Applying the pWAR to the 2026 Florida Gubernatorial Primaries

The Moneyball revolution did not stay in baseball. It colonized basketball, football, soccer, and eventually politics. The idea is simple: conventional wisdom about who wins is usually just incumbency bias in disguise. The metrics that actually predict outcomes are less glamorous than name recognition and more reliable than vibes.

pWAR, or Political Wins Above Replacement, is an attempt to bring that same discipline to candidate evaluation. Though initially developed for the 2026 Maryland Republican gubernatorial primary, the pWAR framework was never just for Maryland. It was built to be portable, because the underlying question it answers does not change with geography: Is this candidate actually better than a generic party placeholder, or are they just a product of their environment?

Florida is a useful stress test. The partisan dynamics are radically different from Maryland. The field is bigger. The stakes are higher. And the race features one of the most structurally interesting mismatches in modern Democratic politics, a former Republican congressman running as a Democrat to replace a term-limited Republican governor in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the governorship since 1994.

The framework travels. Here is the evidence.