How Gamification Is F*%&ing Up Our Elections

An election is the ultimate serious game: a contest between one or more people where the winner gets to make the rules for everyone else for years to come.

In the USA, Presidential elections have always been the weirdest version of this, with their extensive primaries (which favors marathon runners over sprinters), massive spotlight, formal debates, and democracy-subverting electoral college. Much of this has been designed over centuries to incentivize candidates to become the most appealing version of themselves and give voters ample opportunity to gain information about this all-important decision. But ever since Barack Obama changed politics by building a massive grass-roots donor network, things have gotten weirder and weirder.

The Rise Of The Small Donor

Presidential candidates need cash badly. It powers everything they do. This is not news, and not new. What Obama did that no one had been able to do before, mostly via leveraging the Internet and social media, was shift the fundraising emphasis from a few small, big-dollar donors onto a more evenly dispersed group of small-money donors. In most ways, this is a good thing. It makes the candidate more responsible to the people than to the wealthy donor class.

Since 2008, numbers of small donors (and in the case of Bernie Sanders even the specific small size of their donations) has become a a badge of honor, and been held up as evidence that voters are dedicated and excited to elect a candidate.

Perverse Incentives In the 2023 Republican Primary

With the Republican primary now in full swing, I want to share a few things I’ve noticed as a game designer and as an engaged citizen, mostly related to perverse incentives. If you’re not familiar with these, check out my explanation in another recent article, “Why And How Gamification Is Harmful.” But in short, a perverse incentive is a reward that causes people to take action that is actually contrary to what the designer intended.

In order to differentiate oneself from a diverse field of candidates, it’s critical to make a good impression on the debate stage. But in order to do this, first you have to qualify to stand on that stage. If you can remember back to 2015, there were so many Republicans running for president that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had to hold TWO debates, one for the most qualified candidates, and a second runners up debate, which cheekily became known as the “Kids Table Debate.”

To avoid this fate, this year, the RNC has placed a strict requirement on debate qualification.

To qualify for the Aug. 23 debate, candidates needed to satisfy polling and donor requirements set by the Republican National Committee: at least 1% in three high-quality national polls or a mix of national and early-state polls, between July 1 and Aug. 21, and a minimum of 40,000 donors, with 200 in 20 or more states.

I want to emphasize the number of required donors. Forty-thousand is a lot of donors for a young campaign in a huge field of candidates. And the fact that the donors need to come from at least 20 different states is another big requirement. You can’t just lean on home-field advantage: national celebrity is required. In theory, this sounds like a good thing. After all, we want our candidates to have broad, national support and what better way to measure that than people excited enough to open their wallets?

However, this clearly favors celebrity-politicians like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis who are adept at using the media to become famous, and makes it hard for low-name recognition candidates like Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson who made a career out of heads-down governing.

This is by design, as the RNC specifically wanted to help clear a path for Trump and minimize his competition. And it’s now causing the other candidates to do some very strange things.

These include taking controversial stances to garner fame, defending their chief opponent, Donald Trump, from political attacks related to his many indictments, and spending massive amounts of campaign funds to generate donors.

Essentially, they’re paying big bucks to political consultants, ad companies, and Facebook, spending $40 to find a $20 donor. This is a horrible use of funds for their campaign, except that the RNC requires it to qualify for debate.

But it gets weirder than that. Much weirder.

Gov. Doug Burgum: Literally Paying Voters To Donate

The sitting governor of North Dakota, one of America’s least populous states, Burgum suffers from a massive lack of name recognition. But what he does have is billions of dollars, accrued in his previous line of work: angel investor and software magnate. This has created a perfect storm of circumstances that’s led to a unique campaign strategy: paying donors directly.

The Burgum campaign announced earlier this month that any donor who gave any amount ($1 or more) would receive a $20 gift card. This effectively pays anyone from any state or any party up to $19 just to become a donor. This is a more extreme example of what I describe above where the campaign needs to spend a lot to generate a donor, but keep in mind that this is in addition to the ad spend that targets the donor. So those $1 donors are probably actually costing at least $50, not $19.

Can Burgum afford this? Yes. Is it an effective strategy? We’ll see. Is it f#&$ed up? Definitely.

Gov. Chris Christie: Appealing To His Political Enemies For Cash

One candidate who doesn’t struggle with name recognition is former New Jersey Governor and Trump Campaign Advisor Chris Christie. The problem? Republican voters all know who he is, but they hate his guts.

After coming out against Trump for refusing to admit defeat in the 2020 election (and for giving him Covid and almost killing him), the Republican base turned against Christie in unison like a flock of birds dramatically shifting in flight.

So who does that leave as potential donors? Trump-hating Democrats. Let’s be clear: Chris Christie is not a liberal, and would not govern in a way that appeals to Democrats. He was Donald Trump’s debate coach, and in recent weeks has come out in favor of Dobbs, the Supreme Court decision that ended abortion access as we knew it in the USA. But he’s calculated (correctly: he’s already qualified for the debate) that Democrats hate Trump so much they’ll pay for the privilege of watching him tear the ex-president apart on the debate stage. This strategy was executed with direct appeals to Democrats, as Christie appeared on partisan Democrat media platforms like Pod Save America. Without the 40k donor requirement, Christie would never do this.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Making His Campaign Into A Pyramid Scheme

Ramaswamy is an interesting character. Before this year, he had virtually no name recognition. He’s not even a politician, he’s an entrepreneur. He’s been one of Donald Trump’s biggest boosters and trades in nationalistic pablum to appeal to far-right voters.

In his quest for 40,000 donors, he’s set up what could fairly be called a pyramid scheme or multi-level marketing scam. Essentially, if you refer another person to donate to his campaign, you get a cut of the money. And you get a cut of the donations of anyone who your referrals refer. This is exactly how MLM schemes like LuLa work. The incentive isn’t so much to sell a lot of goods (or in the case of the Ramaswamy campaign, to donate a lot yourself) it’s to refer as many people as humanly possible, regardless of the quality of the goods, bringing them into the stream and setting them up below you. The money flows up and pools into the pockets of the earliest and largest recruiters, to the point where the actual dollar amounts are meaningless.

This is the perfect expression of the perverse incentives set up by the RNC. The campaign has literally become a get-rich-quick scheme that is absolutely divorced from the candidates’ politics.

A Better Way

(And Why We Won’t See It)

By now, it’s clear that the perverse incentives of the Republican debates have completely f#$^ed up the primary. Designed to favor one type of candidate over another (or even one specific candidate over the others), they’ve caused all the candidates to do some pretty bizarre things. So what would a better way be to qualify candidates for the debate?

You could go strictly by polling, but this is a catch-22, as candidates often need a good debate appearance to rise in the polls. You could lower the donor requirement, and this might help, but it doesn’t get rid of the perverse incentives, and instead just makes it even easier for anyone willing to go to these bizarre lengths to qualify for the stage.

If the RNC truly wanted a small stage consistent of qualified individuals, one way would be to automatically qualify anyone who’s served in national office or as a governor. This would allow serious candidates with opposing viewpoints (like Christie and Hutchinson) to qualify for the debate without needing to go begging their political opponents for money or making themselves into spectacles to raise their national profile. For those who haven’t served in government, good performance (say 2–5%) in reputable state polls like the Iowa Register would be the best indicator of interest and ability to grab voters attention. People like Ramaswamy could barnstorm important states South Carolina and New Hampshire, states they will need to win in the general, and build an organization there while proving they can excite the base.

But this isn’t what the RNC is interested in. They’re interested in raising up candidates like Trump who can dominate the media narrative. This is also evidenced by their Winner Take All approach to primaries, a mechanism that allows candidates with high floors (like Trump’s 30%) to dominate crowded fields. Until that changes, Republican voters are stuck with a broken game.

Sam Liberty is a gamification and serious game designer. He teaches Game Design at Northeastern University, and if the former Lead Game Designer for Sidekick Health.