Mario Kart and Trump
One might imagine there are few similarities between a video game and Donald Trump’s unexpected success in politics, but as it turns out, there’s one similarity that can’t be ignored. Surprisingly enough, as of September 16th, Donald Trump was a shocking 21 points ahead in New Hampshire and 17 points in South Carolina. Forgetting the discussion of how Trump got so ahead in the first place (the author thinks it’s because people are sick of establishment, but I have a more simple explanation that I won’t state here), the more game theory related focus is on the response of the other Republican candidates to this situation. After all, game theory is a people game. In class, we learned that when three companies are competing, when one company pulls ahead, the other two companies join forces to take that company down, thus creating a balanced structure. By all rights, that should happen in the case with Trump, especially when a good amount of the population believes that Jeb Bush has a decent chance of winning the election.
However, this isn’t the case with Trump. His fellow Republicans released a video two weeks ago attempting to drag him down by saying that his view align more with those of Democrats than Republicans, claiming he supports Obamacare and Hillary Clinton, but the video failed to go viral. This, then, elucidates another phenomenon. In competitive situations, when one person pulls ahead of the pack, others normally drag him or her back. However, when this person pulls too far ahead (as is the case with Trump), the others fall to fighting amongst themselves. Games like Mario Kart and Settlers of Catan have strategies to combat this situation, dubbed aptly the idea that “the rich get richer,” but it appears that a real life strategy has not yet appeared. This can also be seen through the wage gap in the United States and how (although not verified by statistics) the top 1% of the population controls over 90% of the wealth. The rich get richer indeed. Game theory is well and nice in this situation, but all this begs the question of how those who are left behind can develop a strategy to catch up and eventually attempt to surpass him, especially with the primaries coming up in less than a year. After all, coming in second place in the polls is no different from coming in at third place; either way, you don’t receive the nomination.
Sources:
http://utahpolicy.com/index.php/features/today-at-utah-policy/7006-game-theory-and-politics-what-mario-kart-can-teach-us-about-2016