905: Offensive Measures

WAR helps identify underperforming GOP targets, not just case studies

The recent debate about WAR has focused on overperformers (specifically, why moderate candidates in both parties do better).

That is a big deal for us - it helps point us to the case studies to evaluate, the candidates & staffers to learn from, and as a measurement of ROI in the districts we invest in.

But while Democratic overperformance is a big deal to us, Republican underperformance is actually a bigger deal. Because that’s where targets come from.

When you look at the districts we’ve invested in off-cycle, you see the result of a diligence process that has a heavy dose of incumbent evaluation. If we are saying a district is an underrated investment, we are in a way short-selling the Republican incumbent.

In both 2021 and 2023, we shorted two Republicans each cycle: Lauren Boebert, Ken Calvert, Scott Perry, and Derrick Van Orden. Three of those had a WAR that was negative in the prior cycle - they’d performed worse than expected.

The fourth was Ken Calvert, who had a slightly positive WAR in 2020 of R+0.3 … but his Democratic challenger was a progressive white guy with dreadlocks:

The cycle before, Calvert had a negative WAR of 3.8.

We felt very strongly about the case for investing in Adam Frisch, Will Rollins, Janelle Stelson, and Rebecca Cooke. As people and as candidates, it was an honor to raise the resources and make the programmatic investments to increase their chances of going to Congress. And their strongly positive WAR scores helped us measure the performance of our diligence process and investments.

But it starts with a short case.

And yes, it is often the inverse of the Moderate Bonus case for Democrats. These are Republicans who are too extreme for their districts.

We need both to be true for things to work. And we surely will in 2026 and 2028. 905 days until the next presidential primary.