President Forever results thread...

[Alben Barkley]

Won 2004 as Kerry while losing the popular vote.



Won Ohio, and thus the election, by literally 1 vote according to the game. Not the first time I've won or lost a state by exactly 1 vote; I imagine that the game just does a coin flip if the results are too close and gives the state to the winner by 1 vote. Still, if anything even close to that happened in reality, it would have course been reverse 2000 -- this time the Democrat won the electoral college thanks to an extremely slim margin in one large state while losing the popular vote. And this time I'm sure the GOP would be calling for recounts. Would be quite ironic if the Supreme Court shut them down citing their own precedent from Bush v. Gore. Also might have led to the end of the Electoral College.

I also held Iowa and New Mexico, unlike the real Kerry, while stlil flipping New Hampshire and losing the PV by less, so a significantly better performance overall. I even only lost Florida by like 0.4 points instead of the 5 the real Kerry lost. I chose Hillary as my running mate; I had her campaign in Arkansas and Missouri quite a bit, but still narrowly lost those states.

[Alben Barkley]

The new Beta version is finally starting to let me finish from start to end (when beginning in primaries). Got through this time with Trump in 2020 - the beta version becomes very unrealistically easy if you start in a primary basically unchallenged. I focused early on meddling and dividing the Democrats to force a contested convention - it was a three way race between Mayor Pete, Beto and Warren. In the GE, Trump train's spinning became almost unstoppable in the final weeks, as well as half a billion warchest built up. The initial goal was to see if I could win DC as a Republican - it was the closest, with TRUMP winning 52-44.

President Donald Trump/Vice President Mike Pence: 63.5% PV, 538 EV
Mayor Pete Buttigieg/Former Georgia Speaker Stacey Abrams: 34%, 0 EV
Ian Schlakman/His VP: 2.5% PV

Gonna try the same thing with Biden next, though it will be harder since it will be tough to divide the GOP primary like you can for Democrats.

I don't usually like playing the primaries for this reason; the game becomes way too easy way too fast. Especially if you are effectively unchallenged or are able to wrap up the nomination early while the other party's primaries are still going. Then you can spend all your time and resources preparing for the general and blasting the likely nominee of the other side while they still have to defend themselves from their primary challengers. I played as Clinton in a 1996 scenario once starting with the primaries, but never ended up finishing it because by the time the primaries were over, I had a huge lead over Dole in all 50 states and it was just boring.