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The Payoff of Defending Hillary Clinton

In Tuesday night’s democratic presidential debate, there was a memorable moment when Senator (I-VT) Bernie Sanders was asked by CNN’s debate moderator Anderson Cooper to weigh in on the scandal that has rocked former Secretary of State (D-NY) Hillary Clinton campaign: her emails.

Instead of attacking Clinton, like Lincoln Chafee subtly did in his opening remarks, Sanders unequivocally stated that the American people are sick of hearing about Clinton’s “damn emails.” Why would Sanders do this? It would seem as if he had much to gain by emphasizing that he has no scandals, while Clinton, the current frontrunner, has. Maybe it could help propel him to frontrunner status if he had criticized Clinton.

To understand why Sanders acted the way he did, we should investigate this using what we know about game theory. Consider a payoff matrix with the rows representing Sanders decisions, and the columns representing Clinton’s decisions. Sanders options are criticize or don’t criticize, and Clinton’s strategy is to apologize or defend her use of the private email server. Obviously, Clinton apologizes. It has much greater payoffs than defending her use of the server. Her campaign has been mired by this issue for so long, and her poll number have reflected that this issue is causing her to lose support. It is a dominant strategy for Hillary Clinton to apologize for her private email server.

But what about for Sanders. Let’s suppose he criticizes her. The payoff is reasonable: he is seen as more ethical and more responsible than Clinton. What if he defends her? Invariably, he will be giving aid to the Clinton campaign, so in that sense, he experiences a negative payoff. But several other positive payoffs manifest that erase this negative. First, Sanders is seen as uniting the democratic party. By choosing to not divide the voters, he has effectively stated that the party as a whole–even though the other candidates may not agree–forgive Hillary Clinton and are ready to move on. This is crucial for the democrats as republicans currently are experiencing what could be called a meltdown. Second, Sanders represented himself as someone who is angry at the press for choosing to not focus on more important issues. When he stated that the American people are tired of her “damn emails,” he underscored how important it is to focus on the real issues, such as income inequality. This drew applause, and showcased how the audience cares less about the e-mail server than about fixing many of the problems plaguing American society.

Sanders defended Clinton because he understood at some level that uniting the party and focusing on more important issues is more important than attacking Clinton, even if he gave a small boost to Hillary Clinton. Understanding this, his payoff for defending Clinton was much higher than attacking her (given that she were to apologize, which she did). Hence, that is what he did.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/sanders-says-americans-are-over-clintons-damn-emails-n444061

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