How an Electorate HQ simulation works

1. Set up the race

Name the two tickets: a candidate and a running mate for each slot, and what they stand for. Use real figures, invented ones, or a mix. Optionally set the state of the union, the mood and conditions of the country your election happens in, and a time setting.

2. The candidates get researched

For real public figures, the simulator looks up who they actually are from public sources, so their record follows them into the race. Nothing is invented for people with no public record; they run on their platform alone.

3. Fifty-one delegations deliberate

Every state, plus DC, gets its own AI delegation. Each one reads current headlines about its state, weighs both platforms against what its people actually face, and decides issue by issue. States report in as they finish, filling the map live.

4. Every call explains itself

Click any state for its county map, or double-click for the full breakdown: the vote shares, the issues that decided it, which planks caught voters' attention, and voices from the state. The wire narrates the night as it happens.

5. Argue with it

Change a platform, swap a running mate, move the election to 1996, and run it again. The point of a simulator is the counterfactuals. Results are AI simulations, labeled as such, and no two runs are guaranteed to agree.

What you are looking at when it finishes

The map colours by margin, not by winner alone, so a state carried narrowly looks different from one carried in a landslide. The tally bar tracks electoral votes toward 270. The wire on the right narrates the night as states report, and it flags the specific platform planks that moved a state, which is usually the most interesting thing in a run: a promise written for one part of the country often lands somewhere its author never considered.

A single click on any state opens its county map. A double click opens the full breakdown: the vote shares, the issues the delegation weighed and which way each one cut, and quotes from invented voters in real towns. Those voices are fiction inside a labeled simulation and are never presented as real people.

If the simulator is busy

The simulator runs on shared free AI capacity with a daily ceiling, so at busy times some states may not resolve. Retry unresolved usually clears them within a minute or two. If you would rather not wait, you can supply your own API key from Google Gemini, Anthropic, Groq or OpenAI in the setup panel: your runs then use your own quota, the key stays in your browser, and it is never stored on our servers.

Try it

The simulator is free to use. For the 2026 midterms, every real race has its own page: start from the elections hub, the Senate, or your state.