Site Updates: 2/1/2024

Senate, FEC Numbers for both Senate and House

I’ve been busy at the new job, but also with trying to get some features added to the site. While I still have a small backlog of minor fixes to apply, it was very important to me that the site get the features I’ll describe in detail... now.

Senate

After several months, I managed to work out a way to present the Senate in a way that’s reasonably consistent with how House districts are presented. The challenge— if you’re interested —came when I realized that no Senate seat has a hard classification or name or title, like with House districts. The only real distinction between one state’s seat and its other seat in the Senate is that one Senator is Junior and the other is Senior, based on a long list of factors that determine seniority. For example, Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were sworn in as Senators at the exact same moment, so their seniority is determined instead by the alphabetic order of their last names. ‘O’ comes before ‘W’ in the alphabet, so Ossoff is the senior Senator from Georgia.

That also highlights the fact that when a Senate seat is open for a given election, there is no reckoning as to which seat it is, in the context of “Senior” versus “Junior.” Seniority is determined by the set of factors above, not the seat itself. With that in mind, the URL scheme I set up for the Senate is “/s/GA/Warnock.” In any case, here’s the Senate. Enjoy that. You can also reach Senate data from the menu at the top of every page on the site.

FEC Data

I’ve also added the ability to see campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, with the data distilled down to three points: Contributions, Disbursements, and Cash on Hand. This is the first of a number of features I want to add to the new election analysis pages that have been made for House and Senate races. Have a look at this one for the Laphonza Butler’s open Senate seat in California, or this one for Colorado’s 3rd District, recently abandoned by Lauren Boebert after her volatility changed the district from safe to competitive. You can see campaign finance summary data, and I encourage you to check back, as the data will be updated over time, as the election nears. The FEC requires quarterly filings from all candidates for federal office.

I have some more ideas, but the site is already in a place where I can just spend hours just diving into various races. I hope you enjoy this data and analysis as much as I do. I will keep working on it and writing about it.