Situational Gamblers: Prospect Theory and the Commonalities of Presidential Campaign Management

It was in the spring of 2008 that the controversial pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright first became a political problem for Senator Barack Obama. Video clips of inflammatory and offensive preaching by the senator's spiritual advisor were being endlessly rebroadcast on cable news, undermining Obama's unifying message. Following a week of bad press, Obama finally dismissed Wright from his campaign's religious advisory committee on Friday, March 14. But over the weekend, Obama apparently decided that simply distancing himself from Wright was not enough. On the following Tuesday, before a small audience of supporters at the National Constitution Center, Obama delivered what nearly all commentators agreed was a profound and eloquent discourse on the history of race in America, covering everything from slavery to the O. J. Simpson trial. It was also an undeniable risk. As Obama advisor L. Douglas Wilder noted, "It was very dicey at a time when race is misunderstood by some and overplayed by others. It was a very, very difficult subject to bring up" (Zeleny 2008). Furthermore, it would seem that this speech was not only a risk, but an unneeded risk as well. The chances of Senator Hillary Clinton catching Obama in the delegate count were, by this point, dauntingly small. Yet by the mere act of this speech, Obama risked raising anew questions about his electability and the types of issues he would have to confront in the general election that coming fall. Indeed, the seemingly more prudent course would have been to simply disown Wright and hope to move on, similar to the way Obama had already handled the distasteful comments of Samantha Power. But he took the risk. He made the speech. Why? The preceding anecdote is important because it suggests what close observers of presidential politics have long known--that sometimes campaigns do not know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. Frequently, we see campaigns take risks they should not and eschew risks they should embrace. The history of presidential campaigns is littered with decisions just like Obama's. The argument of this essay, though, will be that presidential campaign management is potentially far more predictable than it at first appears. By applying prospect theory to three critical junctures in the 1980 presidential primaries, I hope to illustrate this simple point. Specifically, this article aims to make three principal contributions. First, it will attempt to show that there may be a general logic to when presidential campaigns take risks. Prospect theory's central empirical observation, that individuals are risk averse with respect to gains but risk acceptant with respect to losses, seems to offer the hope of at least understanding the processes behind campaign decision making, even when the choices themselves are perplexing. Second, this article is an advance in the academic study of campaign management. Traditionally, literature in this area has been less than rigorous, geared more toward "how-to" guides and manuals intended for an audience of participants (e.g., Beaudry and Schaeffer 1986; Belker 1982; Woo 1980) than toward social scientists looking for meaningful conclusions. There are a few notable exceptions. Arnold Steinberg (1976) considers how various psychological and organizational theories apply to the practice of campaign management, though still with the goal of helping his readers make their own organizations more efficient. Marjorie Randon Hershey (1974) examines how a candidate's personality affects the types of choices that his or her campaign is likely to make, among other interesting topics. Perhaps the best of this limited work is by Daniel Shea and Michael Burton (2006). Their book Campaign Craft is informed by relevant, state-of-the-art scholarly research and peppered with applicable case studies. But their objective is descriptive at best. The authors explain the details of campaign plans, opposition research, polling, and the like, but they do not try to provide any analytical overview. …