What is Your Number?

When I meet with people who want to run for office for the first time, my initial question is always “Do you know your number?”. There are only three answers:

• Yes, and I know what it is

• No, but I know I need this, and will need some help with the calculation

• <Blank stare>

The answer to this question tells me more about their potential for success than any other question. More than their positions, their demeanor or their biography.

“Your number” is how many votes you need to garner to win an election. There is some secret sauce that goes into the calculation, and I won’t delve into that here.¹ If you don’t know your goal, you cannot achieve it.

The greater the granularity in the development of the number, the better prepared a candidate is to be able to plan accurately. All campaigns are data driven, and knowing how many votes a candidate needs, the better targeting can be at the demographic, issue and geographic levels. Trust me, the Harris-Walz campaign knows their number, down at least to the county level in all 50 states, even the ones they will not contest.

I bring this up because of the bus trip that Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are taking this week. Conventional wisdom says that to win Georgia, a Democrat needs to win Atlanta and its suburbs BIG and cede the rest of the state to the GOP because “no Democrat wins there.” That’s also what was said to Josh Shapiro and John Fetterman regarding the Pennsyltucky part of Pennsylvania. They ignored conventional wisdom and are now Governor Shapiro and Senator Fetterman.

I’m going to skip the math because if you’re a political junkie, you’ve already pulled out your maps and your calculator, and you can name the counties. If you are not a political junkie, I promise, the math would hurt you.

So, let’s look simply with a few made up numbers.

Let’s say that you need 101 votes to win a local election. You know that you have banked 50 votes in the blue part of your district, because these are SuperDems who never miss an election, and vote straight blue tickets. You need to therefore get 51 votes. Conventional wisdom says that you should stay in the blue area and try to run up the numbers with intermittent Democratic voters, new voters, voters in your demographic, as well as undecided voters. And yes, that’s an important part of “the number”.

But let’s look at the other part of the district and make the assumption that there are 50 registered voters there, with a projected turnout of 50%, thus 25 likely voters. Further assume that Democrats ALWAYS lose that area and have never received more than 5% of the vote, or between 1 and 2 votes. The Republican candidate is neither going there, nor spending advertising dollars, as the local Republican organization will have his/her name on the sample ballot, and potentially a lit drop. That is 23 or 24 votes of the 51 you need that are being left on the floor.

So, YOU go! You speak at a park, or a supporter’s house. You tell them your biography, why you are running, and what you would do differently if elected over your competition, who is likely the incumbent, or at least has a record about which you can talk. You won’t win that area, but maybe you’ll get 5 votes. If you are going to a purple area that’s close, you actually might do better than expected.

There are other benefits, too, and I’ll get to them after the next example.

Below is a map of voter registration in Pennsylvania. It’s current, and if you click on this link, the data becomes interactive, and you can see the specific percentages by county by party. But the map shows the summary data. The redder the CD, the more Republicans, the bluer the CD, the more Democrats, with the grey CDs being more balanced. While this is 2024 data, the percentages from 2022 are only different by a couple percentage points.

Now, let’s look at what Josh Shapiro did in 2022 to become Governor. He went to all those ruby red and orange areas and changed the dynamics. If you look at Pennsyltuckey in the map above (that huge mass in the center of the state, with PA-10 being the orange area), you couldn’t see how Shapiro could pull it off. But in ALL those orange striped areas, in the graphic below, the margins were lessened, and in some counties, outright won. For example, upper left corner, Erie County, part of CD-16 was won by Shapiro with 59.8% of the vote. And yes, if you click this link, you can see the county totals. Note: there are more counties than CDs.

The Harris-Walz bus tour is going to places that are red, not even orange, but they will likely be able to drive up the numbers to add to their totals from the Atlanta metro area. This matters because:

1. Rural people feel abandoned by the Democratic Party. In fact, NOT going to Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio (especially rural areas) was part of the decision-making process that cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election.²

2. The proposed policies of a Harris-Walz administration would greatly benefit farmers, especially compared to the proposals of the MAGA crowd, as described in Project 2025. Voters will hear that.

3. Voters who meet a candidate are more likely to vote for them. Especially if they feel they are being heard.³

4. The groundwork for this trip’s organization was successfully leveraged by Senator Raphael Warnock two years ago.

5. “Seeding” areas can help to grow our influence over time. This may well make future elections go more our way.

6. Going to red areas makes the other side have to spend money, in this case, money they don’t have. In addition, the Harris-Walz campaign uses all rallies to solicit volunteers to help build the overall organization. The Convicted Felon-Couch Guy campaign lacks organization in Georgia.⁴

7. Having volunteers and voters in multiple locations in Georgia will help with any post-election nonsense the Republicans try.

So there you have it. Learn your number, play to your strengths, and don’t forget to lose less in red areas.

1. If you want to run for office, and you need help calculating your specific number, reach out and I’ll help you.

2. It was one of MANY mistakes, certainly not the only one. I primarily blame Mark Penn and James Comey, but the campaign should have done better overall.

3. This is especially true in local elections.

4. In 2020 and 2022, presidential and statewide Republicans have relied on Kemp’s robust organization, but that’s iffy this year, and the campaign itself does not have a boots-on -the-ground organization in Georgia. Um, nor anywhere. They’ve outsourced.