Statistically Engineered BetterChances for Trump in November
Oct 12, 2024 2:20:14 GMT -5
Post by ExquisiteGerbil on Oct 12, 2024 2:20:14 GMT -5
The ‘Moneyball’ Election: How Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Has Statistically Engineered Better Chances for Trump in November
Matthew Boyle
11 Oct 2024
Washington, DC
Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in battleground states, particularly Arizona, have an edge in 2024 that they never had before: Ballot chasers on the right, led by conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, working hard to statistically undermine Democrats’ chances of repeating the 2020 shocker that took Trump out and installed Democrat President Joe Biden in the White House.
Tyler Bowyer, the former Arizona Republican National Committeeman who’s leading the Turning Point Action ballot chasing operations, compared the never-before-seen-on-the-American-right effort to the Moneyball story of how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team ditched the conventional wisdom of traditional scouts, entirely replacing them with statistical analysts who emphasized on-base percentage. The effort shocked professional sports and saw the A’s go on a historic winning streak in the summer of 2002 and make a playoff run nobody thought possible on a small budget that paled in comparison to bigger market teams like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox. While the A’s didn’t end up winning the World Series that year, the Red Sox, led by owner John Henry, employed the same strategy the next two years, and then in 2004 saw the storied franchise reverse an 86-year drought of national championships known to many in Beantown as “the Curse of the Great Bambino.” After winning the 2004 World Series, the Red Sox would win several more over the next two decades despite a lingering drought they’re currently in. The Moneyball story of “sabermetrics,” using statistics to bolster a professional sports team’s chances of victory, was first told in a 2003 book by Michael Lewis and late memorialized in a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt as A’s general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as his statistics-obsessed assistant.
A big part of the story in the movie on this front is how catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg, played by actor Chris Pratt, has a high on-base percentage but, as portrayed in the movie, was a terrible defensive first baseman. The stats guys in Beane’s front office needs to convince head coach Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, to actually put Hatteberg in the lineup—to which he eventually very reluctantly agrees. Across the board, the movie shows that when the coach finally agrees to these various changes from the general manager’s office, the team starts netting some major victories including a massive winning streak in the summer. But towards the end of the winning streak, as the team blew a massive lead late in a game, Hatteberg comes up to the plate and hits a walk-off home run to secure the record-breaking (at the time) 20th consecutive win. So, the moral of the story is, statistics can get you into a better spot, but you still have to execute to win ball games.
Bowyer, in a lengthy interview late this summer with Breitbart News, laid out how he and the Turning Point crew are applying that same Moneyball mentality to winning elections for Republicans, and defeating Democrats.
“The important part about Moneyball, in addition to it being a statistical analysis, is that you still have to do it,” Bowyer said. “The coolest part of the Moneyball story is you’re basing who you put out on statistics as opposed to just sticking them out there, but you’ve got to still do that work right? It’s not, ‘oh what if this many Republicans show up based off the polls and their feelings?’ No, it’s truly like Moneyball where it’s you actually have the people in the field doing the work. That is the key part of this where you have to chase. You have to have the bodies to actually do it, otherwise you’re screwed. That’s the basic piece of how Republicans have gone into almost every modern election. The general push since basically Bush was in office where they had a chase program, probably the last one that was adequately used was the last Bush election, you now just have Republicans who have just said they’re going to get on the right side of polling and just pump money into Karl Rove, which means independents would be on our side and that’s how you win. Well, that doesn’t work anymore, because Democrats figured out they can just replace all those votes with low-propensity voters hanging out in their parents’ basement who are moody or having a bad day that day, because all they have to do is chase them. By the way if they expand early voting, which they did in 2020, it makes it even easier.”
So, how is Bowyer accomplishing this feat? Well, first off, he explained, the focus begins primarily with locking down his state of Arizona for the right. Arizona and Georgia, two states whose electoral votes total 27 combined, both slipped away from Trump in the days after the election in 2020. If both move back into the Trump column, and Trump holds North Carolina—which he won in both 2016 and 2020—then Trump is simply one state away from the presidency no matter what the final state is between Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. Without Arizona, Trump would need Pennsylvania to be the state that puts him over the top, along with North Carolina and Georgia. So Arizona plays a critical role here in relaxing Trump’s needs in the upper rust belt, and makes it that much easier for the former president to wipe out the current Vice President on Nov. 5.
“Our big focus, our primary focus, has always been Arizona first and that’s just from the statistical focus we talked about from your first piece, which is that Arizona statistically makes the most sense,” Bowyer said. “Arizona is kind of like for us what Michigan is for the Democrats. If they lose Michigan, it makes it really tough for them to win the presidency. It’s still possible, but it takes a huge amount of statistical breaks to win. Arizona is the same for us. If we lose Arizona, it takes a huge amount of statistical options off the table. I’ve never analyzed the left’s statistical options, but I would assume that Michigan is way, way up there just knowing the map. So, for us it’s been Arizona and going down the list of what matters the most and what things are looking like and feeling. Wisconsin matters too, and that’s where we’ve put our second biggest muscle piece in Wisconsin. We have a full-time operating office out of Waukesha – it’s right on the border of Waukesha and Milwaukee. I’m there literally every three days for ballot chasing training. We’re doing literally the exact same program that we’re doing in Arizona. Wisconsin is a little bit more tricky because Arizona in Phoenix everyone lives on top of each other but in Wisconsin it’s a lot more spread out. It’s a lot like the rest of the Midwest, a little bit more rural and more suburban rural, so you have to have a significant amount of people able to make contact with people in different ways. Wisconsin is going really well. We have a team of about five times as many people on the ground as they had in 2020 right now, and we’re going to continue to up that and continue chasing votes.”
That first piece to which Bowyer is referring is an article Breitbart News published way back in January of 2024 from Las Vegas, Nevada, where Turning Point Action brought together party activists and election officials from key battleground states to chart out the ballot chasing strategy for the right nationwide but particularly in battleground states. As Breitbart News reported at the time, Turning Point Action identified millions of potential perhaps likely Republican voters who did not vote in the last several elections for whatever reason. Maybe they were not registered, or maybe they were not politically engaged to the point of caring enough to vote. In the key battleground states, like Arizona, these numbers are significantly higher than the margins that separated Trump from Biden in the 2020 election results. In Arizona specifically, it’s 27 times the margin. In Georgia, it was 45 times the margin. In Wisconsin, it was 26 times the 2020 margin. And so on and so forth across the battlegrounds.
In 2020, there were 3,333,829 votes cast in Arizona. Trump got 1,661,686 of them. Biden got 1,672,143 of them. Biden’s margin over Trump was a mere 10,457 votes. When you’re talking about more than three million votes cast, slightly over ten thousand is basically a statistical rounding error. It’s such a minor difference, that any slight smidge of a bit of an edge one way or the other going into the rematch—which this election originally was set to be and kind of still is—could blow it wide open. So Bowyer and company began studying the data in Arizona in the aftermath of 2020 and trying to look for that edge. They found it, they think, in what they call low propensity voters. If they can juice things for the right a few thousand here, a few thousand there, they could give Trump a statistical advantage nobody sees coming that looks like five or more percent extra for him in the final vote totals as compared with last time. And that could be ballgame. Lights out. It’s over. Pack it up. Go home, Kamala—at least in Arizona.
Continued at link
Matthew Boyle
11 Oct 2024
Washington, DC
Former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in battleground states, particularly Arizona, have an edge in 2024 that they never had before: Ballot chasers on the right, led by conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action, working hard to statistically undermine Democrats’ chances of repeating the 2020 shocker that took Trump out and installed Democrat President Joe Biden in the White House.
Tyler Bowyer, the former Arizona Republican National Committeeman who’s leading the Turning Point Action ballot chasing operations, compared the never-before-seen-on-the-American-right effort to the Moneyball story of how in 2002 the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team ditched the conventional wisdom of traditional scouts, entirely replacing them with statistical analysts who emphasized on-base percentage. The effort shocked professional sports and saw the A’s go on a historic winning streak in the summer of 2002 and make a playoff run nobody thought possible on a small budget that paled in comparison to bigger market teams like the New York Yankees or Boston Red Sox. While the A’s didn’t end up winning the World Series that year, the Red Sox, led by owner John Henry, employed the same strategy the next two years, and then in 2004 saw the storied franchise reverse an 86-year drought of national championships known to many in Beantown as “the Curse of the Great Bambino.” After winning the 2004 World Series, the Red Sox would win several more over the next two decades despite a lingering drought they’re currently in. The Moneyball story of “sabermetrics,” using statistics to bolster a professional sports team’s chances of victory, was first told in a 2003 book by Michael Lewis and late memorialized in a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt as A’s general manager Billy Beane and Jonah Hill as his statistics-obsessed assistant.
A big part of the story in the movie on this front is how catcher-turned-first baseman Scott Hatteberg, played by actor Chris Pratt, has a high on-base percentage but, as portrayed in the movie, was a terrible defensive first baseman. The stats guys in Beane’s front office needs to convince head coach Art Howe, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, to actually put Hatteberg in the lineup—to which he eventually very reluctantly agrees. Across the board, the movie shows that when the coach finally agrees to these various changes from the general manager’s office, the team starts netting some major victories including a massive winning streak in the summer. But towards the end of the winning streak, as the team blew a massive lead late in a game, Hatteberg comes up to the plate and hits a walk-off home run to secure the record-breaking (at the time) 20th consecutive win. So, the moral of the story is, statistics can get you into a better spot, but you still have to execute to win ball games.
Bowyer, in a lengthy interview late this summer with Breitbart News, laid out how he and the Turning Point crew are applying that same Moneyball mentality to winning elections for Republicans, and defeating Democrats.
“The important part about Moneyball, in addition to it being a statistical analysis, is that you still have to do it,” Bowyer said. “The coolest part of the Moneyball story is you’re basing who you put out on statistics as opposed to just sticking them out there, but you’ve got to still do that work right? It’s not, ‘oh what if this many Republicans show up based off the polls and their feelings?’ No, it’s truly like Moneyball where it’s you actually have the people in the field doing the work. That is the key part of this where you have to chase. You have to have the bodies to actually do it, otherwise you’re screwed. That’s the basic piece of how Republicans have gone into almost every modern election. The general push since basically Bush was in office where they had a chase program, probably the last one that was adequately used was the last Bush election, you now just have Republicans who have just said they’re going to get on the right side of polling and just pump money into Karl Rove, which means independents would be on our side and that’s how you win. Well, that doesn’t work anymore, because Democrats figured out they can just replace all those votes with low-propensity voters hanging out in their parents’ basement who are moody or having a bad day that day, because all they have to do is chase them. By the way if they expand early voting, which they did in 2020, it makes it even easier.”
So, how is Bowyer accomplishing this feat? Well, first off, he explained, the focus begins primarily with locking down his state of Arizona for the right. Arizona and Georgia, two states whose electoral votes total 27 combined, both slipped away from Trump in the days after the election in 2020. If both move back into the Trump column, and Trump holds North Carolina—which he won in both 2016 and 2020—then Trump is simply one state away from the presidency no matter what the final state is between Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin. Without Arizona, Trump would need Pennsylvania to be the state that puts him over the top, along with North Carolina and Georgia. So Arizona plays a critical role here in relaxing Trump’s needs in the upper rust belt, and makes it that much easier for the former president to wipe out the current Vice President on Nov. 5.
“Our big focus, our primary focus, has always been Arizona first and that’s just from the statistical focus we talked about from your first piece, which is that Arizona statistically makes the most sense,” Bowyer said. “Arizona is kind of like for us what Michigan is for the Democrats. If they lose Michigan, it makes it really tough for them to win the presidency. It’s still possible, but it takes a huge amount of statistical breaks to win. Arizona is the same for us. If we lose Arizona, it takes a huge amount of statistical options off the table. I’ve never analyzed the left’s statistical options, but I would assume that Michigan is way, way up there just knowing the map. So, for us it’s been Arizona and going down the list of what matters the most and what things are looking like and feeling. Wisconsin matters too, and that’s where we’ve put our second biggest muscle piece in Wisconsin. We have a full-time operating office out of Waukesha – it’s right on the border of Waukesha and Milwaukee. I’m there literally every three days for ballot chasing training. We’re doing literally the exact same program that we’re doing in Arizona. Wisconsin is a little bit more tricky because Arizona in Phoenix everyone lives on top of each other but in Wisconsin it’s a lot more spread out. It’s a lot like the rest of the Midwest, a little bit more rural and more suburban rural, so you have to have a significant amount of people able to make contact with people in different ways. Wisconsin is going really well. We have a team of about five times as many people on the ground as they had in 2020 right now, and we’re going to continue to up that and continue chasing votes.”
That first piece to which Bowyer is referring is an article Breitbart News published way back in January of 2024 from Las Vegas, Nevada, where Turning Point Action brought together party activists and election officials from key battleground states to chart out the ballot chasing strategy for the right nationwide but particularly in battleground states. As Breitbart News reported at the time, Turning Point Action identified millions of potential perhaps likely Republican voters who did not vote in the last several elections for whatever reason. Maybe they were not registered, or maybe they were not politically engaged to the point of caring enough to vote. In the key battleground states, like Arizona, these numbers are significantly higher than the margins that separated Trump from Biden in the 2020 election results. In Arizona specifically, it’s 27 times the margin. In Georgia, it was 45 times the margin. In Wisconsin, it was 26 times the 2020 margin. And so on and so forth across the battlegrounds.
In 2020, there were 3,333,829 votes cast in Arizona. Trump got 1,661,686 of them. Biden got 1,672,143 of them. Biden’s margin over Trump was a mere 10,457 votes. When you’re talking about more than three million votes cast, slightly over ten thousand is basically a statistical rounding error. It’s such a minor difference, that any slight smidge of a bit of an edge one way or the other going into the rematch—which this election originally was set to be and kind of still is—could blow it wide open. So Bowyer and company began studying the data in Arizona in the aftermath of 2020 and trying to look for that edge. They found it, they think, in what they call low propensity voters. If they can juice things for the right a few thousand here, a few thousand there, they could give Trump a statistical advantage nobody sees coming that looks like five or more percent extra for him in the final vote totals as compared with last time. And that could be ballgame. Lights out. It’s over. Pack it up. Go home, Kamala—at least in Arizona.
Continued at link
