Alabama historical WAR
WAR is the race residual: the actual legislative-minus-ticket gap minus the fitted structural expected gap, in two-party margin points. The Democratic candidate receives the residual and the Republican its exact negative. One fixed reference model scores every cycle, so early-era Democrats show large positive WAR by construction.
How to read these scores
Every cycle is scored against the fixed 2018–24 reference model: the post-2016 Southern decaying_lag ridge fit, applied unchanged to 1994–2014 and identical to the published same-cycle residual for 2018 and 2022. Pre-2016 expectations are modern partisan expectations, so read early levels as distance from modern partisan gravity, not as a contemporaneous fit.
No pooled candidate effect, career average, fundraising, ideology, or committee identity enters WAR. A residual cannot uniquely divide credit between candidate strength, opponent weakness, and omitted local conditions.
Explore the results
Color shows which side ran ahead of expectation. It is not the district's partisan lean. Colors are capped at ±30 points; race details show uncapped values.
Candidate-cycle WAR results
Swipe sideways for every column.
| Cycle | District | Candidate | Alabama WAR | Raw ticket gap | Structural expectation | Lag component | Scoring method | Baseline margin | Actual margin | Votes |
|---|
Career cumulative WAR
Single-cycle WAR credits the first defiant cycle in full and later ones only net of the decayed prior gap, so sustained overperformance is spread thin. Career WAR sums a person’s scored cycles and is the measure of defying partisan gravity for longer than expected.
Show these careers as a table
| Candidate | Party | Cycles | Scored | Career WAR | Mean cycle |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Richard Laird | D | 2006–2010 | 2 | +116.5 | +58.2 |
| Richard Lindsey | D | 2010–2014 | 2 | +110.8 | +55.4 |
| Steve Hurst | D | 2006–2010 | 2 | +106.1 | +53.1 |
| Morrison | D | 1994–1998 | 2 | +99.9 | +49.9 |
| Alan Harper | D | 2006–2010 | 2 | +97.3 | +48.6 |
| Little | D | 1994–1998 | 3 | +92.3 | +30.8 |
| McDaniel | D | 1994–1998 | 2 | +89.7 | +44.8 |
| Phil Poole | D | 2006–2014 | 3 | +89.1 | +29.7 |
| White | D | 1994–1998 | 3 | +86.8 | +28.9 |
| Tommy Sherer | D | 2006–2010 | 2 | +86.8 | +43.4 |
| Johnston | R | 1994–1998 | 2 | -98.4 | -49.2 |
| Frank Chandler | R | 2006–2010 | 2 | -97.3 | -48.6 |
| Bowen | R | 1994–1998 | 2 | -94.4 | -47.2 |
| Holland | R | 1998–1998 | 2 | -92.2 | -46.1 |
| Adams | R | 1994–1998 | 2 | -80.6 | -40.3 |
839 scored people, 134 of them across more than one cycle. Pre-2016 cycles are scored against the fixed 2018–24 reference model, so long careers that began in the 1990s accumulate large positive values by construction. 55 2022 candidate-cycles carry a source identifier that cannot be linked to earlier cycles and are counted as single-cycle careers.
Historical scoring boundary
One reference model scores every cycle, and it is never trained on the elections it scores.
1994–2014
The selected post-2016 Southern structural model is fit once on 3,658 strict modern races, then applied backward to 412 Alabama races. Negative years-since-2016 values make this an extrapolation outside the training era.
2018–2022
The 97 modern Alabama races exactly preserve the published same-cycle residual WAR values.
Historical WAR is descriptive. It cannot uniquely divide a race residual between candidate strength, opponent weakness, and omitted local conditions.
Data and provenance
Download the complete historical race residuals, candidate orientations, coverage, coefficients, and content-addressed manifest.
How to read historical WAR
Positive WAR means the candidate performed better than the fitted structural expectation; negative WAR means worse. The Democratic candidate receives the race residual and the Republican receives its exact negative.
Candidate display names come from election records, with archived election pages used only as a spelling cross-check. Names printed in capitals in the records are shown in title case. Finance provider and committee names are prohibited.