The Lunch Table
This whole thing pretty much runs out of a lunch table at ETHS. Every day my friends sit there while I talk about polling averages and precinct maps instead of normal stuff. They've watched me pull up the site on my phone a hundred times, told me when something looked weird, and somehow kept showing up even though I've definitely bored them half to death. This has been one of the coolest projects of my life. Not because of the model or the data -- because of the people who let me be way too excited about a congressional primary, never made it weird, and never got annoyed. They believed in it before anyone else did, and that matters more than they probably realize.
Sammy Jain, Teddy Gutstein, Vikram Kelly, Nathan Gregory, Ido Salant, John Spyrson, and Nick Jackson.
There were a lot of late nights. The time Railway deleted the entire data volume at 3am and I had to rebuild everything from CSV backups. The nights spent staring at chart smoothing algorithms trying to figure out why the lines looked wrong. Refreshing the site over and over after a deploy hoping nothing broke. My parents never once told me to stop, even when I was clearly up way too late on a school night working on a congressional forecast that nobody asked me to build. Thank you for that.
Shout-out to Elle Zebala, who I've been going back and forth with about politics since middle school. She'll listen to whatever half-baked theory I have that week and then tell me exactly why I'm wrong. Wouldn't have it any other way -- a lot of how I think about this stuff comes from those conversations.
Thank you to Mr. Patel, my AP Gov teacher, and to Julian Cronin.
And to Matthew Eadie, the local reporter whose tweet about IL9Cast kind of started all of this.
To everyone else at school who's checked out the site, sent me a tip, argued with me about the race, or just let me ramble at them -- thanks. You know who you are.
