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Old 04-11-2019, 05:22 PM   #4
QuikSand
lolzcat
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Annapolis, Md
To be candid, I think this statistic is basically nonsense, and I don't it for the purpose of performance evaluation at all. I instead know that it conveys something superficially impressive about the effectiveness of our organization, and use it that way. Each year, when we run the numbers, we can say "bills we support have a better chance of passing than your average bill, and bills we oppose have a lesser chance of passing." That is invariably true on the surface, but it belies other contributing factors.

Anyway, for a given year, our success rate can vary from 70-90% calculated this way. This year's ~80 is obviously in that range, but doesn't really illustrate our effectiveness in any way that I think is useful.

When I evaluate effectiveness, I am more aware than the stats of the issues where our efforts did, or could have, made a real difference, and I weight those cases far more than the cases where the outcome was largely outside our control. In other words, my lobbyist gets more "points" from me for killing a bad bill that was popular and had every right to pass than for killing another bad bill that was obviously so poorly conceived that it was going to die of its own weight anyhow (and both of those cases happen routinely).
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