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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/EvilCatboyWizard on 2024-08-18 22:52:44+00:00.

FAIR WARNING! Be advised that this community is about a presidential election game which, while it mostly falls under the purview of history, is impossible to entirely divorce from actual politics, especially given the actions of the people involved. Read at your own peril if you wish you avoid such a thing.

What is NCT?

The New Campaign Trail, or NCT, is a browser game with a cult following among history nerds of all types.

It’s the continuation of the original game, simply “The Campaign Trail”, created by one Dan Bryan.

A relatively simple game at its core, NCT has you take the role of a presidential candidate from one of the United States of America’s many elections and try to steer them to victory, through answering policy questions and selecting which states to personally visit.

Many of America’s most noteworthy elections are present in the game, From Abraham Lincoln’s ascension to the big chair in 1860, to the first sparks of what would blossom into the Progressive Era in 1896, the heavily divisive election claimed by many to have been wrongfully stolen in 2000, and even as recently as the presidential election of 2020.

Perhaps one of the game’s biggest claims to fame, however, is its robust and active modding community.

The modding community…

Indeed, modding The Campaign Trail is, doubtlessly, the primary reason it has the following it does. Talented modders have created all sorts of new experiences, from adding in historical scenarios not in the base game like the elections of 1920, 1796, and 1872, to adding elections of entirely separate countries, like a pair of mods chronicling the 2017 and 2024 general elections in the United Kingdom, or the 2021 German election.

Beyond just the historical elections, however, I would argue and many would agree that the main draw of the NCT modding community are the unique and fascinating alternate history scenarios that people concoct.

What if Howard Dean won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004?

What if LBJ was framed for orchestrating the Kennedy assassination?

What if the first American Revolution had failed?

These scenarios provide completely fresh, new takes on how History happened, and are often some of the most innovative mods in the way they stretch the game’s mechanics to their absolute limit.

…And the rest of us.

I’d like to take a brief moment to shine a light on the character of the REST of the NCT community.

It is noteworthy how, despite what you may stereotype about this many American history nerds all gathered in one place, the Campaign Trail community is actually rather left-leaning overall, and surprisingly diverse. This surprisingly open culture will have notable ramifications later down the line…

But, for now, without further ado,

Time is a flat circle… or a line.

As the coding got more and more ambitious in alternate history mods, so too did the scope of their stories. Eventually, the NCT community gave rise to organized timelines, where multiple mods would be made focusing on an alternative timeline past one point of divergence.

The earliest, to my knowledge, example of such a project is a timeline known as “Bryanverse”. This timeline followed a PoD where Theodore Roosevelt won the Republican nomination in 1912, and runs against three-time Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1916 after taking America fully into the great war ahead of schedule, leading to a Bryan victory (Hence the name). The timeline then has two more mods following Bryan’s rocky term being brought to an end by Republican Leonard Wood in 1920, then an alternate 1924 where Wood easily dispatches racist firebrand James A. Reed.

The Bryanverse is a classic of the NCT fandom, and while it is not the most technically advanced by the standards of what people pull off nowadays, but it is nonetheless an all-time classic and provides the gold standard of a well-put-together timeline.

Now, this should be enough background for the community at large to get into…

Red and Butter

Enter: 1948 Red. Red follows a point of divergence that sees noted progressive firebrand and nowadays obscure vice president Henry Wallace never be replaced by Harry Truman, and thus ascend to the presidency in the aftermath of Franklin Roosevelt’s death. (Notably, this mod happened to release at the same time as another mod with almost the exact same premise but different candidates and its OWN controversies, “1948 Identity War”.)

His opponent, IRL future perennial candidate Harold Stassen, would lead the charge and ride a wave of economic dissatisfaction and anti-communist fervor to the white house and establish a streak of Republican dominance.

It’s here we get introduced to the face of the series, one NCT modder known as “Captain Tom”.

Tom was the project lead for the red series, and its public face on reddit and discord as well. He was also a prolific modder by himself, releasing individual mods and working with other faces of the NCT modding community in collab projects.

This mattered especially when Red decided to do a rather ambitious project to decide the direction of the series: A primary where YOU got to vote for the next candidate!

The 1952 convention went off relatively hitchless, and to somewhat surprising results given r/thecampaigntrail’s political leanings, and that of Reddit at large.

Dark Horse progressive-but-not-too-progressive obscure governor of Arkansas Sid McMath won the day, and carried the Democratic banner in the next Red mod: 1952

…He canonically lost, surprising very few, but set the seeds for the future of the series.

Code Red

This next section delves greatly into historical inaccuracy, so feel free to skip to the next chapter of the post if you don’t care for such things. Don’t worry, we’ll still be friends.

Now, it’s at this point in the timeline that some of the biases begin to show, albiet a lot of it is in hindsight. The first of these crop up in the 1948 mod, where Henry Wallace is portrayed unfairly in some regards and assigned unfair positions, such as ordering a land invasion of Japan instead of using the nuclear bomb, only to use it later anyway on communist China.

While Red portrays some failures of Stassen’s presidency very noticeably, such as his plan to construct low-income housing flopping and the fact his anti-communism leads to the arrest of Helen Keller before he pardons her, it at the same time gives greater credit than deserved to his foreign policy, such as dramatically negotiating a partition of China into two, something both sides would find unacceptable.

The 1956 iteration of the Democratic convention went differently than the previous one: Whereas 1952 had been held solely through polls on reddit, the 1956 iteration would incorporate the discord server! Prospective delegates were able to join up and roleplay as a member of one particular candidate’s camp, making backroom deals and fighting to get their guy to the top. And in the end, the winner was congressman John McCormack, yet another dark horse liberal, though with a significantly more establishment tinge.

His republican opponent, now that Harold Stassen was termed out?

…Joe. McCarthy. The infamous anti-communist crusader.

Potentially an interesting history, bizarre that it’d happen, but with potential.

…and then he won.

John McCormack had been paraded as the most milquetoast liberal candidate whom could easily ride to victory in a year that massively favored the democrats against one of the most unpopular candidates that could have been run.

The reasons given for his loss were seen by many as horribly contrived, to boot, such as sending his Texan running mate to campaign in Illinois, and generally acting very egotistical and out of character for the wizened elder statesman he was seen as in real life. This is where the accusations of Red being a conservative circlejerk of a series really started coming out in full force, and it would only get worse.

But the next problems come not from within the mods themselves, but from the community interactions outside of them…

Conventional Problems

The 1960 Red Democratic convention was set to dwarf them all. Now, the convention would be held entirely on discord. There would be no reddit polls. With more players than any previous convention, people flooded in to take on the roles of DNC delegates to the various candidates, voting on discord as the candidates were eliminated one-by-one.

In addition, Tom controlled NPC delegates he would distribute to different camps to reflect how things such as campaigning and debate performances went.

The three candidates that matter for this, however, are the finalists: …

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