Game Theory in the Presidential Election
After the political debate this Wednesday, many have noted that presidential elections highly represent the simple form of a game. In this game, the candidates are players and the voters help to decide the outcome of the game. The voters do not vote for the person they completely agree with, but with the person that has the highest “utility value” for them – or, the candidate who does the most for them in the long run. There is also an idea that the people will vote for people they feel has the highest chance of winning, so that they can be correct and have a feeling of agreement with the future president.
The article narrows down the presidential candidates to only two players, saying that usually one candidate will be leading and the other will be second place – the rest do not matter as much. This is true for most elections, where two main parties are rallying against each other where the third highest (Ron Paul?) tends to gather about 1% of the votes. This kind of segregation tends to spread over the months as well, where there are a lot of potential candidates which are eventually narrowed down.
This type of dominant first place game makes the lower parties – second place and lower – more likely to form small alliances where they try to remove the first place candidate. This article refers to Donald Trump as the first place candidate, but the second player has not been completely determined – better Ben Carson and Jeb Bush. The person who manages to become second place must make the candidates feel as if they have a higher utility or happiness through voting for him, rather than get them to complete convert to their ideology.
This sort of narrowing the presidential election into a game, while it does have its benefits, does not completely tell the whole story of the election. Having one “main” player and a bunch of other candidates proves to make a sort of disadvantageous situation for those who are not first in the runnings. But, by separating the election into a game, it is easier to make rough estimations of the outcome, and see how much of an impact changing some numbers or a belief can have. One can see just how much is needed perhaps to sway an election in his favor.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2015/09/18/what-game-theory-tells-us-about-wednesdays-debate-and-the-republican-primary/