In the Trump era, centrist operatives and pundits have leaned on corporate money and claims of superior electability to contain the Democratic Party’s rising left flank. Their case holds that moderates are better equipped than progressives to unite a coalition against MAGA politics and capture seats needed for a majority.

Progressive candidates, however, have overcome corporate spending to win closely contested primaries. With nominees from across the Democratic ideological spectrum leading in polls around the country, centrists have increasingly shifted from predicting progressive defeat to complaining that progressive victories may come by smaller margins than expected.

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has become a prominent target of that revised argument. Jack Miller, communications director at Chamber of Progress, wrote on Twitter: “El-Sayed is underperforming in a D +8 environment. If he was a stronger candidate, we would have had more money for FL or MS, but instead we’re investing in MI.”

Comparable scrutiny has not surrounded establishment candidates such as Chris Pappas and Cinde Warmington in New Hampshire or Kathy Hochul in New York. That disparity reflects how the electability debate increasingly relies on a statistic known as Wins Above Replacement, or WAR, to judge candidates against a modeled expectation.

Popularized in politics by Split Ticket, WAR attempts to measure how much a candidate exceeds or falls short of the expected vote share for a generic replacement level candidate. Much of the calculation uses presidential results in the same district, even though presidential campaigns do not advertise or compete uniformly across states.

A presidential nominee’s regional strength can also distort the comparison. If Josh Shapiro were the 2028 nominee, candidates in Pennsylvania could receive worse WAR scores because of his strength there, while candidates in Montana and Idaho could benefit from a lower presidential baseline in states largely ignored by national campaigns.

Political WAR also differs sharply from its better known baseball counterpart. In Major League Baseball analysis, WAR estimates how many additional games a team wins with a particular player instead of an average free agent or minor league replacement at the same position.

Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani currently has a WAR of 6.5, meaning his team wins roughly 6 or 7 additional games with him. A political WAR of 6.5 does not mean a candidate wins 6 or 7 more elections because an election produces a binary outcome rather than a continuous series of wins.

In Split Ticket’s model, a WAR of 6.5 means a candidate’s vote share relative to the presidential result is 6.5 points higher than predicted. A candidate can win comfortably while still being branded an underperformer if the model expected an even larger margin.

Data journalists Mark Rieke and G. Elliott Morris and political scientists Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica have raised methodological objections. Bonica and Grumbach argue that proprietary adjustments favor moderates, while Morris and Rieke contend that presidential voting is a poor basis for comparing House and Senate candidate quality.

Rieke’s The Data Diary and Morris’s Strength in Numbers offer an alternative called Wins Above Replacement in terms of Probability, or WARP. That measure estimates how much more likely a candidate is to win than an average electoral performer, distinguishing consequential gains in close races from meaningless extra votes in routs.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren illustrates the difference. She won 59.8% of the vote in her 2024 Massachusetts Senate reelection, yet Split Ticket assigned her a WAR of negative 10.8 because she trailed Kamala Harris’s share by 2 points instead of running nearly 9 points ahead of the top of the ticket.

Strength in Numbers calculated Warren’s WARP at 0%, finding practically no chance that Democrats would lose the seat with Warren or a replacement level candidate. Warren spent no money, made few public appearances, gave much of her campaign treasury to candidates in competitive races, and traveled nationally to campaign for them.

That choice reflects what WAR misses about safe seats. Candidates facing little danger can preserve money, avoid competing for campaign workers and advertising space, and support allies elsewhere instead of piling up additional votes that do not change the office or its powers.

El-Sayed, meanwhile, defeated an establishment united behind Haley Stevens, who had endorsements from retiring Sen. Gary Peters, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. AIPAC made stopping El-Sayed a priority, spending $30 million as part of a primary blitz against him that approached $70 million.

The Beacon Coalition later endorsed Republican Mike Rogers through an RNC distributed voter guide, despite receiving a $200,000 grant from Third Way’s Moderate Power Venture Fund. Third Way publicly disagreed with the coalition’s actions, but the coalition also endorsed the Republican challenger to Rep. Summer Lee.

A victory by El-Sayed would put a progressive supporter of Medicare for All in a statewide swing state office after attacks on his religion. Whatever margin emerges, the powers of a senator remain the same, and El-Sayed has framed election as merely the beginning: “You think my goal is to win—only? That’s not my goal. My goal is to govern well. We treat getting elected as if that’s some sort of achievement. That’s when the thing starts.”