Minor league baseball functions as a training ground for MLB. Players, directly signed out of college or high school, grow and hone their skills before the concept of winning matters. On average, a player will not make the big leagues until he is 24 or 25, meaning 3-7 years of learning.
This is what we often refer to as “gaining experience.”
Although baseball has a clear structure on how to gain experience, the concept is not foreign to most working people. We start at the bottom where we learn new skills, office politics, and personal life balance. As we gain experience, we advance. This has nothing to do with us getting smarter. We are actually less able to learn new skills, but we are better at knowing how to learn the new skills we need.
Like baseball, politics has a structure on gaining experience and advancing, although certainly less official. This week, 2xParked will investigate the minor leagues of New York City politics.
Starting from the Top
Politicians and baseball players have similar advancement, where they start small and work their way up.
I looked at the past positions held by the current 100 US senators. Above is the most common path of excellence. In baseball, nearly all players go through each level of the minor leagues. In politics, it was clear that there is no one set path. This makes sense due to the complex relationship between power and politics.
As an exercise, you should try creating a hierarchy of power within government. We may start out by putting the president on the top, but what comes next? Would you put down VP, senator, governor, or a member of the cabinet? As we work our way down, it becomes more wild. Could the mayor of New York City, a municipality with more people and a higher GDP than many states, have more power than a Governor? Where do checks and balances fit in? Once we open to the gate to private employees, such as CEOs (who we have seen become presidents and mayors), we will run out of paper.
Starting from the Bottom
Let’s not look at the end, but rather the beginning: the entry into city or county politics.
Our own New York City Council acts very similarly to the lowest levels of minor league baseball. In the minor leagues, if a player does not improve, his career ends. With a two-term limit, council members can not stay onboard forever. They have to decide whether (and how) they want to advance. Some will have opportunity to move up, usually into more powerful citywide positions (e.g. Borough President, Public Advocate) or into wider legislative positions (e.g. State Senate, Congress).
I investigated where City Council members go after their terms end. I looked at all of the members who were termed or voted out over the past 15 years and whether they were elected somewhere else within 3 years of being in City Council.
We see, when not being convicted of a crime (which happened surprisingly more than I was expecting), City Council is the end of publicly elected life for many individuals. It does not mean that our reps disappear, but the opportunities to advance through elections grow smaller and smaller. There are only a handful of congressional seats or city-wide positions, and the competition for those include other “minor leagues”, such as other parallel government roles and private citizens.
Top Prospects
In baseball, players in the minor leagues who show potential are referred to as “prospects”. As our next graduating class of term-limited City Council members vie for their next job (such as Brad Lander for City Comptroller or Mark Levine for Manhattan Borough President), I was curious who are some of the top prospects remaining in the City Council.
I was especially curious when I saw that of past City Council members who enacted at least 6 laws as primary sponsor per 4-year term, 56% were elected to a new position. Only 21% of members who enacted less than 6 laws as primary sponsor were elected to a new position. This highlights that people who successfully legislate are more likely to advance.
Of course, doing the work is not everything. In a democracy, perception matters. That means having voter and peer support.
I looked at the City Council members who will likely remain in the position beyond 2021, and determined the “top prospects”. I solely used data that represented…
Ability to do the work: legislation passed as City Council member
Liked by voters: Twitter followers, individual donors
Liked by peers: Committees led, endorsements, money raised
From these metrics, I determined the Top 5 Prospects (not in any order) who are likely able to get elected to a new position after their City Council terms end.
MayorModel
I formally announce that I have no plans to run for mayor in 2021. You can add that to the wiki page.
Under most circumstances, no one would have even asked a statistician who runs a fairly successful hyper-local newsletter, but after this past week, I think the only likely candidate not to enter this wacky race is Dick Dastardly.
This race is starting to look a bit like the presidential party competitions for Dems in 2020 and GOP in 2016. With the announcement that Max Rose has entered, the list of remaining obvious potential candidates is nearing its end. (I still am waiting for Andrew Yang to officially announce before including him in the model. It is ready though!) Here are the top five candidates likely to get the Dem nod to help guide what is going on. As a data modeler, it is my duty to reiterate each week that the data used for these results right now is pretty limited considering that there are no major polls yet.
Only one candidate is trying to make the leap from City Council to Mayor, Carlos Menchaca. Menchaca finds himself at 3% It is uncommon to make the direct leap, but two recent mayors (de Blasio and Koch) served on the City Council at some point in their elected careers prior to being elected mayor.
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