The (Political) Supreme Court & Dominant Strategies
Article: A Game Theorist’s Advice To President Trump on Filling the Supreme Court
In response to the recent death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Bhaskar Chakravorti penned an opinion piece in The Hill to supposedly “advise” President Trump on filling the Supreme Court this election season. In reality, Chakravorti, Dean of Global Business at Tufts, lays out a game theory-inspired strategy for Senate Democrats. Chakravorti advises Senate Democrats to uniformly threaten to pack the Supreme Court if they win the Senate and White House. Chakravorti argues this is a dominant strategy for them because it is no-lose.
To understand why this strategy is no-lose, it helps to break down Chakravorti’s argument using what we’ve learned about games and dominant strategies in class. We can identify two strategies each for the Democrats and Republicans. Democrats can either threaten to pack the court or stay the course, while Republicans can choose to either fill the seat or wait to fill it until after the election.
Chakravorti’s first strategic advice primarily deals with voter turnout – a metric he argues could significantly influence the election. Leading publications such as the Washington Post agree with him. To map this out, we can choose some arbitrary values to represent an effect on turnout. We can use 0 to indicate that voter turnout is not impacted, -1 to indicate voter turnout is suppressed, and 1 to indicate voter turnout is increased.
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Democrats |
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Republicans |
The Pack Threat | Stay-The-Course | |
| Fill | (R -1, D 1) | (R -1, D 0) | |
| Wait | (R 1, D 1) | (R 1, D 0) | |
By drawing out the scenario Chakravorti explains we can identify that threatening to pack the course is not only a dominant strategy for Democrats, but a strictly dominant strategy. Chakravorti correctly finds that this is a no-lose strategy, because Democrats “win” the Pack-Fill scenario and turnout for both parties is likely to increase in the Pack-Wait scenario .
This, however, leaves out the potential long term impacts of these decisions. Chakravorti briefly mentions this, describing the Pack threat as “risky”.
The risks, most likely, are that court packing harms the Democrats’ favorability in the future and that Republicans rush to fill alienates their voters and costs them the election. (Chakravorti notes that Trump specifically risks reducing the odds of his own re-election)
To game out risk, we can again assign some arbitrary values to how much an action deviates from established norms…
0 – Uncontroversial, not harmful
1 – Mixed opinions, potentially harmful
2 – Controversial, likely harmful
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Democrats |
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Republicans |
The Pack Threat | Stay-The-Course | |
| Fill | (R 1, D 2) | (R 1, D 0) | |
| Wait | (R 0, D 2) | (R 0, D 0) | |
The Pack Threat (2) is more damaging than Fill (1) because it breaks with established norms and is controversial even within Biden’s party. Fill (1), however, is not controversial within Trump’s party and thus less likely to spark as much internal revolt and damage. However, filling the seat could still cause moderate harm as it is deeply unpopular outside of Trump’s party and could impact voter turnout (see previous example).
Looking at the possible outcomes, the best strategy is to act controversially when your opponent is uncontroversial – from Chapter 6 of the textbook we know that this type of game can be classified as a prisoner’s dilemma and specifically an arms race, because in this context both parties are using increasingly harmful tactics to “win” while in reality neither party would suffer long-term harm if they acted un-controversially.
So why don’t they just get on with packing? In the Democrats’ case, the short-term benefits of voter turnout only outweigh the long-term harm for some Democrats. If a Democrat is relying more on voters from outside the party, acting controversially might not be in their best interest.
But why don’t the Republicans just wait if it could give them a voter turnout boost you might ask? Unfortunately, here again other factors come into play. While a Wait strategy might yield short-term turnout benefits and avoid the moderate long-term harm of Fill, Republicans are likely also concerned that if they lose the White House or the Senate (not both) they might lose the ability to complete the nomination.
Essentially, the increase in turnout has to justify the risk of losing the election. And turnout, compared to any other year, is perhaps the most fickle thing to gauge this election season.