A message to you Rudy

A growing addiction to US politics has slowly crept up on me - at least for non-academic purposes - and, may God forgive me, I’ve been following the primaries closely. The collapse of Rudy Giuliani’s bold strategy of missing out the early primaries to concentrates on victories in big diverse states is particularly interesting. But could it have worked? Just to see, I replayed it during a coffee break on the excellent President Forever political sim game:- you can generally knock together a campaign strategy and get to Super Tuesday in half an hour or so.

In this scenario running the Giuliani ticket, I was a little more cautious and did a little better than the real Rudy and his advisors. I won Florida handsomely. But the result and campaign dynamics were, sadly, basically the same: the frontrunner coming out of Iowa and the early small state primaries had so much momentum, he just blew me away (see map above). The main difference between my virtual tilt at the White House and the real one was that the frontrunner that crushed me was Mit Romney, not John McCain. Bad news for liberal Republicans in some alternative reality, but I guess is just about possible. I did manage to pick up California on Super Tuesday though, thanks to early endorsement by Arnie Schwarzenegger, but by then was then so busy barnstorming key states and throwing cash at last minute advertising to shore up my rapidly eroding polls leads it was too late. I even managed to lose New York for Rudy! Not that it made a difference given Romney’s dominance across the Midwest and the South. Hasta la vista, baby.