Multiple Choice Question: Imagine you open your bank statement and it says “$1,000.” How are you reacting?
Said with no emotion, “I have $1,000.”
Said with confusion, “I have $1,000?”
Said with excitement, “I have $1,000!”
I would be willing to bet $1,000 that it is not (1). You likely are not opening your statement and stating a fact. This is a very accounting one-dimensional perspective.
If you expected last week’s pay check to clear, you might be confused why it is only $1,000. If you thought you were going to have nothing in there, you might be ready to go out and buy a new pair of shoes.
Since most of us are not accountants, when we look at any metric, we try to make sense beyond its fact status. If it instinctively seems high or low, we are subconsciously comparing to some expectation. In the data world, common comparisons are “zero” or “average.” Sometimes we are more advanced and add context like how a 50 degree day in March means “time to get out” while a 50 degree day in September means “time to shut in.”
In sports, there is a popular concept called “replacement players” which are the baseline comparison of many individual player statistics.
For example, in baseball there is a metric called WAR, or “Wins Above Replacement.” This metric estimates the contribution of an individual player in terms of wins, the ultimate metric in sports, versus a player a team could call up from the minor leagues at any time. These are the “replacement players.”
What is core about these players is that they are assumed to be
Highly skilled. They are playing at the second highest level in the profession.
Not as skilled as Major League players. There is a reason why they are still in the minors.
Fungible. They are easy enough to find and replace.
WAR has become the favorite stat among both baseball nerds and novices because it is a metric which is interpretable (e.g., Player A is worth X more wins than Player B).
If you reread the sub-title of this post, the next logical question is: what would happen if I applied this concept to the House of Representatives? Duh.
2xParked has got your back.
With the midterms approaching and every House seat up for grabs, I quickly created a new metric I will call BAR, or “Bills Above Replacement.”
The core idea is simple. House of Reps has one remit as a national legislative body: legislate. This is a metric to help us look back at the 119th congress and translate each representative’s actions into bills passed compared to some replacement congressman who could have been called up from the bench of local politicians, community leaders, and business moguls.
Using legislative data gathered from congress.gov…
I collected [1] how many bills an individual sponsored, [2] how many bills an individual co-sponsored, [3] session attendance, and [4] if the individual was a party leader in core committees.
I found the relationship between these components with bills passed in the House. I did not include “bills made into law” because [1] that is dependent on the Senate and the President and [2] that can take a long time depending on everything from politics to prioritization. I adjusted based on Party since the GOP has an advantage of being able to set the agenda.
I compared how each representative performed to a “replacement player”, i.e. congressmen taking oath mid-way through a term.
I translated this into bills passed above a replacement congressman, aka BAR.
There are some key limitations I am aware of and will attempt to remedy as we re-evaluate:
It accounts for quantity over quality. Writing 100 bills on changing the name of a post office likely does not equate to writing one bill on taxes.
It does not account for the fact that some bills are more difficult to pass and the backroom skills and influence required to do so.
It does not account for the end-result of becoming a law.
I think this is a good start overall. Our four key input metrics represent constructing a bill, having influence on peers to pass a bill, setting the agenda, and representing constituents when votes are needed. In my professional career I have seen many occasions where some data is worse than no data, and I do not believe this to be the case.
Without further ado, here are our NYC reps this term:
Here are some of my initial observations.
In this Congress, NYC has good representation. Kudos to us for mostly doing a good job in 2024 and voting for folks who will work hard to represent our City. If NYC were a state, its BAR average of 0.65 would be 11th best, in between Vermont and California, and its total BAR sum of 8.4 would be 6th best right after Michigan.
Next Congress will have big shoes to fill for New Yorkers. Retiring at term’s end, Nydia Velázquez is still putting in the work in her final term as the ranking member of the House Small Business Committee. Jerrold Nadler on the other hand…
Notable Comparison: Maxine Waters, age 88, is still among the Democratic leaders while Hal Rogers, 88, is up to BAR with Nadler.We will lose active high achievers from this past term. Brooklyn favored Brad Lander over Dan Goldman and Darializa Avila Chevalier over Adriano Espaillat in June’s primary. Do New Yorkers even know these were in the top 30th percentile of representatives last year?
Notable Comparison: George Latimer has had a good freshman campaign after ousting Jamaal Bowman in the 2024 primary, showing that work can be done quickly and expectations should be high.Don’t take too much stock in Hakeem Jeffries’ stat. Jeffries and Mike Johnson are unique in that they are the party leaders, not just a leader of a committee. They are more for shaping the vision, not just agenda, and I will have to noodle a bit on how to account for that in v2.
Notable Comparison: Mike Johnson ranks around Jeffries, but again, this should be expected but held with a grain of salt.What is Nicole Malliotakis doing? As the lone GOP representative from New York, she is producing less than many of her neighbors in the House despite them being part of the minority party.
Notable Comparison: Michael Lawler, who won a difficult upstate seat filled with ex-New Yorkers, is one of the top ranked members of the House with 2.5 BAR.What is AOC doing? There is an argument to be made that AOC’s grand power is her influence outside the chamber. That being said, as a leader of progressives within the chamber, I would have expected her influence to be represented more in terms of the cosponsoring aspect. If you argue that she might have been anti-congress by not sponsoring and cosponsoring, then her BAR is fitting that she is, as the kids might say, a mid legislator.
Notable Comparison: Fellow noted progressive leader Ilhan Omar ranks in the top 71st percentile with a BAR of 0.6, meaning work can still be done as a leading but divisive political voice.
In most private jobs, there is a grace period for someone to learn. For our new congress-elects and our returning incumbents, they do not have this luxury. A short-term loss in congress could mean lives and livelihood, so hopefully the new freshmen are ready to legislate on day 1. Otherwise, it is justifiably within our power as voters to vote them out in two years.
Even though this model is an MVP (minimum viable product, not most valuable player, for those of you not speaking the business lingo), we now have tools to quantify performance. I expect only improvement from here on, and you should too!
Adam from 2xParked.
P.S.
Here is the newest card to my collection. It screams New York City 1,000 times over.
First, it is a 1952 Topps card. Topps is still the top manufacturer of baseball cards, and its history starts in Brooklyn. Story goes that sales for these 1950s Topps cards were poor and took up space, so they threw them in the water. This created scarcity as cards became a major hobby force in the 1980s, and the crown jewel, the 1952 Mickey Mantle, can be yours today starting at $100,000. You can try wandering around Industry City to see if some of them avoided the water, but I have yet to find any.
Second, Hank Thompson is a New York Giants legend. The New York Giants, the Coogan’s Bluff-based predecessor to the now San Francisco Giants, took two seasons after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier to play their first Black player. That player was third baseman Hank Thompson. Thompson would play on the Giants for eight seasons, including the 1951 World Championship team, and he would accumulate a career WAR of 30.8 (bWAR). He also was the first Black player on the St. Louis Browns, the team which eventually moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, making him the only player to be first to integrate two teams.