To win the nomination your candidate has to be the one the base wants. To hold the seat they have to be the one the middle can live with. Every move below is you choosing, again, which one you're willing to make them.
Every district in the game is built the same way. Learn the three roles and you can read any map on sight.
Where a primary is won. Also full of people who'll vote for whoever wins the nomination anyway.
Usually the biggest bloc on the board, and always the one that decides November. Reliably where you're least comfortable.
Drifting, or stubborn, or out of reach. Cheap to move, and it doesn't forgive.
It's the ground you'll be standing on when the general starts, and it's set weeks earlier by decisions that felt free at the time.
Only a few moves touch it at all. Television, if you aim it right. The editorial boards. The party's endorsement.
Television only helps you in November if you spend it in the swing. A saturation buy in your own base wins you the nomination and does nothing for the seat.
Pounding your base doesn't make a district safer. The game will let you do it all day, and the warning is easy to miss.
There's a person at the top of the ticket, and they have their own read on the race. Every platform call you make either backs their instincts or overrules them, and they keep score.
Belief rises when you back your candidate's nature and falls when you push them against it. A candidate who trusts you gives the speech of their life at the convention and pushes harder on the trail.
It's a quiet multiplier on your two biggest set pieces, bought with platform calls you were making anyway.
Every tack to the center you make against your candidate's grain is a withdrawal. Overrule them all race and they go through the motions when you need them most.
The squeeze between base and middle isn't only about voters. It's about the person you're asking to sell it.
Their belief jumps, and the move they wanted usually fits the campaign you're already running. The cheapest belief you'll ever buy.
A candidate who gets what they asked for throws everything into that move, and it lands harder.
Belief drops, sometimes hard. Occasionally the right call, if what they want cuts against the seat you're actually trying to hold.
But refuse after a race of overruling them, and you've told the same candidate no one time too many.
Five moves, and two things to spend them on. You can't have both, and most players never notice they made a choice.
Money isn't a score, it's moves you get to make later. Show up broke and you'll spend the primary watching richer people campaign at you.
The sources aren't interchangeable. Small-dollar rewards a fired-up base, bundlers reward an establishment network, and institutional money writes the biggest check and asks nothing up front.
Every fundraising push is a room you didn't walk into, and somebody else is walking into it. That's their volunteers on your doorsteps in four weeks' time.
An endorsement isn't a logo on a mailer. It pays twice: delegates, money or volunteers now, then a free, powerful move in the primary when you send them out to work their own turf.
The group that can work the swing is worth more than all the others put together, because that's the zone that decides the seat.
You can be turned down, and a room you lose is a move you burned. Groups read your platform, so this is a bet on positions you already took.
Some are mutually exclusive in spirit. Cozy up to the business wing and the groups that were already yours will notice you cutting against your own base.
Before the primary opens, the party gathers to endorse. Everything you banked in the coalition phase gets spent here, in a single afternoon, for a prize that follows you all the way to November.
You arrive with committed delegates from the coalition you built, then work the biggest delegations, give a speech pitched to your candidate's strengths, and survive whatever the floor throws at you.
There are two honest routes. The insurgent banks base energy and delegate endorsements. The institutionalist banks credibility and a strong establishment profile. Both can clear 60%, in the way that fits who they are.
No hard ballot cap. If nobody clears the bar, the last-place candidate drops and the horse-trading begins, ballot after ballot, until someone breaks through or it comes down to two names with neither there.
Deadlock and the endorsement is withheld. Everyone goes to the primary machine-less and even, and the afternoon you spent was still spent.
Twelve moves, and that's the whole primary. Every one of them is a thing you did instead of two other things. Money isn't the score. It's how many moves you get.
Most moves persuade people. This is the one built to drag them to a polling place in a primary where most of the district stays home.
It scales with your volunteers, so a coalition you built weeks ago is quietly making every field push land harder.
It adds support, and it raises turnout in that zone, which helps whoever leads there. In a zone you're losing, the turnout half helps your rival.
And it does nothing for November. A monstrous turnout operation in your base wins a nomination and hands you a seat you can't hold.
The biggest lever on the board, and the only weekly move that touches November. It's where a fat war chest turns into a real advantage.
A heavy buy reaches past the zone you aimed at and bleeds into the others. Some candidates know how to buy media, and their dollars go further.
Enormous. A heavy buy is most of a war chest, and it's gone.
And it only pays November in the swing. This is the sharpest edge in the game, and it's the one players walk straight off.
Reliable persuasion exactly where you aim it, for a fraction of the air war, and it scales with your candidate's standing.
The workhorse for a campaign that can't afford television but still has to move people who aren't already with it.
It won't move November. Not in the swing, not anywhere. Mail persuades primary voters and the fall never hears about it.
And it costs most of what a light television buy costs, and that one does move November. Do that arithmetic before you reach for it.
Nearly free, and it nudges turnout as well as support. It rewards reach and authenticity, and for a candidate people warm to, the lift is close to what a $900K mail drop buys.
The cheapest real move in the game, and you can aim it anywhere, including the swing.
Once a week, and like mail it doesn't touch November. No town hall has rescued a zone you're losing by double digits.
And it's still a move. Moves are the scarcest thing you own.
Worth far more than it looks. Cashed on your next attack it makes that attack drastically harder to survive, and spreads it into the base too.
The one setup move a serious campaign plans around. If you know you'll have to take the front-runner down, buy the binder first.
A move and real money, and the board doesn't change. In a four-week race, spending a turn on a week where nothing visibly happens takes nerve.
And it's wasted entirely if you never throw the punch.
Everything else grows your pile. This shrinks theirs. When a front-runner is pulling away, no amount of building will catch them and you have to go and take it.
With a dossier banked it's devastating. One candidate has nothing to lose, hits harder than anyone, and pays no blowback at all.
It stains you in the swing, which is the exact zone you can't afford to be disliked in.
Going negative in the middle to win a primary is an efficient way to arrive in November as a nominee the middle has already decided against.
One of the best moves in the game, and it costs no money. This is the coalition phase paying out: real strength in the swing, hard turnout in your base, or a fundraiser that refills the chest in one turn.
A free move that lands like a paid one is how a poor campaign beats a rich one.
You can't buy it here. It was bought weeks ago, with moves you spent in rooms instead of on the phone to donors.
Raise money all through the coalition phase and this button is gray, and it stays gray.
Free, and one of the only moves besides television that lifts your November outlook. Win it and the fall gets materially easier.
Your odds scale with institutional standing and electability, so a credible, establishment-flavored candidate should simply take this.
Losing it can be worse than never trying. The board doesn't sit the race out: pass on you and they endorse your most credible rival instead.
That hands them the boost in the swing while you get a consolation shrug. Along with a bad day at the State Fair, it's one of two moves that can leave you worse off.
Strength in all three zones, plus turnout everywhere, for free, in a single move. Few moves come close.
This is what the party's endorsement is actually for. The rest of the field can only watch, because it's unbuyable.
You must have won the endorsement. If the party backed somebody else, or withheld it, this doesn't exist for you.
Republicans win a convention, not a machine. Their endorsement is real, but there's no single monolithic operation to call in the way the party can on the other side, so plan a campaign that never expected one.
It hits every zone at once, which almost nothing else does. A triumph is a better rate than any television buy in the game.
Your odds ride on reach. A candidate built for cameras should always take it, because it breaks her way far more often than anyone else's.
It can go backwards. Your candidate fumbles a question, the clip goes around, and you lose ground in the swing.
A low-reach candidate is rolling a die he's weighted against himself, and paying for the privilege.
The reload. A small-dollar haul that scales with how fired up your base is, plus volunteers that make every future ground game land harder.
Spend a week here so you can keep spending everywhere else. A movement candidate with a hot base can rally into a genuinely big number.
It's a week you didn't campaign in the swing, and the opportunity cost is a twelfth of your entire primary.
And it only ever grows your base. Rally twice and a sixth of your campaign went into the zone that was never going to decide anything.
Free, and on a good night the biggest single swing available to you: a huge lift plus a turnout surge, landing when nobody has time to answer it.
It rides on your candidate's best quality, whatever that happens to be, so every candidate has a version that works.
It's a genuine roll. It can land with a thud, a thin crowd and a forgettable clip, on the last week you had.
There's no way to make it safe. There's only a way to make it matter.
In the primary, field work paid out at once. Here it only cashes on election night. You won't see it working, and you have to keep doing it anyway.
The doors moved real support in the primary, where nobody had a party label to fall back on. In November they have one, and a field push barely shifts a number. Same move, most of its persuasive power gone. Knock to turn out the people you already won.
Run to your base and the middle is soft, and your opponent knows it. Tack to the middle and your base won't turn out. He reads the board you actually built and hunts the weakness you actually made.
There's no version of this where you're comfortable. That's the game.
Twelve of them, and that's the race. A dollar you carry to primary night bought you nothing.
Every point you buy at home is a point among people who were voting for the nominee regardless.
Every tack to the center against their nature costs belief, and belief is what powers the speech and the trail. Moderating isn't free; someone has to sell it.
The machine and an activated endorser were bought in phases that ended before the primary began. The closing argument is free to everyone; the race you built decides what it's worth.
Raising turnout in a zone helps the candidate ahead there. Persuade first, then mobilize, never the other way around.
A handful of moves carry real variance, and every one of them is weighted by qualities your candidate either has or doesn't. Lose, and you can usually trace the line of decisions that got you there.
Run to your base. Win the nomination by twenty. Then watch what the middle does to you in November, and read back the twelve moves that put you there.