Now that Gillespie has conceded the Virginia senate election, Democrats can breathe a lot easier than they were on Election night. Given the slim margin by which he was a head, it is probably safe to say they are all glad they voted. So I think it is time to revisit minimax regret as a solution for the paradox of voting. For certain, Mueller (and Professor Coppock, for that matter) lays out the devastating criticism that people don't seem to operate on minimax-regret, but I think you could try to support the argument with the way that campaign ads frequently go negative. Under this argument, the negativity marks a candidate as someone undesirable, so as to encourage voters to support his or her rival, since they cannot stomach the possibility of his or her winning. This is obviously far from proven, but it makes for an interesting thought..
In fact there's an episode of Futurama that hits on exactly this topic. (I can't link it because one or two of the jokes are iffy.) What if Richard Nixon--via bizarre legal shenanigans--managed to subvert term limits and run for President again? Futurama being the kind of show it is, the election comes down to a single vote, only for Nixon to win because none of the main characters go to the polls. Even when the chips are down, the main characters act on expected marginal benefits instead of on potential regrets.
Which is where this comes back to the Virginia Senate race. Even this "near upset" ended up with Gillespie conceding, because less than one percent of the electorate still to comes to over 16,000 voters. Only one of them needed to vote to prevent Gillespie from winning. Remember, Warner was up in the polls most of the time. It is entirely possible that some Democrats stayed home (driving the margin of victory down), because they believed that Warner was certain to win.
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