A political consulting startup that focused on obtaining a technological advantage over its competition by leveraging data to help its candidates win elections
Throughout the Summer of 2022, I worked as a data scientist for NWF, a political consulting startup. This company at the time was focused on getting new clients, helping the political candidates that they were partnered with win their upcoming elections, as well as creating a new political data platform that they could monetize to help raise money to grow the company. I worked on these three major projects throughout my my time with NWF.
The co-founder of the company recognized my interest and ability to do the work and had me lead a team of interns that were hired shortly after me to scrape and clean county data, and then build a database out of it. This went incredibly successfully, and I was able to accomplish this task months ahead of their timeline, as well as initiate a market research process for the product to see if different universities would be interested in buying the product for their political science departments. We went ahead and started production of the prototype for the political data-based application they wanted to create. In PowerBI, a developed this prototype that displayed voter data from every county in the US and utilized drill-down analytics to provide quick and easy insight into the people that our clients would be representing. After this project, I worked on helping the company choose what clients to get. The company wanted clients with a certain set of values, people focused on grassroots movements that didn't take money from corporations/lobbying efforts. After combining various forms of data scraping and political research with NLP to create a sentiment score for each of the clients they considered along with a percentage of correlation to certain ideologies, I was able to provide strong recommendations to the company for what clients to partner with, and this worked really well for them. Everything else I did at the company involved various forms of political research and analyzing data surrounding clients as well as people in the counties of our clients.