The People's House (WIP) (UPDATED: 2/19/24) - Presidential Sim

@RFKramer just got idea, Will taking VP from opposite party decrease your floor and increase you cap in terms of electoral votes ? like Unity administration logically should have opportunity to have higher EV cap if things go well and while pulling FDR or Reagan would be imposible it could still be able to go higher than purely party based, while comparatively if that administration fucks up it could be hated by everyone without having the shield of partisanship.

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That was the original. I noted that making the MC the 48th would have real-time events catch up with the game VERY fast, which would be less than optimal, and the author agreed, so he decided (IIRC) to push the number up.

Which was a whole lot better than the US’s usual policy for every American country south of them, aka, supporting, enabling, and enacting right-wing military coups to pad their own bottom line.

All Bush years were fumbling years. Also most of them were war crime years, as well.

ColOmbia. With an O. Columbia is a US district.

I must confess to be befuddled by the US’s stance on Taiwan. They don’t recognise Taiwan as an independent country. But if Pelosi made a state visit to Taiwan against the wishes of the Chinese government, that means they don’t consider it to be part of China, either. Sooo…

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Just want to clarify that it was 50.42 VS 47.35 percent, so a 3 percent margin, not half a point, just mentioning so wrong info on the elections isn’t spread as fact

As for the game itself i enjoyed the demo, don’t think i can really add any critiques right now since it seems you’ve written a lot that isn’t in the demo yet, but one thing i did find weird is how choosing your state works, choosing a solid blue state in a swing region makes it seem like it’s purple, but guessing thats just to simplify code?
And less a critique and more something funny but i like that if you’re from the south your automatically a country kid, guess no city slicker option for me

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On the topic of the president foreign visit to East Asia, I thought it would be great if the US can truly make their Asian pivot and counter Chinese influence in ASEAN with the help of Japan and South Korea, be it through trade deals, development of human resources, military training, arm sales, or investment in general.

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He won over the runner up by three points, half a point over all. That is a significant margin. And as I stated, a suspicious one considering his ties to Venezuela and Venezuelan state actors who still exert control over the tens of thousands of refugees in Colombia.

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Obviously but don’t discount the mc as a potential “realigning” candidate for their party. Reagan ended the immediate post-war Keynesian consensus while Trump ended the Reagan era, so it should perhaps be difficult but not altogether impossible for the mc to end the Trump or post-Trump consensus too and start a new era of their own.
Obviously it is already possible for the mc to win, albeit narrowly, against what I am assuming was a fairly strong incumbent president in Hoffman who’d probably have been predicted to win in a landslide and what is more to do it with a very unusual coalition with a (former)Democrat VP.
So, going forward, if mc can keep his coalition together and ideally grow it then it should be, again not easy, but possible to win a more competitive primary for re-nomination if we assume the previous primary was indeed our mc playing against the b and c tier candidates of their party due to it widely being expected to lose against a fairly strong and reasonably popular incumbent from the opposing party.

Yes, the whole “saint Obama” hagiography our media devolved into was quite undeserved by the actual facts and policies of the man, who was at best a moderate conservative. Though all the Trump clickbait free publicity was, if anything, even more cringeworthy. :unamused:

That being said, as a potential realigning candidate there may be one aspect of both Obama and Reagan that our mc might also possess and that is simply being that rare, once in a generation, political talent of their generation.

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You aren’t wrong about Bush. Same can be said of Obama though. I mean, he literally started off his presidency by killing an American citizen and justifying it by saying he was a military age male and thus might have been a terrorist. That is an extrajudicial assassination and isn’t legal. Bush was just incompetent. Wildly so.

And yeah Colombia. Didn’t notice that I did that.

And as for Taiwan, the US had ties to the original Chinese govt pre-Mao which is the Taiwanese govt. They fled to Taiwan as the communist revolution torched the country. The US maintained ties hoping they would eventually return to power and it evolved into a tight trade partnership. China hates it because they see the Taiwanese govt as a threat and fear they would swoop in and provide an alternative if CCP rule ever began to slip. Taiwan is also an extremely important trade partner for the US and one of the western worlds most prolific rare earth metal and microchip manufacturers. The only reason the US doesn’t openly recognize Taiwan is because China has repeatedly threatened all out war if the US ever did, possibly even including nuclear attacks on Taiwan and the US. As with your typical communists they are prone to outsized tantrums.

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If I recall correctly, Cruz made the exact same mistake, so it’s possible this was just your brain doing a copy-paste.

I’m not a fan of Obama, either.

Ah, thanks. I mean, China is definitely not going to do that, but it’s an explanation.

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The public demo is quite old so it’s very possible that it did say you were the 48th President. I recently pushed it to 50th, one because it’s a more fun number, but mainly to avoid the story catching up with real time to quickly.

I’ll absolutely revisit this when I’m going to write the section of Chapter 3 where the main character can visit Asia.

A unity ticket will boost your re-election chances, but there is a set cap for each party as to the maximum electoral votes you can get. For Democrats, this number is higher as it’s more feasable for a Democrat to win a bigger, Conservative-leaning state like Texas or Florida as opposed to Republicans winning bigger, Liberal-leaning states like California or Illinois.

I feel equally befuddled! (excellent choice of words). This is why I stick to domestic politics haha.

This has been fixed in the private demo. I’ve manually put in for each state whether it’s safely Republican, Democratic, or a swing state! Originally, I didn’t even have states (just regions), which is why that old code still does this.

This is the main conflict of the Asia summit that I have planned! You’ll be able to work towards furthering trade with China (which will help the economy & give you some more spending money for when you do the budget at the end of the chapter) or towards building up alliances to counter Chinese influence in the area.

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As long as my mc can still win Oregon through a combination of sheer political talent/skill and homestate advantage I’m good. :grin:

Of course going into coalition with dissafected Dems might help run up the popular vote total by getting more votes in these places, which can ultimately help with actually winning the popular vote even if it doesn’t come close to making them swing states. Kinda the situation the Dems are in now with regard to Texas and some other states.

That being said, I expect that even for all his talents and pulling off a narrow win against a solid Dem incumbent like Hoffmann my mc did still lose the popular vote, though maybe not by quite as large a margin as Trump did.
If he does beat the primary, get renominated, succeeds in realigning the party and wins the election I would expect him to win the popular vote at reelection though, particularly if the Dems only put up their b and c tier candidates against him that cycle. :thinking:

Not on average…on average I bet California would be a pretty centrist EU country.

I’ll refrain from commenting on Columbia, since I don’t know enough about that one, but here in the EU it is more that neoliberal tinkering is causing our welfare state to degrade than anything inherent to it or voter manipulation. Not everyone left of center is a Chavista buying votes with corruption and oil money when the good times lasted. Even in Venezuela though Chavez only got his chance because the old elites just couldn’t pretend to even give a shit at all.

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Popular vote doesn’t matter in the US (thank God) or California and New York would basically control all fifty states. There is a reason the two have such expanded welfare programs: to draw in more voters and increase state power by making them dependent upon the state. A popular vote system in the US would inevitably lead to civil war or national divorce as disaffected states abandoned the Union. As it is, everyone from Florida to Idaho hates Californians and their far-Left politics hence the Rightward lurch in many states and the flight from leftist population centers like California and New York to Florida and Texas. You can actually look to Europe and Colombia to see the effect of expanded welfare and popular vote manipulation where political parties that seek to reduce welfare always suffer so the battle becomes who can offer more and sway the dependents. Usually this decimates the Right since it is typically more inclined towards financial fiscalism except for in the US where the Right throws billions into military funding resulting in the Air Force spending thousands on teacups and the Pentagon spending tens of millions on a blimp.

That would be an insane dlc though if the author wanted to make some extra money later. I’d love to play out being president during a dissolution and civil war.

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US politics can’t be compared to European politics. The cultures are too different. Plus the American Left is further Left socially than most European nations which is why a bunch of them have started to push back on some policies. And the European Right isn’t Right at all on the US political scale.

But look at France and the UK. Both have accepted massive amounts of refugees and immigrants and it has turned the tide in a lot of cities and regions including London. These refugees can apply for citizenship and gain voting rights so they’ve become a voting base that is wooed via expanded welfare.

This is of particular interest because it happened in Rome as well. As immigration changed the political landscape the politicians in the Senate became less and less Roman. It caused riots and intense rivalries that aided in Rome’s dissolution.

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I do think that Oregon is on my list of potentially winable states, though you may need to get the max possible landslide victory to do it. I don’t think I’ll be able to include any sort of homestate advantage, as that’d mean I’d need to code a system to calculate and add up results for all fifty states, which would be near-impossible to pull off under the constraints of ChoiceScript.

I will say that, depending on how much money and influence you build up in your first term, you will be able to meddle a bit to try to change who the opposition nominee would be.

I’m not sure that DLCs are a possibility, but this might be something that pops up in one of my later stories, assuming I keep writing after I finish TPH (which is the plan).

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So, which is it: is popular vote irrelevant, or are California and NY trying to draw in more people to increase their influence?

Yeah, they’re trying to have their citizens not live in subhuman conditions, imagine that. The bastards.

Truly, the opinion I value: that of people who vote for deSantis. Also, Idaho is super-reliant on government tax dollars, most of which come from blue states, so it can shut the entirety of the fuck up.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! lol. Yes, the people who increased debt by ONE TRILLION DOLLARS so they could give their rich friends tax breaks are totally inclined towards financial fiscalism.

Most red states are entirely dependent on government welfare to function, welfare which is mostly subsidised by blue states’ tax dollars. So this entirely absurd notion that republicans are somehow opposed to “welfare” is a blatant lie; republicans love welfare, provided it goes to themselves and the super-wealthy and not, y’know, poor people who aren’t them.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Politics Thread

The trouble is that currently the Dems are almost the same, at least economically (the more substantial differences are cultural), subsidize the super-wealthy, only with the occasional “trickle down” crumb to the less fortunate, which is more than the current Republicans, but over here the mainstream of the Dems would be about on par with our conservatives. They are not economically liberal and certainly not social democrats in any meaningful sense of the word.
The difference between the current versions of the US Democratic and Republican parties are what the differences are between our conservatives and the outright far right/ neo-fascist parties. :unamused:

Aww…so you scrapped this idea then? I think it is still a good idea, especially if you select the option to run with a VP from the other party. But, your, call.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Politics Thread

While obviously this is a politics game, we should probably keep the focus on the game and not on general politics. https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/politics-thread/598 is the thread for the latter; wear a flame-resistant suit if you want to wade in there.

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We did drift a little. Apologies. It was a fun discussion though.

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I was very confused at how I suddenly started tracking the politics thread lol.

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