With less than a month until the November 5 general election, it’s hard to avoid weekly polls that show a dead heat for president and razor-thin congressional races across the country primed to flip which party controls the House and Senate.
But for Harrison Lavelle ’25, the poll numbers are not just something he watches — they’re something he crunches.
Lavelle, a political science and international studies major, is a founder of Split Ticket, an election analysis website. Started in 2021with a couple of partners he met in a “thriving election community on Twitter,” Split Ticket aims to give followers a new model of political forecasting.
Based on original tracking polls and deep research into the political geography of races as well as pulling data from other polling sources, Split Ticket offers ratings for the percent chance a particular candidate has of winning and, in the case of Congress, the percent chance a party has of taking control.
“Our main goal from the beginning was to give people the data with nonpartisan analysis,” says Lavelle. “We want to give better insight of where the election actually stands, free from pundit narratives.”
Unlike other polls, says Lavelle, he’s looking at aggregates that control for things like how old a poll is, the quality of other polls used, population, and sample size.
Lavelle’s site has received a lot of mainstream buzz this election season. In addition to publishing weekly updates on the state of the race in the House, Senate, and presidency, Split Ticket has penned a New York Times opinion section analysis of the amount of campaign money spent on abortion-related ads and has created an interactive game featured in Politico that challenges readers to be a campaign manager tasked with choosing where to invest resources. A few congressional candidates in tight races have even used Split Ticket polling results in their campaign materials.
“It’s been cool to see the positive reception of the site,” says Lavelle. “I’m happy that people have received it so well.”
— Kara Pothier MAT ’08