Note: This was originally a idea for OpenLeft’s American Blogger contest which it won and is currently on OpenLeft’s front page but I thought I’d share with y’all at Swing State Project beacuse I know you guys have great ideas too. What do you think of the idea?
The voters hit the polls and the people decided in the fifth American Blogger contest. And the winner was PIE! (Progressive Investment Effectiveness) You can read my original comment here. Essentially it is a idea to develop a system (PIE! Scores) to determine which candidates progressive small donors should donate to if they want their money to be most effectively used to create progressive change via the political system.
In this post I will go into a bit more detail about the project and then will outline ideas for criteria and ask for your brilliant ideas for different criteria! This project won’t work if it’s just one person working on it, we need as many people as possible to make this a people-powered PIE! project.
First off let me talk a bit more about the project. The idea is to come up with a set of criteria on which to determine how effective small dollars would be in bringing progressive change, then each candidate running a semi-competitive challenge gets assigned a PIE! Score. Hopefully progressive small donors will look at those PIE! Scores when they are making their donations and progressives will be more effective in making change via the electoral system.
The criteria I originally proposed were:
1. Seats Where We Can Make the Most Progress: Crisitunity of Swing State Project has developed a method of predicting in which races replacing the incumbent with the challenger would produce the largest right to left swing in voting. You can view the House edition here and the Senate edition here. Debbie Cook in CA-46 and Andrew Rice in OK-Sen would earn the most points in this category while Becky Greenwald in IA-04 and Jim Slattery in KS-Sen would fare the worst.
2. Likelihood of victory: Investing in races where Democrats are already heavily favored (Mark Warner in VA-Sen) or where Democrats don’t seem like they have a chance (Wyoming’s Senate races for example) is not a very good use of money. In this we would factor in a number of considerations to determine what the likelihood of victory in each race is. Races that are tossups or competitive (AK-Sen or NM-01 for example) would earn the highest points while races that seem safe (NY-13, NM-Sen) or very tough (CA-46, GA-Sen) earn less. We would have to come up with a exact system for this. Potentially we could average out the rankings of the Swing State Project, Cook Political Report, Chris Bowers and Nate Silver, something like that.
3. Money’s effectiveness: In Alaska when you advertise all the money is being spent on getting your message in front of potential voters eyes. In say IL-10 when you advertise on TV your spending lots of money reaching people who live in the Chicago area but not in your district. Therefore races with cheap media markets that predominantly reach potential voters (NE-Sen, WY-AL) get high points while races that have expensive media markets that don’t just reach your voters (VA-Sen, IL-10) get lower marks.
4. Progressive Leadership Bonus: We also want to elect progressive leaders. People who have endorsed the Responsible Plan (Darcy Burner), put out statements against FISA (Tom Perriello), worked for progressive movement organizations (Andrew Rice) or showed other tendencies that indicates they would be a progressive leader in Congress (Al Franken) would get extra bonuses. For example Tom Perriello was a original signer of the Responsible Plan, put out statements against FISA and worked for a movement organization (Avaaz.org) so he would score very well. Someone like Ronnie Musgrove (MS-Sen) who has showed signs of being a very unprogressive leader (like pushing to put the Ten Commandments in public places) would not get any bonus here.
So let’s say the first three criteria each earn you up to 30 points for being the best in that criteria and as low as 0 if you are one of the worst in the criteria and you get a 3 point bonus for each of the first three progressive leadership bonus’s and 1 for other signs of progressive leadership.
Andrew Rice would get a 30 from category 1 because he scored the highest among Senate challengers, OK-Sen isn’t considered a tossup (such as AK-Sen which would give it a 30 score) but it isn’t considered completely hopeless (a 0 such as WY-Sen) because of Inhofe’s low approval ratings, general insanity and Rice’s strong campaign so I would give Rice a 10 in this category, Oklahoma is a very effective media market so I’d give him a 30 there and he gets a 3 point bonus for founding the Progressive Alliance Foundation and an additional point for his aggressive netroots outreach and being on the record calling himself a progressive Democrat.
So Andrew Rice would get a PIE! Score of 74. We’d have to calculate for all the candidates but I’d guess that’s a fairly good score.
Get how it works now? Kind of? Well now I want YOUR ideas for criteria. Are the current ones good? have a idea for a new one? Also, Do you think the 30-30-30-10 split for weighting each criteria is a good system? Do you have any ideas for other areas to award Progressive Leadership Bonus’s?
Please speak up then! After we decide the criteria I will post once or twice a week with one of the criteria and the community can help refine each one. For example we will need to decide how to determine the likelihood of victory.
So please make suggestions, give feedback and let’s have some PIE!
…I think you may need to give bonus points to Senate candidates somehow, until we have 60 ayes on routine procedural matters, or until we have a President who’s willing to invest significant political capital into passing progressive legislation into law (Johnson comes to mind as an example here).
First, we have a bigger majority in the US House than we do in the US Senate.
US House = 54.25% D
US Senate = 51% D
So we have to multiply Al Franken’s score by 1.064 to compensate for needing more senators at this time. (Multiplying 51 by 1.064 = ~54.25)
Jon Powers = 70
Al Franken = 74.48
Lets say you decide the bonus for getting the majority (I said X, because it can be any number) here we’ll use 5 and getting the ability to pass legislation is another 5 points. In the US House we have passed the 50%+1 threshold that is required to meet both those goals so Jon Powers gets 70+0(5) = 0. In the US Senate, we’ve passed the threshold for the majority, so Al Franken doen’t get that bonus, but we haven’t reached the threshold to pass legislation in US Senate. So Al Franken gets 74.48+1(5) = 79.48
Jon Powers = 70
Al Franken = 79.48
You can use any number, I just picked 5.
I’d probably add some kind of bonus for having an up or down ballot race.
A race Like MA Senate or WY AL get no bonus because we don’t need to worry about any other races up or down ballot in those states.
A race like NE-3 or LA 4 will get a bonus because they have impact on 1 up ballot race. While Obama isn’t competetive in either location, these campaigns run in these districts could have an impact on the Senate races. Even though that logic applies that Obama woul also do better here, it assumes that people will split their ticket voting for McCain and Landrieu or Kleeb along with the Democrat for Congress but not for the more progessive Obama.
In the next category, you could have 2 races impacted. Like MO 3, where a strong Dem race can impact both the Governor’s race for Nixon and the Presidential race for Obama.
In the final category, you have groups that impact 3 races. Like the NC Governor’s race. That will have an impact of Kissell, Hagan and Obama. The better Perdue does, the better they will do and vice versa.
If you really wanted to expand beyond this, you could ad additional bonuses when it comes to races at the statewide level (AG LT. Gov, SoS, Auditor et al) and then break it down even further to state races like State Senate and State Rep.
House = +2X if we have less than 50%+1 because we are fighting to gain the majority, and the ability to pass legislation. If we have over 50%+1, then +0X
Senate = +2X if we are under 51%, +1X if we’re sitting at 51%-59%, +0X if we’re 60%+