Oct 22, 2026 · 8 min
A Moneyball test for political donations
Can a "moneyball" system work for campaign funding?
The episode examines whether smarter allocation can improve electoral impact without fixing the deeper forces driving campaign spending.
- 1Oath directs donors toward competitive, underfunded races rather than already saturated national contests.
- 2Its early results suggest smaller campaigns can become more competitive, though success remains difficult to measure.
- 3Better targeting cannot resolve dark money, escalating costs, or billionaire influence in elections.
Don't miss
Brian Derrick explains how Oath’s scoring system can redirect donors from saturated Senate contests to overlooked state legislative races.
The brief
Moneyball’s statistical approach to baseball inspires a political question: could donors gain more influence by backing overlooked, competitive races instead of famous national contests?
Maria Aspin and Brian Derrick describe how party establishments concentrate money in expensive campaigns, leaving Derrick searching for a less wasteful way to fund candidates.
Derrick and Taylor Arata’s Oath scores candidates by competitiveness, stakes, and financial need, often steering donors toward obscure state legislative races over well-funded Senate contests.
Donors say the strategy helped them find winning smaller races, while Oath claims it has made other contests more competitive and now processes about $1 million daily.
The experiment has limits: smarter allocation cannot by itself counter record spending, dark money, billionaire influence, or the Republican Party’s different fundraising model.
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