Chicago Sun-Times: BLAIR HULL'S WINNING FORMULA

He did it with blackjack and the financial markets. Now Democrat M. Blair Hull is trying to turn his bid for the U.S. Senate into a math problem.

The millionaire investor is using a mathematical formula to help win the race, combining voters' ages, ethnicity, wealth, voting history and other factors into a complex equation that one magazine writer said "looked like part of the human genetic code."

The densely written theorem is a string of precise numbers carried out to the eighth decimal place. It's designed to identify people for Hull to target with fliers in the mail or telephone calls. Those chores were previously handled by precinct captains, who often flunked high school math.

"The basic idea," Hull said, "is you take the probability of voting times the probability of voting for Blair Hull and multiply them together, and that gives you the relative weight of how desirable it is to contact that person."

A mouthful, to be sure, except for the most accomplished mathematicians in the state, who now undoubtedly have found their candidate of choice.

"This is not going to make a successful campaign in and of itself," he said. "But it gives you a slight advantage, a slight edge, and it makes us a little more effective."

Hull is running in the March 16 primary against state Comptroller Dan Hynes, state Sen. Barack Obama, former Chicago School Board President Gery Chico, health care executive Joyce Washington, radio talk-show host Nancy Skinner and Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas.

"The formula says 'I'm spending $40 million,' " Pappas said, laughing uproariously after learning of his formula. "He's driving everybody crazy in this race, except me.

"Everybody will be running around trying to figure out his formula. ... Forget about the formula. The formula is: The guy's got money."

Hull, 61, won $25,000 on blackjack in the 1970s using a mathematical system that relied on teams of card counters. The former high school math and physics teacher parlayed those winnings and other number-crunching methods into a $531 million trading company. He said he plans to pump $40 million of his own money in the race.

His campaign formula was first published in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

During a campaign stop at the University of Chicago in November, senior editor Joshua Green asked Hull about a campaign aide's remark that Hull believed he could devise an algorithm for winning elections. Hull grabbed his notebook.

"Sure enough, a lengthy equation unfolded across the page that to my untrained eye looked like part of the human genetic code," Green wrote.

Green told the Sun-Times that Hull scribbled a version of the formula off the top of his head but then checked it out with a campaign aide. Green said all the demographic factors Hull put into the equation made a certain political sense.

"Honestly, I was pretty impressed with his math skills," Green said. "I couldn't read a formula like that, let alone write one."

Hull said the formula is based on a phone survey of 5,000 people. Their demographic traits and voting preferences were entered into a computer and crunched by a campaign analyst, who devised the formula with the computer's help.

Michael Mezey, a political science professor at DePaul University, read the Atlantic Monthly piece but is skeptical.

"Winning primaries is very much sort of getting your people to the polls, especially in a divided race," he said. "And that's not subject to a mathematical formula."

But Hull is deadpan serious about his campaign's use of the mathematically driven strategy, defending it as an example of the type of innovation he would bring to the U.S. Senate. And he's not worried about letting his opponents in on the secret.

"This is a technique that I'd invite them to use," he said.

That is, if any of them could decipher it.

Probability = 1/(1 + exp (-1 x (-3.9659056 + (General Election Weight x 1.92380219) +

(Re-Expressed Population Density x .00007547) + (Re-Expressed Age x .01947370) +

(Total Primaries Voted x -.60288595) + (% Neighborhood Ethnicity x -.00717530.))))