Coups, Counts and C***S, Chapter 2: The Coup that Never Was (Update from Brutus)

[Adam Griffin]

There were arguably two in-game events that broke me. The first was the totality of my (first) Presidency (and a good deal of it was outlined in my post in Chapter 1): the minutiae of having to serve as a bipartisan caretaker and a savior, all during a period where I knew everything would be erased momentarily for the new incarnation of the game that I (ironically) had been fighting for for years; when you are such a partisan character, it really was a numbing experience to be President and have to serve as somebody entirely your opposite in terms of impulses.

The second was the upset of February 2017; it appeared to me (at the time) that it was so entirely in the bag that I wasn't even involved at all in the run-up to the election. My whole thought process was "how can we lose this election? we have the biggest [on-paper] advantage ever!". Arguably the election with which I was the least engaged; boy, did I learn...

[Adam Griffin]

As others, I have a hard time recalling specific instances of this particular campaign (especially since I was tuned out at this point more than any other in the past 7 years - the two October 2016 ties really wore out what little my prior Presidency hadn't), but it was on my radar in the final days that NeverAgain didn't actually campaign publicly or privately in the final stretch. Apparently he did initially contact our target voters, but he never followed up and/or pestered them to the extent that DFW did (or at all), and just assumed they would be there for him. Combined with the lack of public presence (which used to be a damning concept, mind you; not anymore; see: June 2019), the final few days before the booth opened were a wake-up call, and at that point, I became aware of the situation the Left was in. However, by then, it was too late to do much of anything about it.

At any rate, NeverAgain lost a dozen or more voters that he should have carried; what was a single-digit loss raw vote-wise should've been a double-digit win. What made it so easy for me to tune out of this race was that it was such a slam-dunk on paper that any Generic Labor should have been able to run and win by single-digits without ever even sending a personal message. If there was any election post-Dissolution (2012) that Labor should've won based on registration stats alone, it was this one. However, DFW was not a Generic Federalist, and we overestimated the number of people who wanted to "Smash the Trumpists". This was the (beginning of the) end for "Old Labor" - in more ways than one.