A Political Curveball

By Mike Allen

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 obsesses over detailed data like turnout in Florida among newly registered Republicans who call themselves fiscal conservatives (91.2% last year), all new G.O.P.ers (75.7%) and overall (65.3%)--numbers that he says show the power of tax cuts. Mehlman sets goals for volunteer recruiting by state, county and precinct, and uses stats to pick his team: "The performance-based approach says that whoever produces the best results is the person you put in charge." One problem: figures don't always reflect rapid change or account for the element of surprise. But Mehlman is a believer. He's already crunching numbers for the next big game: the 2006 midterm elections.