The purpose of this game is to simulate a United States presidential election with two players, one managing the Democratic Party and the other the GOP.  The player will choose the candidates and decide on a weekly basis how to allocate campaign funds among the states.  They will be able to check their candidates' standings in the polls and use this to determine their future campaign decisions.

Prior to the party conventions, the standings between the two parties are balanced.  The breakdown of the states is as follows.

Strongly Democratic ( Polls: 55% to 45%) Nine states, 121 Electoral Votes

         California, Connecticut, DC, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Washington.

Leaning Democratic (Polls: 51.5% to 48.5%) Six states, 79 Electoral Votes

          Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin.

Barely Democratic (Polls: 50.5% to 49.5%) Eight states, 69 Electoral Votes

          Delaware, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Pennsylvania

Barely Republican (Polls: 49.5% to 50.5%) Four states, 69 Electoral Votes

          Colorado, Florida, Ohio and Virginia

Leaning Republican (Polls: 48.5% to 51.5%) Ten states, 79 Electoral Votes

          Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia.

Strongly Republican (Polls: 45% to 55%) Fourteen states, 121 Electoral Votes

         Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Wyoming

Prior to the official start of the campaign season around Labor Day, the parties hold primaries and conventions to choose their Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees.  Each player will choose the nominees for his or her party.  Each candidate has certain advantages and disadvantages depending upon where he or she was popular and unpopular; for example, the polls will move in favor of a candidate in his or her home state.

Because the 2008 Democratic convention was held first, the Democratic player will choose first.  The Candidates that you may choose from are the following.  Barack Obama (Senator, Illinois), Joe Biden (Senator, Delaware), Al Gore (Vice-President, Tennessee), Kathleen Sebelius (Governor, Kansas), Hillary Clinton (Senator, New York), Evan Bayh (Senator, Indiana), Ted Strickland, (Governor, Ohio), Tom Vilsack (Governor, Iowa), Bob Graham (Senator, Florida), Andrew Jackson (General, Tennessee), Martin VanBuren (Vice-President, New York), Samuel Tilden (Governor, New York), Franklin Roosevelt  (Governor, New York) and John F. Kennedy (Senator, Massachusetts).

Enter one of the following codes to choose your Presidential (DEMP) and Vice-Presidential  (DEMVP) candidates.

Obama, Biden, Gore, Sebelius, HClinton, Bayh, Strickland, Vilsack, Graham, Jackson, VanBuren, Tilden, FDR, JFK

Now enter the following line to apply the changes to the polling data relevant to your candidate choices.

Now it's the Republican player's turn.  The available candidates for the Republican nominations are John McCain (Senator, Arizona), Sarah Palin (Governor, Alaska), Mitt Romney (Governor, Massachusetts), Mike Huckabee (Governor, Arkansas), Tim Pawlenty (Governor, Minnesota), Rudi Giuliani (Mayor, New York), Tom Ridge (Governor, Pennsylvania), Bobby Jindal, (Governor, Louisiana), Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Senator, Texas), Abraham Lincoln (Representative, Illinois), Ulysses S. Grant (General, Illinois), Teddy Roosevelt (Vice-President, New York), Dwight Eisenhower (General, Kansas) and Richard Nixon (Vice-President, California).

Enter one of the following codes to choose your Presidential (GOPP) and Vice-Presidential  (GOPVP) candidates.

McCain, Palin, Romney, Huckabee, Pawlenty, Giuliani, Ridge, Jindal, Hutchinson, Lincoln, Grant, TRoosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon

Now enter the following line to apply the changes to the polling data relevant to your candidate choices.

Now enter the following line to view the changes to the polling data relevant to your candidate choices.

Game play will proceed as follows.  Each player has 100 million dollars of campaign funds to allocate each week.  These funds cannot be carried over into the following week, so it is in the player's best interest to use as much of their funding as possible per turn.  The cost of campaigning in each state is roughly proportional to the state's population and is listed below.

When you campaign in a state, the polls in that state will shift.  You can gain up to additional 1.5% in your polls in that state, but it's also possible that something you do offends the state's voters. To reflect this, there is a chance to instead lose up to 0.5% each time you campaign in a state.

One note regarding strategy; in actual presidential elections, candidates rarely campaign in the states that are leaning strongly in one direction or the other.  In this game it is possible, but difficult, to move these states from strong support to a roughly toss-up status. If the players' goal is to model something approaching a realistic presidential campaign, they should focus their attention on the "leaning" and "barely" categories.

Once you decide on the states that you want to campaign in, you need to fund your campaigns. For each week of the campaign, expand the appropriate cell and enter a list of the states that you want to campaign in.  Each state should be entered spelled out, with each word capitalized but no spaces between words.  Make sure that your spelling is correct.  As an example, if the Federalist party wanted to campaign in California, The District of Columbia, Ohio and New Jersey, their funding command would look like this.

      >  FEDFund := [California, DistrictofColumbia, Ohio, NewJersey];

In this section, you simply need to click in each cell and hit the "enter" key to execute the general election in that state.  The elections are listed in the order that the last polls close in that state.  Once a candidate reaches 270 electoral votes, he or she is elected President, but you can continue the election to see how you did all across the country.

If you would like to see your election results on an electoral map, there are many good electoral college calculators on line.  One nice option can be found at the 270 to win website at <http://www.270towin.com/>.

The cost structure for campaigning in the various states is obviously a simplistic one, the cost is $1,000,000 per seat in the House of Representatives.  This illustrates an important characteristic of the Electoral College, the "small state bias."  In reality, because of the differences in the ratio of voters to electoral votes it is more cost effective to campaign in the small states.  It is this small state bias that creates the possibility of an "electoral inversion" where one candidate wins the popular vote but the other wins the electoral college and therefore the election.

The initial poll standings were based on the 1 September 2008 standings that were published on electoral-vote.com.  States were shifted, generally to the right, so that the number of electoral votes in each category (eg. Strong Republican, Leaning Republican, etc...) were exactly balanced out.  The poll numbers chosen for each state are set to make everything at least somewhat competitive and so certain standings, like those in DC or Utah are far from realistic.

If you want to try to use this game with an actual set of poll numbers you can edit the poll numbers in start up code section (This will require you to restart the Maple server).  These are defined in the "SetPolls" process and look like this:  FloridaPolls := .495.  The number entered is the relative strength of the Democratic candidate compared to the Republican candidate so to enter your own poll, you should replace each number with the result of the following calculation.

The electoral college numbers are entered in the SetElectionData process as lower case state abbreviations, such as "ny" for New York.  To model a historical election, you can change these values to the appropriate numbers.  If you are modeling an election and have entered your own poll numbers DO NOT execute the DemocraticCandidates() and RepublicanCandidates() processes.

One bit of accuracy that was sacrificed for the sake of playability is the relative funds that were available to the candidates.  In reality, the Obama campaign was much better funded than the McCain campaign.  If you'd like to play the game under these circumstances, you can open the startup code, find the BudgetCheck process and locate the two places where the line

     if WeeklyExpenditureDEM <= 100 then print...

appears and change the "100" to "200."  

In the actual election including primaries and the general election, Obama spent roughly $750 million and McCain spent about $350 million.

Instructors should notice that historical candidates are allowed as choices, but recall that the initial poll standings are based on modern strengths of the Democratic and Republican parties.  Because of this some odd and possibly disconcerting results will occur, such as Abraham Lincoln doing well in the south.  Such results should lead to discussions, for example, of the 1860 election and of how the parties and the regions of the country have changed over the years.

The fifty-one state elections generated on Election Day are randomly determined based on the poll numbers after the eighth week of campaigning.  Elections are simulated using roughly 1000 voters, approximating the margin of error of most opinion polls.  Because these elections are randomly generated, the candidate leading in the polls in a state may not win that state and identical sets of poll results can lead to different winning candidates.

This application was created using Maple 11.  Work on the game was started in the Elmira College class "A Mathematician Looks At American History," MAT 1940 and was continued as part of the Elmira College summer research program.  It was inspired, in part, by a game called "The Next President" that one of the authors played in junior high school in 1977.  Readers interested in tracking and simulating elections are encouraged to seek out the many good websites on the topic during the next election cycle.  Among these are <www.fivethirtyeight.com> and <www.electoral-vote.com>.  

Thanks go to our "play testers," Marcia Metcalf, Dan Bastardo, Sara Kleinick, Dr. Joanne Redden and Dr. Jim Twombly.  Additional thanks go to Ms. Metcalf and Dr. Twombly for their many, helpful suggestions and to Ashley Culpepper for some revisions to the code that improved the playability of the game.

Saari, Donald G. Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting. Amercian Mathematical Society. 2001.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Pres/Maps/Sep01.html accessed on 31 May 2010

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/poll.closing/ accessed on 11 June 2010
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/info/blank_map.png accessed on 14 June 2010

http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/cancomsrs/?_08+00+PR accessed on 30 June 2010

many individual election and biography pages at Wikipedia such as:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1860 and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Strickland