Economics of Election Campaigning

With the US election “ending” the democratic and republican party had to make some hard decisions of where to advertise what. I read up on it a bit and I thought it was very confusing. So, I tried to frame it in an economic way: A continuous game theoretic play with three possible actions.

Actions:

There are three campaigns a political party can run:

1. Persuasion ads

These ads target undecided voters or voters leaning towards voting for the other party. For instance, the democratic party might show ads to conservative leaning voters to persuade them to vote for Biden.

2. Mobilisation ads

A republican stronghold is worthless if it doesn’t vote. Thus, it might be useless to show a republican city persuasion ads, since 90% of them are republican anyway. What they need to do is to mobilise these republican voters to go box their ballet. Here ads that encourage voting will be shown.

3. Demobilisation ads.

To continue with the example above, democrats have a strong incentive that the turnout number of the republican city is low. They run ads demobilising inhabitants, in order to decrease republican votes on a state level.

If the Dems run persuasion ads then there are people to persuade in a given state. This means that Reps must also run persuasion ads. This can get dirty in so called battle states.

If Dems see no need to persuade cause it’s a blue state anyways, then they mobilize. This means the Reps must hold against that in equal measures, thus demobilize.

Vice versa, If Dems feel like they can swing a republican state by demobilizing its core voters, Reps will hold against it by Mobilizing.

If Dems do nothing in a state, there might be little to do for Reps either.

This turns into a pretty boring self-fulfilling prophecy. Any marketing campaign taken by one will be counter acted by the other. I understand that there are way more nuanced ways to look at this, but essentially what happens here is that 14 billion USD of (mostly) taxpayer money is used to poor gasoline into an already divided country. It seems like the electoral college and the media landscape in the US incentivize a game in which political campaigns and the general public always lose, while ad revenues increase.

It would be fun if that game had some regulations:

1. You are only allowed to spend x money on

a. Persuasion ads

b. Mobilisation ads

c. Demobilisation ads

2. There is a limited number of periods (10 moths, each month being a period)

3. At the start of each period a campaign has to commit money and intent (demobilize,

mobilize, persuade) of the campaign regarding each state.

This would result in a game like RISK. Each campaign would think about whether to strengthen their strongholds or attack their opponent dependent on their resources and the move by the other. This could lower cost for the public as well as incentivize less aggressive tactics in politics.