The political stats site Split Ticket has a new study looking at Wins Above Replacement (WAR) for political candidates. In other words, what’s the impact of candidate quality versus the voting patterns of a district or state? I don’t think anyone reading this blog will be surprised that it matters less over the years.
In 2016, candidate quality was worth almost 6% per race, in either direction — meaning that on average, a tied open seat would go to D+6 or R+6, based on candidate quality. By 2024, this had been sliced in half to just 3%, as local party and race differences began to fade in favor of nationalized politics. Challengers and incumbents alike now struggle to set themselves apart from the national party, and voters increasingly vote accordingly.
Polarization has also caused the band of plausible outcomes to shrink for any given race — 14 of the 15 elections with candidate effects of 20+ points happened in 2016 and 2018, and the remaining one happened in 2020. Since then, no election anywhere has seen candidate quality yield a 20+ point electoral effect.
Importantly, this trend is even starker for 15+ and 10+ point overperformers: 59 races had a candidate effect of more than 10 points in 2016, but by 2024, this number had plummeted to just 13.
There’s a small bright spot in this dark cloud:
Clearly, Democrats have consistently had the advantage when it comes to races where candidate quality ended up making the difference. This has been particularly true in the Senate, where Republican candidate quality woes have cost them a comfortable majority time and again (in 2020 and 2022, it actually cost them the majority altogether).
Translation: the Republicans’ penchant for nominating weirdos cuts against them.
My conclusions:
A 60-seat Senate majority isn’t in our future. Our leaders in the Senate should adjust accordingly if we ever want to get anything done. As more of a risk-taker than the average Democrat in the Senate (which makes me the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind), I think we should get rid of the filibuster.
We need to take a hard look at the PVI of a district or state, and whether they were running against a weirdo, when we evaluate the performance of a Democratic winner. Perhaps some winner doesn’t have a magic touch, but rather they’re just performing where we’d expect, or they lucked out with their opponent.
Similarly, our tolerance for primaries against Democrats acting like Republicans should be higher. If someone in a D+6 district is acting like someone in a R+3 district, there’s nothing wrong with putting resources behind a primary challenger.
