Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

From my earlier posting (last April!):

Fans of the Michael Lewis baseball book "Moneyball" will know that taking a hard look at statistics can offer insights that the human eye cannot. According to Lewis and his subject, Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane, baseball teams with limited payrolls can compete - and win - against overfunded franchises like the Yankees and Red Sox, if they have the creativity and determination to find inefficiencies in the game. On-base percentage, formerly a comparatively unheralded statistic, turned out to be just that kind of ineffiency. So the A's loaded up on undervalued players with major flaws but who walked a ton, and sure enough, Oakland was able to end up near the top of the league in runs scored - and in wins. That's Moneyball.

Here's what I've been wondering: could any of the lessons of Moneyball apply to the world of politics?

Well, yet again it turns out Team Republican once agian picked up the message. Try not to notice that they got the idea before I did, but read this bit from Time magazine:

Could a secret of Republican electoral success be ... baseball? Actually, it's Moneyball, Michael Lewis' best-seller about how Oakland A's manager Billy Beane built a top team by picking players on the basis of their stats, not their reputations. Republican National Committee chairman and Baltimore Orioles fan Ken Mehlman is applying Moneyball's stats-centric strategy to his own game. "Politics, like baseball, for years was less effective than it could be because you didn't try to quantify things," he told TIME. Mehlman managed Bush-Cheney '04, which set "metrics" for making phone calls and knocking on doors, and tracked ads on spreadsheets. He obsesses over detailed data like turnout in Florida among newly registered Republicans who call themselves fiscal conservatives (91.2% last year), all new G.O.P.ers (75.7%) and overall (65.3%)--numbers that he says show the power of tax cuts. Mehlman sets goals for volunteer recruiting by state, county and precinct, and uses stats to pick his team: "The performance-based approach says that whoever produces the best results is the person you put in charge." One problem: figures don't always reflect rapid change or account for the element of surprise. But Mehlman is a believer. He's already crunching numbers for the next big game: the 2006 midterm elections.

I still think that statistics could be used for even better purposes. Politics is a game of chance with a million factors, granted, but there has to be value in crunching old polling and financial data to find someone's historical likelihood of winning a race. I suspect that most people agree, but all of us are too lazy to be the one to start collecting massive amounts of data. Fair enough.