The Mideast: Dead?

[Adam Griffin]

I'd just like to point out that while I had personally supported giving up on the Mideast as a competitive region for a long time prior, I wasn't involved with the diaspora and actually, I don't think I was even Chair at that time. The citizens there did not want to give up back then. To my knowledge, it wasn't really a coordinated effort by the party so much as it was a collective discussion among citizens there who were tired of trying. As I recall, the left had basically been shut out of the Mideast since the (left-leaning majority in the Assembly at the time) ignorantly went along with Inks' proposal to change the method of election to the standard bearer employed in all regions today, which destroyed the elastic ability for both sides to win majorities depending on the circumstances. This was is early 2013, I believe.

But the Mideast really wasn't any more competitive then than it is today; having a 60/40 split for purposes of one-seat regional elections - or even Assembly elections - basically guarantees the Right would dominate there. And of course, any efforts to "strategically recruit" to the region would have been met with complaints about how the region was being destroyed. People who wanted to be Governors, Regional Senators and evn assemblymen simply decided to seek opportunity elsewhere. My Party has always been regionally diverse - we even had a name for it at one point (Griffin's Five Region Strategy), but it proved to fall short in two regions due to Federalist tendencies to clot together in them. I tried to break this tendency, but alas.

As far as ebbs and flows, I haven't been around as long as some, but I've been around long enough to see what the true ebbs and flows look like. The game went through several of these cycles in 2012 and the first half of 2013, but we've been in a consistent cycle of inactivity and regional crumbling for the past year. Obviously, something isn't working and the tendency to advocate for more of the same is more a reaction to the messenger I feel than the message itself, and is perpetuating this ongoing issue.