Who asked Nikki Haley to run for president? Can somebody introduce us to the gentlepersons who convinced Tim Scott to enter the contest? Is anybody outside of his family and his congregation urging Mike Pence to join the Republican field? The same applies to the other long shots — Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, Chris Sununu and Chris Christie — who have been flashing their presidential dance cards at voters. Have any of them stopped to consider the deleterious effect that having a swarm of candidates in the race might have on the outcome?
This is from Jack Shafer, “Return of the Republican Clown Car,” Politico, June 1, 2023.
Shafer goes on to point out, correctly, in my view, that the large number of candidates will likely give a plurality of votes to Donald Trump and that, therefore, he will likely be the 2024 presidential candidate.
In answer to Shafer’s last question, my guess is that some of them stopped and asked that question but some of them, at least, thought they could be “the one.” Others are probably doing it for the publicity and the related other things that publicity might lead to.
What this illustrates is the tragedy of the commons. Each knows that his or her probability of winning is small and would like the others to exit so that he/she will have a much higher probability. None of them has a strong incentive to care about the big picture that, I’m guessing, they all would like to avoid: the nomination of Donald Trump.
That’s the way the commons works.
For more on that, see the article that I commissioned the late Garrett Hardin to write for The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, “The Tragedy of the Commons.”
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Jun 3 2023 at 11:29am
This coordination problem could be easily resolved with bargaining. I would guess the minor candidates would prefer getting a 30-40% of becoming VP or Secretary of State to a 1% of becoming president (in fact dropping out in exchange for a DeSantis cabinet position probably increases their long term probability of becoming president).
I guess there are reasons such bargains aren’t more common. It’s probably risky for the most plausible candidate to try to ‘sell’ cabinet positions like this since the person they’re trying to sell to could publicize the attempted back room deal and hurt the other candidate. Also of course the contract is unenforceable, so a candidate might drop out for another candidate and after the latter wins he can just reneg on what was promised without much consequence.
David Henderson
Jun 3 2023 at 2:55pm
That would work somewhat but possibly worse than you think.
The reason is that once the game is known, more candidates would enter. It is true that the ones who enter first would be more likely to be serious contenders and would, therefore, quality for a bigger prize for exiting, leaving even more-obscure candidates who wouldn’t take much of the vote. Still, additional entry is a problem.
Mark Z
Jun 4 2023 at 10:16pm
Good point. A better system (at least for solving this particular problem) might then be to allow each losing candidate to give their votes to another candidate at any point prior to the convention (e.g., all the losing non-Trump candidates could decide whether to allocate the votes they received in the primaries to Trump or to DeSantis). Then the obviously losing candidates would be selling their actual votes to the top two or three candidates after the fact, rather than merely selling their prospective votes to expected top candidates ahead of time. They could also, of course, pledge their votes to whichever other candidate they most support for principled reasons, in theory.
vince
Jun 3 2023 at 1:13pm
There’s a simple solution that doesn’t reduce choices. Our voting system, winner-take-all, is one of the worst possible voting system. Its spoiler problem is eliminated with instant runoff voting (ranked choice) or approval voting.
Airman Spry Shark
Jun 3 2023 at 2:48pm
Winner-take-all is the failure mode of electoral college vote allocation in States other than Maine & Nebraska; the terrible voting system we’re currently using is first-past-the-post.
Slocum
Jun 3 2023 at 5:53pm
It keeps their names in the news to some extent. As presidential candidates, they can raise and spend funds (thereby sowing some favors they can reap later), and eventually hopefully they can strategically end their campaigns, endorse a rival, and maybe become, say, secretary of Transportation in a new administration.
Thomas Hutcheson
Jun 3 2023 at 7:07pm
Maybe there is perfect coordination around Trumpist policies. Each potential contender reckons that with fewer candidates, there is more chance of a non-Trump candidate. A non-Trump candidate might move toward the “median voter” who is less a fan of Trumpist policies than Trump.
Mark Brady
Jun 4 2023 at 1:20pm
In his entry on “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin correctly observes that “[s]ome of the common pastures of old England were protected from ruin by the tradition of stinting—limiting each herdsman to a fixed number of animals (not necessarily the same for all). Such cases are spoken of as “managed commons,” which is the logical equivalent of socialism.”
Of course, it all depends what a writer means by the word socialism, but it is far removed from the abrogation of private, i.e., individual, property rights that readers would likely interpret socialism to imply.
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