Slow and Steady Wins the Race?
Examining Newcomer Presidential Tickets
Written by GraVandius
Over the course of my Europeian career and especially in the past presidential election, I've always asserted that running for president as a newcomer is a good thing. I argued that the experience gained from campaigning would help you succeed later on. Following a rehashing of the argument in Samuel Jackson III's platform thread, I decided to test my theory by doing research on newcomer presidential candidates who have run over the past few years.
First it was necessary to define a newcomer presidential ticket. I selected the definition of either the president or the vice president not having previously served as a minister or a senator. I also did not include any ticket that stood with the clear intention of being a joke. Using these qualifications, I looked all the way back to January 2013 for anyone who at least stood for president. I found (counting the most recent election) 14 tickets that qualified as newcomers under my definition. Interestingly it is clear to see in the graph below that newcomers running for president is something that has been increasing over the past few years.
I then looked at each of the candidates’ platforms, or lack thereof, and rated them on a three-tier scale. The first tier is classified simply as Bad. Candidates who did not post a platform at all, or made one with no mention of the Ministries fell into this tier. The second is Mediocre. These platforms made at least some perfunctory mention of the ministries without showing much comprehension as to the specifics of each ministry. Finally, a Good platform is one that mentions specific plans for each ministry and is at a generally acceptable standard for a presidential platform.
As you can see above, the majority (60 percent or nine candidates) of the newcomer tickets fall into the bad category. This was not particularly surprising as newcomers by nature don't know a lot about the region. However, one would hope that there would at least be more that qualified for the mediocre category. Getting from bad to mediocre literally only required recognizing that the ministries exist. This just takes a minuscule amount of effort. Being the type of person who neglects to do even that is not a matter of not knowing the region but displays a level of arrogance that likely leads to the results shown below.
This graph plots the maximum position every newcomer candidate achieved to date and the ranking of their campaign, excluding those in the most recent election. The extent of the clarity in this result blew me away. There is a direct correlation between how successful newcomer candidates are in Europeia and the quality of the campaign they run. Everyone who never reached a higher rank than an assistant minister was given a Bad rating. Everyone who received the position of deputy minister ran a mediocre campaign and everyone who has reached the position of minister ran a good campaign. The fact that the distinction is that clear is amazingly convenient. It would seem to show that the amount of effort a newcomer puts in to a candidacy tends to be emblematic of the amount of effort they put into the region later on.
This study also revealed why I may view this in a different light than most of the region. The only two people prior to this most recent election who was deserving of a good rating and achieved a minister or a senator position were...Kaboom and myself. I don't want to sound like I'm tooting my own horn here but there was a distinct disparity between many of the other newcomer campaigns and ours. We started planning almost a week in advance (something many newcomer candidates don't do at all) and drew format from Writinglegend's platform. We worked really hard for almost three straight weeks and ended up garnering 21 percent of the vote.
This brings us to the conclusion of this study and the answer to the question whether it is helpful to run for president as a newcomer. The short answer is clearly no. Simply running for president with no real background is likely you’re going to end up in the Bad column with a stunted Europeian career. Unless you plan on really putting in the immense work on a quality platform, research, and campaign don't run for president. It likely damages your image and will be a poor reflection on you going forward.
Bellow I have included the "raw data" of each of Candidates and their Rankings:
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