RICHMOND, Va. — Chaz Nuttycombe doesn’t get to spend election night in a posh bar, crowded ballroom, or even an air-conditioned news studio.
He’s probably still eating pizza, but he’s doing it in front of his computer screen at home, while simultaneously crunching numbers and digesting data as the results slowly come in.
While in the past the candidates and their campaign staffers have been glued to television networks to figure out which way the voting wind has blown after the polls are closed, an increasing number of politicos and interested citizens are turning their attention to the social media accounts of a select few experts, and Nuttycombe is now one of those considered a must-check.
He’s quick to share the credit.
“When it comes to my job as a forecaster, and now a pollster, I work with a brilliant polling committee,” Nuttycombe told Catie Beck during an appearance on the most recent episode of ‘Untold – A WTVR Podcast.’
At just 26, the Virginia Tech alum has taken the election prediction world by storm, becoming one of the most talked about and sought-after forecasters in the country.
And for good reason. Nuttycombe and his teammates at the nonprofit operation State Navigate were stunningly accurate when it came to calling the outcomes of the various Virginia contests earlier this month.
“We did pretty well this year, especially in our polling,” said Nuttycombe. “There was only one other pollster by margin of victory, YouGov, that did better than us for the governor race. They had Spanberger by 15, we had 13 in both of our surveys … Of every pollster that asked about the races here in Virginia for governor and lieutenant governor and attorney general, we did the best.”
State Navigate’s precise prediction in the AG’s race between incumbent republican Jason Miyares and democrat Jay Jones also earned Nuttycombe his first death threat, the pollster said. While some other surveys showed Miyares as the favorite in that contest, in the wake of Jones’s text message scandal, Nuttycombe’s final forecast projected the democrat prevailing, 51.1% to 48.9%.
“If anybody would ask me, whether publicly or privately, who do you think wins this, I absolutely kept saying Jay Jones,” said Nuttycombe. “Because at the end of the day, there was gonna be this big turnout advantage.”
But while the success might seem sudden, it didn’t happen overnight.
“I've been forecasting, as a hobby for state legislative elections, since 2017 when I was 18,” said Nuttycombe, who grew up in a conservative household but spent his teenage years cheerleading for Democrats.
After high school, the western Hanover native took his passion to Blacksburg, where he honed his craft and created an election prediction company called CNalysis, a sort of predecessor to State Navigate.
While he has political opinions, Nuttycombe said his work is purely nonpartisan. And now that his nonprofit has put itself on the map, the mission is to expand it. State Navigate currently focuses on about a half dozen states, but they plan to go nationwide, and do a lot more than just predict elections.
“Obviously forecasts are shiny and they grab attention,” said Nuttycombe. “But we do a whole bunch of other data too. We are calculating where the ideology is for each legislator in every state legislative chamber in the country, and that's using their actual floor roll call votes, so seeing where every legislator is in relation to one another.”
“My main goal as executive director is pushing us to where we're gonna be able to get out in those states and continuing to find like-minded individuals to keep supporting our work and donating, giving us grants to make sure that everybody can get this data for free.”
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