Perhaps out of boredom or maybe because I trust formulas more than my own hand-tweaking, I’ve been approaching the actual score/number generation with a series of formulas. This is what I did when determining Trump’s percentage for each state, and now it’s what I’m doing for the VPs.

Which back to our topic, here’s a fun fact about VP state bonuses in presidential elections: they’re inversely proportional to a state’s population. The smaller a state is, the more its population will care about having one of their own as VP. This might be bad news for VPs from California, but great news for me because this means I can create a formula in a straightforward fashion.

The first step is finding the scenario of maximum effect to use as a baseline. This gives me an idea of what is the peak potential of a VP-home state effect. Luckily in 2008, we were given data for just that. Sarah Palin is governor of Alaska, a small state.

McCain carried about 59.4% of the vote in 2008. Add his national loss margin of 7.2% to get 66.62%. Romney lost by 3.9% nationally in 2012 and held 54.8% of Alaska’s vote. Add 3.9% and I get 58.7%. Subtract 58.7% from 66.62% and you get 7.92% of a contribution from Sarah Palin specifically.

I did some testing and raising Rubio’s Alaska multiplier from 0.96 to 1.3 seems to get me close to 8 percent, which is what I need. That’s a difference of 0.34 in the multiplier.

I calculated Palin’s gain in multiplier terms as follows: 7.92% divided by 58.7%, then add 1. For the other home-states I took Alaska’s EV count (3) over their respective EV counts, multiplied by the Palin gain (in multiplier terms) we calculated at the beginning of this paragraph.

I took the other-state multiplier, divided it by the Palin multiplier, and then multiplied that ratio by whatever existing multiplier was in the game’s code for the candidate. This seems to have worked, with there being visible but not insane results due to your VP picks.

Some fun facts for those who sat through the math:

• Hillary Clinton has two home states, Arkansas and New York. This is done as an easter egg of sorts given that election data shows that she did gain support in certain areas of Arkansas which saw a reversion in the 2020 election.
• Hillary Clinton is the only VP with safe states as her home state, which is another reason I was fine giving her two, since it wouldn’t have that much of an effect either way.
• Hillary Clinton nets you about a 4 percent gain in Arkansas, making that the state with the largest sway.
• Ted Cruz currently holds the least sway, given that Texas’ population is larger than that of even New York.