Today, the Dealer is proud to release our official county-by-county interactive forecasts of the 2021 Georgia runoff elections for the U.S. Senate. This makes us one of the only data journalism sites willing to predict possible outcomes for Election Day on Tuesday, as most of our peers, including FiveThirtyEight, haven't touched this one.

As has been our mission all along, the folks at FiveThirtyEight finally noticed us. Specifically, they cease-and-desist-noticed us. Take a look:

Following our colleagues in other largely data-science based news organizations, we’ve conducted a variety of mathematical examinations and statistical quandaries in analysis of the recent elections. Due to some technical difficulties, we were unable to utilize our typical analysis programs. However, our intern Brian assures us he can do the same things in Google Sheets. So we’ll see how this goes. In the midst of a pandemic, the political landscape has changed a lot since even the last year. And gearing up to the election, it’s certainly informative to look at the percentage of Republicans who’ve maintained their faith in Trump over the past year. Ok, uhh, Brian, that’s just…

They said it couldn’t be done. They said it was logistically impossible—we were “students” with “work to get done”. They said we were just a “minor college humor magazine” and that we “didn’t even have a Wikipedia article.” How were we supposed to create the data journalism site that makes the next big splash in the world of being whatever nerds read these days? By, I don’t know, data journaling, that’s how. And we did it. We journaled that shit. And we’re here to present our findings to you. Here’s what we got so far. First step, we built a homepage for the whole project to collect all of our…

Collecting national polling results, and filtering out for the ones that had words instead of big numbers, gave us the following easy to follow and mostly accurate polling results. Nate Silver himself rated our methodology a solid “F” for “Fast and gets the job done”, and when we showed it to our Stat 220 TA, he immediately passed out onto his keyboard and accidentally ended the Zoom meeting. We didn’t have the guts to call him back.

With political candidates in today’s 24-hour news cycle, it’s less “what have you done for me?” and more “what have you done for me lately?” Who cares which political candidate is best for the country when you could know which political candidate had the best day yesterday? This useful trend has led obsessing over minor daily updates to the FiveThirtyEight election forecast to become a time-honored tradition. Come election season, the site would become a mecca for people looking for a daily dose of anger or schadenfreude. Turns out driving people insane is pretty lucrative . Who knew? The design for this year’s FiveThirtyEight forecast interface, however, takes pains to…

We decided that it was time to leave the dark cramped maintenance closet of our headquarters and hit the streets and see what the people had to say about the key issues this election cycle.  Unfortunately no one was outside, and everyone we approached made sure to stay six feet away from us at all times, which made interviewing them pretty difficult. We did manage to find three individuals on campus willing to talk to us: two Rev Coms who apparently haven’t realized there’s a pandemic going on in here, and a frat brother smoking outside of a children’s preschool, so it was nice to survey both ends of the…