1. Overview — what Reach is for

A campaign has two scarce resources: time and money. You cannot knock on 494,000 doors. Reach exists to answer three questions so you spend both wisely:

• Who do we talk to? Our supporters who need a nudge to vote, and the gettable middle — not the locked-in opposition.
• How do we reach them? A text or email is cheap; a door knock is expensive. Reach the right people the cheapest way.
• Where do we spend? Which precincts and neighborhoods give the most return.

2. How the scores work (the math, in plain English)

Every voter carries a handful of numbers. Here's what each means, why it exists, and what to do with it.

Party score, ballot score, turnout score (0–100)

These come from a political data vendor — each a 0–100 rating. Republican / Democratic party score = how R- or D-leaning a person looks. Ballot scores = a similar lean from ballot-marking patterns. Turnout score = a general "this person tends to vote" rating.

Republican lean & partisan strength

We subtract the Democratic score from the Republican score. Positive = leans Republican; negative = leans Democratic. We bucket everyone into five labels: strongR leanR independent leanD strongD.

Turnout probability & turnout decile

On top of the vendor score, Reach's own model estimates each person's chance of voting in November 2026 as a percentage.

The honest test: we pretended it was still before the 2024 election and, using only information from back then, asked the model to guess who would vote in 2024 — then checked against what really happened. It correctly separated voters from non-voters about 86% of the time.

The turnout decile sorts everyone into 10 equal groups, from least likely to vote (decile 1) to most reliable (decile 10).

What to do with it: decile-10 folks vote no matter what — don't waste a GOTV nudge on them. The gold is the middle deciles: supporters who might skip if no one reminds them.

Support estimate (0–100)

One 0–100 number for how likely someone supports JJ. It blends the party score (70%) with the ballot score (30%).

Quadrant — the core targeting map

Every voter is dropped onto a grid. Left-to-right is support; top-to-bottom is turnout.

• Base = support estimate 60+.
• Opposition = support estimate 40 or below.
• Persuade = the middle, 40–60.
• High vs Low turnout splits on the turnout decile (6+ is "high").

What to do with it: Base — Low get GOTV reminders. Persuade get persuasion. Opposition gets left alone. This grid is the single most useful targeting picture in the app.

Segments — six "lookalike tribes"

The computer grouped all voters into 6 behavioral tribes by their lean, turnout, age, and primary-voting habits. Nobody hand-picked these; the patterns came out of the data.

Do-not-contact & the holdout

• Do-not-contact flags locked-in opposition — strong Democrats who always vote. We deliberately skip them; reaching them just reminds the other side to turn out.
• Holdout is a random ~10% of voters we deliberately never contact, kept consistent. Later we compare them to people we did contact, to measure whether outreach actually moved the needle.

3. The screens — how to use each one

◎ HUD (home)

The war-room overview. Win number (votes to win), projected support (and whether you're above/below it), turnout, universe, and margin (green ahead, red behind). Plus the top winnable precincts and the Low/Expected/High scenarios.

Start your day here — "are we ahead, and where's the opportunity?"

🗺 Map

See the county geographically. Two dropdowns: Layer (Precincts / Municipalities / Census tracts) and Color by (lean, turnout, or Election OPS for precincts; income, poverty, or education for tracts).

• Precinct/municipality dots are approximate — sized by voter count, colored by metric (no official boundaries exist in the data).
• Census tracts are real neighborhood shapes filled by the SES color you pick — the one true-boundary layer.
• Voter dots appear once you zoom in (up to 50,000 at a time). Click a voter for the full profile; click a precinct/tract for a summary panel.
• Box-select (top-right): drag a rectangle to instantly count voters inside it, then refine into a segment.

Use it to scout a neighborhood, find supporter clusters, or see where income (and R support) lines up with votes.

Voter 360 (profile drawer)

Everything known about one voter (click a dot): party, partisan strength, quadrant, DO-NOT-CONTACT / HOLDOUT flags, scores, turnout probability + decile, participation history spark-chart, best channel, and household members. The neighborhood (Census) block is labeled clearly as area context, not personal data.

▦ Segments (Segment Builder)

Stack filters (e.g. "leanR" AND "turnout decile 4–7" AND "precinct X") and watch a live count + demographic breakdown. Save the list to reuse or export.

📊 Models (Models & Analytics)

Look under the hood: turnout-decile distribution, score histogram, feature importance (top drivers: recent general voting, the vendor turnout score, voting frequency), the 6 segment profiles, the Census income-quintile validation, and the model cards (the 86% backtest).

Use it to answer a skeptic — this is the "show me it's real" screen.

◳ GOTV (Targeting & GOTV)

The quadrant grid as a to-do list: six cards (Base / Persuade / Opposition × High/Low) each with a live count and a recommended action. Opposition cards are red and marked do-not-contact enforced. A compliance panel explains the do-not-contact and 10% holdout rules.

⚾ Money (Moneyball) · ⚄ War (War Game)

See sections 4 and 6 below.

◴ Live (Election-Day Live)

A live precinct-reporting feed on election night — votes in, precincts reporting, % in (green at 100%). Shows an "offline" state until results flow.

⤓ Export (Exports)

Generate the actual CSV contact lists. Pick a quadrant (opposition is excluded) and a channel: walk, phone, mail, or chase (low-turnout supporters needing a final push). Compliance is always on: do-not-contact voters and the 10% holdout are stripped automatically — you cannot export them.

⚙ Admin (Data Health)

System vital signs: data/model version, voter count, scored date, API status, whether the 2026 primary data is available (it isn't — that file was blank), and a data-quality report.

4. Moneyball Mode explained

Borrowed straight from baseball's Moneyball: the traditional way of valuing players (and voters) misses bargains. A scrappy team found undervalued players with better stats and won. Reach does the same with voters.

OBP — On-Base Percentage

In baseball, a player who reliably gets on base. For a voter: strong Republican lean + actually shows up to vote — a dependable R vote.

SLG — Slugging

Baseball power. For a voter, voting volume and history — how many elections they show up for, including primaries.

OPS — the combined value score (0–100)

OBP + SLG in one 0–100 number — the headline "how valuable is this voter" grade. Everyone also gets an OPS decile (rank in 10 groups).

Value-per-dollar

The most practical number: expected Republican-supporting votes per dollar it costs to reach them. A reliable supporter you can text for 30 cents beats one who needs a $5 canvasser.

"Outs" — not worth contacting

In baseball you avoid outs. Here an out is low-lean, low-turnout, and expensive to reach (door-only). Spending on them is wasted money.

The four tiers (your roster)

• Tier 1 — Core mobilization Top-value, reliable supporters who've voted recently. Turn them out (any channel — a door knock is fine for your base).
• Tier 2 — Undervalued (the high-OBP bargains) The whole point of Moneyball. Strong supporters whose turnout is only medium, who are cheap to reach (text/email), prime age. The usual playbook overlooks them — but they're efficient gold.
• Tier 3 — Persuasion swing Gettable middle voters with decent turnout. Make the case.
• Excluded — Outs / do-not-contact Skip.

The Moneyball screen

Four tier cards (Tier 2 glows — it's the edge); a one-page brief for the candidate (votes in play, outs avoided, dollars saved); an OPS precinct leaderboard with an inefficiency number = (traditional rank − value rank) — a big positive means a precinct is under-attended relative to its value; mispricing bars; and per-tier CSV export (do-not-contact and holdout already removed).

5. Neighborhood / Census data

Reach matched every voter to their Census tract — a small official neighborhood (a few thousand people). From the Census we pull each area's median income, poverty rate, education, home values, unemployment, and race makeup.

We sort neighborhoods into 5 income groups (quintiles, Q1 = lowest → Q5 = highest), weighted to hold roughly equal numbers of voters.

The finding for this campaign: Jefferson County leans heavily Democratic overall, but Republican support AND the "undervalued bargain" voters both concentrate in higher-income neighborhoods. The Models screen shows this as a rising line — the Tier-2 share climbs as you move up the income quintiles.

Use it to prioritize higher-income tracts for canvass and persuasion, and to back up your targeting with independent Census data.

6. War Game

A what-if simulator. Move sliders ("boost turnout? persuade more? spend more?") and it estimates your odds of winning — a flight simulator for the campaign, a safe place to stress-test strategy.

The Win Number

How many votes it takes to win: just over half of the expected turnout (half the expected voters, plus one). More expected voters → higher win number.

Win probability (the simulation)

Hit Run simulation and the computer plays out the election thousands of times (about 2,000–5,000 runs), each with a little random luck, then reports the fraction of runs you won.

• It starts from our expected supporter votes.
• Turnout slider converts "supporters who might not show" into actual votes — the strongest lever.
• Persuasion slider + budget flip some gettable voters — but only as many as your budget can afford to contact, and only a fraction actually flip.
• Each run wiggles your support total (±6%) and the win number (±5%) randomly, then checks: did we clear the line?

Sensitivity — which lever matters most

Reach nudges each lever a little, one at a time, and reports which one moves your odds the most — telling you where to put your energy (usually turnout, in a base-heavy plan).

The optimizer — how to split a budget

Suggests how to divide dollars across door, phone, mail, and digital by each channel's cost and effectiveness. Cheaper channels get bigger shares (more reach per dollar).

A rule-of-thumb calculator, not the full simulation — a starting split, not gospel.

7. Glossary

8. Trust & limitations

Reach is powerful, but be a smart skeptic. The honest fine print:

• Modeled estimates, not certainties. A support estimate of 72 means people who look like them tend to support us — not that they will. Strong odds, not facts.
• The turnout model was tested honestly (86% on a fair, no-peeking 2024 backtest). Good — but no model is perfect, and 2026 won't equal 2024.
• Precinct/municipality dots are approximate. Only the Census tract layer has true boundaries.
• The War Game is a stress test, not a forecast. Built conservatively on purpose; read its low odds as "here's the work it takes," not "we'll lose."
• Persuasion / uplift math are documented rules of thumb, not proven cause-and-effect — which is exactly why we keep a holdout to measure real impact later.
• The 2026 primary data was blank in this extract, so it's excluded everywhere (flagged on Admin).
• Census data is about neighborhoods, not individuals.
• Compliance can't be turned off: do-not-contact voters and the 10% holdout are stripped from every export.