The Psephology Project

I haven't been idle. I got a new job too!

I've been quiet on here lately. Sorry about that. But I want to assure you-- both of you --that I have not been idle. In fact I wanted to take this moment to tell you what's kept me busy since August. An ambitious project has occupied the majority of my free time as I wanted to give it the focus I believe an undertaking like it deserves. I've passed this around to a couple of people, and secured the blessing of the management team over at the Cook Political Report for the integration of their data in it. The feedback from everyone who's seen it has been positive, and I am happy with its current progress.

The Psephology Project by John Kelly

The word comes from the Greek word for "pebble," which refers to the means by which people voted in the earliest examples of Democracy. From the about page:

…there is a mountain of psephology data, and in that mountain, as with other agglomerations of data I have spent my career handling, there are messages. Messages that are going unnoticed and unheeded. This website is the most complete effort of mine, to date, to try to find, isolate, and cast a light on those messages.

Also:

…it is also my intention to provide a service to which most people do not have access, not being employed by large news organizations, political parties, campaigns, advocacy groups, corporate entities, educational institutions, or other well-resourced entities that are able to hire consultants and firms to aggregate and present this data to them. I believe very strongly that the public are entitled to public information, and indeed our societal outcomes are better when they have it.

Currently, the site only has information about the US House of Representatives, but in the coming weeks I will be adding information about the Senate, upcoming elections for both houses of Congress, and hopefully I can provide some valuable insight for the upcoming Presidential election.

In the meantime, I will be linking back to pages on the site in my posts here on Substack, and I encourage anyone who stumbles across this post to do the same. In addition, I have renamed this Substack from "I'm Still Hopeful"(and I definitely still am) to "Counting Pebbles," having repurposed the blog as an official editorial complement to the hard data in the Psephology Project.

Please let me know what you think of the project, and any ideas you may have for things that you’d like to see it do.