Even in an ordinary year, fielding candidates for every available position is important.
In a wave year it becomes crucial, because opportunities open up that no one would predict in advance, and you need to be on the ballot to take advantage of them.
So my question is simple:
Is there a single interactive nationwide map that shows every single elected position (down to dog-catcher), revealing the current incumbent, past electoral results, all current candidates for any upcoming elections, their endorsements and funding status, the demographics of the electoral base, polling results, etc., with the ability to filter, extract statistical summaries, rank order, etc., and also to write novel spread-sheet-like macros for exploring correlations, etc. ?
If not, WHY NOT?
With such a map I could zoom in on my locale to see the status of school board races, county sheriff, water quality board, etc. And I could filter to see which of those positions are held by Tea Party members, or fundamentalists, or socialists or libertarians or Democrats about to retire, or whatever.
Alternatively, I could use such a map to identify locations where no Democrat is running and figure out if I know anyone in that area who would make a good candidate.
I could display the races ranked by how tight they are, to help direct my contributions to the tipping points, or by their positions on some spectrum of issues, to direct my contributions to causes I care about. I could use it to link to phone banks for registration drives and GOTV efforts.
I could use it to highlight upcoming town-hall events or legislative votes related to issues I care about.
And on and on and on.
With an open-sourced code base, the map could be tailored to allow creative minds to add useful features no one has yet considered.
Any pointers welcome.