Sam Alito and the Law of Competitive Balance

At the dawn of the sabermetric revolution, Bill James identified the Law of Competitive Balance — the easily observable tendency for things in sports to trend back to the center because of changes in incentives and strategies. This is of course not a “law” in the ironclad sense — organizations can overcome it on a year-to-year basis through some combination of resource investment, talent identification/development and quality coaching, for example. (What defines a Bill Belichick or Bobby Cox is precisely their ability to resist the various factors that pull teams back to the center.)

Now that he’s a classic example of the relatively small but very important number of genuinely cross-pressured voters — a white guy in the Midwest who thinks Fox News is less biased than CNN but still very, very reluctantly voted for Clinton and Biden because he hates Trump — he was able to predict the reverse-thermostatic effect of Dobbs right after the draft of the opinion was leaked:

The leaked draft of the Alito Decision is a GREAT example of the Law of Competitive Balance Operating. 

            I can remember even as a young boy, perhaps as early as 1960, puzzling over how Presidential elections could possibly be so close, with many Presidential elections being decided by less than 1% of the popular vote.  Intuitively, it seems almost impossible for so many elections to come down to such a narrow margin.

            It’s the Law of Competitive Balance.  When one political party holds too much of the power, or holds power for too long, they begin to do things that the public does not expect or does not support.  This reduces the margin of their advantage.  Meanwhile, the other party is also going over-the-top on whatever they can control.  Both sides are pushing the percentages toward 50/50.

            Two weeks ago, it seemed extremely likely that the Republicans were headed to large victories this November.   They still think they are, because the new polls haven’t come out yet, so they don’t realize yet what has happened to them.  They—meaning the persons added to the Supreme Court by Republican Presidents and Republican Senates–have motivated their opposition in the strongest way that it was possible to motivate them.  Over the next five months, this will push the polls closer and closer to 50/50, probably (although not certainly) depriving the Republicans the gains that they were anticipating. 

            Joe Biden is 10% more popular than chronic diarrhea.   He got elected because of the many millions of us who were not going to vote for Donald Trump come rain, come shine, come hell or high water. 

            I watch Fox News pretty regularly, because they are less crazy than CNN, so I know that this is true:  that they still don’t believe this will happen.  They’re still talking as if the Democrats will gain no political advantage from this.  They’re going to learn different.  It’s the Law of Competitive Balance. 

This is not the only factor behind the Democrats having the best in-party midterms that didn’t involve a massive terrorist attack in decades — there is the not-unrelated tendency of Republican primary voters to nominate kooks and ghouls, for example. But this being a rare case of the major disruptive and unpopular policy change being executed by the minority party (through their ill-gotten stranglehold on the judiciary), and the ability of Democrats to use this effectively, is almost certainly the biggest factor. It is needless to say nothing to celebrate — the impact of Dobbs will be horrible! — but once it’s done better to take advantage of it than not.

Incidentally, I think his explanation of why there’s so much complaining over Ted Williams’s unfair treatment from MVP voters when he really has nothing more to complain about than Mays, Mantle, Musial, Aaron etc. etc. is also probably right.