Launching Akashic

# Launching Akashic

A page for every place in America.

Posted 2026-05-24 by Kenton Tilford.

Akashic is a public reference for the political and demographic history of every American place. Type any US address and you land on the page for the county that contains it — every presidential election the place has voted in since 1876, the modern demographic profile from the Census, religious adherence from the 2020 US Religion Census, a 12-archetype classification of how the place votes, and the counties whose voting pattern most resembles it across the long historical record.

## What's on every page

- **Election history.** Every presidential election from 1876 to 2024 — Democratic and Republican vote share, margin, winner. Gaps in the pre-1928 record are shown honestly rather than interpolated.
- **Demographics.** Population, age structure, race and ancestry, income, poverty, languages spoken at home, all from the most recent Census ACS five-year file.
- **Religious adherence.** Adherent counts by tradition from the 2020 US Religion Census, bucketed into seven groups for display.
- **Maps.** A precinct-level 2024 map for counties that have one. Historical 2016 and 2020 precinct maps where available. For larger geographies, a choropleth of the constituent counties.
- **Archetype.** A 12-label classification — Democratic loyalist, Republican loyalist, Realigner, Bellwether, Populist, Recent convert, Urban anchor, Old Confederacy, Western maverick, Frontier, Sparse, Tossup — assigned by a deterministic rule sequence.
- **Similar places.** The ten places elsewhere in the country whose voting trajectory most closely resembles this one.
- **Narrative.** A few paragraphs of generated prose summarizing the place's political character, plus an editor-written lead paragraph where coverage exists.

## What's covered

A page for every geography level the federal government tracks at the political-relevant scale: 3,143 counties, 51 states (including DC), 430 congressional districts, ~6,600 state legislative districts, 918 metro areas, 208 media markets — plus a long tail of ~31,900 incorporated places and unincorporated communities served on demand.

## What's deliberately not here

Ballot measures, downballot races, primary results, polling, prediction-market prices, and turnout by demographic group. Some of those are on the roadmap; the rest live in the broader Akashic Intelligence platform.

## Sources

Election results from the MIT Election Lab and ICPSR historical archive, with 2024 totals from each state's certified returns. Precinct geometry from VEST. Demographics from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024 five-year file. Religious adherence from the 2020 US Religion Census published by ASARB. Boundary geometry from US Census TIGER/Line 2024.

Original editorial copy, the 12-archetype taxonomy, and computed derived data are published under CC BY 4.0. The full per-source license breakdown is in `/ATTRIBUTION.txt`. AI training and indexing are explicitly welcomed.

Built by Akashic Intelligence.