I am finally getting over my primary fatigue that has plagued me for the last few months. After the Obama nomination was self-apparent, I pretty much turned my attention to other things. The war in Georgia and the state of the national economy took up much of my discussion time, and summer consumed the rest.
Still, I have been writing, photographing and attending summer classes, and I plan to start posting some of the things I've found interesting over the last couple months. I thought I'd start by sharing an essay I just wrote analyzing the vice-presidential picks. I spent a great deal of time thinking about the issue, and I think that it is something worth reading. Enjoy:
The American presidential election provides a wealth of opportunities for exploration by political scientists. The infighting between the parties and the candidates and the large variety of goals and interested parties makes for a complex and fascinating contest, which makes delving into it all the more rewarding. Game theory appears to excel at parsing the process, which is why I chose to explore the election for this course essay – specifically I wanted to analyze the surprising selection of the vice-presidential candidates by Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican contender John McCain.
While many, including myself, were surprised by the choices by the candidates that appear to contradict the game theory expectation that each candidate would moderate their ticket, I think that the decisions can be rationally understood and supported using game theory.
Prior to the early morning announcement on Aug. 23, that Delaware senator Joe Biden would carry the Democratic vice-presidential title, the Obama campaign was remarkably tight-lipped about their selection from the field of contenders. In lieu of concrete information, journalists camped out in front of the houses of the three leading candidates, as well as tailed Obama and his surrogates. The McCain campaign was similarly close-mouthed before their choice a week later of Alaskan governor Sarah Palin as their VP pick.
This degree of secrecy is abnormal for American elections, where a hungry and well-connected media tends to receive tip offs well in advance of formal announcements. It was a change of pace for the news outlets, which were so on edge that a pizza delivery prank to Joe Biden’s house in Wilmington received live national television coverage in the hope that it was some kind of political symbolism. Only a flurry of 11th hour Wikipedia updates and a careful monitoring of unscheduled flight plans tipped the hand of either campaign.
With all this in mind, it is clear that the campaign advisors were operating in a climate of incomplete information. Not only did they not know the intended pick for VP by the other party, but each pick represented a different strategy for their respective campaigns. The inability to predict their opponent prevented either campaign from making a response for fear of reacting to the wrong strategies and utilities.
In game theory terms, the selection of the vice-presidential candidate was the paradigm-changing “costly signal” that indicated the campaign course to both supporters and opponents. The classic example of the “costly signal” in game theory is the wedding band, which is offered to a potential fiancé to indicate the seriousness of one’s intentions. The ring accomplishes two things: it signals long-term investment in the relationship, and it also overtly promotes an intended course of action.
Game theory predicts that each of the players in this situation will sit on their hands until a third player, “Nature,” makes an action that unveils the preferences of each party. And so the campaigns did since the end of the primary season (though political fatigue was also a part of that) – but the advent of party nominating conventions was the third player that would determine the future strategies.
As the Democratic Party convention was scheduled earlier than the Republican Party convention, Obama was forced to make a decision with less information than his opponent – a disadvantage that he attempted to mitigate with the above-mentioned uncharacteristic party discipline that gave Republicans little time to react.
Obama effectively had three significant candidates going into the Democratic convention: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Richardson. Each choice had broad implications for the last leg of the election campaign.
Biden would bring a wealth of experience to the campaign and a Catholic working-family background that would help to defuse the Republican narrative against Obama, but his long, liberal Senate history would be unlikely to win over many Republicans, nor particularly excite independents. While popular in his state, Delaware has a negligible number of electoral votes.
Clinton’s more moderate politics would nominally bring in many fence-sitters, especially women. However, her selection would also serve to invigorate part of the conservative base more interested in voting against her than voting for McCain. It would also create ongoing turmoil within the Democratic Party still sore after the primaries, though there were already a number of discontents (such as the PUMAs, or Party Unity My Ass, that had exploded onto the blogosphere with their intention to punish the Obama campaign’s treatment of Clinton by voting for McCain) that promised complications regardless of the pick.
Finally, Richardson, as a Latino and governor of New Mexico, would bring his own assortment of pros and cons to the ticket. He would help with a battleground state, and bring in a Latino population wary of Obama during the primaries, but he would also rile a conservative population already uncomfortable with a young, Black president.
In short, Obama was faced with the prospect of choosing to increase his own support by going after independent voters, or attempting to depress McCain’s conservative base that appeared to have lackluster support for their candidate.
(Part two to follow)
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