The Campaign Trail Game Has Returned.

Vince

Monthly Donor
The above Mondale 1984 result is a good result. Its better than the OTL 1988 Dukakis result, both in the popular vote and electoral votes.

Its the game system, but I don't think a New Deal Democrat in the 1980s who got within 2% of winning the nationwide popular vote was going to lose West Virginia. I could buy Mondale with that nationwide popular vote percentage carrying West Virginia but losing Maryland, which Dukakis lost narrowly with a slightly lower nationwide popular vote percentage.

My guess this is a Reagan does badly in the second debate result.

Just saw this. Mondale won the second debate, Clinton won the VP debate. Everything went right but I still lost. I think the scenario is setup that it's impossible to win on Normal with Mondale.
 
Just saw this. Mondale won the second debate, Clinton won the VP debate. Everything went right but I still lost. I think the scenario is setup that it's impossible to win on Normal with Mondale.
I understand certain elections are going to be difficult but I fail to see a reason to make scenarios that are literally unwinnable
 
I understand certain elections are going to be difficult but I fail to see a reason to make scenarios that are literally unwinnable
I mean it makes sense if they are going for a degree of realism, to at least make it unwinnable on "normal", with the idea that normal difficulty is intended to most resemble real life conditions, and with the idea that in real life, even with far better strategies, some candidates in some elections simply wouldn't have stood a chance, with their opponent simply being in too strong a position

Look at 1860 in the base game, for example, where the best you can do (even on easy) is deadlock the electoral college as Douglas, with the idea that maybe he'd be elected in the house in that scenario. Or for a more extreme example, Nader in 2000, where it might not even be possible to just win 5% of the vote in at least some difficulties

Looking at it in that way, you could just look at it as a "win" in order to do significantly better than OTL if playing as normal with some of those elections where your candidate lost in a massive landslide OTL

Also, iirc even those ones are at least winnable on some of the easier difficulties
 
I think there have been presidential elections where the winning party was going to win, baring some outside event, that neither side had control over, breaking against them.

There are other elections where the winning party would win unless they screwed it up really badly. And that is without getting into the fixed elections.

I'm not sure how a historical election simulation game would handle the issue of fixed elections. I think at a minimum it has to be dealt with in a 1876 scenario, since the only reason the election is known at all is because it was fixed. Also 1864, since regardless of what Lincoln may have put in his letters, the GOP was simply not going to let Lincoln lose that one, though they might have allowed a McClellan win without the Copperhead plank and a different running mate.

In the specific case of 1984, how to make it competitive has been debated on this forum. Assuming the first Reagan term goes IOTL, and the game scenario tends to assume these things, Reagan as running as a Republican incumbent president during the Cold War, when incumbent Presidents who were not thought "weak" (Carter) would win, and often win big, and Republicans tended to win as well. And the economy was as good as it could have gotten, though people thought the Democrats had a chance earlier in the year, when the economy was in a worse condition. So with these parameters, Reagan is going to win and the issue with playing Mondale is if he can do anything to make it closer.

So for a situation like this, you need a random event where Reagan's dementia is both worse and more obvious than IOTL, which with a POD after March 1984 was the only thing that was going to stop him. This could happen in maybe a fifth of the games. If this happens when playing as Reagan, the player would have the option of replacing Reagan with another presidential candidate (the Vice Presidential candidate doesn't automatically replace a Presidential nominee who withdrawals, though in this case the Republican National Convention would almost certainly have reconvened and nominated Bush and a new vice presidential candidate), or toughing it out. When playing Mondale, when this event occurs, sometimes there is a new Republican candidate and sometimes there isn't. Otherwise you are trying to do better than Mondale's historical result though there is another issue that the only real break that campaign got historically was the first debate, everything else broke against it.

And since some player made scenarios explore different nominees, there could always be a scenario where the race is between Bush and Mondale, where the Republicans would have the advantage, but Reagan's charisma is removed. Reagan opting for a single term due to worse health or his wife's wishes is a plausible POD.

The 1956 election is similar, there is one wildcard, which is Eisenhower's health, and that is it. You have to have Eisenhower withdraw to make it competitive. I don't think you can even do this for 1952, which was actually not a blowout in the final results, but its hard to see a path for victory for Stevenson. With 1972 you have to have Watergate and other scandals blow open in a way that the Nixon player can't get control of. With 1964 there is nothing you can do to give Goldwater a chance except to have LBJ plan the JFK assassination and get caught, which other than the CT is still ruled out as being an event that occurs before the scenario.

To look at other postwar elections, the incumbent is probably going to win in 1996 and 2012, and lose in 1980, but in these cases if the player playing Dole/ Romney/ Carter makes a lot of good decisions, the random of the algorithm might push him over the top. I don't know how the algorithm works.

Before World War 2, there wasn't the Cold War incumbent advantage, but there were cycles of dominant and out parties and periods where things were pretty stacked in favor of the dominant and against the out party.
 
1634997918203.png


Best case scenario for the Dems in the 2018 Senate Midterms scenario IMO. In spite of a massively disadvantageous map the Democrats retook the Senate with a gain of five seats, for a total of 53. In term of popular votes the Democrats prevailed with a whooping 61%! (Normal Difficulty)
 
View attachment 689779

Best case scenario for the Dems in the 2018 Senate Midterms scenario IMO. In spite of a massively disadvantageous map the Democrats retook the Senate with a gain of five seats, for a total of 53. In term of popular votes the Democrats prevailed with a whooping 61%! (Normal Difficulty)
Actually that's just a gain of 4 seats (starting with 49, +TN, AZ, NV, and TX), if it's only 53 total

You can also win MS-special in the game (though it's kinda questionable, since the in-game numbers go by the first round where there's a Democrat and two Republicans, and the game doesn't simulate the second round that happens if nobody gets 50% for that particular race, and iirc it's not realistic to get 50% in that one on normal) bringing it to 54, D+5
 
Actually that's just a gain of 4 seats (starting with 49, +TN, AZ, NV, and TX), if it's only 53 total

You can also win MS-special in the game (though it's kinda questionable, since the in-game numbers go by the first round where there's a Democrat and two Republicans, and the game doesn't simulate the second round that happens if nobody gets 50% for that particular race, and iirc it's not realistic to get 50% in that one on normal) bringing it to 54, D+5
My bad, forgot about Alabama for a sec... :p

Is MS winnable on normal or its just with one of the lower difficulties?
 
C50FBB24-B549-47A5-9E29-2037FA5B948F.jpeg

Carter on Normal. Look at that Popular vs Electoral Vote difference! :p

Won the first debate, but lost the second. But then Desert One was a success, so, take that, Reaganites!
 
I think whatever algorithm is used to produce the results in these games, including the ones on github, produces too much of a chance to get a popular vote/ electoral vote rehearsal. Ignoring issues with vote fraud, this happened in 1876, 1888, 1960, 2000, and 2016. And mainstream historical accounts say there was no reversal in 1960. Also, the Hayes electoral vote margin in 1876 was produced by three electors appointed by the Colorado legislature, even crediting Hayes with the three disputed southern states, Tilden won a majority of the electoral votes decided by the voters. I'm not even counting 1824, since Jackson got pluralities in both the nationwide popular vote and the electoral college.

Anyway, in the game, reversals seem to happen half the time in close elections, which is really too much. Its hard for Dewey in 1948 and Hughes in 1916 to win without one, and you often get them for McKinley in 1896 and Clay in 2000. The frequency in which they happen in 1948 is noteworthy since the election is known for Dewey losing despite maintaining a lead in the nationwide polls, presumably if he had won the polls would have been accurate and he would have won the nationwide popular vote!
 
And mainstream historical accounts say there was no reversal in 1960.
It depends of how are counted Alabama's votes, since it has both a mixed Democratic slate of unpledged and Kennedy voters and votes being elector by elector.

From here:
Varying methods have been used to break down the vote into Kennedy and unpledged votes. One method is to take the 318,303 votes as Kennedy votes and the 324,050 votes as unpledged votes, giving a total much higher than the actual votes cast.[5] Another is to take the 318,303 votes as Kennedy votes and the remainder (5,747 votes) as unpledged votes.[6] A third is to split the 324,050 in the proportion of 5⁄11 to 6⁄11, following the proportion of electors, giving 147,295 votes for Kennedy and 176,755 for unpledged electors.[7] In all cases, Republican candidate Richard Nixon of California, then Vice President of the United States, has 237,981 votes. If the last method is used, it means that Nixon won the popular vote in Alabama; it also means that he won the popular vote nationally.[3][7] Congressional Quarterly calculated the popular vote in this manner at the time of the 1960 election.[3]
 
I think whatever algorithm is used to produce the results in these games, including the ones on github, produces too much of a chance to get a popular vote/ electoral vote rehearsal. Ignoring issues with vote fraud, this happened in 1876, 1888, 1960, 2000, and 2016. And mainstream historical accounts say there was no reversal in 1960. Also, the Hayes electoral vote margin in 1876 was produced by three electors appointed by the Colorado legislature, even crediting Hayes with the three disputed southern states, Tilden won a majority of the electoral votes decided by the voters. I'm not even counting 1824, since Jackson got pluralities in both the nationwide popular vote and the electoral college.

Anyway, in the game, reversals seem to happen half the time in close elections, which is really too much. Its hard for Dewey in 1948 and Hughes in 1916 to win without one, and you often get them for McKinley in 1896 and Clay in 2000. The frequency in which they happen in 1948 is noteworthy since the election is known for Dewey losing despite maintaining a lead in the nationwide polls, presumably if he had won the polls would have been accurate and he would have won the nationwide popular vote!
I don't know, the thing is, a lot of elections just aren't that close, there's only been 6 where the popular vote was within 1% either way, and in those cases, 2 of the three had the popular vote winner be the electoral loser, and a third was 1960 which was ambiguous due to Alabama

And also, in pretty much no election is the popular vote exactly tied with the tipping point state vote. Its just that this often doesn't end up coming up due to elections usually not having such narrow outcomes. Let's take two of your examples, 1916 and 1948. In real life, Wilson won the popular vote by 3.1%, but the tipping point state (California) was won by just about 0.4%. So Hughes had a pretty sizable electoral college advantage - with a uniform national swing of 0.4%, he'd have very narrowly won despite losing the popular vote by 2.7%. And with Truman, he won by 4.5%, but the tipping point state for a Dewey win (Illinois) was won by Truman by just about 0.8%. So with a uniform national swing, Truman could have won the popular vote by about 3.7% and still lost to Truman, hell, he could have won the popular vote by 4.1% and still had it go to the electoral college

Looking at some of the other ones, McKinley didn't have quite the electoral college overperformance as the prior two, but still did overperform by around half a percent. And Clay did overperform by about a fifth of a percent (and also, the third party element could be more relevant in that one)

Just looking at recent elections, Trump could have lost the popular vote by 3.8% and won in 2020, did lose by 2% and win in 2016, Obama could have lost by 1.5% in 2012, and by 1.7% in 2008, and Clinton could have lost by 0.9% and won in 1992. So, out of the last 9 elections, 5 were cases where a sizable electoral college over or underperformance existed and where someone could have won despite losing the popular vote by about 1% or more, and a 6th had a popular vote/electoral college mismatch but was very narrow

So actually I think the game does pretty decently in this regard. Given how much better Dewey did in the electoral college in particular, I think it makes sense that if he had won, at least with the sort of narrow win the difficulties above easy tend to bring, that he'd still do better in the electoral college than the popular vote and be especially liable to a popular vote loss
 
My strongest Rockefeller 1964 victory yet. Beating LBJ in the debate gave me a lot of momentum. Ran a campaign that was strongly pro-Civil Rights, moderate on the Great Society, and went on the attack on LBJ.


CampaignTrailRockefeller2.PNG

CampaignTrailRockefeller.PNG
 
Sorry to double-post, but: I also got an interesting victory scenario for Bernie in the four-way 2016 scenario (first in the electoral college with Hillary coming in fourth, despite the reverse being true in the popular vote!):



CampaignTrailBernie1.PNG

CampaignTrailBernie2.PNG
 

Vince

Monthly Donor
So I just noticed the 1932 Roosevelt/Biden election scenario.

You get massively dinged when your VP selection comes up as people question you nominating a VP that hasn't been born yet

Biden1.png


Thankfully you make back and then some with some nice merchandising later on.

Biden2.png
 
So I just noticed the 1932 Roosevelt/Biden election scenario.

You get massively dinged when your VP selection comes up as people question you nominating a VP that hasn't been born yet

Thankfully you make back and then some with some nice merchandising later on.
I played it, and I tried to lose and failed.
 
Top