Three-candidate election strategy

Abstract

The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum, (iii) the time left to the election, and (iv) the rate at which noisy information is revealed to the electorate from now to the election day, when there are three or more candidates. It is shown, in particular, that the optimal strategy for controlling information can be intricate and non-trivial, in contrast to a two-candidate race. A surprising finding is that for a candidate taking the centre ground in an electoral competition among a polarized electorate, certain strategies are fatal in that the resulting winning probability for that candidate vanishes identically.