I tried to play the US as if the radical wing of the tea party was elected to see if the game would stay balanced. To my suprize i was able to get re-elected the first time. (Difficulty = 100) I started the game with the socialism slider at about 15% and liberal at about 65% - perhaps that was too far, now that i check back - given the us the liberal conservative split should be about 40/60? i started with about a third liberal and a third state employees - so it wasn’t entirely out of whack.
Policywise i started by minimizing corporate taxes, labor laws, and taking a big chunk out of public pensions. played the events and small scale social policies to “feed the base” conservative, retired, capitalist, self employed, patriots. A lot of these coincide with productivity boosts. Making the poor poorer didn’t have much of a drag on my popularity, nor my economy. (so what if they are homeless and working 60 hours a week?) I did get a general strike but that was easily patched with a labour laws fix, which i then renegged on as soon as the cris was passed and it didn’t come back again.
Then about two thirds of the way through term one, Market crashes, external events and downgrades tanked the economy (as usual) and i had to go looking for something to cut. Its the US so the biggest fatted cow of course was the military, I knocked off about 40% of military spending. (I must have been playing as Rand Paul) … This did not get me crucified politically as i would have expected. I also had to reluctantly boost the sales tax to avoid a debt crisis.
In short, the things that should have killed me politically didn’t have much of an effect, however i was dishing out as many red meat policy ideas as i could find.
takeaways -
umm, where is my foreign policy option to invade some backward but resource rich country? There are lots of red meat events but not many policy ideas.
no matter how i tried i could never get enough political capital to bring in school prayers or fund failth based schools.
eventially i had to increase the alcohol tax because my workforce was drunkenly trashing the economy. again this didn’t cause much of an electoral upheaval.
I’ll have to try some modding to create a few. 