{"id":9753,"date":"2012-09-24T15:46:05","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T19:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9753"},"modified":"2012-09-24T15:46:09","modified_gmt":"2012-09-24T19:46:09","slug":"game-theory-and-the-super-pacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=9753","title":{"rendered":"game theory and the super PACs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine that you lead a conservative super-PAC like American Crossroads, Restore Our Future, the Koch network, or the US Chamber of Commerce, which collectively planned to spend a $1 billion on this fall’s election. Of course, you must accommodate a bunch of separate and strong-willed donors, but I think these are the goals you will balance:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Support the person you most want to see win, which is probably Mitt Romney, because you most want to see Barack Obama lose<\/em>.<\/li>\n
  2. Make the greatest marginal difference in the election by supporting candidates who are in a position to benefit from your dollars.<\/li>\n
  3. Support candidates who will maximize your members’ after-tax profits. Whom to choose is debatable–it could even be the Democrats, if you believe they have a better macroeconomic policy–but leaders of conservative super-PACs presumably believe the answer is fiscally conservative Republicans.<\/li>\n
  4. Support candidates who are likely to win, because if they win without your money, you have no pull with them. There’s a debate about how much access and influence money buys, but you have something else to worry about besides influence. If Democrats win despite<\/em> your spending $1 billion for Republicans, you will send a clear message that you are weak and the Democrats can build a coalition without you.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Now, consider that the odds of Barack Obama’s winning in November are 90% according to Sam Wang<\/a>, 77.6% according to Nate Silver<\/a>, and 71.7% according to Intrade<\/a>. Consider also that both the House and Senate are in play, with numerous unpredictable races.<\/p>\n

    No wonder Karl Rove is spending his money<\/a> on behalf of Senate Republicans. The Center for Responsive Politics reports <\/a>that conservative super-PACS were spending $10 million\/week on behalf of Mitt Romney until a few weeks ago, but they are down to just $2.07 million in the last week.\u00a0 CRP also calculates <\/a>that Restore Our Future has spent $84 million on congressional races, American crossroads has spent $34 million, and Americans for prosperity has spent $31 million.\u00a0 Meanwhile, an industry like financial services (including real estate and insurance) demonstrates how to distribute your cash if you are mainly concerned about your own after-tax profits plus mollifying the winner. They’ve given <\/a>$221 million to Republicans, of which only $29 million had gone to Romney. They have also given $116 million to Democrats, including an ingratiating $12 million to Obama.<\/p>\n

    Conversely, if you are a liberal Democrat, I think your favorite outcomes, in descending order of priority, are: 1) win Congress, 2) win the presidency with no help from corporate donors, and 3) win the presidency with some corporate support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Imagine that you lead a conservative super-PAC like American Crossroads, Restore Our Future, the Koch network, or the US Chamber of Commerce, which collectively planned to spend a $1 billion on this fall’s election. Of course, you must accommodate a bunch of separate and strong-willed donors, but I think these are the goals you will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2012-election"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9753"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9781,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9753\/revisions\/9781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}