A Political Curveball

The influence of Moneyball on Republican strategy

Could a secret of Republican electoral success be ... baseball? Actually, it's Moneyball, Michael Lewis' best-seller about how Oakland A's manager Billy Beane built a top team by picking players on the basis of their stats, not their reputations. Republican National Committee chairman and Baltimore Orioles fan Ken Mehlman is applying Moneyball's stats-centric strategy to his own game. "Politics, like baseball, for years was less effective than it could be because you didn't try to quantify things," he told TIME. Mehlman managed Bush-Cheney '04, which set "metrics" for making phone calls and knocking on doors, and tracked ads on spreadsheets. He...

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