching the effect of campaign finance spending in Virginia state legislative elections on their outcomes after controlling for data points that have a proven impact on them (such as incumbency and ideology).
Other Data
State Navigate purchased access to VoteSmart to use their data as a starting point for candidate photos, websites, and social media. Our team will be building on top of their existing work to fill in existing gaps as we look to build out district summary pages for each state, giving voters and professionals a powerful tool to easily read the most imperative data on each state legislative district election.
Missouri, California, Illinois, and Arkansas presidential calculations for our 2024 Statewide Elections by Legislative District sheet have been entered. There are more Trump-won seats held by Democrats than Harris-won seats held by Republicans in Arkansas, while the opposite is true in Illinois, Missouri, and California. Remarkably, there are two seats in the California legislature (both of which are in the Central Valley) that voted for Trump but are represented by a Democrat. You can find our updated 2024 Presidential Party Loyalty here.
Maine is our last remaining state for presidential data. There are difficulties here due to some towns being split by House district, but do not disclose precinct results.
We’ve finished gathering precinct data for the 2023 and 2024 elections in Virginia for our district summary pages. Unlike anywhere else, we’ve estimated how many provisional votes (most of which are same-day registration) there are for each candidate in each precinct; these are included in the total.
A formula similar to that used by CNalysis for the 2023 Virginia legislative forecasts has been created for the 2025 Virginia forecasts. The forecasting team has begun discussing ideas for what data to factor, where to place it, how to weight it, etc. Unlike the forecast in 2023, campaign finance data and incumbent ideology are expected to be quantitatively applied to this year’s forecast.
The team has done various data organization projects, including: changing the way loans to campaigns are calculated/displayed, organizing bills at .jsons, preparing to make launches in each state after our core three incredibly fast by organizing various forms of pages/databases/code/structure, etc. We do the hard work, so you don’t have to!
Thanks again for following our work. We’re excited for the next two months. We hope you’ll continue following us: if you have any connections or resources to help us out, please reach out to our President, Chaz Nuttycombe, by email at chaz@statenavigate.org
Best Regards,
- The State Navigate Team