Our Mission

What Makes RacetotheWH Unique?

• Race to the WH features in-depth and sophisticated election projection models that are easy to read, clearly understandable, and fun to look at. Our goal is to give you all the tools you need to understand the state of American politics .

• Our Projections that are accurate, rigorous and evidence based, while being fully transparent.

• We combined our data with political insights that brings you right into the heart of a campaign’s strategy. We won’t just show you that Donald Trump could be vulnerable in Georgia, or that Susan Collins is fading in Maine. We’ll break down what’s driving the change.

• Break down the political strategy behind the curtain that cut through the noise and fluff, instead focusing on what is actually driving decisions

Editor and Chief/Founder: Logan Phillips

Our History:

By: Logan Phillips

Race to the White House was born out of a classroom project I worked on as a Graduate student at Columbia University in 2019. I took took a class on Presidential Campaign Management with Professor Karine Jean-Pierre, now Kamala Harris Chief of Staff. Along with three other students, I was assigned on Joe Biden’s “campaign team”, and tasked with creating a detailed campaign plan that would map out his overarching strategy, message, and campaign structure to win the primary and be positioned for success in the general election. As you may remember, Biden was one of the last major contenders to announce his campaign, so we had to build his campaign from the ground up without any inspiration or guidance from the real thing.

I’m strongly believe that the best way to build a campaign strategy is to combine qualitative and quantitative information. At this point in the cycle, there were no public polling averages, no projection models, and very little analysis of which demographics groups the candidates excelled with. Rather then fly half blind, I decided to build all of these tools myself from scratch. That including a polling average - with breakdowns by different demographic groups - and a crude forecast for the first few states in the primary.

From time to time I updated my model - and tinkered around with it in December to see how it would do in the Iowa Caucus. Honestly, my expectations were that it would do O.K., but lag well behind professional forecast like Nate Silver. In reality As you can tell given that I’ve literally made a site that showcases data and politics, I’m a bit of a nerd, so I restarted all my forecast a half a year later when the Iowa Caucuses were around the corner so that I could take it for a spin and see how it did on election day. Realistically, I had pretty low expectations for my forecast accuracy - but I ended up outperforming many of the heavy weights among pundits and forecast, including Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight. Needless to say, at this point I wanted to see how far I could take this. I certainly didn’t get everything right - but by and large I outperformed the vast majority of pundits and accurately predicted that Joe Biden was a much stronger contender then people realized even in the week after Iowa and New Hampshire, and beat most of the experts by correctly projecting a Biden as the frontrunner to win the primary before even South Carolina, and I projected a much better performance on Super Tuesday then most expected.

This was going to be the end of my forecasting efforts, in part because it took so much time to get it right, and I didn’t want to take away any more from my last semester at Columbia. Then, the Coronavirus hit. Like many other Americans, my life turned felt turned upside down overnight. I went from quite possibly the happiest and most socially and intellectually stimulating time of my life up to that point, to near total isolation in NYC apartment at the height of the pandemic. The whiplash was brutal, and I was in desperate need of something to do that actually mattered and would bring life meaning outside of taking classes on zoom. I channeled all my energy into building a general election model for the White House, and learning how to design a website around it. This was the genesis for Race to the WH.

I’m proud of the forecast and the design around it, but just making a website for forecast wasn’t enough for me. I didn’t want to make the stats version of the ESPN for Politics. First, data without context isn’t that meaningful - you have to connect it to the bigger picture. However, much more importantly, I think the stakes in elections are just too high to treat it like a baseball game. Both my parents grew up in single parent households below the poverty line, and they were able to make it out and succeed not just because they were smart or hardworking, but also because they were given a shot. From free school lunches so they could focus, glasses so they could see the board, and affordable college loans for my dad, basic government programs that leveled the playing field made all the difference in the world for them. As economic mobility has dropped precipitously since then, and as those programs so rarely reached nonwhite Americans due to a combination of both malintent and misguided mistakes, its clear we need to create the same ladders of opportunity again.

Therefore, Race to the WH therefore tries to do three things.
1. Data can tell us a lot about politics, but most people struggle to read and process a list of numbers on an excel sheet. My goal is to make data actionable by presenting it in a visually appealing way that will help people see insights into politics. While I champion the data-driven and evidence based projections we’ve built at RacetotheWH.com, I think one of the biggest assets we have is enabling our viewers to make their own conclusions, especially in the breakdowns of all relevant data for each state in the Presidential and Senate Elections. battleground States Use Data t

2. Bring you behind the curtain and break down the political strategy driving campaigns. There are ton of popular narrative in the national news that totally miss the point of what’s really going on in a campaign. My goal is to show you what really matters in politics

3. Most importantly, connect the politics to the actual impact that it makes in peoples lives. The consequences of elections are enormous, and good policies can and have made transformative impacts in the lives of Americans. Likewise, certain styles of politics are predatory, divide americans, and make lives worse for the most vulnerable. We should never lose site of either of these threads, and my goal is to emphasize them in a way that both mobilizes people to take action, and become more informed citizens and voters

Therefore, I expanded the sites vision beyond just the projections. I cover the campaigns, political changes in America, and the policies politicians pursue. Beyond 2020, we’ll be focusing significantly more on what the moves by the incoming Biden Administration or the Trump administrations suggest about their second term, and explore how they are executing their agenda.

Bio - Editor In Chief, Logan Phillips

I first got involved in politics as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg college running our voter registration to get more students engaged in our Democracy. I went on to be an Eisenhower Institute Fellow and study national security, where I briefed the direction of the NGA, the intelligence agency that found Osama Bin Laden’s location, on food insecurity in West Africa. After graduating, I interned in the White House for President Obama. I worked on the President’s schedule in the Department of Scheduling and Advance, and I organized round tables discussions between Senior Staff and Interns.

Afterwards, I organized for Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in South Carolina, and then assisted the American Institute of Architects political lobbying team. In 2018, I moved to New York City and started a two year Graduate Degree program at Columbia University, and got my Master’s Degree in International Affairs, with a Concentration in Security Policy and a Specialization in Conflict Resolution and Latin American Studies. During the summer of 2020, I assisted Elizabeth Warren’s campaign in New York City by helping build, recruit and train a team of leaders across every neighborhood in Manhattan, each of which would would go on to host bi-monthly events and collectively recruit thousands of volunteers.

Finally, I worked with a think tank of the United Nations for the first five months of the 2020. The U.N. is prepared to end their peacekeeping mission in Darfur, Sudan that was started as a result of the Darfurian Genocide, and I worked along several other Columbia Graduate students to help them design strategies to protect vulnerable civilians from mass atrocities and detect early warnings of escalated violence without the presence of UN Peacekeepers. I founded and became Editor in Chief of Race to the WH in May.

Bias:

As you can tell by look at my bio, I’ve worked in progressive politics for several years, and I’ve even volunteered for Joe Biden’s campaign. I look at politics through a progressive lens, and I don’t think I can avoid this without compromising the quality of the analysis that I bring to the table. Here’s what I can promise you - my articles will alway strive to be fair and thoughtful. I’m not going to try to manipulate you into supporting Democrats by providing misinformation. I try to fairly characterize both parties point of view. My view is that reporters should be as transparent as possible about their own background, so that the readers know their perspective, and feel informed when making their own decision on what to believe and take from their articles.

Nonetheless, when I see politicians trying to directly use political strategies that target vulnerable populations, weaponize prejudice, ot lie about their record, I feel duty bound to hold them to account both as a journalist and as someone that cares about decency, politics, and government. I understand that not all of my viewers will appreciate this - but we each have to live according to our own moral code.

Forecast Credibility:

At Race to the White House, I’ve made extensive effort to design a model that was as accurate as possible, and doesn’t lean towards either party. The Forecast was tested out on every Presidential Election since 2000, and every Senate Election since 2004, and it predicted the party that won in twelve of those thirteen elections. On average across both Forecast, the average state projections has missed the final result by 0.01% towards the Republican party. The one election it got wrong was the 2016 Presidential, but it gave Trump a significantly higher chance of upsetting Clinton then most major forecast at the time (a 40% chance of victory).

Other Members of the Team:

Interested in writing for Race to the WH or being a Race to the WH Fellow?

Send me an email at RacetotheWH@gmail.com

Sonia Aviv - Social Media Director

• Sonia Aviv runs the Instagram account for Race to the WH.com and produces terrific, clean, and compelling social media campaigns that often communicate a larger story.

• Sonia’s break out article was on Arizona Senator Mark Kelly - and how he became the heavy favorite in a race that was supposed to be one of the most closely contested in the Senate.

• Sonia is a lifelong New Yorker, who graduated from Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs in 2020, with a degree in Public Policy.

• She worked on two of the School’s Premiere New Sources - the Journal of International Affairs and the MorningSide Post - which has made her invaluable as a copyeditor.

Avee McGuire - Race to the WH Fellow

• Avee just joined the team in September, and will be helping us keep the Battleground States and State of the Senate up to data with new analysis

• Avee graduated from University of South Carolina in __. She organized on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in South Carolina, and is starting Graduate School this fall at the University of Belgium

Political Consulting:

I do political consulting work with campaigns, typically for Democrats or progressive leaning organizations. I do political strategy, run and build forecast for races, and I do data analysis. A key part of this is data visualization. As I said earlier, there are many excellent political strategist and candidates who are much better able to use data when it’s presented in a visually appealing and easily proccessible away. This is one of the central missions at RacetotheWH, and I provide the same service.

To contact me about any opportunities, email me at RacetotheWH@gmail.com