How the Electoral College Influences Campaigns and Policy: The Probability of Being Florida

This paper analyzes how US presidential candidates should allocate resources across states to maximize the probability of winning the election, by developing and estimating a probabilisticvoting model of political competition under the Electoral College system. Actual campaigns act in close agreement with the model. There is a 0.9 correlation between equilibrium and actual presidential campaign visits across states, both in 2000 and 2004. The paper shows how presidential candidate attention is affected by the states’ number of electoral votes, forecasted state-election outcomes, and forecast uncertainty. It also analyzes the effects of a direct national popular vote for president. ∗[email protected], IIES, Stockholm University, S-106 91 Stockholm. I thank Steven Brams, Steve Coate, Antonio Merlo, Torsten Persson, Gerard Roland, Tom Romer, Howard Rosenthal, Jim Snyder, Jörgen Weibull, and seminar participants at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, Cornell University, the CEPR/IMOP Conference in Hydra, Georgetown University, the Harvard / MIT Seminar on Positive Political Economy, IIES, New York University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the Wallis Conference in Rochester, the editor and three anonymous referees. Previous versions have been circulated under the titles: ”The Lindbeck-Weibull model in the Federal US Structure”, and, ”The Electoral College and Presidential Resource Allocation”, and "Optimal Campaigning in Presidential Elections: The Probability of Being Florida.". JEL-classification, D72, C50, C72, H50, M37.