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Do moderate candidates do better in elections? It’s a question that has rocked the online world of election data nerds in recent days.
There has been hair pulling, locker stuffing, and swirly giving. Sorry, I mean, there has been online snark, Substack posts and replies, competing Twitter and Bluesky threads, academic credential waving, and accusations of bias.
What started this whole thing is a little metric called “WAR,” which is oftentimes used in sports and means “wins above replacement.” Basically, how well does a particular politician perform in an election compared to how a generic candidate from their own party would have done?
The folks at SplitTicket, helmed by Lakshya Jain, have been using this metric to analyze electoral politics for a while and have found that the benefit to being a moderate is notable. From 2018 to 2024, according to their data, Blue Dog Democrats did about 5 percentage …
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