Marquee races are not the only places to build power this election. Your limited time and money invested into “undervalued gems” can deliver wins that while not high-profile can be high-impact.
Sam Wang, founder of the Princeton Election Consortium recently presented a virtual town hall entitled “Redistricting Moneyball 2020.” Paul Rosenburg examines the approach for Salon:
As with the original “moneyball” concept, made famous by Michael Lewis’ book, the idea is to use smart statistics to identify undervalued prospects as a way of leveraging the power of small donors.
The “moneyball” approach (from baseball) focuses on political races with a high propensity for flipping the U.S. Senate and on down-ballot races with the chance of splitting control of legislatures that will draw new districts in 2021. In states without independent redistricting, ensuring bipartisan control of legislatures minimizes the chances of seeing the sort of heavily skewed districts the Republican REDMAP project delivered in 2011.
“There are Texas State House races that have the potential to influence multiple congressional districts over the next decade,” says Connor Moffatt of the the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Rosenburg writes:
What’s more, those races overlap considerably with the “Texas Nine” congressional districts that political scientist Rachel Bitecofer has highlighted as prime targets for flipping in her 2020 forecast. That’s not even considering the psychological and strategic impact of accelerating the shift of Texas from solid Republican territory to a purple or even a blue state. Texas, in short, is loaded with undervalued gems in this election cycle.
PGP uses a statistical approach to identify races with the most “voter power” where a little bit of money and effort can yield influential results, if not high-profile ones. Several tight Senate races have more chance of taking away Mitch McConnell’s power than Amy McGrath’s challenge in Kentucky. A close race in Montana, a state with few residents, has the highest propensity for flipping the Senate to Democrats in the PGP scheme.
Find a list of U.S. Senate races and their relative voter power here, as well as tabs for “Moneyball” states where “a few hundred voters mobilized in the right districts could bring a state bipartisan control of redistricting, leading to fairer districts for a decade.” These include TX, MN, KS, FL, CT, and NC. Voters in those states should examine where their money and effort could do the most good.
Factors include not just how votes can impact individual races, but how close the balance is between the major parties in state legislative chambers. There are several other groups both on the national and state levels offering similar guidance, Rosenberg explains:
The point is, you have options and you can find information. You can decide what battles matter most to you, and prioritize them on your terms, based on much better evidence and better data than hand-waving promises from politicians and misleading media narratives. And we can all count on the Princeton Gerrymandering Project to keep on developing new tools to help citizens fight for fair representation in the next big wave of redistricting battles that’s just ahead.
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