This was a serious problem with The Political Machine 2012 and the fact that it hasn't been fixed is one of my biggest disappointments with The Political Machine 2016. Total lack of realism.

The developers of this game appear to not have done any research at all as to electoral data history what the U.S. political map actually looks like. Vermont has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988. In 2004, Kerry won it 60-40, in both 2008 and 2012 Obama won it 67-31. Vermont should not be competitive unless as a Republican candidate you manage to run such an incredible campaign (and your Dem opponent runs such a horrific campaign) that you're winning a 48 state landslide.

This is what a 2016 map realistically should start off looking like.

There are multiple problems. One seems to be the fact that partisan affiliation alone is used to determine the lean of each state, so in Vermont you have a higher percentage of independents than either party. In the 2012 game I went into the files and manually modified party affiliations in each state to get a more a realistic map, but there should be another way to inject some realism reflecting state voting patterns. I tried modifying state issues as well to move states toward one party or the other.

Even after doing that for some reason it still seemed too easy to flip super-safe states like Vermont Republican, while Ohio is still a swing state or Republican.

I hope there can be some mechanism for producing more realistic outcomes introduced.