Political Games Forever

In the upcoming version, we have introduced a new variable called Electability.

In the 2008 scenario’s primaries, Ron Paul tends to do better than people think he should do. Part of the problem with Ron Paul in particular was that in the scenario he receives large amounts of money (reflecting his real-world fundraising success). However, it was also a trend with other candidates that people did not expect to do that well. This has become known as the Ron Paul Problem.

To address this, we have introduced Electability in the upcoming version. Each candidate has an Electability value, from 0-100. It is determined by 3 things. The candidate’s attributes (such as Leadership, Issue Experience, and so on) weighted for the attributes’ profiles, the candidate’s distance from the center for various issues weighted for the issues’ profiles, and their momentum.

The lower the Electability value, the less likely potential voters are to move to that candidate’s camp.

Here are some sample values from the upcoming 2008 scenario for various candidates:

Obama: 84

Clinton: 76

Edwards: 75

McCain: 83

Romney: 92

Paul: 35

(Note: These can and do change as a game progresses.)

Electability goes part of the way to solving something that was missing from the game (a voters’ reluctance to vote for someone who was not “Electable” in some way), and therefore part of the way to solving the Ron Paul Problem.

Feedback appreciated as always.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 9:41 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.