The Election as a Market
Candidates are gearing up for the 2020 election which means there is a lot of strategizing that needs to be done and it starts with winning primaries. For our purposes, we will be thinking of the election as a market where the voters are the sellers and the buyers are the candidates. I propose that the voters, or specifically that their votes, are what is being sold since this is what each candidate is aiming to get. However, in this instance, there can be multiple buyers for each seller and each seller is trying to maximize the number of buyers.
To simplify our problem, let us suppose that the “value” of getting a vote is aligning with a certain set of ideals that a given voter looks for, or more broadly saying the right thing for that voter. This idea is supported by the NYTimes article, Which Candidates Will Win Tonight’s Democratic Debate? Six Experts Offer Tips. In the article, various critics are offering tips on what it would take for each candidate “to win” which we will define as “increase the number of voters they have.”
At a high level, a tip for one of the candidates is to talk about the issues that they have been talking about and tie them back to current issues that voters have expressed concerns about. However it also says don’t go too far with this approach. Assuming that the candidate is doing well in the polls (or in this market), then it makes sense to continue talking about the issues they have tied to their campaign since they probably align with ideals of the voters they already have thus continuing these discussions should sustain the voters’ preferences for this candidate.
Like in any market, however, your chance of winning is not dependent solely on what you do, it also depends on what your opponents do. For this reason the tips for some candidates included phrases like show that you are more competent than others or be ready for candidates that may attack certain parts of your campaign. In this case we may think of our market a little bit more like an auction where whoever goes first is at a disadvantage because candidates who go after the first may be able to tailor their response to appeal to a given set of voters or simply because the candidates who go after, have the chance to question the first candidate and bring down the voters’ preferences for that candidate.
As we can see there are many ways in which an election resembles a market or a game, whether that be because candidates are competing for a set of resources (votes) or because a candidate who goes first is at a disadvantage since candidates who go after may adjust their responses which can lead to an increase in their voter base base or may lead to a decrease in the voter base of the first candidate.