OK, I will admit that I'm a rather busy person these days, and now that I have a bit of summer vacation (ha! it's a
working vacation) I finally have the opportunity to peruse the copy of Crashing the Gate I recently got at the Clark County Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Dinner (thanks Ms. Armstrong!).
Anyway, I'm outraged. Not at Kos and Armstrong, but at those "consultants." If I didn't know any better - strike that, I do- I'd say it was a conspiracy to keep Democrats from taking back the country, because what Kos and Armstrong say is patently obvious to anyone with a smattering of a mathmatical background. In what follows, I'd like to outline a bit of game theory, and how a game theoretic approach applies to the national political party politics, based on what Kos and Armstrong mentioned in CTG.
Kos and Armstrong mention several races- Musgrave v. Matsunaka in Colorado, and De Lay v. Morrison in Texas are two good examples, where Kos and Armstrong mention that even though the Democrats "lost," the election, they forced the Republicans to spend gobs more money than they would have if the election wasn't contested. I don't know if Kos and Armstrong point this out, but in the DeLay case, he had to resort to breaking the law. This "lost" race, then resulted in the House Majority Leader being boooted out of Congress.
Doesn't sound like a loss to me. Does it sound like a loss to you?
Game Theory
If you never heard of Game Theory, it's because our educational system sucks, but let me give a brief outline of it and the inevitable links. Here's Wikipedia's entry as a starter. My personal favorite though is Gametheory.net.
Game Theory involves, as its name implies, the application of mathematical methods to "games" defined in ways that model strategies and reactions amongst players, and payoffs or outcomes.
See where I'm going yet?
Well, it's quite simple: the Republicans and Democrats are - or should be- playing the game of "get the most elected representatives in Congress to take control of it." To do this they have to apply a stategy of spending money, on ads, on field workers, and so forth. A given allocation of money spent on campaign things yields a given likelihood of winning (assuming a competent campaign.) Now each contest is one small part of the aforementioned game, so that taking control of Congress is a game that is an aggregation of the hundreds of races (which are dependent on each other).
Now Kos and Armstrong point up an interesting fact: the relatively meager financing of races in deep red areas draws inordinate, disproportionate amounts of Republican money to defend those races, or as we math types like to say, there is a nonlinear relationship between the amount of money a Democrat spends to mount a challenge in a deep red district and the amount of money spent by a Republican defending it.
That means that contesting races in these areas has the effect of levelling the playing field in areas that are "really" contestable which, as shown above is actually a misnomer, because the Repubs will just break laws if they have to do so, and that gets them out of Congress anyway!
The "consultants" that Kos and Armstrong berate should know this; the data that Kos and Armstrong give show that this should be obvious to anyone "skilled in the art," assuming, of course, that these clowns have operations researchers or systems engineers or applied mathematicians on staff, which they ought to have, if they are going to win races.
As I noted above, for a competent race, there should exist an optimal allocation of money for ads, field workers, and so forth. Do we know what it is? It is clear that whatever these consultants are doing, they aren't optimally allocating money, because this "nonlinear Republican response" is not being taken into consideration. And that's why I'm outraged.
Take a look at one race, for example: Lieberman versus Lamont. Lieberman and his drones claim that the Lamont fight will hurt down-ticket and Congressional races, but it should be obvious to all by now that the exact opposite is true. Where does Lieberman get his funding? Maybe he does have a couple of union endorsements, but you can be sure that whoever's corporately funding him is getting their money sucked out from potential Republican challengers. Therefore, regardless of whether Lamont wins this aspect alone helps down-ticket and Congressional races!. And I haven't even mentioned the fact that by getting the base out for Lamont, it gets them out for the other races.
It's a good thing Dean and his allies get this 50 State Strategy, and you can see why some folks in the Washington beltway don't like it. By open-sourcing election technology , it puts them out of business.
And that means, you know, more democracy.