Welcome to The Downballot, the premier nonpartisan source of information for the thousands of elections below the presidency, from Senate to city council.
Journalists, activists, political professionals, academics, and enthusiasts have all relied on us for years. Subscribers know they can trust us to provide accurate, comprehensive coverage of these often-overlooked but critically important elections. When it comes to downballot races, our readers are guaranteed to be the best informed in their fields.
If you'd like to support us, the most important thing you can do is become a paid subscriber. Our operations are supported by readers like you. We have no big backers—no corporate megadonors, no billionaire benefactors.
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At The Downballot, it all starts with our Morning Digest newsletter, in which we summarize and analyze every important development in every competitive race across the country, every weekday without fail.
Our focus includes—but is by no means limited to—contests for the Senate, the House, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, state supreme court, state legislature, mayor, county executive, district attorney, sheriff, and city council, as well as ballot measures. If there's a race too obscure for us, we have yet to come across it.
We also produce a wide variety of unique data sets that shed light on all of these elections and set the gold standard for accuracy and transparency.
We're best known for our calculations of the results of every presidential election broken down for each of the nation's 435 congressional districts, but we also publish special election trackers, election calendars, fundraising charts, demographic data, and much, much more. Find it all in our Ultimate Data Guide!
In addition, we put out a podcast every Thursday morning where we take a closer look at the key downballot stories making news each week and interview major political players for insights into their work. Our guests have included members of Congress, top campaign operatives, fellow election analysts, and even Julia Louis-Dreyfus! Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform right here.
We've got a long pedigree. Our publisher, David Nir, first began covering elections at the Swing State Project in 2003 and launched the Morning Digest in 2009. In 2011, his site was acquired by Daily Kos and became Daily Kos Elections. He was joined in 2014 by Jeff Singer, chief writer of the Morning Digest and the steward of some of our most important data projects.
David and Jeff are assisted by a close-knit group of longtime contributors, including David Beard, Matt Booker, Daniel Donner, Jake Hernandez, David Jarman, James Lambert, Steve Singiser, Stephen Wolf, and Quinn Yeargain.
Above all else, we are committed to presenting objective, truthful information, regardless of what our personal political preferences might be. No one can win elections by exhorting their side to clap harder and cheer louder. Only by confronting reality as it stands can we safeguard our democracy for future generations.
Site Policies
Artificial Intelligence
The Downballot does not use AI to create content. We believe that if humans are consuming our content, then humans should be producing our content.
All of our content is created and reviewed, start to finish, by humans. Humans write, edit, and produce everything we publish, including our newsletters, articles, headlines, emails, social media posts, livestreams, podcasts, and data sets. We do not use AI to generate or manipulate photographs, graphs, charts, or any other images or videos.
We may write about and include AI-generated content created by others if necessary for our coverage.
The Downballot uses AI for tasks including research, data analysis, checking grammar and spelling, audio transcription, refining human-authored headlines, and as a thesaurus. Any task we perform using AI requires human verification and undergoes a careful review to ensure that, like all of our work, it meets The Downballot’s high standards for accuracy.
Political Gambling
Members of The Downballot’s staff are prohibited from betting on political matters, including elections. We do not use data from betting or prediction markets as an analytical tool.
Endorsements
The Downballot does not endorse candidates for public office.
The Downballot was recognized as a Featured Publication by Substack in September of 2024, three weeks after our launch.
