Introduction

So, what's all this then?

The Political Machine 2016 is a simulation game (of sorts) about the 2016 general election in the USA. You pick one of several candidates for either the Democratic or Republican party (sorry, no Greens or Libertarians allowed - at least not as a party, you can run with Stein as a Democrat or Johnson as a Republican) and run a campaign against the other party. Build campaign headquarters, run ads, make speeches, gain endorsements and use surrogates to convince the voters that you're the right person to run the USA and score big on Election Day!

OK, and what kind of LP is this going to be?

That's for you to decide! I mean, it's going to be a screenshot LP, that much I'm going to have to decide, but beyond that, who we play as and what we do is going to be entirely up to you folks! I'm essentially just going to be the campaign operator, feeding you the information you need to make the right decisions, and then making those moves. Every turn is a week, and before every week, I'm going to hold a vote on what we should do in that week.

That sounds complicated.

Nah, it's all pretty simple when you get right down to it. Sure, the game has a lot of numbers that you can spend ages staring at, but at the macro level, there's not a lot of different things you need to pay attention to. And besides, you're going to be just one voice amongst many. Masking individual ignorance through a mass amount of people is one of the great things about democracy!

Alright, I'm ready to Make America Great Again now!

Well, hold on a minute. There's some things I still need to go over. Since this is a game involving politics, tensions might flare up in the thread, and I don't want that. You don't want that, either. Nobody wants that. So with that in mind, here's three things I want you to know.

1) Don't take it too seriously. It's just a game, and the developers don't take it that seriously either. When bobblehead *INSERT CANDIDATE HERE* can go to bobblehead non-copyright-infringing Stephen Colbert ripoff Steven Coldcut's show and say that their solution to unemployment is building a whole lot of water parks, then you shouldn't be taking it seriously.

2) Don't take it too personally. Again, it's just a game. Even if your grandma would die if Obamacare was repealed, that doesn't mean that this thread wants to kill your grandma because it decided to campaign on repealing Obamacare. They're just trying to win.

3) Above all, just have fun with it. We're going to go and see if direct democracy can run a political campaign, and it's probably going to blow up spectactularly, but hey, that means it blew up spectacularly, and that's fun!

But before we can start, we need to work some things out, because this wouldn't be your campaign if you didn't get to pick the candidate (note: I know that the game allows you to customize a candidate, but that would be a lot more complicated than just using one of the pre-made ones, so we're going to stick to the pre-made ones for simplicity's sake)! First and foremost, a simple question. Will our candidate be:



A) A Republican?

or



B) A Democrat?

Table of Contents

• 01 - Picking Our Candidate
• 02 - Picking Our Opponent
• 03 - Political Opportunities
• 04 - Beginning The Campaign
• 05 - Week 1
• 06 - Week 2
• 07 - Beginning The Campaign, Take 2
• 08 - Week 1, Take 2
• 09 - Week 2, Take 2
• 10 - Extra - A Quick Look At Campaign Mode
• 11 - Week 3
• 12 - Week 4
• 13 - Week 5
• 14 - Week 6
• 15 - Week 7
• 16 - Week 8
• 17 - Week 9
• 18 - Week 10 and 11
• 19 - Week 12
• 20 - Week 13
• 21 - Week 14
• 22 - Week 15
• 23 - Extra - The 1.03 Update and Hillary's Worst Nightmare
• 24 - Week 16
• 25 - The Not-Quite-So-Grand Finale: Zodiac Strikes Back
• 26 - Election Post-Game Wrap-Up, Sponsored By Towa Group