The Wisdom of Futility

Stu Rothenberg has criticized partisans of both sides (particularly Howard Dean and Tom Coburn) for arguing that the parties should expand the playing field by recruiting and supporting candidates in supposedly hopeless districts. Defenders of Dean's 50-state" strategy argue that the last election demonstrates the success of a broad-front strategy as opposed to the narrow targetting advocated by most political consultants.

So who's right?

Rothenberg is correct to point out that we can't use the last election as a real test, since there was a pro-Democratic wave that brought down a number of Republican incumbents. In most elections, those incumbents would have been re-elected. One might argue that reducing an incumbent's vote share from 60% to 55% might feel like a moral victory, but it is scarcely a method for building a congressional majority. According to Rothenberg, there really are only so many potentially competitive seats, and under normal circumstances even incumbents in marginal seats are going to be re-elected. Why waste precious resouces on races you aren't going to win?

Chris Bowers over at MyDD has one good argument. Democrats need to field credible candidates in every district in order to take advantage of unexpected events. If the Democrats had given Mark Foley and Tom DeLay a pass, we would never have won those seats. You just never know. Dean has also made the argument that parties need to contest every seat in order to build up a long-term infrastructure so that when a seat opens up, the party is in a better position to take advantage.

Rothenberg could of course poo-poo these points. Why waste money on races on the off chance that something funny will happen? It seems terribly inefficient, doesn't it?

Which is where my argument comes in. I suspect that challenger spending has an asymmetric effect on incumbent spending. Let's say a long shot challenger can only raise $10,000. The incumbent will spend around $100,000, and will be persuaded to hand over a good chunk of his war chest (say half a million) to the national party to spend in competitive races. Now if the DNC puts $100,000 into a long-shot, the Republican incumbent there is going to spend $1,000,000 - just to be safe. Presto! For the cost of $100,000, the Democrats have just eliminated $500,000 of Republican attack ads in another seat.

As of yet, I have no concrete evidence to support my claims, only impressionistic observation. But it wouldn't really be all that difficult for a political science researcher with spare time to find out, since the data if freely available. If my hypothesis is true, then it makes a lot of sense to fund challengers even against seemingly invincible incumbents. Not because you expect to win that race, but because it will help you win another one.