Today, with states' near-universal adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the political system has achieved that which was not possible less than 2 decades ago. Just why this is so remains unanswered. Some observers have attributed states' embrace of the standards to the substantial financial incentives that the federal government embedded in its $4.35 billion Race to the Top initiative. Despite these perceptions, little is known about states' adoption and the degree to which federal incentivization conditioned their decisions. Using an innovation diffusion conceptual lens and event history analysis, we test the influence of states' aspiration for Race to the Top funds, controlling for a set of other predictors typically correlated with states' decisions to undertake policy adoption.