I wanted to elaborate more last night, but I got frustrated because when I try to modify a quote with emojis in it, my browser refuses to let me type anything!
For starters, Canadian territories in Atlasia are sparsely populated. They are also reflective
solely of the Atlasians living there, and not the Canadians themselves (we don't own the provinces). As such, election results may appear different than real-life and different from how Canadians as a whole would vote.
Whenever I filled in a given territory, there were a couple of ways that I considered before doing so.
If the territory had a balance of voters roughly equivalent to real-life presidential election results (examples are California, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, etc), then I did my best to keep their results in line with that. In some cases, they were slightly altered (for instance, WI is a bit more right-leaning here because it was 50/50 instead of 53/46).
If the territory had no population, I considered the region it was in, the surrounding territories and its real-life electoral climate. Depending on these metrics, I made a decision as to how best to proceed. Usually, real life electoral climate was ditched first as an absolute if the region and/or surrounding areas would make it look odd, but patterns were often maintained (every county may have just shifted 30 points left or right, in other words).
If the territory had a voter make-up that did not resemble its real-life electoral trends, then we just went with the in-game results solely.
However, I did try to make sure that in a lot of these territories, there were at least some "competitive" areas, as no territory is obviously going to go 100% for a candidate IRL. It was here that I again relied upon what the region and to a lesser extent the surrounding territories looked like. For instance, Mississippi has some D-R counties because the South and states that border MS are quite conservative more or less. Likewise, Pennsylvania was 75% Bore
at the polls but because the NE is a relative swing-region, its results do not reflect that. For all of this, let's assume that all of the voters have a slightly different preference depending on the state than the voters in the game (because our sample sizes are too damn small
).
