Could Kerry Have Won? Optimal Political Platform Design: A Special Case of the Share-of-choices Problem

• Activity Number: 196
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 8, 2005 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
• Author(s): James J. Cochran*+ and Jeffrey D. Camm and David J. Curry and Jon Pinnell and Rajesh Radhakrishnan
• Companies: Louisiana Tech University and Dartmouth University and University of Cincinnati and MarketVision Research and Transfreight LLC
• Keywords: Political Campaigns ; Estimation ; Combinatorial Optimization ; Bias ; Presidential Elections ; Conjoint Analysis

Abstract

We treat the problem of finding the optimal estimated political platform for a U.S. Presidential candidate as a special case of the share-of-choices problem (selection of product attributes that result in the optimal projected market share) for which potential positions on various issues are handled as levels of product attributes. We first apply conjoint analysis to data collected by MarketVision Research from battleground states in October 2004 to estimate the utility voters associate with various positions on issues for the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. These estimated utilities are then used in an integer programming formulation to find the optimal estimated political platform for a candidate. The result is a maximal coverage problem with special ordered sets for which the Electoral College must be considered, resulting in a series of 51 linked subproblems (one for each state and the District of Columbia). Finally, we use our approach to find the projected winner in each state, estimate the variance and bias of the estimated Electoral College votes for each candidate, and assess the sensitivity of each candidate to changes in his position.