I’ve been fortunate enough to take advantage of fields where the water level was set pretty low, and getting the basics right counted for a lot. Baseball, in the pre-Moneyball era, used to be one of these. Billy Beane got an awful lot of mileage by recognizing a few simple things, like the fact that on-base percentage is a better measure of a player’s offensive performance than his batting average. Nowadays pretty much everyone realizes that. In politics, I’d expect that I’d have a small edge at best if there were a dozen clones of FiveThirtyEight. But often I’m effectively “competing” against
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