Breakwater is a small start up advisory firm working largely on tech policy issues with clients mainly in the US.
We are in the early stages of building a predictive model that can place a risk score for the emergence of highly charged and politically salient social issues in states across the United States, in the lead up to the 2024 elections. Using multiple data sets organized around a list of risk factors (partisan polarization, timing of state legislative sessions, income disparities, presence/absence of gun control laws at the state level, previous history of political violence, and of course many more) we are constructing a simple weighted risk score by state and month, with the outcome being the likelihood that some major social-political issue of electoral significance will 'pop'. We would also like to develop a visualization (almost like a dynamic heat map) that could show the risk in multiple states at a particular time, and show how that risk changes over time.
