Campaign Trail Modding: Introduction
Table of Contents
After way too long of a hiatus, I tied up the loose ends and published the mod on 6/26/2023, you can play it on the Campaign Trail Showcase, as 2016d: Rubio vs Biden. I don’t really care about the game anymore, I haven’t played it in years. So, it’s still unbalanced, buggy, etc. Maybe one day, I will return to it to add more modern features and a playable third party, but for now I’m ready to put this project behind me for the time being.
This is easily one of my dumber projects, mostly just doing this as a summer project to act as an outlet for my recent hyperfixation on U.S. elections. And by fixation, I don’t even mean in a political way, but moreso just really getting drawn into the numbers, stats, and players in a narrow strategic sense. How I follow them is kind of like how people get into baseball: poring over histories, charts, and statistics. Over the course of the pandemic, one of the things I found to pass my time was a web-game known as The Campaign Trail.
The premise of The Campaign Trail is pretty simple. You’re able to pick from various historical presidential elections (often ones which were rather close) and essentially replay them, taking the place of any of the candidates and watching as you make decisions for them. Through your decisions, it becomes possible to alter the outcomes of these elections.
However, the game’s developer has always been relatively inactive, so shortly after some time the game’s community got together, cloned the site, and began editing it to allow for modding support. With mods in the game now, it became possible to create our own scenarios.
Game modding in the abstract sense has generally interested me, as I find the whole idea of taking someone’s work and expanding on it in different ways to be rather cool. Since this was just HTML and JavaScript, a lesser-known game, and one which isn’t too large in scope I felt like I had a decent amount to contribute.
I tried monkeying around with the site a bit, managed to add a Credits section to allow mod creators to credit themselves and edited the site’s color palette to be more consistent.
Eventually I decided to try my hand at creating a mod, figured it would make a nice summer project. Little did I know how much of a slog it would be. The biggest issue I found, especially at the time where I started, is that this game (since it’s not designed to be modded) has next to zero documentation. Often times variables will exist where nobody in the community exactly knows how they work.
Either way, I got to making my own scenario. The scenario I decided to go with was the 2016 election, but with a bit of a twist: the nominees would be both Marco Rubio and Joe Biden, in turn providing a 2016 general election which would most likely look in line with the political environment of 2015. As I am rather young, I figured this would be a good pick as the key events and topics of discussion were very much within my memory.
The following sections are write-ups on various issues I ran into during the course of development and how I came to address them.
Background
The 2016 election was an incredibly pivotal one, not just in terms of the following administration, but in the ways it acted as a turning point for both parties and the ideological shifts they’d undergo. It’s very commonly argued that the catalysts for this were both the campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and the unexpected success they had running insurgent campaigns.
This mod provides a sort of “what-if” for neither of these populist campaigns really hitting their stride, the timeline where the 2016 election proceeded as expected by both parties’ establishments.
The pre-conditions for this scenario are as follows:
- Joe Biden has reason to run, defeating both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the primary handily. Unlike in the main timeline, he exits the primary as a broadly popular figure among the base with some opposition from Sanders, but not to the same extent.
- Marco Rubio is somehow able to gather together a broad enough coalition to stunt Trump’s momentum in the primary and defeat him.
The specifics of this, such as whether or not the GOP primary goes to the convention or if Beau Biden still dies, I leave intentionally vague.
With all this set up, we get some pretty interesting dynamics going on with this matchup.
- Youth vs. Experience. Marco Rubio in a lot of ways modeled himself after Barack Obama, as a sort of fresh face.
- Sun Belt vs. Rust Belt. 2016 proved to be the beginning of a realignment of sorts as we began to see a rising Hispanic population turn many Sun Belt states from solid Republican to increasingly competitive. In the opposite direction, with widening polarization based on education, many Democratic strongholds in the Rust Belt began to shift right, improving Republican prospects. These shifts are part of a larger pattern, but solidified with the nomination of Trump in OTL. Rubio is a candidate with a good deal of Sun Belt appeal, whereas Biden’s image plays moreso to the Rust Belt.
- Optimism vs. Pessimism Throughout the Obama administration, the GOP relied on a good deal of negative campaigning and obstructionism in their messaging. Marco Rubio, however, ran his primary campaign on a clean-cut and optimistic platform. This is in contrast to Biden’s style, which is often more brash and rooted in experience.