Hello! If you’re looking for celebrity clickbait, try the Huffington Post. But if you’re looking for a fresh, data-based, daily look at the ins and outs of the 2016 GOP presidential nomination site, you’re in the right place!

Why data? Isn’t that boring? And what can data tell us about who’s going to win eight months from now?

“Why data?” is easy to answer. Most political “news” is nothing more than opinion masquerading as analysis. No editor publishes a piece that starts “Mike Huckabee increased his chance to win the Iowa caucus today by .37 percent.” Better to blow your finding up out of all proportion and claim you’ve identified a trend that will continue into the future and will change everything. And if your amazing, unsupported insight proves to be wrong in two months’ time, like last summer’s “libertarian moment,” well, there’s always a new trend that you can blame and catch the next wave promoting.

Unlike most reporters and pundits, I’ve actually done what I’m writing about. I’ve run campaigns, been a candidate myself, and generally spent the better part of three decades looking at political data. This means I know how to find data, how to interpret it, and — most importantly — how to use it to look beyond the snapshot and into the looking glass.

As for the boring part — look, if you want stories about “the 20 Hottest Republican Women” you’ve already spent too long on this blog. But for those of you who want to know rather than opine, you’ll find this blog to be different than other data-based analyses. We won’t do multivariate regressions or talk about Pearson’s r here. That’s eye-glazing stuff that makes you want to scream “nerd alert!”

Instead, I try to emulate the great baseball writer and data analyst Bill James. The numbers form the heart of the piece, but they are used sparingly and always in support of the larger story. You don’t need to like or know any math to understand what’s going to go on here.

And as for what data can tell us about the future, it turns out it can tell us almost everything. Contrary to what liberal elites tell us, voters matter. They divide into pretty predictable groups, in pretty predictable numbers, and react in pretty predictable ways to pretty predictable stimuli. That’s true whether one looks at either party’s primary electorates or at general elections themselves.

Once you buy into that, suddenly things that appear to make no sense can be observed long in advance. John McCain seemed to come out of nowhere in 2000, for example, but in fact his profile perfectly matched that of the long-overlooked, but relatively large, group of moderate Republicans and independents. At the same time, you could easily have predicted his quick burn out once you did some simple math and noted that he could not replicate his New Hampshire win without moving to the right — moderates were a much smaller share of the vote in almost every other state. When you saw him double down on the moderate maverick schtick, you could have easily bet the farm on Bush regardless of the tactics Bush used.

I go into all of this in my 2014 article The Four Faces of the Republican Party, and dive even deeper in my forthcoming book The Four Faces of the Republican Party: The Fight for the 2016 Nomination (Palgrave MacMillan, November). The gist of the argument is that in presidential years, the GOP has four primary factions with predictable sizes, distribution, and candidate preferences. Predicting who will win is a simple case of seeing who is appealing to which groups and why, and then putting the pieces together.

If you’re asking “what are these factions,” “how large are they,” and “who’s doing well with each,” then we’re going to be fast friends. The answers to those questions are the subjects of my next few posts.

And if you’ve come this far but still aren’t hooked? Well, he said THIS — you’ll never guess what happened next!