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Friday, October 30, 2020

An Analysis of Michael "Colin Blue Moon" Bloomberg's Presidential Failure

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - How Colin of Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising was amazing, but Mike Bloomberg of the 2019–2020 presidential primaries was a failure.

With Election Day happening early next week and the next President of the United States will either continue to be President Donald John Trump or be Democrat challenger Joe Biden, I think it's time to go back around nine months when a number of outlets were afraid (or maybe happy) that billionaire Michael Bloomberg would be the Democrat Party's presidential nominee and all of a sudden, it's time to take him seriously.

The gist would be that Mike Bloomberg, whom no one actually likes as a person, would flood the United States with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertisements for him, and in states that his opponents would be cash-strapped to actually compete in. Thus, voters would be hearing all Bloomberg, all the time. In the end, when he did drop out, half of the billion dollars in spending was done by just the Bloomberg campaign. He equaled all of the other campaigns combined. To this day, his campaign has still “out-raised” (by virtue of his own money) the presidential campaigns of the two people actually nominated by their party.

What did he get in return for that ridiculous amount of cash? He didn't get first or even second place in any state or territory besides American Samoa, which basically no one competed in. (KoopaTV darling Tulsi Gabbard got two out of its six delegates just because she was born there—those were the only delegates she got before dropping out. Mike Bloomberg got the other four.) In the end, it was a monumental waste of $500 million with perhaps the worst return on investment in history.

Why did this go so wrong? Perhaps it will be helpful to compare Bloomberg being the commander of his campaign with Colin, a commander of the Blue Moon nation in the Advance Wars series that is known for being one of the best commanding officers in the series. All of Colin's units have 10% weaker firepower compared to normal... but he more than makes up for it by being able to buy units at 80% of their regular price. It turns out that Colin Blue Moon and Mike Bloomberg have a lot in common, but also have very different strategies:

Advance Wars 2 Black Hole Rising Super CO Power Colin Blue Moon Michael Mike Bloomberg
Both Michael Bloomberg and Colin Blue Moon believe in the POWER OF MONEY!


They're both exceedingly wealthy and are able to recruit others with their power of money. They're both pretty awkward dorks—or are outright weird—in terms of socialising with people, failing to have any kind of interesting personality traits. (Well, besides the sexual harassment allegations against Bloomberg.) Both Colin and Bloomberg's “personality” is that they are basically walking giant bags of wealth. Other people are more than happy to take advantage of that.

While Colin is inexperienced in commanding, Bloomberg should—theoretically—be very experienced, having won three mayoral races (being mayor of New York City for twelve years). However, he took a very unconventional approach to his campaign, which would be the opposite of how Colin commands on the field. (And any other political candidate with sense.)

Despite Michael Bloomberg announcing his candidacy in November 2019, he chose to skip competing in the first four states on the campaign calendar and wishing to just focus on the “Super Tuesday” states (competing on March 3, 2020), because over a third of the delegates of the entire primary season would be awarded on that day and he thought that the other candidates would be too cash-strapped fighting in the first four states to be able to compete.

This strategy essentially looks at money as the primary resource when fielding a campaign. However, it ignores that money is not itself a strategy, but is instead a force multiplier. As a consequence of different states voting months apart from one another instead of all on the same day, American presidential political campaigns are about MOMENTUM. Voters in later-voting states want to feel like their vote actually matters, which means they're voting for someone who they feel like can be a winner. The best way to demonstrate you can be a winner is to have already won contests in earlier states, which is exactly why different political campaigns put most or all of their eggs in the baskets of the first four states (commonly first two or three), rather than the ones that come after. Even though those states don't give many delegates, they can carry a big momentum boost into future contests with the SNOWBALL effect. (Referring to how a snowball gets bigger as it rolls down a snowy incline and collects more snow.) It is to Bloomberg's folly that he viewed the Super Tuesday states in a vacuum. Basically, he started too late.

Colin knows about momentum and snowballing in Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, and its sequel, Advance Wars: Dual Strike. Because he can make more and/or better units in the same amount of time (with less resources) than his opponents, he can have more units to throw around to capture properties, perhaps purchasing Armored Personnel Carriers faster. Because he can get more properties sooner with more Infantry, Colin will get access to more funding, which means he can make even more units and better units even faster. Soon, he'll be producing Tanks and Mid-Tanks and then Neo Tanks way before his opponents can catch up, and soon, he can swarm the map with cheap units. The minor offence reduction doesn't matter, since he can more than make up for the deficit with quantity. Not to mention that should his units get destroyed, he'll just fill up his CO Power quicker, which allows him to multiply his money! His advantages compound on one another, while his opponents are on a linear path.

Still, even traditional Advance Wars commanding officers don't try to do what Mike Bloomberg did. He's like the equivalent of a campaign mode map where your opponent has a swarm of weak pre-deployed Tank units that don't move scattered across the map (the equivalent to buying lots of staff members and deploying them to different states), but still far away from where you are. You start with a few properties (including bases) and can capture others across the map. Eventually you can build up your own Tanks and Artillery and Rockets in your army because you can acquire the momentum and capture properties, but your opponent will be stuck with stationary Tanks. You can pick off the Tanks one by one as you make your way across the map and rout them. While there are a lot of them (since your campaign mode opponent is really rich), they're not posing a real threat and they're not riding any momentum. Certainly no enthusiasm.

That's why Colin Blue Moon and Michael Bloomberg, despite being of the same archetype, have such different results. Bloomberg spent his money, but it was unwisely spent and accomplished nothing, because no one wanted to vote for him instead of the other candidates that voters had gotten to know for much longer than him. If Bloomberg was more like Colin and was trying to win from the very beginning—and have his successes actually build up off one another instead of try to just suddenly materialise—things may have turned out very differently for who would ultimately become the Democrat Party's presidential nominee in 2020.



If you want an even deeper gameplay (or politicial) analysis, go ahead and comment for what you're looking for in the comments section. Ludwig has been thinking about this topic ever since Bloomberg dropped out right after Super Tuesday, but today was the last possible day he could've published an article about it before the election happened and it'd be too late.


KoopaTV actually made a strategy game based off the presidential primary process, called The Wonderful 1237. You can play it/read about it here.
Colin isn't the only Blue Moon CO with a KoopaTV article: Grit gets one, too, about how great his long-range options are in stamina fights!

6 comments :

  1. The only thing scarier than a Biden presidency would be a Bloomberg presidency. Unlike Biden who looks like a nursing home escapee, Bloomberg is at least somewhat competent and would be capable of doing great damage to the country.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not scarier than a KAMALA HARRIS presidency.

      I don't know what his policies would've ended up being, since his strategy was so terrible.

      Delete
  2. i think i found a new person to hate on this website instead of lheticus !

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hey, my article was great and Advance Wars doesn't get enough attention.

      Delete
    2. i am talking about KKKody BITCH, i do not count u <3

      Delete

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