Thank you
@Istillian for your thoughts while I slept the night away! Speaking of things that happened while I was asleep, lots of new endorsements coming for Lloenflys in the last few hours - did the campaigns finally realize this was an actual election?! Endorsements include President Icarus, Interior Minister Vor, and Gorundu.
@Pichtonia , can you read between the lines for us? Are there common threads here, or is this last minute endorsement cycle expected during a competitive race?
@Writinglegend you've run a few campaigns. How good of a sign is it for the Lloenflys campaign to secure the outgoing President's endorsement? Recall that it appears Icarus would possibly defeat either candidate in a three way race - whether that speaks to Icarus's continued political strength or a lack of enthusiasm over the current field is unclear.
Back to Istillian...
So I do wonder if possible foreign affairs challenges or staffing problems may upend a lot of our candidates goals, and destabilise the general momentum throughout the term (which is worrying given the current activity issue.)
A key moment of the debate (in my mind) was when Lloen was able to get OD to agree there is no silver bullet for activity concerns when asked about staffing concerns in Comms. An artful dodge, but I do wonder whether either candidate can square their ambition with the reality in communications or elsewhere. Perhaps F/S will indeed be the solution! That being said, at least in comms, I was surprised to see what was envisioned compared with the reality of our staffing situation, and the answers provided by our candidates.
One final thought on the debate - its possible that with no ENN Liveblog (a debate tradition) momentum from the debate will be harder to obtain, as the citizenry was less engaged than normal. Only a handful of citizens tuned into the live debate, so we should downweight the impact that debates typically have.
Finally, whether you think the debate changed hearts or minds or not, modern elections are usually determined by GOTV efforts with less engaged citizens. Here, I think it comes down to the social connections of the Vice Presidents. Can Sopo engage with less active citizens, or will Kuramia's ERN background give GOTV the person touch that the Lloenflys campaign could really benefit from?
There are more than 60 votes outstanding in a Presidential election , and our Pre-debate poll only attracted 27. OD should be encouraged that Europeians who are less excited about the current direction of the region are more likely to support him - maybe this extends to non respondentss. Lloenflys has to be excited by securing President Icarus's endorsement, now he has to hope that he can get as much mileage as he can out of this last minute support.