BLACKSBURG, Va. – A Virginia Tech student is on the verge of potentially predicting every single General Assembly seat correctly from this year’s election.
10 News first told you about Chaz Nuttycombe the night before Election Day. In 2020, the Virginia Tech senior launched CNalysis, an online election forecasting platform specializing in state legislative races.
During the interview, we asked Nuttycombe what his prediction was regarding how the balance of power would shake out in Virginia.
“In the state Senate, Democrats are pretty moderate to heavy favorites to hold the state Senate,” Nuttycombe said. “We have Democrats as slightly favored to flip the House of Delegates.”
As election results started pouring in, Nuttycombe and his team began to realize several of their predictions were correct. The following morning, Nuttycombe said they had predicted at least 138 of the 140 races correctly and he was confident in the remaining two going his way.
“A lot of hard work. A little bit of luck I guess. There are plenty of scenarios where we could have had a bad night for our forecast if the Republicans did a little bit better or the Democrats did a little bit better. I felt pretty good about our forecast this year,” Nuttycombe said.
Nuttycombe was already put on notice back in 2019 when he predicted 99 out of 100 House of Delegates seats correctly.
With more than 22,000 followers on his personal X account, numerous politicians, analysts, journalists, and political fanatics follow his work.
This year CNalysis called races and provided results on the page. With hours of endless work, Nuttycombe didn’t realize the gravity of what he was accomplishing until the following day.
“I wasn’t able to appreciate it last night because I was trying to call the winners based on the election results but I’m appreciating how well we’ve done so far,” Nuttycombe said.
With Democrats now having the majority in both the House of Delegates and Senate, Gov. Glenn Youngkin will have a harder time getting some of his agenda passed.
“Democrats were trying to run like it’s 2022 and Republicans were trying to run like it was 2021. The fact of the matter is that 2022 is the most recent election. I don’t think the Republicans won on the issues this year,” Nuttycombe said. “They lost on abortion and they lost on education and they won on education in 2021.”
Nuttycombe plans to grow his business by adding new employees and website offerings after he graduates in May.