u/Cyopia

Playing as Biden in 2020: got almost all of my legislation passed, had a great lead-up to the midterms, base was "solid" or something in the election UI, I both had a bigger war chest than the Republicans and had better national polling, had 64% approval, (+14!!!! genuine +24 difference to Biden OTL), economic metrics were ALL better or equal to OTL Biden's (4.2% GDP growth vs. 2.6% / 3.9% unemployment vs. 3.7% / 6.2% inflation vs. 7.1%).

The election UI itself was predicting +2-3 House pickups and no Senate change (Dems flipped Pennsylvania IRL in a worse environment, but fine, whatever), everything is lined up for a great midterm, right?

Right?

Then the midterms roll around, I somehow perform worse than OTL and lose -27 seats in the House?? AND THEN lose a further 7 seats in the senate??????????? Why is there a -8 seat difference compared to OTL? How the hell is this being calculated?

For reference: the only two presidents since split-ticket voting died down who went into a midterm at ~65% approval were Bush in 2002 and Clinton in 1998: they gained +8 and +5 House seats, and went +2 and even in the Senate.

The result the game gave me is literally worse than "2006 six-year-itch lame-duck Bush at 38% approval loses 30 seats in the house and 6 in the senate". Not second-FDR Biden at 64% approval (who somehow severely underperformed OTL Biden at 40% approval in the same election IRL).

I literally only have 2 stakeholders in opposition, my base was "solid", I fundraised more, I was predicted to win in the election UI, my government and party stability were +13% and +15% higher than game start respectively. So really, how?

I've seen other people on the sub complaining about this exact thing too, is there literally no way to perform realistically other than specifically metagaming (farming stakeholders)?

Also, why does the game not have Senate classes? It'd be pretty easy to implement and add way more realism. I somehow lost a Class 3 election for a Class 1 or 2 seat in New Mexico.