Issue link: http://tcnj.uberflip.com/i/1532430
30 The College of New Jersey Magazine W ith a newly inaugurated president, it's easy for most Americans to make the 2024 campaign season — with its relentless horse-race polling and often biased chatter — a distant memory. But for Harrison Lavelle '25, the poll numbers, and politics in general, are not something he views casually. Lavelle, a political science and international studies major, is a founder of Split Ticket, an election analysis website that he started in 2021. With a team of five, all under the age of 30 and several still in college, Split Ticket has some of the youngest analysts in the field, and their 2024 forecasts were among the most accurate. The political world took note as Split Ticket prediction models appeared in media outlets such as Politico, The New York Times, and the BBC. After the election, they contracted with The Washington Post to write two articles per month and to continue their forecasts for the 2025 governor races in Virginia and New Jersey, and then the 2026 midterms. We talked to Lavelle about what it is like to be in the political hot seat. TCNJ Magazine: Why did you start Split Ticket? Harrison Lavelle: I followed politics closely starting in 2016. I met some friends on Twitter because I was part of a thriving election community there. We noticed that the polling was off that year; there was an underreporting of the vote for Donald Trump. We began to map and model elections ourselves, and after the 2020 election we started our own website for election analysis. TM: How is Split Ticket different from other sites? HL: Our main goal from the beginning was to give people the data with nonpartisan analysis. We felt too many personal views about individual races were coming into the polling coverage. We wanted to give better insight free from pundit narratives, and we hope our quantitative, statistical models will better predict election outcomes. " A lot of people read polls as an indicator of certainty, which is not what they're supposed to do. The polls are just meant to show you the range of possible outcomes." TM: Explain what you mean by models. HL: You can think of a model as a program that runs a number of simulations, and the aggregate of those simulations is more or less the prediction we get. Then we create graphic interactives on our website to help people visualize the numbers. In 2024, we had a model for the Senate, House, and presidential races to show how likely it would be for a candidate to win. And for the House and the Senate we also gave the percent chance a party had of taking over each chamber. TM: Do you have a particular expertise when it comes to the analysis? HL: I bring a lot of knowledge regarding political geography to the scene. Especially when it comes to the House model, it requires knowledge of individual districts and dynamics, and so it is nice to have personal knowledge to check the results from models against.