REDSTATE KAMCHATKA!!:
It’s possible if you decide to go wildly insane on us that you cd hunt down actual real grown-up discussions, pro and con, of the US system of choosing the President, the loved-and-hated Electoral College – and even read and absorb them all. The case that TMFD must make, of course, is that, whatever its creakily baroque drawbacks from the limited perspective of political science, it’s a system that allows for campaigns of tactics and strategy even more addictively detailed than Risk!: considered purely from the POV of gaming, it allows the fan-observer to examine and dissect – in advance and afterwards – every possible managerial decision and player move: eg “Michigan has come into view by Bush because of Kerry’s weakness among Catholics. In Michigan, Catholics comprise about 5% more of the voting population than the rest of the nation. However (and this is likely underpolled), there is also about a 5% bump over the national average of Arab-descent voters in Michigan, which has flipped from being pro-Bush to now pro-Kerry by a lopsided margin.” And from a non-gaming perspective, one of the potentially radical elements here is that fan-observers are now also (courtesy the interweb) more than ever potential participants: not just ahem “stakeholders”, but fund-raisers, agitators, commentator-critics, blue-sky imagineers, curators of the soul of a political project and/or prankish (re)movers of the goalposts…
[update: i just found THIS to stop me getting to bed at a sensible hour — i am ps not the ONLY superannuated uk “rock” hack to be unhealthily mesmerised by all this stuff, so i am informed]