In Brief:
- Virginia native Chaz Nuttycombe first got interested in politics in his home state but now follows elections nationwide. He’s the only person who attempts to call the outcome of every legislative race.
- He’s part of a generation of election data whizzes who started young but made an impression on established experts through social media.
- Nuttycombe called legislative contests with 96 percent accuracy in 2022.
Chaz Nuttycombe got his first-ever forecast wrong. In 2012, he predicted that Barack Obama would lose his re-election contest. “I was 13 years old, so I try not to be too hard on myself for that,” he says.
Nuttycombe quickly recovered, correctly predicting Donald Trump's 2016 victory. The following year, he followed the Virginia governor’s race closely, but noticed there was much less attention devoted to legislative contests. He forecast the 100 state House seats that were up that year.
He's since expanded his efforts to take in state races across the entire country. He is the only forecaster who calls every legislative contest nationwide — and there are nearly 6,000 of them this year. “Chaz did a great job in finding an undercovered but important niche in American politics — state legislatures — and developed a great amount of expertise in it,” says Kyle Kondik, communications director for the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “I give him a lot of credit for the work he does, which is certainly difficult given the thousands of districts across the country.”
Nuttycombe is only 25 and graduated with a degree in political science from Virginia Tech just this past spring. In this era of social media and easy access to data, other young people have put out their maps and forecasts and quickly made names for themselves, including G. Elliott Morris (now with 538) and David Byler (now a columnist for the Washington Post).
But Nuttycombe — who does forecast federal races — is unusual in concentrating most of his attention on legislative contests. Two years ago, he called 96 percent of the nation’s legislative races correctly. “Drilling down to democracy’s bedrock,” he calls it.
“People who do this are mainly interested in one state or a set of states and specialize in them,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University. “It’s very rare to try to do it in as many places as possible.”
For Nuttycombe, though, legislative races are too much fun to limit himself to a single state or region.
“Congressional races have become pretty much in line with the presidential vote, but you still have a whole bunch of state legislative races where that doesn’t happen,” Nuttycombe says. “Congressional races are, in my opinion, boring, but state legislatures are still very interesting.”
Not Making Money
Nuttycombe looks at the data — how districts vote in presidential and statewide elections, along with campaign finance totals — but he also talks to consultants and observers on the ground to find out whether candidates who might look strong on paper are neglecting the work of knocking on doors or have gotten caught up in some local scandal. “He starts with the strong baseline of our era, the partisan direction of a district,” Grossmann says. “What’s good is that he is quite willing to adjust his forecasts based on things happening in the campaign or local knowledge.”
Over time, mostly through the connections made on the Internet, he’s put together a group that helps him with odds-making, mapping, GIS data and editing. Although his team has expanded, their efforts have not been moneymakers. “I think there was one year where we made maybe $10,000 for the company as a whole,” he says. “It doesn’t even make what someone working a minimum-wage job would make in a year.”
Nuttycombe, who grew up in the Richmond area, is back living with his parents. Despite the lack of profitability for his enterprise, Nuttycombe intends to expand. His forecasting firm is known as CNalysis. Once he gets through the election, he intends to turn his attention to his new venture, State Navigate, which aims to promote citizen participation in the legislative process by providing people with aggregated state government news and information such as ideology of legislators and campaign finance.
“I’d like to do something more than just be the predictions guy,” he says. “Can I help voters and help state legislators by creating a hub for data on every state legislature?”
