Presidential Candidates: Where the rich get richer
During the first Democratic Party debate of the election season, two candidates headed in with widespread name recognition and leading positions in the polls. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders held commanding leads of 45 and 29 percent of the electorate respectively, over the rest of the Democratic candidates who polled at or below 1 percent each (below Vice President Joe Biden at 18%, who had not even declared his candidacy). In an article from Vocativ.com, author Brian Byrne uses the rich-get-richer effect to analyze the effects of the debate. According to the rules set by the moderators, any time a candidate had their name mentioned by an opponent, they were allowed 30 seconds to respond. As the two frontrunners, Clinton and Sanders were naturally invoked several times by their less popular rivals, who had to seize their debate opportunity to attack the two leading candidates and stake out their own place in the field. However, this meant that Clinton and Sanders each received 3.5 extra minutes of speaking time as a result of their guaranteed response time. They then used this time to spread their own messages, and attack each other, which only added more to their respective response times. As we can see, Clinton and Sanders’s high media exposure entering the debate made them the center of attention, which in turn gave them more time to attract further exposure. In essence, their high publicity generated further publicity for them in the debate, while the lesser known candidates remained stuck in the shadows.
This is a great example of the rich-get-richer phenomenon we learned in lecture, where the probability that something experiences an increase in popularity is directly proportional to that something’s current popularity. This effect further explains why, in the following weeks, Vice President Biden declined to run for President, stating that “the window for a successful campaign has closed”. Because he waited so long to enter the race, Hillary Clinton’s early entry advantage grew exponentially, causing him to fall far behind in terms of resources and popularity.
Source: http://www.vocativ.com/news/239566/democratic-debate-time-is-money/