The U.S. House candidates who moved the needle in 2024

Announcing our new measure of candidate quality, the Wins Above Replacement Probability (WARP)

Editor’s note: Building on this newsletter’s increasing rate of collaboration with other smart, independent political analysts, today’s post is the result of a lot of behind-the-scenes work by me and Mark Rieke, a data scientist and blogger at The Data Diary. Mark has been working for some time now on a new measure of candidate quality in U.S. House elections, which I was happy to provide data for and feedback on, and which we now detail in this piece.

Both Mark and I wrote the piece, so I use collective nouns, but please give Mark all the credit for the modeling work — I formulated some parameters, but he wrote every line of code. Tomorrow, I’ll publish another analysis of these numbers for premium subscribers. The big question there: Do voters still reward ideological moderates?

Elliott