President Obama and the Tortoise

Today's underdog: President Obama

If President Barack Obama were a college basketball team, he’d be Butler. If he were an animal, he’d be the tortoise. The list goes on, but your sake and mine, I will come to my point. President Barack Obama has become the underdog, partly due to his own actions and partly due the trends of history.

In this article, Tom Cohen supports the argument that Obama is casting himself as an underdog. President Obama’s campaign team argued Obama was the underdog entering the first debate, President Obama was very confrontational in the last debate, and over the past month, Obama has been campaigning hard, including a 48 hour road trip. Cohen labels all these actions as underdog behavior. An interesting statistic also points to Barack Obama as an underdog. In this article from the PAX Americana Institute, it is illustrated that only Ronald Reagan has won reelection when unemployment is above 7%. Based on this information, I feel I can declare Barack Obama an underdog.

Before considering if this Obama strategy will keep him in the White House, we need some more information. In Jonathan Smucker’s recent blog post titled “Underdog vs. Winning Team Impulses”, Smucker evaluates how we like to cheer for the underdog, but at the same time, we like to be on the winning team. This is further supported by several studies referenced in a Slate article by Daniel Engber. We want an underdog who also has potential to win. In other words, as Engber emphasizes, if the underdog truly has no chance to win, then we won’t root for that underdog. Let’s examine two hypothetical teams, as Engber does. Team X is half as likely to win as team Y (odds 2 to 1), but team X’s win would be two times as enjoyable as team Y’s (gratification 1 to 2). If we care about ability to win and gratification of win (being an underdog), the two numbers identified, then neither teams holds an advantage among neutrals. Engber also points to studies that show people will view an underdog’s odds more favorably than “experts” identify them to be. So, in the example given, team X may now be only two thirds as likely to win (as opposed to half as likely), with the same amount of gratification, simply because people wish to make the underdog more capable of winning. Now, team Y’s advantage over odds is smaller than team X’s advantage over gratification. Team X, overall, has the bigger advantage.

That said, let’s apply the information to the election. Barack Obama has championed himself as an underdog. Therefore, he has indicated his odds of winning are worse than Mitt Romney’s. However, when we consider some chances, like Intrade’s, Obama has over a 60% chance of winning. Consider Engber’s simplified characteristics. If Obama’s odds according to voters are better than Romney’s (assuming this is what Intrade is showing us), and the gratification of him winning is greater (because of being an underdog), then Obama holds the voter advantage. Of course, this is an oversimplification, and we cannot now know if it will work. But if it does indeed work, we learn that to win as an underdog you should increase perceived advantage without losing potential gratification, or, in other words, look stronger but still be as fun to watch win. Furthermore, it seems the Obama campaign team took a step similar to one taken by Turkey, as explored in the last blog post. The team departed from the norm in proclaiming themselves underdogs.

Will becoming the tortoise allow the President to beat the hare, Mitt Romney? Is Mitt Romney even the hare? Or is it more like the President and the tortoise racing a cheetah? Or is Romney the tortoise? After the election, we may be able to add the tortoise to the likes of Turkey on our list of the winning underdogs. But maybe the hare will come, too.