Mod Women Win
Split Ticket analysis tells two truths, which add up to prioritizing Rebecca Cooke today
There are thousands of Political Science PhDs out there, but shockingly few great resources to understand which candidates are the strongest.
Split Ticket launched in late 2021 as a hub of the most interesting mapping, modeling, and political forecasting in the online community known as #ElectionTwitter. It quickly became an invaluable resource, and its recent partnership with The Washington Post has yielded two pieces from co-founder Lakshya Jain that are key to understanding recent elections - and debunking harmful narratives.
Moderates win. And so do women.
More on the research in a minute, but quick related note: today is the final day of the quarter, which means you’ll be bombarded with text messages and emails from candidates needing to “meet this urgent deadline.”
When Democratic small donors are bombarded by text messages, there are few resources for them to understand which candidates are worth their money. Which leads to a misallocation of precious dollars to unwinnable races.
Welcome co-founder
has made the case for fixing the broken political marketplace on CNN, WaPo, etc - and written about how there is a better way. Our growing community has contributed more than $500,000 to the most important, most overperforming candidates. And when Q1 fundraising is announced on April 15, the top data point for knowing who will win the House in 2026 is Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin’s Third. Here’s from this morning on what to watch for:How are House candidates doing early in top-tier races?
Several Democrats launched campaigns against vulnerable House Republicans early this year, so we'll be watching to see whether they open strong and scare off other intraparty opponents. One candidate we'll be paying close attention to is Wisconsin Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who is seeking to avenge her close loss last year to Republican Rep. Derrick Van Orden in the 3rd District.
You can learn more about Rebecca here, and can support Rebecca here on our Win The Middle Slate (click “customize” on the right to allocate across the slate).
Moderate Women Win
Remember the movie Moneyball about how small-market baseball teams outsmarted the big spenders?
The sober, creative analysis done at Split Ticket is a modern, political version of The Bill James Baseball Abstract that inspired the movement that revolutionized sports.
James popularized the concept of WAR - Wins Above Replacement, a measure of a player's overall value showing how many wins they contribute above the performance of the generic next-available player. Split Ticket does something similar for candidates, and it puts Rebecca Cooke - who ran a TV ad standing in the literal “middle of the road” - at 7.3 points above replacement, one of the highest of any challenger in the country.
This is one data point that helps answer one of the most pressing questions for Democrats: do candidates need to move to the left to mobilize the base?
The answer is no, something political science has long demonstrated.
A second piece from Split Ticket answers another question Democrats have asked in the wake of another presidential loss: do male candidates do better than female candidates in winning tough districts?
No. If anything, women do better.
Why Mods
In his recent piece on moderation, Jain analyzes 8 years’ worth of data and finds that every cycle, moderates outperformed. And the more moderate a candidate was, the better they did:
At Split Ticket, we have modeled the last 8 years of candidate quality in congressional elections via our wins-above-replacement metric, and thus have perhaps the most comprehensive database of candidate quality in the Trump era.
Although our database covers every race contested by both parties, we’ll limit our analysis to incumbents here for ease of classification1 — while quantifying challenger ideology is quite difficult, it’s much easier to classify Congressional incumbents, as clearer ideological groupings begin to emerge in caucuses.
In each of the 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024 cycles, we found that the more moderate a congressional caucus was, the better its members did, on average.
On the other hand, as the chart below shows, extremists in the Freedom Caucus, like Scott Perry, underperform.
This is true of both parties. The Progressive Caucus underperforms the fundamentals. It’s no surprise that the candidates in districts Trump won by 2 points or more in 2024 don’t associate with the Progressive Caucus.
Instead, the top individual overperformers are from the New Dems and Blue Dogs:
Adam Gray - New Dem, Blue Dog
Jared Golden - Blue Dog
Kristen McDonald Rivet - New Dem
Don Davis - New Dem
Tom Suozzi - New Dem
Marcy Kaptur - No caucus
Henry Cuellar - New Dem, Blue Dog
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez - Blue Dog
In both parties, incumbents from the most moderate caucus overperform the most (Main Street Republicans by 2.3 and Blue Dogs by 3.9) while those focused on moving the party away from the center (Freedom Caucus and Progressives) perform below baseline:
Women Win
It’s hard to learn the right lessons from Presidential elections. They only happen every four years, which means each election takes place in an almost entirely different media and economic context. That’s why the research Jain conducts focuses on Congressional races, which happen more frequently and include far more candidates. Just because Harris and Clinton lost does not mean Democrats shouldn’t nominate female candidates in tough races.
In The Washington Post, Jain runs through the data showing that there is no evidence that women perform worse as candidates:
Across the nearly 200 House races in which women faced off against men, the margins were almost exactly where they should have been, given each district’s demography, political lean, distribution of campaign cash and other “fundamentals.” And of this set, in the 69 battleground races the Cook Political Report rated as “in play,” the female candidates actually did 1.2 points better on average than the fundamentals suggested they should have.
Welcome candidates like Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defy the partisan expectations of their districts. The most impressive Republican overperformers, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are both women. The key to electoral success isn’t a candidate’s gender, it’s how they position themselves relative to voters.
We’re excited to announce that Jain will be at the WelcomeFest, and speaking of moderate women candidates, Rebecca Cooke will be as well!
Support Moderate Women to Win
Cooke is one of those moderate women overperformers - and was featured on our Women Win The Middle slate last Fall.
According to the Split-Ticket “Wins Above Replacement” model, Cooke overperformed the fundamentals of her district by a whopping 7.3 points. How did Cooke do it? The New Yorker wrote a deep dive on Wisconsin featuring part of the answer:
Cooke believes that there is a problem with the national Party’s image, which was reinforced by Harris’s messaging choices.
“The Democratic Party brand is far left right now, when that’s not the majority of the country,” Cooke said. “We don’t have an agenda that really tells people what we’re going to do, how we’re going to make things better, and how we’re going to improve people’s lives.”
She went on, “There was a lot about joy, but there are a lot of people that aren’t feeling joy in their lives right now.”
It didn’t help to tell voters that the economic numbers were getting better when they weren’t feeling it. Nor, from the vantage point of her mostly working-class district, did Cooke think Harris’s courting of celebrities was wise. “Most people can’t afford to go to a Beyoncé concert,” she said.
Because of Cooke, Van Orden is now in a swing district. And this cycle, he’s on the ropes.
Van Orden is the polar opposite of a moderate. He’s the type of extremist who puts what should be safe districts on the map:
He participated in the January 6th insurrection rally and said of his participation, "I went there to stand with them, to stand up for electoral integrity." He has been seen yelling and cursing at teenaged Senate pages after partying in his office where alcohol was spotted, drawing rebukes from members of his own party. Van Orden also wrote a book called the Book of Man: A Navy SEAL's Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood that included a story about exposing a man's genitals to female officers. He has missed a number of key votes, but did find time to vote against expelling serial liar and fraudster George Santos.
Our community has raised more than $500,000 for candidates like Rebecca, but far more is needed.
Understanding what works in campaigns is vital for democracy. Join Rebecca, Lakshya, and many others at WelcomeFest on June 4 in DC to learn how to put the best research into practice.