In 1983, he and his M.I.T.-graduate brother, Dean, founded Aristotle Industries, which helped introduce computer software to politics. But that failure helped him to detect an unmet need: predictive political data. Phillips had miscalculated his prospects. He ran again two years later, and lost by double digits once more. In November, Phillips lost to his opponent, a four-term Republican incumbent, by twenty-five points. “John Phillips is an astonishing young man,” Proxmire said, after Phillips announced his candidacy President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy, then challenging Carter in the Democratic Presidential primary, reportedly sought Phillips’s endorsement.

confiscated it after a Pakistani official asked Phillips for a copy, he alerted a senator he admired, William Proxmire of Wisconsin, who later referenced the incident in a speech. Four years earlier, while a junior at Princeton, Phillips-the son of a Yale engineering professor-had become an unlikely media sensation, thanks to a paper he wrote on how to build an atomic bomb.

He would turn twenty-five, the minimum age to hold the seat, a few months before the election. In 1980, John Aristotle Phillips declared his candidacy for the United States Congress, in a district in Connecticut.