Grea Kriopia Wins Presidential Election by Unexpected Margin
Written by Andy
Edited by Gem, Vor and Sanjurika
Grea Kriopia has won Europeia's Presidential Election on the first round by an unexpectedly large margin, prompting many to question the legitimacy of election polling.
On the 16th December, two tickets had declared their intention to stand in the upcoming election: @Grea Kriopia (GK) led the first ticket with @Sincluda, whilst @Vor joined forces with @Rand to form their opposition. A poll conducted by the E-News Network (ENN) in the hours prior had predicted the GK/Sincluda ticket was on track for a sweeping victory against the Vor/Rand campaign, with 48.2% likely support compared to Vor's 27.6%. That outcome looked unlikely to change as this same poll found that almost no Europeian citizen had the potential to significantly dent GK's lead - including Europeian heavyweights like PhDre and Kazaman.
Two days later, pollsters arguably saw their first anomaly of the cycle in the wake of the Presidential Election Debate, where ENN polled respondents who watched the debate either in real time or retrospectively. Bizarrely, whilst most respondents believed GK won the presidential debate and indeed she managed to move more of her supporters from "Lean" to "Definitely" in her favour, Vor appeared to pick up a sizeable chunk of undecided voters. Theories and explanations for this anomaly were proposed in the poll's thread, but no definitive answer was necessarily reached.
A mere few hours after this poll was released, the race was suddenly disrupted by the last-minute and very unexpected entry of a HEM/Sopo ticket. PhDre, on behalf of the Europeian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC), scrambled to take up the ENN's polling mantle and conducted a flash-poll almost immediately after the pair declared their intention to stand. The EBC's poll defied the ENN's first findings, noting that with undecided voters included, GK and Vor were reduced to 30% and 13.3% respectively, whilst HEM accrued 26.7% and 30% remained undecided. Interestingly, this poll also found that when undecided voters were forced to make a choice, GK held onto 40%, whilst HEM and Vor achieved 36.7% and 23.3% respectively, potentially suggesting Vor had been relegated to a distant third place. Think the polling weirdness ends there? Think again! In head-to-head hypotheticals, respondents sided with Vor over both HEM and GK's ticket by small margins, whilst GK/Sin seemed barely able to pry out a victory from a run-off with HEM/Sopo.
Polling aside, the election campaign itself yielded discourse on a series of interesting conversations. The GK/Sincluda platform titled Go Beyond proposed several intriguing ideas including a return to offensive raiding (of undesirable regions) and pre-drafting liberations & injunctions for vulnerable regions. The Vor/Rand ticket, whose platform was titled Building Connections, proposed pushing allies to increase sleeper usage, and merging Gameside's This Week in Europeia and Communications' Weekly News among other reforms. Let's Open The Doors, a highly unusual campaign pushed by HEM & Sopo, focused heavily on concerns some citizens expressed over a perceived lack of upward mobility in the Europeian executive. It critiques Europeia's "Big Training industrial complex" in favour of "giving people jobs", pledged not to select a cabinet until after the election and giving voters an application form to fill out to express interest, whilst also criticising inefficiencies in the Ministry of Media, among other things.
When the election at last rolled round on December 20th, the campaign felt like it had dragged on for much longer than it had with all its various twists and turns. The fiercely-anticipated poll began and, for twenty-three and a half hours, the vote flip-flopped between a GK/Sincluda outright victory and a runoff between GK and Vor. Approximately in the last thirty minutes of the vote, a series of GK voters rushed to the polls, pushing the then-Vice President comfortably over the 50%+1 threshold needed to win on the first round.
The election is now over; GK won comfortably with 39 votes (59.4%) to Vor's 16 votes (23.5%) and HEM's 13 votes (19.1%). Pollsters licked their wounds, examining what went wrong and questioning whether any improvements to polling can be made. A prominent theory for the polling discrepancy was that the GOTV game of the GK/Sincluda campaign was significantly stronger than that of its opponents, resulting in less active or politically engaged citizens showing up for the ticket which approached them first - or which was the only one to reach out at all - on election day. The newly-elected President has nominated her Cabinet, all of whom have now been confirmed by the Europeian Senate. Her picks are as follows:
- World Assembly Affairs - Ervald
- Grand Admiral - Andusre
- Radio - Sopo
- Communications - ICH
- Gameside Affairs - SkyGreen
- Outreach - Caldrasa
- Foreign Affairs - Vor
- Technical Architect - UPC
- Culture - Spuzz City
- Attorney General - Ellenburg
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