Today, State Navigate is proud to present the pre-alpha version of our first real website. In collaboration with web designers at WhichSide Digital, we have developed a format for our comprehensive digital database and news platform. Our combined efforts aim to chart (quite literally) a new frontier of state and local politics. This is the first public step in development, where our donors and audience can explore and interact with some of the features we provide.
Thanks to the generosity of our donors and in no small part to the ingenuity of our President Chaz Nuttycombe, we are able to begin our operation with the full confidence of a paid staff and workplace. Our data team is at the heart of our operations; therefore, it feels appropriate to take a moment to thank the “core four” people at State Navigate who made this possible: Political & Data Science Committee Data Science Chair Mary Radcliffe, upcoming Development Director Jack Kersting, Political & Data Science Committee Data Science Vice Chair Charlie Kramer, and Vice President Michael Foley. Thanks to their skill and dedication to creating a unique experience for analyzing state legislatures, it took our team of all-stars a mere three months to lay the foundation for a revolution in state legislative data accessibility.
Here’s what we are able to present to the public at large in our pre-alpha version, and a taste of what’s to come in the next few weeks.
Now Available
1. The new homepage for State Navigate. Our live map on the website acts as a hub system for directing you to the custom state-by-state election experience of your choice. Our South Carolina preview is an excellent representation of our template for other states that are soon to follow.
2. The homepage for State Navigate: South Carolina. This will act as a template for the remaining states that we are working on expanding into. The state-specific homepage features:
- A wheel of selected and featured State Navigate donors from each state. Thank you, South Carolina donors!
- A small RSS feed of recent news articles on South Carolina state politics
- Our thoughts, writings, and notes on South Carolinian politics
- Most importantly, a district map of both the House and Senate of South Carolina. Check out our District Summary by simply clicking a district on our interactive map, or using the handy drop-down menu.
3. The District Summary pages for each district, which includes:
- The name, party, and photo of the current incumbent
- A beautifully designed interactive precinct map of recent election results in the district for both primary and general elections
- The campaign finance totals for each candidate that has run or is running presently in the district. This includes the amounts raised and spent, their current and previous cash-on-hand totals, and how much their campaign has been loaned.
- A profile of the district compared to others in the chamber by percentile, including the 2024 presidential margin as well as racial, educational, and economic demographics.
4. State Aggregate, our page that uses RSS feeds from news sources reporting on South Carolina state politics across the political spectrum to easily aggregate what liberal, conservative, and politically neutral sources are reporting. This is our news hub, which includes articles, thinkpieces, and current events from different reporters based in regions and districts across the state.
Coming Up
1. A comprehensive campaign finance database that allows you to see and download the received donations and expenditures of each registered committee. We will also include a search feature for individual donors.
2. A bill tracking system for the previous and current legislative term in South Carolina, allowing you to see the details of each bill.
3. A list of the current members and committees of the state legislature.
4. A rollcall vote database that will use each legislator’s floor rollcall votes to measure their ideology and probability of voting for/against each rollcall vote using W-NOMINATE.
We are on track to complete our remaining tasks for South Carolina by the first week of May, if not sooner. Once the state-specific infrastructure and pages are completed for South Carolina, we will have a template which we can use for each and every state to publish on the State Navigate website. After South Carolina, we have our sights set on Virginia, then Utah, with more states to come throughout the rest of the year.
Our team has been working hard over the last couple of months, and with the dedication required to create an excellent experience for viewers on our website, the work is never-ending. At this time, now more than ever, we would greatly appreciate it if you, dear reader, would join us in celebrating our South Carolina pre-alpha launch by donating to State Navigate. As a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, your contribution will be tax-deductible and goes towards creating a new and essential resource for the public in navigating state legislatures across the country.
Once again, thank you to those who have donated, those who donate monthly, and to those who plan to donate in the future. This would not be possible without your generosity, or without your effort in sharing the mission of State Navigate with others. It is because of people like you that we can do what we love– creating accessible, reliable, and nonpartisan coverage of all things related to state legislatures. Thank you!
Yours in service,
The team at State Navigate
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