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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2642 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 26, 2025

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Don't you find it amusing that some people are trying to stop Mamdani with the same toolset that hilariously failed to stop trump for 10 years straight and are surprised at their failure.

There are extremely long think and hit pieces and lots of snark, refutals and zingers. And none of them are in format or place that are engaging to the people that will vote for him.

The hectoring boomer "you're not allowed to vote for him" tone is so incredibly bad it makes one doubt the supposed competence of the billionaire bloc that forms the anti Zohran forces. If they're this stupid, he might be right that they don't deserve all that money.

Also the failure to find a replacement level candidate to run against him. The best the anti-Mamdani forces could come up with were a granny-murdering sexual-harassing unpopular ex-Governor, a paid Turkish agent, and a Republican. None of them are people you run if you actually want to win a NYC mayoral election.

replacement level candidate

Help a foreigner out; what does "replacement level" mean in this context?

The term originates from sabrmetrics (Society of American Baseball Research), which is a set of derived baseball statistics developed starting in the 1980s or 1990s. In baseball terms, 'replacement level' refers to the average player that you could get at a certain position from the next league below - basically the default freely available player if you had no other options. Then the associated term 'value over replacement player' (VORP) would be how much better a specific player is than that freely available guy from the lower league. It is possible to have negative VORP if you are worse than a random guy from the lower league, which does happen (less frequently in modern times) due to contracts/non-performance factors.

In an American political context, ‘replacement level politicians’ get the margin their party gets on average in that particular district- for example, Ted Cruz is exactly replacement level, he gets the average margin for a statewide Republican in Texas. A negative value over replacement candidate gets less than a typical member of the same party would get in their district- Bob Menendez, the now imprisoned former senator from New Jersey, was notorious for underperforming other statewide democrats.

The highest value over replacement candidate right now is probably Susan Collins, the republican senator from Maine.

Thanks, TIL

To add to what MadMonzer said:

Wins Above Replacement and Replacement Level became popular as analytical concepts because they capture the reality that the "average" player in the major leagues is actually really good, a team full of average players would be pretty good, and an average player costs a decent amount of money/resources to acquire. What you get for "free" (a minimum contract and no draft capital) isn't an average player, it's a replacement level player. So once you determine what a "free" player looks like, you can determine how many wins a player was worth over a free player, and on the free agent market you can determine the value of each win.

Compare to the financial concept of the Risk Free Rate of Return, you don't compare your return on an investment to zero, you compare it to what you would have gotten without taking on added risk. This lets you both assess how much return you got on an investment in a more rigorous way (if I made 5% on an investment over a time period when I could have gotten 4% in FDIC insured CDs, I actually made 1% over risk-free rate of return), and determine the cost of risk you're taking on (in an efficient market every percentage point over RFRR represents a chance of losing your money).

The closest real analytical concept in politics is the polling around Generic Democrat and Generic Republican ballots, where respondents are asked if they would prefer to vote R or D without candidate names attached. But in most people's imaginations, the Replacement Level candidate looks like a person, every congressional district has a local mayor or councilman who will run for anything or an ambitious young ADA who pictures himself getting to congress someday. There was a prominent local lawyer for years in my town who would always accept the Democratic nomination for a position if the party couldn't dig up another candidate, he never won and my great aunt used to joke that "the poor guy couldn't get elected dog catcher," but he was always willing to be on the ballot, that's probably what a replacement level candidate looks like.

I bring this up because you want to distinguish Replacement Level from Average, the Average major league baseball player is really good at baseball and at $8mm/WAR on the free agent market an Average player is worth about $16mm/yr. An Average candidate for President is factually a really smart and accomplished person, a good politician*. Even somebody who makes it pretty far in the primaries is damn good at the game.

Which is where I would differ with my learned friend in argument @MadMonzer : Hillary Clinton, for all my dislike of her policies and my dead-ender belief that Bernie got rat fucked, was an incredibly good politician. 2016 Donald Trump was just that good that he ended her career. She was a way above average candidate in terms of experience, in terms of her ability to rally institutional support and scare off opponents, etc. There's a reason only joke candidates ran against her.

Bringing it back to the NYC mayoral race, this is a case where you have three below-replacement candidates running against Mamdani. Cuomo is a disgraced former governor with a litany of scandals**, Eric Adams probably sold his soul to Donald Trump to avoid federal indictment, and Sliwa has a tan line from his beret. Replacement level for Mayor is probably a lesser CEO in the Bloomberg mold, or something like that, and none of them reach that level.

*I'll note here that when I talk about a "Politician" I'm including within that identifier their whole machine, their advisors and handlers, their braintrust, the power behind the throne, the people that are referred to in political reporting as "[Candidate]-World." I don't think trying to untangle the influence of different factors is useful, it's better to just lump them all together than to try to argue who the man behind the curtain is. In this conversation George W Bush is also Karl Rove; Barack Obama is also David Axelrod; HRC was also John Podesta and Bill Clinton; Joe Biden is probably mainly his tight universe of advisers.

**My favorite Cuomo story I read was that he told a male intern that if he got a boob job he would make a hot tranny. Which is just top tier sexual harassment: invent a woman to harass if none are available.

There was a prominent local lawyer for years in my town who would always accept the Democratic nomination for a position if the party couldn't dig up another candidate, he never won and my great aunt used to joke that "the poor guy couldn't get elected dog catcher," but he was always willing to be on the ballot, that's probably what a replacement level candidate looks like.

At the bottom end, that seems right. Further up the tree, a replacement level candidate is a good performer at the level below in the same way that a replacement level Major League Baseball player is a star in AAA ball. Given that each party only has 20-30 governors at a time and some of them will be too old, focused on running for re-election as governor, or not interested, I would say an average governor is a replacement-level Presidential candidate, and an average medium or large city mayor is a replacement-level gubernatorial candidate.

She was a way above average candidate in terms of experience, in terms of her ability to rally institutional support and scare off opponents, etc.

True, but she was sub-replacement in terms of her ability to win votes from normal people, which is what wins elections. Hilary's election history looks like: 2000 NY Senate Primary - Party establishment persuades all other serious candidates to pull out. 2000 NY Senate General - 55-43 against a literal replacement-level Republican candidate (Lazio was drafted last-minute after Giuliani was forced out due to a combination of a cancer scare and a bimbo eruption). Gore won NY 60-35 2006 NY Senate Primary - No serious opponent 2006 NY Senate General - 67-31 against a no-name Republican. Spitzer won his gubernatorial race 69-29. 2008 Presidential Primary - Lost to Obama 2016 Presidential Primary - Won 55-43 against the comic relief candidate in what was supposed to be a 2000-style uncontested election. 2016 Presidential General - Lost to Trump

Both the 2008 primary defeat and the 2016 loss to Trump involved unforced errors of the "trying to win something other than the election" variety. Hilary's strategy in 2008 was based around being annointed winner by the media rather than having more delegates at the convention - in particular this meant she didn't bother campaigning in states she couldn't win, allowing Obama to run up the score. In 2016 she was campaigning in California and not the swing states - it isn't clear to me if this is because she was running up the popular vote margin because she thought it would somehow make her inevitable victory more legitimate, or if it is that she was focused on fundraising long after it no longer made sense.

"Level" here refers to the quality or ability level of the candidate. The idea comes from sports analytics - "replacement level" is the level of the player you would be able to recruit relatively quickly to fill a gap in the roster created by e.g. an unexpected injury. What this means in practice varies depending on how leagues are structured, but for example if you are an English Premier League club then "replacement level" is going to be the level of a good Championship player. "Value over replacement" is the holy grail of metrics - how many extra points/games do you win if you have this guy on the team instead of a replacement level player. And a player with negative value over replacement should be fired and replaced with a replacement level alternative, even if you aren't in a position to recruit a good alternative.

I am claiming that a bunch of Democratic establishment candidates, in particular including Hilary Clinton for President in 2016 and Cuomo for NYC Mayor in 2025 are negative value over replacement.

Probably means ‘someone as good or better’, such that you could replace him without it being obviously a terrible idea.

No, it doesn't.

Apparently. Was going off general semantics, sports analytics not really my area!

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