The Electorate

About this game

Latest news

• Announcements·5 Aug 2026Official

  Gameplay Showcase #1 - Counties and Election Night

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• Announcements·28 Apr 2026Official

  Dev Log #14 - Events

  Hi all! After a quick break, I’m back to doing dev logs. Today we're covering the events system.Events are important for creating immersion and adding replayability to campaigns. In The Electorate, events can come in a wide number of forms. Scandals, rogue journalists, campaign staff whistleblowers, town hall Q&As, interactions at a rally, and even assassination attempts. My main inspiration for the events system is how events are handled in Crusader Kings III, where character-focused interactions prevail and make sense in the context of the game. I believe this brings the game to life in a meaningful way, and I wanted to replicate that same idea in The Electorate.How Events Are BuiltEvents can be triggered after a turn is completed or after an action is taken on the campaign trail. Events are based in game context, but are selected randomly out of a pool of hundreds of eligible events. Every event has a title, body text that sets the scene, and up to four choices. Each choice carries structured consequences that feed directly into the game's other systems, such as your finances, media coverage, your relationships with outlets and staff, etc. Some choices are also dependent on your candidate's attributes and traits. Candidates like Donald Trump will get opportunities to hold larger rallies and boost turnout while Bernie Sanders can drive better grassroots donor support.If you want to get a look at the internal system driving these, you can take a look at this event sample. Events are written in JSON format, and I plan on opening these up for modding.{  "scandal.0001": {    "Category": "Scandal",    "Subtype": "Finance",    "MinProgress": 0.0,    "MaxProgress": 1.0,    "Weight_Base": 1.0,    "EventTitle": "{CandidateName} Faces Questions Over Donor Ties",    "EventBody": "A report published by {OutletName} has surfaced contributions from                 {DonorName} to the {CandidateName} campaign. Your communications                 team is asking for direction.",   ...
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• Announcements·12 Mar 2026Official

  Dev Log #13 - Media Outlets

  Hi all! Today's dev log is all about the media system, one of the more complex and dynamic systems I've built (and still building) for The Electorate.As we all know, the media has a major impact on election cycles. The first competitive US election was in 1796 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. One of the key features of that race was the use of newspaper outlets to smear or promote each candidate. Back then, the only way to really learn about a candidate was through the papers, so control over the media was essential. That brutal campaign was eventually won by Adams, but it gave a gloomy foreshadowing of just how nasty American elections would get in the future. In The Electorate, I’ve tried to model the media landscape in the US as best I can for now. This is a system that you could spend an endless amount of hours building on, but I think this is a good start for inclusion in the game’s 1.0 version. Let’s get into it.Media OutletsThere are six outlets in the game currently. Three traditional newspapers and three TV stations that also have newspaper outlets. Each one has a political bias that maps to the same 1-9 ideology scale used throughout the rest of the game, with 1 being far left and 9 being far right. Outlets have preset bias categories, like left-leaning, centrist, or right-leaning, but the actual number on the scale randomizes each game. A right-leaning outlet will always fall somewhere between 6-9, but where exactly changes every time you play.Outlets also come with their own levels of influence and viewership. Any outlet clearing 5,000,000 monthly viewers carries significant Influence, and stories they publish will have a more dramatic impact on your Media Spin than a smaller outlet covering the same story. It’s up to you to actively court and work with these media outlets to keep stories in check. Of course, this is independent media, so that won’t always work, but it’s good to at least try.Your relationship with each outlet isn't entirely on yo...
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• Announcements·24 Feb 2026Official

  Dev Log #12 - Demographics & Customization

  Hi all! Today’s dev log is going to focus on demographics and the customization options you’ll have access to. Customization is the single most wanted item in the game, and luckily for you all, that was my plan from the beginning.However, because of the demand for it, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how deep I can go with customization while still depicting an accurate electorate, and ensuring candidates and their positions still make meaningful changes, while also integrating more options into the game’s voting system.Let’s get into it.How Demographics Impact IdeologyA key feature of the game that I’ve discussed in previous dev logs is the ideology system.There was recently a discussion about how demographics should impact voting behavior in our Discord (join here if you haven’t already), and I want to take this time to explain why I believe the best way of modeling that is through the ideology system.In an election, people do not vote because of their race, ethnicity, income, age, or whether they live in a city or not. They vote because those traits, combined, determine their perception and psychology of voting. Ideology is a tool to label the psychology of a voter.For The Electorate, what that means is demographics are used as a series of inputs that determines a single ideological output. With that output, we’re able to determine who is likely to vote for who, and create our voting shares.Demographics in the GameAs of right now, there are 19 different demographics in The Electorate, all grouped into six categories. These demographics are based on publicly available data from the US Census. For urbanization, I'm using an equation that calculates the county's population density per square mile.GenderMaleFemaleRaceWhiteBlackHispanicAsianOther (includes Native American and other races)EducationHigh SchoolSome CollegeBachelors DegreeAdvanced DegreeAge18-3536-6465+Income>$100K
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• Announcements·10 Feb 2026Official

  Dev Log #11 - Campaign Staff

  Hi all! Today’s topic is Campaign Staff. Before we get into that, I have a couple of announcements and shameless plugs. First, our Discord and Steam Community have grown significantly over the past week. We can all thank Reddit for that. Feel free to join and engage in the conversations happening in those communities.Two, If you haven’t already, share the game with your friends who might be interested in a game like this, because that seems to be a big source of discovery.Three, I have some UI screenshots in this dev log. These are a work-in-progress and still not finalized. With that said, let’s get into it.When I started planning the campaign staff system, I wanted to build something that felt interactive. It would have been easy to just make it so that you simply hire a few advisors who give bonuses to your activities and call it a day, but that would have been boring.Instead, I wanted to make a system where your staff takes on a personality of its own, and it starts with your senior staff.Senior StaffCampaign staff is split into two parts. Senior staff and junior staff.Senior staff are director-level operators who run the campaign. There’s a total of six senior staff members, with the campaign manager as the highest level official and the only one who comes with a personality. The six roles are:Campaign ManagerOperations DirectorFinance DirectorCommunications DirectorAnalytics DirectorGeneral CounselEach senior staffer comes with their own experience, salaries, modifiers, and risks. Additionally, each staff member has an approval rating of you.Experience ratings are on a scale of 1-5, and determine salary costs. Staff with higher experience will naturally cost more to employ. They also tend to have higher base modifiers.Each staff member comes with risks, too, such as a chance of “gaffing” on any given turn, which will trigger an event that could damage your campaign. For example, your campaign manager could say something demeaning about a certain group of peopl...
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