Live Players in the 2024 Presidential Race
There are candidates who can adapt and change and those who can’t. What does that tell us about 2024?
From my new article in POLITICO Magazine:
Every presidential election is different. Usually this isn’t because of notable changes to American laws, but because of how American society changes, whether in terms of technology, economics, values and beliefs, or many other factors. Powerful interests and the general public come together in a match of procedure, tactics and raw popularity, not just to determine who should be president, but to remake the rules of the game.
This changing landscape is what presidential candidates must navigate every four years. And in doing so, some candidates far outperform others, often defying all expectations. This is because some candidates are “live players” and others are “dead players.”
The “live player”/“dead player” framework is something I came up with in 2017 when examining recent Silicon Valley companies and I’ve found it useful in economic and political analysis more generally. What’s a live player? A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that can do things differently from how they were approached in the past. That’s pretty rare. Most individuals and institutions are “dead players.” They operate off social scripts handed down from previous generations of experts, superiors and exceptional performers. These scripts can be explicit, like the procedures for handling unusual tax situations at the IRS. They can also be implicit, like the way an aspiring tech entrepreneur might imitate how Steve Jobs dressed or spoke. In a presidential race, most of the relevant scripts are implicit. A candidate should appear presidential. A candidate must appeal to the people of Iowa. A candidate may be more extreme during the primaries, since they can pull back to the center later.
Live players are those capable of going off-script. Not for its own sake, but because the course of events and fundamental trends often make our social scripts obsolete. Even when such social scripts stop working, most people and institutions don’t change their behavior. Being a dead player isn’t all bad. Dead players find it easier to get along in society; and often established ways of doing things are effective. Experimenting is a costly business. But the ability to foresee changes in events, and to change strategy accordingly, can give live players a significant, if not always overwhelming, advantage.
The election predictions system in the U.S. — from polling to punditry — doesn’t always know how to handle live players. Many election predictions are made by projecting current trends into the future. This is essentially a bet that the candidates will play by the established rules, which is to say, that they are dead players. When this is true — such as the 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore — this type of projection will work reasonably well. Live players, however, will upset the conventional wisdom because they are not limited by the conventional strategies. This can lead to upsets, especially in primary elections, such as Barack Obama’s 2008 victory over Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over a long list of established Republican luminaries.