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Show It's no surprise that Bush will win election the editor's column By marc 1IADD0CK .A This won't come as a great surprise sur-prise to most of you, but George Bush is going to win the election next month and become our next president. Oh, I know This has already been predicted by polls and pundits, pun-dits, but I have it on even better authority than that. "Mr. President" says so. No, I haven't been consorting with clairvoyants or astrologers. But I've been gaming and that's even better. ; This prediction is based on a day of heavy gaming activity on a recent Saturday, carried out while BYU buried its opponent of the day. (By the way, that's about how bad Bush is going to beat Dukakis.) Saturday's events have a little history. In early 1960, when John Hall was a boy in Florida, he got one of these bookcase-type games called "Mr. President." The game simulates simu-lates all of the activities that lead '. up to a presidential election, including in-cluding the convention, campaigning, campaign-ing, advertising, press endorsements endorse-ments and the final tally according ; to the Electoral College. ; The Electoral College is, of ; course, the key to any election. It doesn't matter how many votes you ' win in an presidential election, just '. how many states you win. '. So in "Mr. President" you have a '; chance to concentrate your caih-; caih-; paign efforts to regions and states ' and if you campaign in the right states, you get the votes to win the election. The game also takes into account ac-count built-in edges in states. For example, in the 60's, the period upon which the game is based, southern states strongly supported the Democrats, and had a built-in edge that could only be defeated by the role of Jimmy Carter and John was Ronald Reagan. And, of course, Reagan won. That didn't surprise us. What did was the huge margin by which Reagan carried the election. It was, by all viewpoints, a landslide. At the time, Carter and Reagan appeared to be running pretty even. In the Electoral College, however, you can lose every state by just a few votes and still get creamed in the final tally. I sat down and based on the game's outcome made a handprinted hand-printed front page for any newspaper newspa-per after the first day of the election and we tucked it away in the box. A few weeks later, Reagan ran away with the election. The morning morn-ing after, John and I got together to compare our "Mr. President" tallies tal-lies with the real thing the resemblance re-semblance was eerie. Four years later we thought about playing the game again, but with Mondale and Ferraro on the Democratic ticket, we just couldn't generate enough enthusiasm to go through the exercise. But this year we thought it would be different. Again, the game was updated, with new cards for the current candidates (Bush and Quayle had more money, Dukakis and Bentsen had better press). Werefigured the built-in edges with the south ' now favoring the Republicans, for instance. Then we played. Three times we simulated the remaining days of the campaign and tallied the results. re-sults. I was Dukakis twice, and Bush once, and it didn't really matter. Three times Bush defeated Dukakis even before California, with its 47 Electoral College votes, was taken into account. Three times the election ran with the following fol-lowing results: Dukakis was very strong in the East Coast, winning big in the states that counted the most mainly New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The election was down hill from there for the Democrats. Bush cleaned up in the South, taking almost all of the Electoral College votes. (Dukakis only got 10 southern south-ern Electoral College votes in the first game.) Bush did very well in the mid-western mid-western states, too, and in the first game won the election before the western states were even counted. Dukakis did better each game but still lost in the south and midwest in such numbers that by the time we tallied up the west, the results were pretty well established. estab-lished. In the first game, it was Bush, 400; Dukakis, 138. In Game two the Duke did better: Bush, 381, Dukakis, 157. We readjusted some of the figures fig-ures for the final game, giving Dukakis some better numbers just for the sake of the contest, but the results were pretty much the same: Bush, 339; Dukakis, 201. So, does this mean anything? I'm not really sure, except that Utah's five Electoral College votes .don't matter a lot when you pick a president this way. , The question isn't who will win, but by how much. John is betting the election will turn out more like game 1, while I lean towards Game 2 we both picked the games we won. Regardless of the game, I'm still faced with the same dilemma come Nov. 8. 1 just wish at least one of the parties could have picked a candidate candi-date I really wanted to vote for. I withdrawing campaign efforts from some other area. It also has a series of stock candidates, can-didates, with strengths and weaknesses weak-nesses that give flavor to the campaign. cam-paign. John and I first played the game in 1980, using the candidates supplied sup-plied in the game. But as the race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan neared, we sat down and made up cards and characteristics for the real candidates stacking their figures according to their strengths and weaknesses. We re-aligned the Electoral College to reflect changes brought aboutby the 1970 census, and refig-ured refig-ured the built-in edges to reflect what we conceived as current conditions. con-ditions. Then we went to battle. I played |