Blog/2025-01-03/First Past The Post

One of the interesting thing about state proportional representation systems with first-past-the-post is that you ideally want to get as many people as you can into your state, including members of opposition parties. That is, if Californian Democrats had a ruthless pursuit of power they would want as many Republicans as possible to come to the state. This is because California's number of seats in the House of Representatives is determined by its population. Simultaneously, it's important that the number of Republicans does not actually go higher than the number of Democrats.

This seems like it could make for a fun game mechanic where there are ideologically aligned pawns that you push and pull by playing cards against certain regions that take effect on their neighbours and so on. The closest I can think of is Shasn which is a fine game and has lots of neat concepts. It does have people of your party and so on, but you start with a population that is tabula rasa. I wonder if there's a game one could play where the people have pre-existing dispositions to certain policies and your actions move them between the map and the more you have in your states the more powerful those states become.

In a sense, that's what the so-called Tech Right has done to the Republican Party. Elon Musk is pro-US-acceleration and has a lot of sway with the party. The people who vote for the GOP don't have much sway with the party but are essential for the vote to succeed. So he needed to carry along all of them as ballast to provide the mass to get victory but if they are too pandered to, they will ruin America. So it's important for him to get them for the weight but not listen to them.

Maybe someone will think of a way to make this kind of game fun. The idea of accidentally flipping your state over to someone else by trying to empower it seems like a cool mechanism.