Billy Beane and Politics

Billy Beane is the General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and has very little to do with politics, which is the main topic of this blog. However, his style of managing the Athletics using Sabermetric principles (analysis of baseball using statistical evidence) holds great lessons for parties who want to win elections. Conventional wisdom in baseball is that statistics like batting average are important, while sabermetric principles state that it matters very little because batting average deals with hits rather than runs and does not examine how effective a player is at creating runs that win games. Politics is fundamentally an inefficient business that is looking for its "Billy Beane" so to speak, who can rate candidates objectively based on how many votes they create (or lose) as compared to the standard candidate that year and figure out seats to target on this basis.

For example: Michael Steele is a better candidate than George Allen, although Allen came much closer to winning the election in Virginia.

Here is why: Michael Steele created 10 percent additional support among African American voters than the typical Republican canddiate would recieve. The exit polls (which probably overestimate his black support) said that he won about 25 percent support although there is not that much difficulty in assuming that he got at least 20 percent or somewhere in that range. That was not enough to win but discounting the Democrats nationwide victories and the disapproval of President Bush he still created positive votes.

George Allen, on the other hand created negative votes for the Republican Party and this was what caused his defeat, not the underlying factors. Sure he would not have lost had he said Macaca in say, 1994, or at least in an environment similar to that type but he would still have done worse than Republicans generally.

I guess where I am going here is that things should be addressed relative to the national trend rather than on their own, because that risks drawing the wrong conclusions. Both parties should get those who created votes relative to the national trend to stand for election again, and dissuade those who did not create positive votes.