The 2016 campaign has been as much about the interplay among candidates as it has been about anything else. Let’s call this interplay “multi-candidate field dynamics.” Here are the basics.
Consider an audience of prospective beverage consumers choosing between Coke and Lemonade. If 60% of people choose Coke and 40% choose Lemonade, Coke wins. Now let’s add a third entrant: Pepsi. Lemonade drinkers are mostly un-moved, although there may be a small fraction who switch to Pepsi just because they hate Coke. Lemonade’s share might drop to 37%. In contrast as many as 1/3 of those who chose Coke could easily be converted to the Pepsi column. So in a hypothetical matchup we might get Coke 40%; Lemonade 37% and Pepsi 23%. And were this really a public contest, we could expect secondary effects. Lemonade fans might for the first time see a chance to prevail and make a point of heading to the supermarket to vote. Cola devotees might stick with Coke as the leader, but they might also feel pressure to move over to Pepsi as the up and comer in contrast to Coke, the sinking frontrunner. Those running the campaign for Lemonade might choose to spend resources getting Coke drinkers to switch to Pepsi rather than the harder challenge of persuading someone to break the Cola habit.
The effects of additional entries from which to choose are plain to see. Yet they become much more complicated as you add variables, such as when you go from three sodas to the seven somewhat viable candidates who will be on the main stage on Thursday night. It gets worse when also considering what the other four people who are not viable can do simply by getting some votes or saying something that might hurt one of the main stage participants. As an example, both Rand Paul and Carly Fiornia are now flogging the Cruz from Canada story. It started with a loud mouth comment from Trump; it now includes a Washington Post Op-Ed from a law professor who says he can't be President. And it has mushroomed to the point where 1/4 of Cruz's Iowa supporters now believe someone not born in the U.S. should not be President. You now have to wonder where some of those voters might land.
Look how important it is to play out the effect one candidate’s actions have on others. Cruz’s struggles might on first blush seem to be good news for Marco Rubio, now in third place nationally and in Iowa. But it might not be. There is still some risk that Rubio could lose to Carson and drop to fourth place in Iowa. This mean Cruz's slide is not certainly to Rubio's benefit if his voters move over to Carson.
Another piece of breaking news is double-edged. The decline of Ted Cruz again seems like upside to Rubio. Trump’s rise to a tie with Cruz seems good for Rubio. But to some degree a very close race between Trump and Cruz also threatens Marco Rubio. His plan to come in third in Iowa is worth more if third matters. Instead, if a close race between Cruz and Trump dominates the caucus coverage and is the better story, then third becomes worth less. That matters as you fight off three Governors in New Hampshire.
The moving parts are without a doubt incredibly difficult to track. They are in fact so difficult to track that the Gang at FiveThiryEight said yesterday that their model does not even try. "There’s also an awful lot our models don’t consider. For instance, they don’t do much to consider the interrelationships in the vote between different types of candidates. For example, if John Kasich gains a vote in New Hampshire, it’s probably more likely to come from a similar candidate like Bush than a dissimilar candidate like Ben Carson. Still, we hope they can form a reasonable benchmark for following the upcoming primaries, even if they’re almost certain to get a few races wrong."
It may be almost impossible to mathematically track such variables. However just because such dynamics can not be easily tracked mathematically does not mean they cannot be tracked. The math can help sometimes, but some times it is just instinct rather than pure math that allows you to figure things out. We here at Multi-Candidate Field Dynamics are unwilling to give up on what is the most crucial factor in the 2016 GOP primary. We will be producing models that show how such dynamics work and which candidates they are currently benefiting. With that knowledge we will be better positioned to tell you who will win and why in Iowa, New Hampshire and beyond.
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The Scorecard is a political strategy and analysis blog. Our hope is to provide information and insight that can be found nowhere else into how and why things are happening in American politics. Unlike many political pundits, we will tell you who we think is going to win as an election approaches; we will tell you why; and we will give you a sense of our level of confidence. Ours is a holistic approach, one that takes in as many numbers as possible but is also willing to look past the numbers if need be. When we turn out to have been wrong, we will let you know. When we are right, we’ll let you know that too.
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About Me
Author Jason Paul is a longtime political operative who got his start as an intern in 2002. He has been a political forecaster for almost as long. He won the 2006 Swing State Project election prediction contest and has won two other local contests. He had the pulse of Obama-Clinton race in 2008 and has been as good as anyone at delegate math in the 2016 race. He looks forwards to providing quality coverage for the remainder of the 2016 race.
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