State Navigate's Polling Fund
Public polling for state-level elections is scarce and often of low quality and high cost. State Navigate has built a team trained in political and data science to address this. Consisting of independents, Republicans, and Democrats, we want to cut through the noise and deliver to the public accurate and consistent polling for statewide and state legislative elections as inexpensively as possible.
Our polling fund allows our supporters to contribute directly to our efforts to make this mission a reality. Donations to this fund will go to operating costs (including set-up fees) for polls our team wants to conduct for general elections and primaries in states and state legislative districts around the country.
State Navigate is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, and all donations to this fund are tax-deductible. You can find our EIN on our website under ‘Donate’.
State Navigate also accepts sponsorships to support its work in conducting public polling: inquiries for such sponsorships to support its work can be sent to chaz@statenavigate.org: We do not accept sponsorships from candidates, PACs, or caucus/campaign committees.
POLLING DATA AND POLICIES
State Navigate is only interested in conducting public polls, and focuses on primaries, general elections, and issues relevant to state governance on the statewide level and state legislative district level. We do not conduct private polling or polling for federal-level elections; public or private sponsorships for individual questions are available. Upon publication of sponsored question(s), we are obligated to disclose the sponsor. Political parties and candidates may not sponsor a poll and/or poll questions.
We poll by sending text messages to registered voters with cell phone numbers. The messages include a link to a web-based survey. Poll results are appropriately weighted to reflect the registered and/or likely voter population of the state or district. Often times for a state legislative district we can send texts to a majority of voters.
High-quality polling can be expensive. Actual cost depends on many factors, especially response rate, sample size, and the polled population. Typically, we need $2,000 to conduct a ~300 likely voter sample for a state legislative district, and $3,500 to conduct a ~700 voter sample for a statewide election. We don’t make much off polling, so this is a loss leader to us; we simply like to poll for the love of the game and the ability to provide the public with high-quality polling on state legislatures and state government.
In 2025, State Navigate was the most accurate pollster in the country according to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin as well as our own findings. We conducted polling for the statewide and House of Delegates elections in Virginia and beat every pollster in the business thanks to our team’s intuition on weighting decisions. 2025 was the first year we began polling, and we look forward to conducting more polling in 2026 and beyond.
MEET THE TEAM
elections coordinator
Michael is an expert in GIS technology and has experience in coding and scraping technology. He is a graduate of Fordham University and the University of Chicago Law School.
data manager
Mary Radcliffe is a mathematician and data analyst from Pittsburgh. She earned a PhD in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. Mary has previously worked as a Teaching Professor at Carnegie Mellon University and Researcher at FiveThirtyEight.
development chair
Elliott Morris is a data-driven journalist and author living in Washington, DC. He’s the author of STRENGTH IN NUMBERS: How Polls Work and Why We Need Them. Elliott was most recently the Editorial Director of Data Analytics at ABC News, where he developed polling aggregation and election-forecasting models and managed the research and data visualization teams for ABC’s data-journalism website FiveThirtyEight/538. Elliott writes a regular blog/newsletter about politics, polling, and elections through the lens of data and statistical analysis.
Political Science Chair
Nicholas Goedert is an assistant professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech with expertise focused on legislative elections and American politics. He is the author of Ground War: Courts, Commissions, and the Fight over Partisan Gerrymanders, published by Oxford University in 2022. His research has been published in journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Legislative Studies Quarterly, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and the Election Law Journal. He served as an expert witness in the Wisconsin redistricting case Whitford v. Gill (adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court during summer 2018), and also serves on the Executive Board of the voting rights advocacy group UpVote Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.
Executive Director
Chaz was the Director of CNalysis.com, the only website dedicated to state legislative election forecasting. He has successfully forecasted thousands of state legislative elections since 2017 during his senior year in high school. A Richmond, Virginia native, Chaz graduated from Virginia Tech with a Bachelor’s in Political Science in May 2024.
