Electify is an election simulator that runs in your browser. It has three modes: a 2028 presidential election night, Career Mode, where you build a political career one office at a time, and Election Lab, where you set up a single race yourself. All three use the same county maps, the same results data and the same vote-counting engine, so a county behaves the same way whether you’re watching it on election night or campaigning in it.

2028 Presidential Election Simulator

Pick the Democratic and Republican tickets from 78 possible nominees and running mates. You can add a Green candidate (Butch Ware or Jill Stein), a Libertarian (Jo Jorgensen or Chase Oliver), or both. Each candidate has home-state, demographic and approval effects that move particular states. A national environment slider pushes the whole map toward one party, and every state moves by its own amount: swing states shift a lot, safe states barely budge.

Then you watch the night. Polls close on the real schedule and counties report one by one on a map of all 50 states, DC, and the Maine and Nebraska congressional districts. Early returns lean Republican until mail ballots catch up. Races are called as they’re decided, with bulletins from AP, CNN, Fox, the New York Times and others. A Monte Carlo forecast runs thousands of simulations to give each side a win probability, the tipping-point state, and projected House and Senate seats.

Career Mode: building a candidate

You start by making a person: name, party, gender, age, face, hair and clothes, a home state and county, and a background. An ideology slider fills in your positions on every issue, or you can set each one yourself. Your home county decides your city, your congressional district and your state legislative districts.

Career Mode: running for office

There are 40 offices and Cabinet posts, from city council and mayor to the state legislature, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Governor, Lieutenant Governor, the other statewide offices (Attorney General, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Auditor and so on, depending on what your state elects), and President. You file during your state’s real filing window and run under its real rules: closed or open partisan primaries, Southern runoffs, California and Washington’s top-two, Louisiana’s jungle primary, Alaska’s top-four with ranked-choice voting, and Nebraska’s nonpartisan legislature. In states where governors run on a ticket you pick a running mate, and a nominee can tap you to be theirs.

The campaign runs week by week from your HQ. You split your hours between fundraising, rallies and canvassing; set your ad budget, issue and tone (including attack ads); commission polls and track the race over time; chase endorsements; manage volunteers, PAC money and your own self-funding; and design a yard sign and a narrated launch video. You can see who you’re running against, and even shape the other party’s primary field. Debates are optional and play out question by question. Things come up on the trail that need a decision, and your campaign manager will answer questions about the race, your opponent and the state.

Election night uses the live county map. You choose how long the count takes, from 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Vote totals roll up as counties report, races are called when the outcome is clear, and you can switch to any other race on the same ballot: Senate, Governor, other House seats, state legislative districts, or the other party’s primary. Every race you’ve run in is saved to your History with full vote counts.

Career Mode: governing

Legislators write bills provision by provision and get a fiscal note, public support numbers, a whip count and their odds of passing before they file. Bills go through committee markup and floor votes. You can vote yea, nay, present or not at all, and every vote is scored against both your party and your district. You join committees and subcommittees (the real 119th Congress lineup in Washington, and each state’s own committees at home), work up to a chair or ranking seat, and use it to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, schedule markups or bury bills. Senators deal with the filibuster, cloture votes and confirmations. You can run for Speaker, majority or minority leader, whip and the other leadership posts. Every vote in every chamber is recorded as a roll call showing how each member voted. There are also caucuses to join, colleagues to build relationships with, and district work: bringing home projects and resolving constituent cases.

Governors propose a balanced state budget that both chambers have to pass, sign or veto bills, deal with disasters and other events in their counties, and issue executive orders that can get challenged in court. Lieutenant governors preside over the state senate in the states where that’s their job and cast the deciding vote on ties; in Texas and Mississippi they also appoint the committees and control the floor. Presidents work from the Oval Office: an agenda for Congress, a federal budget, a Cabinet, and crises in the Situation Room. You can also serve as Vice President or be appointed to the Cabinet.

Every office has an approval rating, cable and local news interviews (some outlets are friendly, some aren’t), endorsements to give, and a salary and campaign account that grows as you fundraise. You can also take bribes, trade on inside information or skim campaign funds. Any of it can get you indicted, then expelled or impeached. Each new term starts with an inauguration and an official portrait, and every office you hold goes on your résumé.

Career Mode: the world around you

The rest of the country keeps going. The Politicians tab lists every officeholder in every state: the President, Vice President and Cabinet, every governor and statewide officer, all 100 senators, all 435 House members, every state legislator, and mayors and city councils, each with a full résumé and approval rating, plus lists of who held each job before them. All Races shows every Senate, Governor, House and state race on the ballot each year with ratings, polls and results you can watch. News collects coverage of your campaigns and scandals, Metrics tracks the economy, poverty, education and more in your state, city and the country (your laws move those numbers), and History keeps every election you’ve run in.

Politicians age, hit term limits, retire, die and get replaced, sometimes in special elections. Vacancies can be filled by appointment, and you might be the one offered the seat. Every ten years the census reapportions House seats between states and redraws the maps, and states slowly drift left or right over the decades. The current and 2011–2021 congressional and state legislative maps are both drawn on their real lines.

Election Lab

The Lab is for running one race exactly the way you want. Pick a state, an office (Governor, Lieutenant Governor, U.S. Senate, a House district, or any statewide office that state actually elects) and a year. Then choose a general election or a party primary, set the seat’s lean, the national mood, which party holds the White House and whether it’s a midterm. You build every candidate: their face, ideology, current office and how long they’ve held it, past jobs, who’s backing them, and how much they spend.

There are also ready-made 2026 matchups with the real candidates, their real polling (refreshed every morning) and the current Cook Political Report rating. When you run it, the returns come in on the same live map Career Mode uses. Afterward you get a written breakdown of who won where and why. You can edit individual counties, or rerun the same matchup to see how much it changes.

Everything else

Your careers save to this device, or to an account so you can pick them up anywhere. There’s a mobile layout and a light mode, and you can add Electify to your home screen like an app. It’s free to play, and new offices, states and features keep getting added. If you want to support it, there’s a ☕ Buy me a coffee button on the home screen.

Data credits. State legislative district boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 cartographic boundary files, and 2018 files for the 2011–2021 maps (public domain). District-level partisan leans are derived from 2020 precinct results by the Voting and Election Science Team (VEST), 2020 Precinct-Level Election Results, Harvard Dataverse, doi:10.7910/DVN/K7760H, licensed CC BY 4.0. The precinct results were assigned to the current district lines and shifted to each state's 2024 lean. The 2011–2021 congressional and legislative maps use VEST's 2016 Precinct-Level Election Results (doi:10.7910/DVN/NH5S2I, CC BY 4.0) assigned to those lines, relative to each state's 2016 result. Town names and locations on the district maps: GeoNames (cities1000), licensed CC BY 4.0.

Election Lab is a sandbox for a single election. The presidential simulator hands you a whole country and Career Mode hands you a career — the lab hands you one race and lets you build every piece of it, then watch it play out on the same live county map and results engine the rest of Electify runs on.

1 · Design the race. Pick a state, then an office — Governor, Lieutenant Governor, U.S. Senate, a U.S. House district, or any downballot statewide office that state actually elects (Attorney General, Secretary of State, Treasurer, Auditor, Superintendent, and more). Choose a general election or a party primary. Then set the stage: drag the seat's baseline lean to make it as safe or as competitive as you want, choose the year, and set the national environment — which party holds the White House and whether the year is a midterm — so the thermostatic backlash that pushes real downballot races is folded in.

2 · Build the candidates. Everything Career Mode lets you set on a candidate, you set here: name, a full custom face, ideology (from the issue quiz or a direct slider), their current office and how long they've held it, past positions, the special interests backing them, and the total money they spent — which really does move the result. A general has two nominees, colored red and blue, and you can add independents; a primary can hold as many candidates as you like, each in their own color. Experience, ideology fit for the seat, money, and backers all feed the same model the campaign engine uses, so a heavyweight with a long résumé and a war chest starts ahead of an unknown.

3 · Run election night. Set how fast the returns come in, hit run, and the count climbs from 0% to 100% county by county — live vote tallies, AP-style call banners, an optional margin needle on two-way generals, and Candidates and Results tabs, exactly like a real election night. No other races are on the ballot, so it's just your contest.

4 · Read the result. When it's called, the recap names the winner with their portrait and a full written race report — how the result compares to the seat's lean and the national climate, how the map broke across metros, suburbs and rural counties, which communities and demographics broke which way, the strongholds and the closest bellwether county, and turnout. From there you can rebuild the candidates, rerun the exact matchup, or head home.

Nothing in the lab touches your saved Career Mode careers — it's a self-contained what-if machine. Tweak one thing, run it again, and see what changes.