This analyst applies ‘Moneyball’ metrics to politics, and it’s looking good for Arizona Dems

Baseball has been kind of obsessed with advanced analytics since the book “Moneyball” came out in 2003; the movie followed in 2011. The idea was to find value in undervalued players — which allows teams to spend less money to win.

Nowadays, one of the most common stats to look at is Wins Above Replacement, or WAR. Basically, it measures a player’s value by figuring out how many more wins he’s worth than another player. For example, according to FanGraphs, defending American League MVP Aaron Judge leads the majors in WAR at 7; that means Judge is worth 7 more wins to the Yankees than if they had someone else in his spot.

Lakshya Jain has taken that stat and applied it to political candidates. Jain, co-founder of the election analysis site Split Ticket, says he was tired of hearing people opine about candidate quality without having any data to back their opinions up. So, he applied the "Moneyball" metric — except he’s calculating how many more votes a candidate is worth than another.

There are a lot of factors that go into this, including controls like incumbency, and whether a district is becoming more red or blue.

Jain uses the example of Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. He says even if she wins her race by 30 points, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how good of a candidate she is, because you need to know by how much President Donald Trump won. Last year, Greene won her race with a little more than 64% of the vote. President Trump won that district with about 68% of the vote. So, he says, even though Greene won her race convincingly, her WAR might not be all that high. That’s because to him, determining the strongest candidates is all about who gets more votes than the generic baseline candidate would get.

Full conversation

LAKSHYA JAIN: I see a lot of value in that because if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re really just asking is there value in figuring out, through polls or through studies in general, like how well candidates do with the voters relative to the types of voters in their district, right?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, it’s almost like kind of getting a bit of a baseline, right? Like if you are in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district, for example, in Georgia, how would a generic, nameless Republican do versus a generic, nameless Democrat do?

JAIN: That’s exactly it, and that’s actually what we calculate. That is exactly what we calculate. We calculate the baseline that a generic Republican would have against the generic Democrat, and then we take the results that actually happened and we say, “Hey, this result saw the Democrat doing 6% better against this Republican than two generic candidates should have had.”

Now why is that? Now once you have the score, people who know context can then add some color to that. But I’ll give you the best example. Let’s just take (Republican Arizona U.S. Rep.) David Schweikert, and David Schweikert consistently does around even with Trump, he runs maybe like a point behind Trump, and people say, “Oh, he’s pretty average.” No, David Schweikert is actually pretty weak. As an incumbent, he should be doing better than Trump by 3-4%, and he doesn’t.

And so you can look at our metric and you can say, “Hey, hang on a second. Someone like David Schweikert is not actually a strong candidate. Someone like David Schweikert is quite weak.” And if you get a blue enough year where the country is just pissed off with Republicans, that’s the kind of candidate who’s vulnerable.

BRODIE: It’s an interesting example though, because Schweikert is somebody who has been seen as vulnerable in his congressional runs for several cycles now, and even in elections where Democrats have done particularly well or maybe even better than expected, Schweikert is a candidate who still wins in that district.

JAIN: He is a candidate that wins in that district, but again I think it’s a question of what’s the expectation, right? If, for example, a generic incumbent just got air dropped into that seat, he would win that seat by about as much as David Schweiker did. He wins that seat because it consistently has like 50%, 51%, 52% of people giving the Republican nominee for president the vote.

But David Schweikert doesn’t control how well Donald Trump does in a seat, right? That’s not within David Schweikert’s control. What is in his control is how many votes he wins above or below, right? Like, how many Harris voters he can convince, how many Trump voters he can convince. And we know enough to say he’s not convincing very many Harris voters at all.

BRODIE: So it’s interesting — and to take it back to sort of a sports analogy, which makes sense, I think, because you’re using a sports statistic here. There’s the idea of, as you reference, “Moneyball.” You want to be getting as many runs as you can. Obviously, the more runs you have, the better chance you have to win.

But in reality, you only need one more run than the other team to win, and it sounds like what you’re saying is with someone like David Schweikert, he just needs 50% plus one. Even though maybe he should be getting more, or another Repblican candidate in his district would be getting more, as long as he gets that 50% plus 1, he’s fine.

JAIN: Correct, right? Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, does really badly in elections relative to what you’d expect, but she’s never gonna be at risk of getting below 50%, or getting below 50 + 1. So she’s fine in that sense.

Now, the reason that Schweikert is different is because Marjorie Taylor Greene’s seat sees Donald Trump win 70% of the vote. David Schweikert sees Donald Trump win 51%, 52%. Now you’ve been through this whole ride a few times, right? You remember 2008, when the word Republican was basically a slur in half of America. You remember 2024 when people were so mad at Joe Biden that polls were saying Donald Trump was going to win by 9 before Biden dropped out.

All of that is to say the country can swing by around 10%, and candidates within that 10% range, candidates to win by like less than 10%, need to always watch their six. They need to always watch their back.

In baseball, the way I look at it is you may have a weak division, and you can get by with winning like 85, 87 games sometimes when your division’s weak. But let’s say another GM goes out and he decides to sign a big free agent, let’s say Juan Soto signed with the Padres again instead of with the Mets. Now what happens?

Now all of a sudden, that team has gotten a lot better. And your approach of constantly and consistently winning 85, 86 games isn’t gonna get you the division title.

BRODIE: So then who is the Shohei Otani or the Aaron Judge of political candidates? Who are the WAR leaders, in your mind?

JAIN: Oh man, when you get me started on this, I can go on forever. I’ll tell you two people that are just truly incredible on the Democratic side and on the Republican side. One each.

Republican side, (U.S. Sen.) Susan Collins.

BRODIE: In Maine, yeah.

JAIN: We have rarely seen a candidate like that. Susan Collins in Maine, liberals will get mad at her because she’s still a Republican and she says a lot, “I’m concerned” while still voting for Republicans. But the fact of the matter is, Susan Collins is much more liberal than the average Republican, and so she wins a lot of liberals and moderates and centrists in Maine. And so we have her doing like 15 points better than expected. That’s an astronomical number.

And then on the Democratic side, it’s (Sen.) Amy Klobuchar. Amy Klobuchar is something straight out of science fiction …

BRODIE: From Minnesota.

JAIN: From Minnesota. She does 9% better than expected very regularly. You know, Minnesota is not a super blue state, but she consistently wins by double digits because she’s Amy Klobuchar, and she just is that strong.

BRODIE: How much of that comes down to those particular politicians and candidates having been around public office and public life for so long, and voters just kind of knowing who they are and being familiar with them and feeling like they can really trust them?

JAIN: That is a big part of it. Trust is the biggest thing in politics. But I will say that new candidates also do really, really well a lot of the time. In Arizona, for example, (now-U.S. Sen.) Ruben Gallego did 7 points better than expected against Kari Lake. Now you might say, “Well, that’s Kari Lake.” But still that’s 7 points better than expected. So overperformance is possible from everyone. They just have to commit to trying to win the middle and trying to win the other side.

BRODIE: All right, so you mentioned Ruben Gallego. We talked about David Schweikert earlier. It sounds like Ruben Gallego would sort of be on the leader board for WAR in Arizona. Is there anybody else that comes to mind or that your numbers show does particularly better than sort of the replacement candidate in this state?

JAIN: Yeah, (U.S. Sen.) Mark Kelly. Both of your guys’ senators are really, really strong. They’re not the typical Democrats, according to voters. In general, Arizona Democrats tend to nominate some pretty strong people, even when they lose.

You guys had (U.S. Rep.) Eli Crane, as your Republican he represents your 2nd District. Well, Jonathan Nez, the president of the Navajo Nation, he ran against Eli Crane, and he did 9 points better than expected. So you guys have people from all over the spectrum, especially really Democrats that are just crushing it with Trump voters, and their only fault is that they’re in a seat that Donald Trump has won by 5 points.