Here is another “not my field” question about the really interesting debate going on on this blog and others, concerning presidential election forecasting models and the question of how much campaigns matter versus the state of economy. Basically, I’ve never understood what all you adepts mean when you argue about whether “campaigns matter.”
We can do simple thought experiments to prove that “campaigns matter,” and matter enormously. For example, suppose that the Republican nominee decides to campaign strongly for changing our system of government to a communist dictatorship. I predict he or she would lose for sure, provided the opponent chose a normal campaign strategy, and for any plausible state of the economy.
That’s an extreme example, but the point is more general: Candidates choose campaign strategies and try to choose them optimally, which is to say that they are trying to choose the strategy that maximizes votes (or actually, probability of winning) given the other candidate’s strategy. To the extent that candidates succeed in this, historical data on campaign strategies, the economy, and election outcomes give us no leverage at all for estimating the causal effect of variation in campaign strategies on election performance. Campaigns could matter enormously, in that if any given candidate had chosen differently he or she would have lost a lot of votes. But you won’t be able to estimate the size of this campaign effect from comparing across campaigns and elections.
I guess what you all must have in mind is that candidates don’t necessarily chose optimal campaign strategies. They don’t choose obviously bad strategies like advocating for Leninism or monarchy, but for reasons of competence they may fail to identify the best campaign strategy within some window around the best. So then I guess the question you are asking is something like “how much do campaigns matter within the range of likely errors in identifying the best campaign strategy”?
But even here we can’t get an estimate of the size of this effect by comparing across campaigns, since maybe the reasons why you ran a less than optimal campaign are also factors that lower your vote share independent of the campaign (for one thing).
The experiment we’d like to run is to convince candidates to randomly choose from a menu of different campaign strategies, and do this for lots of elections so we could identify average effects. Not going to happen for US presidential campaigns. (Though Leonard Wantchekon famously pulled it off with candidates for a parliamentary election in Benin, and I’ll bet we start seeing some of this for lower level elections in the US in the coming years.)
The points are: (1) campaign strategies obviously matter, in a meaningful sense, and matter a lot, and (2) seems unlikely that you could estimate how much from data on past presidential elections, because candidates choose their strategies in light of all kinds of idiosyncratic, situation-specific information that Nate Silver, Doug Hibbs, Ray Fair, et al will never have.
If this is right (and maybe I’m missing something), then “how predictable are presidential elections based on economic fundamentals?” is an interesting question, but one that doesn’t have much or any bearing on the question of how sensitive is vote share to changes in campaign strategy. Further, the closer that candidates are getting to optimal campaign strategies, the more it will be true that “campaigns matter” in the sense that they could hurt themselves by choosing different strategies, but (obviously) they couldn’t help themselves by choosing differently.
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See here, As Gary and I discussed in our 1993 paper, approximate economic determinism is consistent with the campaign mattering. The efforts of the two campaigns help to push voters toward the choices that would be expected based on the fundamentals. This argument works because the general election has two major candidates who are roughly equal in resources and clearly differ in ideology.
Right, I agree that economics could have a big effect on who wins conditional on roughly optimal campaigns (which doesn’t imply that campaigns don’t matter since candidates could lose votes by choosing worse strategies). But in the case of your specific argument, aren’t you pushing a different notion of what it would mean for a presidential campaign to matter?
Your theory if I get it is that (a) voters want to condition on fundamentals (economic and ideological) but start out unclear on what they are, and (b) “balanced” (which I think could mean roughly optimal against each other) campaigns inform them of the state of the fundamentals. So here the implicit counterfactual to claim that campaigns “matter” is to imagine a world where there are no campaigns at all. In this world, more voters make bigger mistakes in voting, and as a result fundamentals don’t predict outcomes as well.
That’s plausible as far I can tell, but it doesn’t seem to be what people are arguing about when they argue over whether and how much campaigns matter. I thought they were arguing over the size of the impact of running this kind of campaign versus that kind of campaign (eg positive vs negative, stress foreign policy vs economy, etc).
No need “to imagine a world where there are no campaigns at all.” Just consider unbalanced campaigns such as for congress or for referenda, where one side massively outspends the other. Or primary elections, where the different candidates have similar positions so that the vote choice is more arbitrary (and also subject to unstable strategic concerns when there are more than two serious options).
I could be missing something, too, but Jim’s comment seems exactly right to me. There is an analogy here, I think, to the “puzzle” of so little money in politics. (The puzzle does not necessarily extend to immature democracies: estimates of total campaign expenditures in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election exceed one percent of GDP.) On the equilibrium path, candidates adopt strategies that lead to relatively small contributions. But, to follow Jim’s example, if one of the major parties in the U.S. advocated a communist dictatorship, it seems probable that enormous sums of money would flow to the other party.
I wrote a post a while back thinking about some things related to this. My main point was that’s a difference between things that don’t matter at all and things that don’t matter because they don’t produce a comparative advantage. I use the analogy of NFL kickers: they are obviously incredibly important, but they aren’t paid much and aren’t picked high in the draft because none of the top 35 kickers in the world is particularly better than any of the other. At the presidential campaign level, I think this explains a lot, and it also predicts when campaigns matter the most: when one side or the other makes a massive mistake, like picking a VP like Palin.
I think it’s relevant here. Here’s the post:
http://www.mattglassman.com/?p=1536
I think Matt is spot on – additionally, it’s much easier to tell the “optimal” campaign strategy after the event, which gives it dubious predictive power for elections.
Also I’d say people are necessarily comparing apples and apples here – advocating Leninism doesn’t seem to be a “strategy” in the sense that the political scientists are using it. Instead such a strategy reflects an ideology, which models such as Silver’s take into account. Obviously, if someone was a Leninist in a American Presidential election, it would render any vaguely politically mainstream candidate the only electable one, in classic Downesian fashion. So one side, the advocates of campaigns mattering will argue that Palin was a bad campaign strategy, on the basis of her ideology. Yet it seems to me that the critics of this view aren’t saying that ideologically radical campaigns don’t matter, just that things such as money spent on a campaign or debate performance matters less. Which may still be open to criticism, but is quite a different argument.