Los­ing with Chris­tine seems like a funny way of winning.

Last year, peo­ple all over the polit­i­cal uni­verse were call­ing Repub­li­cans crazy for reject­ing the more mod­er­ate Mike Cas­tle, Sue Low­den, and Jane Nor­ton for the more extreme Chris­tine O’Donnell, Shar­ron Angle, and Ken Buck. After all, those three Sen­ate seats would have been enough to shift the major­ity from the Democ­rats to the Republicans.

The response from many in the Tea Party wing of the Repub­li­can Party is that it’s bet­ter to lose with a “real” con­ser­v­a­tive than to win with a RINO. Is that posi­tion really all that crazy? It’s worth inves­ti­gat­ing, given that this year’s lead­ing Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, other than Mitt Rom­ney, have all been work­ing dili­gently to find just how far off the right end of the polit­i­cal spec­trum they can go.

If a voter’s goal in the vot­ing booth is merely to ensure that as many mem­bers of Con­gress as pos­si­ble have Rs after their names, then the polit­i­cal strat­egy of aim­ing for the most ide­o­log­i­cally pure can­di­date is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. But vot­ers make their choices for a num­ber of dif­fer­ent rea­sons. The polit­i­cal party name is a brand, a short­hand for a big­ger, more com­plex concept.

What mat­ters to many vot­ers (one would hope it’s most vot­ers) is the gov­ern­ment poli­cies advo­cated by the can­di­date. There­fore, to such vot­ers, the degree to which the can­di­date aligns with their desired poli­cies deter­mines their over­all sat­is­fac­tion with that candidate.

The impact of this is sig­nif­i­cant. To under­stand how it can ratio­nally lead to votes for Chris­tine O’Donnell, con­sider the fol­low­ing scenario.

You roll a die. If you get a four, five, or six, you col­lect a dol­lar. If you get a one, two, or three, you pay a dol­lar. Over the long run, assum­ing a fair die, you should end up with the same amount of money you started with.

Now let’s say that you’re given a choice. You can stick with the model I described above (Model A), or you can go with a dif­fer­ent model (Model B), where you win only if you roll a five or six…but if you win, you col­lect three dol­lars. You pay a dol­lar if you roll any­thing else.

Two-​​thirds of the time, you’ll pay a dol­lar, but the remain­ing third of the time you’ll col­lect three. Roll 300 times, and (on aver­age) you’ll be up $100. It’s less likely on any given roll that you’ll win, but with a pay­off big enough to over­come the longer odds against winning.

Buck: the trend

To seri­ous con­ser­v­a­tives, Cas­tle, Low­den, and Nor­ton rep­re­sented Model A. O’Donnell, Angle, and Buck were the Model B can­di­dates. The bet they made was that the value of a win, man­i­fest­ing itself as behav­ior more akin to Michele Bach­mann than Olympia Snowe, would over­come the longer odds.

In fact, they did man­age a cou­ple of wins, with Rand Paul in Ken­tucky, over the more mod­er­ate Trey Grayson, and with Pat Toomey over the erst­while Repub­li­can Arlen Specter.

On bal­ance, then, it seems that the Tea Party ide­ol­ogy gam­ble paid off.

What does this mean for 2012?

We should expect to see more of the same, par­tic­u­larly in the House. The Tea Party can afford to lose a few seats in the House if they replace some mod­er­ates with a few Bach­menn. Such a shift would give them less con­cern about ever hav­ing to com­pro­mise on cut­ting spend­ing, cut­ting taxes, and elim­i­nat­ing large swaths of government.

Even in the Sen­ate, the unbal­anced pay­off favors more extreme Repub­li­cans in the gen­eral elec­tion. 70% of the seats up for elec­tion are held by Democ­rats, so even a “throw the bums out” elec­tion would favor Repub­li­cans. Cou­ple this with a red­der sen­ti­ment today than in 1996, and it seems like an appro­pri­ate time, from a pol­icy per­spec­tive, for rel­a­tive extrem­ists to come out of the woodwork.

This also would explain the Any­body But Rom­ney crowd, who keeps flit­ting from one winger to the next. Sarah Palin to Don­ald Trump to Tim Paw­lenty to Michele Bach­mann to Rick Perry…the cur­rent winds are blow­ing in a direc­tion that makes the gam­ble look worth­while. They may seem crazy, but per­haps they are crazy like a Fox.

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