This year marks seven years since I created my first set of state legislative predictions. It’s hard to believe that much time has flown by, as well as the four years since CNalysis first launched in March 2020. What started as a hobby and pastime during high school and college has turned into a unique public service that has allowed thousands to learn about their state legislative elections, giving me one of the highest privileges anyone can ever receive: a sense of purpose.

When I first started doing this, I didn’t think it would garner much attention given that state legislative elections aren’t attractive and shiny like presidential, gubernatorial, or congressional elections. When I started CNalysis, I saw it as a fun project with some friends and a place to put my predictions, writings, and maps. The CNalysis team and I have made our mark and have attracted the attention of elected officials from the state house to the Governor’s mansion, as well as journalists, politicos, and of course, political junkies. 

I am beyond lucky and grateful to have the privilege of working with such talented people: cinyc9, Allie, Jackson, Bailey, Chris, Jack, Aidan, and most recently our two new interns Alan and Scott are the unsung heroes of this website – I quite literally would not be able to do the work I have over the past four years without them.

CNalysis was launched as a single-member LLC in 2020 and was never meant to continue on in perpetuity given its business format and my desire to try and make our work as freely accessible as possible. Any pay that myself and staff would receive would be from part-time work with odd hours, especially in the lead up to election day.

However, our work, as aforementioned, has gone beyond being a side venture and has attracted considerable attention, even being cited in The New York Times, The Washington Post, FiveThirtyEight, Vox, The Atlantic, POLITICO, The Guardian, NBC, ABC, The Hill, and more. After our first election cycle in 2020 and the audience we built, I realized that this could be a career after I graduated from Virginia Tech.

That time has come – I earned my Bachelor’s in Political Science at Virginia Tech last month. In 2022 I started exploring my options for what I’d like to do with CNalysis, and a year ago I came to a bittersweet conclusion: that we will have to end operations after the 2024 election. There are several reasons why I have made this decision. 

Firstly, now that I’m 25 and have a team behind me that has been instrumental in my work, I’m no longer a fan of running a website named after me. Yes, we could apply for a name change or file a DBA, but by the time I reached this decision, CNalysis already had a brand in itself that I was not interested in putting the time and resources required for a new name and branding.

Secondly, at the end of the day, we do not earn enough revenue in Substack/Bang for Your Buck subscriptions and donations for this to be a job that pays well enough for the amount of work required, especially closer to election time. I love the work I do, but the hours become longer the closer we get to the election and the more stressed I get as essentially once a year my reputation is on the line. 

As someone who is obsessed with providing as perfect of a product as I can, there is an immense amount of work that comes with preparing a final forecast for thousands of districts at once and writing about them all. The 2022 cycle was especially physically stressful as I balanced school, forecast finalizations, and kept up to date with thousands of state legislative district results over the course of two weeks – anytime I could leave my apartment during this time period was a rare privilege. Outside of myself, my staff also deserve better pay for the outstanding work they do.

To continue, there are several ideas I’ve gathered over the course of CNalysis’s existence (and longer) that I’d like to pursue that require more resources than what we’re capable of in our current format, financially and otherwise. These are ambitious ideas related to state legislatures that I’ve dreamt of accomplishing since my teenage years that would give me the pleasure that comes with diving into a new field and creating a new project, which CNalysis in its scope and capacity cannot provide. I became especially tempted over the last year to try and accomplish these goals as I’ve grown somewhat tired of the repetition that comes with forecasting state legislative elections.

A year ago, when I decided that there won’t be a CNalysis come 2025, I started laying the groundwork for the next steps in my career that can allow me to provide the public with state legislative forecasts and other content related to state legislatures that I believe are imperative; creating a “home” for state legislatures. Tomorrow, I’ll finally be able to announce this endeavor, with a full feature launch of said project expected in January 2025.

CNalysis, again, will continue to run through December this year: our forecasts, articles, and Bang for Your Buck model will continue being updated as usual, with Bang for Your Buck expected to launch this Summer. After December, appropriate content from this website will be migrated over to the new project. I look forward to sharing the details with all of y’all tomorrow.

Best Regards,

Chaz