On The Campaign Trail Simulation Analysis

In fighting for a seat in the US senate in the election simulation game On the Campaign Trail, there are many similarities to a real election campaign which is to be expected. However, the more interesting issues are the dissimilarities the simulation shares with real world campaigns. The issues of polling, campaign advertisements, opponent strategy, and various campaigning techniques to name a few are some of the aspects the simulation goes into.
When looking at the similarities of the simulation and real world campaigns, on the surface they seem very similar and in some ways that’s true. The chief similarity to me was the use of polling. This is arguably the most important part of any campaign, especially when it comes to issue setting. …show more content…
When we wanted to run a fundraiser, all we had to do was simply pick a county to hold in in and that was it. There was also a bonus amount of money awarded to either one or both of the candidates at the time of the Gallup poll. This is a massive oversimplification of how financing a campaign works, but considering the intricacies of it makes sense in a simulation. In a real world campaign financing is everything, as money buy the ads, advisors, managers, staff, supplies and everything needed to run a successful campaign. Being as the intricacies of campaign finance are not presented in the simulation, it is also no surprise that it doesn’t address campaign finance reform at all either. This simulation is set in the 1980s which is well before campaign finance reform gained a lot of steam with reforms like the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) or McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee. Recently, fundraising and financing have become even more important, as modern campaigns have been spending increasingly large amounts of money on getting their candidates elected. One approach that we did use in our simulation that is used in real campaigns is backward mapping. We knew if we wanted to run an ad blitz across a bunch of networks, send out a large scale mailer campaign, or anything with a substantial cost we would need a lot of money. So we made sure that in prepping for the ad, we ran a fundraiser in a county we thought would garner us the most money, and for the most part it worked perfectly. But another big difference with the simulation is that we also never had to worry about acquiring seed money in order to start our campaigns, which is one of the biggest struggles many candidates face if they are not wealthy in their own right (Burton