Abstract
This paper examines decision-making by political candidates under three different objective functions. In particular, we are interested in when the optimal strategies for expected vote share, expected plurality, and probability of victory maximizing candidates coincide in simple plurality elections. It is shown here that if voters' behavior, conditional on the policies proposed by the candidates, is identical in expectation (i.e., ex ante), and candidates are restricted to choosing pure strategies, then all three objectives lead to the same best response function when there are two candidates and abstention is not allowed. We also provide a counter-example to Hinich's claim of general asymptotic equivalence in two candidate elections without abstention in which voter types are independently, but not identically distributed as well as a counterexample to general best response equivalence between these objective functions in two candidate elections in which abstention is allowed, but our other assumptions are satisfied.
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