With Alaska Republicans having finally nominated Daniel S. Sullivan as their choice for the Senate seat there--and with my vacation having finally ended--candidate-choosing time has pretty much wrapped up. In pretty much all races where primaries have yet to be held, the results are foregone conclusions--New Hampshire's Senate is going to be Jeanne Shaheen vs. Scott Brown, etc. (The exception is Rhode Island's Democratic primary for the governorship, which is still basically tied and probably won't be settled until September 9.) As a result, it's probably time to start talking about candidate quality.
"Candidate quality" is about as nebulous as political jargon gets. That's largely because it's a composite of a number of qualities that are just as nebulous as "candidate quality", if not more so: name recognition, political experience, etc. However, that doesn't mean we can't quantify it. Some, like FiveThirtyEight's recently published model, compute candidate quality as a function of the highest political office the candidate has ever held. Depending on what we're trying to calculate here, political experience appears to be the single best metric of candidate quality among all other possible variables, even better than favorability ratings (although those still probably play a role). But for us, candidate quality is all about trying to figure out how undecided voters will break once it actually comes time to put a name down on the ballot.
While (probably) not the same as others have done, I've very crudely measured candidate experience by putting candidates into "tiers" based on the candidate's political career to that point. Specifically:
