The Game Theory Behind the Great Republican Trump-Dumping of 2016 (don’t worry, no actual math)
Throughout the 2016 electoral cycle, a trickle of important Republicans have been renouncing their presidential nominee, Donald Trump. But most Republican officeholders continued to endorse him, the RNC stood behind him, and even some of his most dedicated opponents, like Ted Cruz, flipped and supported him.
But after a 2005 tape of Donald Trump explaining how he likes to “grab [[married] women] by the pussy” hit the news, the trickle became a flood, as Republican official after Republican official renounced him, withdrew their endorsements, and declared their intention to vote for someone else. As of this writing the flood continues. The New York Times has a growing list.
Moreover, the Republicans who have renounced him are getting bigger and bigger. The “grab them by the pussy” renunciations include, as of the time of this writing (the evening of October 8) no fewer than ten sitting Republican senators, most importantly John McCain and John Thune, and five sitting Republican governors.
For comparison, in the entire scandal-ridden campaign up to this point — -even through Trump’s doing outrageous things like attacking a Gold Star family, claiming that a judge ruling on a lawsuit about his fraudulent university was disqualified because of his Mexican heritage, and inviting Vladimir Putin to hack his opponent, only four sitting Republican senators and two sitting Republican governors (again by the Times’s list) had renounced him.
Also, this:
Why now? What made “grab them by the pussy” the tipping point?
The Rapist-Renunciation Cascade
First: credit where credit is due: I didn’t initially recognize this as a cascade. Fellow political scientist Jennifer Victor did.
But let’s talk about how it works.
First, to be sure, there’s a lot of truth in what many of my fellow lefties have said, namely, that the Republican response to Trump’s latest outrage only reflects their own profound racism and misogyny all the more — that it was only when Trump was caught making crude remarks about assaulting married white women — other white men’s “property” — were the Republicans too disgusted to continue the charade.
But I think there’s something deeper to this. We all know that a lot of Republicans hate Trump’s guts, and that very few of that party’s leaders had any desire to see him win the nomination. But once he had the nomination, and once the first few key endorsements came rolling in, as well as some level of informal/customary and (perhaps? I’m not sure of the RNC’s governance rules) control over party resources, most of the rest of the Republicans quickly fell into line.
This scenario looks strikingly like a phenomenon described by the political economist Timur Kuran as “preference falsification.”
The idea of preference falsification is best understood in terms of a dictatorship. Suppose you oppose your brutal dictator, but you think others around you support him. You’re likely to pretend that you support the dictator too, because, otherwise, you’ll stand out as an opponent of the regime, and you’re likely to be punished.
(A simplified version of) Kuran’s great insight is that there can be societies where almost everyone is thinking like that: everyone opposes the dictator, but nobody can show it, because nobody knows that anyone else opposes the dictator. (Or, more appropriately for the Trump case, everyone knows that their fellows oppose the dictator, but nobody knows that their fellows are willing to incur the risk of retaliation to act against him. That’s a form of preference falsification too)
The key here is the problem of collective action. In such a situation, acting alone is incredibly costly, because the dictator can call on the (grudging) support of everyone else to punish the lone dissenter. But acting collectively, the people have plenty of power to overthrow their leader. But they’re unable to act collectively, because they don’t know each others’ preferences or the extent of their willingness to act.
In Trump’s case, his control over people who themselves controlled a substantial chunk of the Republican Party’s resources and credibility means that if any of them acted alone, he had the capacity to impose substantial sanctions on them, including reduced party support, potential support for primary challengers to their seats, etc.
That’s why it’s no accident that almost all of the people who renounced Trump before “grab them by the pussy” were former elected or appointed officials, people with nothing to lose from making enemies of the person who controlled the resources of their party.
Non-monotonic response to shocks.
What happens in such a situation where something really dramatic happens? Consider the case of Mohamed Bouazizi. Bouazizi was a street vendor in Tunisia, whose wares were stolen by a petty official in the country’s dictatorship. But instead of quietly accepting his oppression as he doubtless had many times before, Bouazizi had had enough, and he set himself on fire.
And then the Arab Spring happened.
Bouazizi’s act (along, of course, with lots of other stuff) essentially made the opposition of ordinary people in the Middle East to their regimes profoundly salient. All of a sudden, many people across the region realized that they weren’t alone in their preferences, and they realized — critically — that they had the capacity to act collectively.
I think this is analogous to what we are watching happen in the Republican party.
When folks like Reince Priebus dared to call out Trump, other Republicans realized that they had an opportunity to wrest back control of their institutions.
If John McCain acts alone, maybe the Republican Party doesn’t give him the support he needs in his reelection campaign.
But if John McCain acts after
- the chairman of the RNC signals that condemning Trump is acceptable,
- the party even looks like it might be cutting Trump off
- lots of other officials also renounce Trump,
- Paul Ryan even dis-invites him from a campaign event
well, then McCain doesn’t have a lot of retaliation to fear any more, because it’s clear that Trump no longer can exercise indirect control over the resources controlled by all those other party members.
And this is a calculus that many Republican officeholders and prospective officeholders are all making at the same time.
Now we see what we always see in these kinds of cascades. The first few big names go tumbling down, those with the most courage or the least to lose or the most independent power, and then others pile on with increasing speed as they realize that they can safely do so. And, before you know it, Trump’s control over the Republican Party is wrested away.
The thing is, the precipitating events in these kinds of cascades always look a little random. Why was the dramatic death of one street vendor the thing that broke the back of half the camels in the Arab world? Who knows? It just happened to happen at the right time, be covered by the right media, tap into the right kind of dissatisfaction, and the whole thing crumbled, even though plenty of outrages had happened beforehand. Complex nonlinear dynamic systems don’t respond monotonically to shocks.
So yes, the Republicans are still racist and misogynistic and xenophobic and all the rest. But the explanation for why “grab them by the pussy” is looking to be the tipping point is more structural than that.
