With older elections, they will more and more find themselves dealing with voting methods other than winner-takes-all, such as subdivisions like in Nebraska or legislative choosing. How will they do it?
The Campaign Trail Game Has Returned.
- Thread starter DTanza
- Start date
Not really. The basic elements of the American system for selecting presidents, meaning only two parties with a realistic chance to win, they both nominate one national candidate through conventions of state parties, and state electors nearly always selected by winner take all plurality elections among the state electorates, were all in place by the time of the 1840 election.
None of them were in place before the 1828 election, in many ways they were put in as a reaction to 1824 where the clear second choice of the electorate was made president. They were actually mostly in place in 1828, but the Whigs were still running several regional candidates in 1836, so the transition was completed in 1840. The regional tensions that resulted in the American Civil War caused the system to break down considerably starting in 1856, with the modern Democratic -Republican duopoly in place after 1876. So elections prior to 1828, and between 1860 and 1876 inclusive are tough for the system to handle, though not impossible, after all there is a 1860 scenario.
There are a handful of state level exceptions. South Carolina retained the legislature selecting electors until the Civil War, long after all the other states had switched. The Colorado legislature selected its electors directly in 1876 (as I have noted, even assigning all the contested states to Hayes, Tilden won the electoral vote among states where the electorate supposedly chose the electors). Two small states, Nebraska and Maine, still use the congressional district method, but this has been used rarely after 1832 and the system has been able to handle this, along with faithless electors, and even the unpledged slates that won two states in 1960.
In 2016, which had a record number of faithless electors, the system started breaking down again, so I actually think a 2020 scenario is a bad idea until we get a clearer picture of what is going on.
Bill Scranton, Jim Rhodes, or George Romney maybe? Walter Judd would have been 1972 levels of "worse".
Goldwater was himself seen as an extremist, so I don't see how anyone would have choosen to join him as VP.
I've done a bit better in this game
Failed to win New Mexico or Rhode Island, but on the other hand, managed to win Washington, Illinois, and Massachusetts. Ends up being 34 electoral votes better than that game, as well as a margin of 7.63 points (and 9.5 million votes) better than that game
Probably the best win I've gotten as Nixon in 1960 so far... I picked Dirksen as my running mate and focused on Texas, California, and the Midwest..
Yayyy?
I Guess?
Anyway, that would be Anti-Trump Moderate Republican Me in this scenario.
I'll second Matthews, I'm pretty sure you can win with all of them with a good strategy but I've had what seems like slightly better results with Matthews
Also, on a different note, I'm just gonna say, there's been a lot of talk from people being anxious for the website creator to work on more scenarios. But honestly? I kinda wish/hope that more general fixes to make the site more stable and functioning are prioritized. Idk if it is just me, but it seems like around a third of the time, the site doesn't load at all, and then around a third of the time when it does load, it fails to actually save the game results. So its kind of in this sweet spot where it is functional enough where I don't just want to stop playing, but broken enough that the site crapping out and causing annoyance is common rather than just a rare occurrence
Also, on a different note, I'm just gonna say, there's been a lot of talk from people being anxious for the website creator to work on more scenarios. But honestly? I kinda wish/hope that more general fixes to make the site more stable and functioning are prioritized. Idk if it is just me, but it seems like around a third of the time, the site doesn't load at all, and then around a third of the time when it does load, it fails to actually save the game results. So its kind of in this sweet spot where it is functional enough where I don't just want to stop playing, but broken enough that the site crapping out and causing annoyance is common rather than just a rare occurrence
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Admiral Fischer
Banned
I made it. 1988 Dukakis/Jackson ticket on normal.
Lost Michigan after a hard protectionist turn, but it was a worthy sacrifice for Ohio and the electoral vote victory.
Lost Michigan after a hard protectionist turn, but it was a worthy sacrifice for Ohio and the electoral vote victory.
I've been doing a bit of a thing
The 2020a game relies a whole lot on luck. When the first info about changing the difficulty in the console commands was revealed however many months ago, I had thoughts about looking into the code to try to modify stuff and get the best questions possible, to have a "perfect game" of sorts. So I looked around in the code and had no idea what the fuck I was doing, and gave up nearly immediately. But having found the subreddit and having seen some basics of the code, I figured out how to do it, sort of
When the game first loads, it picks all the questions at that time. But you can go into the code and swap out questions. Then you can go into the console and paste the modified game, you can't change the first question (I think?) but can change the rest. IIRC this is how the people on reddit are making the modified games, which has the limitation of only being able to have 25 set questions rather than a larger bank of questions you can get by chance. But that's beside the point
Long story short, just paste the code in the spoiler below into the console once you are on the first question, and then go from there. I'll probably maybe do it for Trump too if I don't get lazy, but so far, here's one for Clinton. I don't know if this is the best possible game, but it is close at least, getting the big ones like the shooting at the Trump rally, Trump fainting, and Trump attacking Clinton in a way that backfires a couple times, plus taking out the questions that hurt, like the FBI stuff, Clinton falling, the recession, and so on. With the questions that don't have as big of an impact, its a bit more complicated to find which ones are best since there's multiple ways questions have effects, nationally, on the individual issues, and state-by-state, and I've been too lazy to look through all the code, but I'm pretty sure these ones are at least halfway decent
Here's a game on normal with this. Clinton wins the popular vote 57.3-39.7, with 75 million votes to Trump's 52 million, for margin of 23 million votes. And in the electoral college, 460-78, winning the Obama 2008 states plus SC, GA, TX, ND, SC, MT, AZ, UT, MO, and AK. Of some note, winning Texas by 8.4%
This should theoretically be a possible result one can get in a regular game, if you get lucky enough and get the right questions
To compare, this one is the best I've gotten with a regular game
The 2020a game relies a whole lot on luck. When the first info about changing the difficulty in the console commands was revealed however many months ago, I had thoughts about looking into the code to try to modify stuff and get the best questions possible, to have a "perfect game" of sorts. So I looked around in the code and had no idea what the fuck I was doing, and gave up nearly immediately. But having found the subreddit and having seen some basics of the code, I figured out how to do it, sort of
When the game first loads, it picks all the questions at that time. But you can go into the code and swap out questions. Then you can go into the console and paste the modified game, you can't change the first question (I think?) but can change the rest. IIRC this is how the people on reddit are making the modified games, which has the limitation of only being able to have 25 set questions rather than a larger bank of questions you can get by chance. But that's beside the point
Long story short, just paste the code in the spoiler below into the console once you are on the first question, and then go from there. I'll probably maybe do it for Trump too if I don't get lazy, but so far, here's one for Clinton. I don't know if this is the best possible game, but it is close at least, getting the big ones like the shooting at the Trump rally, Trump fainting, and Trump attacking Clinton in a way that backfires a couple times, plus taking out the questions that hurt, like the FBI stuff, Clinton falling, the recession, and so on. With the questions that don't have as big of an impact, its a bit more complicated to find which ones are best since there's multiple ways questions have effects, nationally, on the individual issues, and state-by-state, and I've been too lazy to look through all the code, but I'm pretty sure these ones are at least halfway decent
Well shit, looks like this site has a character limit. So the code is in this google doc linked here instead
Here's a game on normal with this. Clinton wins the popular vote 57.3-39.7, with 75 million votes to Trump's 52 million, for margin of 23 million votes. And in the electoral college, 460-78, winning the Obama 2008 states plus SC, GA, TX, ND, SC, MT, AZ, UT, MO, and AK. Of some note, winning Texas by 8.4%
This should theoretically be a possible result one can get in a regular game, if you get lucky enough and get the right questions
To compare, this one is the best I've gotten with a regular game
So, I got around to doing the same as above with Trump(/Christie) for 2016, to find what might be the best theoretically possible game (or at least close to it)
The link to the code is here, again just paste it into the console when you are on the first question
While Clinton starts with an advantage, it seems like Trump has more opportunities for rare events to shift things more in his favor
Here's a game on normal, where Trump wins a whopping 49 state victory, just losing Hawaii and DC, and getting a 60.5-35.7 percent popular vote victory, a 24.8% margin - 79.5 million votes to Clinton's 47 million, for a raw vote margin of 32.5 million. Compare that to the Clinton win, a landslide itself but one where Clinton merely got the largest popular and electoral vote since Reagan, and lost 12 states, while Trump gets the largest popular vote win since Coolidge in '24, and (ever so narrowly) the largest electoral vote win since Monroe in 1824 if I'm not mistaken
The link to the code is here, again just paste it into the console when you are on the first question
While Clinton starts with an advantage, it seems like Trump has more opportunities for rare events to shift things more in his favor
Here's a game on normal, where Trump wins a whopping 49 state victory, just losing Hawaii and DC, and getting a 60.5-35.7 percent popular vote victory, a 24.8% margin - 79.5 million votes to Clinton's 47 million, for a raw vote margin of 32.5 million. Compare that to the Clinton win, a landslide itself but one where Clinton merely got the largest popular and electoral vote since Reagan, and lost 12 states, while Trump gets the largest popular vote win since Coolidge in '24, and (ever so narrowly) the largest electoral vote win since Monroe in 1824 if I'm not mistaken
On Reddit Someone released a 1980 sceniro you can only play as cater there is a lot more feedback form the advisers and questions