Introduction to the OR Forum Article: "Blotto Politics".

In this May–June 2013 issue of Operations Research, we have chosen to highlight the paper “Blotto Politics” by Alan Washburn. Elections are an area with rich potential for applications of operations research and over the years have attracted interest from a wide range of perspectives. Recently, probably driven by the rich data available, most research activity has focused on predicting election outcomes (Kaplan and Barnett 2003, Chen et al. 2008). Operations research has also been used to model the design of political districting (see Garfinkel and Nemhauser 1970, Mehrotra et al. 1998) as well as to analyze the behavior of various voting systems. In “Blotto Politics” Alan Washburn presents a parsimonious model of the competition between two parties for the U.S. Electoral College in a presidential election. This problem has been studied in the political science literature—see, for example, similar studies by Brams and Davis (1974) and Cook et al. (1974)—but has to some degree been neglected by operations research, a notable exception being Belenky (2005). We solicited comments on this work from several experts on elections from the field of political science. The comments of David Primo, Jay Goodliffe, and David B. Magleby appear online in the OR Forum blog (http://www.informs.org/Blogs/Operations -Research-Forum). In Washburn’s model two sides, Blue and Red, allocate resources to the 50 states to try to capture the electoral votes for that state. In this stripped-down representation of presidential elections, if Blue invests xi resources in state i and Red invests yi and there is an inherent bias toward Blue of zi, then, if xi + zi − yi is positive, Blue captures all the electoral votes. Clearly this model is a simplification of elections abstracting away many important details. For example, the assumed linear relation between spending and votes has not been established, and the effect of spending on votes across states is probably not independent. That said, within Washburn’s framework, there are features of real elections that come through. For example, in his model of continuous public spending he shows how focusing resources on a carefully selected subset of states rather than trying to compete everywhere is an advantageous strategy. When some states are leaning to one side or another, determining the subset of states to focus on can be complicated, but it is still valuable to do. We do see this occurring to some degree in practice where a small number of battleground states get disproportionate attention because they are up for grabs. At the same time, the behavior in practice is not as stark as the model projects because reality is more complex. Identifying possible causes for the gap between behavior and the model can also be illuminating. Blue campaigning in a heavily blue state may be motivated by other goals than the direct influencing of voters. It can influence fundraising, and it can affect other concurrent elections on the local level. Also, as the commentators on the OR Forum Blog point out, campaigning is multidimensional involving spending both time and money in a state. These limitations of the model all indicate potentially fruitful areas for operations research modeling of election campaign decision making. By highlighting this article in the OR Forum, we hope to increase awareness about an interesting area of significant societal importance.