About After the Midterms

This November we helped win a sheriff's race we had no business winning on paper. Chris Lowery ran as an independent in Jefferson County, Arkansas, against a two-term Democratic incumbent, in a county that votes Democrat up and down the ballot. We managed his campaign: strategy, the website, the automations, the social program, and the day-to-day from the first week to the last.

He lost early voting by about 900 votes. He won Election Day in the rural precincts and finished ahead by 229. Unofficial until the county certifies, and we will update this line when it does.

That race is why this site exists. Most of what we did was not clever. We knew our number on voter contact, we spent against it, and we did not waste the last thirty days. Everything we publish here comes from that kind of work, in that race and in the Ohio and Arkansas campaigns before it.

Who writes this

Nathan Spalding runs Victory Frameworks, a campaign strategy and technology firm, and builds AmericanElectionHQ, an election data and polling platform covering all fifty states. He has done paid campaign work in Ohio and Arkansas since 2022 and co-founded American Polling and Research with Chris Philips in 2026.

Chris Philips is a campaign manager and co-founder of American Polling and Research. He managed the Lowery campaign. Together they organize The War Room, a private group for campaign practitioners.

Why Victory Frameworks publishes this

Because the people who will run 2027 and 2028 campaigns are deciding right now what to do differently, and most of the advice they will get is either sold to them or made up after the fact. We would rather put what we know in writing, with the sources attached, and let it be checked. Some readers will want help with their own race. That is fine, and it is not a condition of anything here.

How the analysis is sourced

Results come from state and county election offices and the Associated Press, with the access date on every figure, and they are labeled preliminary until the state certifies. Interpretation is kept in its own section and every causal claim names the evidence it rests on. Questions the data cannot settle are listed as open, with what would settle them. Every substantive change is dated in the update log on the piece. Nothing here is anonymous sourcing and nothing is a number we could not show you where we got.