The Split of the June 2026 Presidential Election

Update, June 11, 2026: Multi has won!!! Here's the data I collected to write this blog post: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lpBhGOSHRLDDM3PUJCt5vS5oM2yrt_RGm6I04IT0DBQ/edit?usp=sharing

Roy404, Vice Presidential Candidate, posted a Gnomestack today alleging Presidential Candidate Multiman155 has been exploiting new players by paying them $150 per post in support of his presidential campaign. This piqued my interest. How bad can the Multi/Jada campaign be to be accused so openly of such crimes? I wanted to know if the numbers backed this claim up. So I did what any good blogger would do, and gathered every single campaign post in #campaign between 12:00am June 1 2026 and ~12:00pm June 10 2026 (1).

There were a total of 337 posts attributable to a presidential campaign in that timeframe, with others going to political parties, HoR specials, and the General Strike of 6/7. Only the #campaign channel was considered for this study, as I do not have access to the /ad logs in-game. The Roy/Roy campaign did not have any messages in #campaign during this timeframe, and have been excluded from this study. End was included in this study despite not being on the ballot as the End/Doc campaign was still active for most of the study period.

To get a sense of the numbers, I grouped the #campaign posts by presidential candidate to judge volume.

From our first graph, Multiman155 is off to a staggeringly imbalanced start, featuring in 67% of the 337 presidential campaign messages sent in #campaign during that timeframe. At (approximately) 240 hours, this is an astonishing posting rate of nearly one post per hour. On the opposite side of the posting spectrum, both Pepecuu and AsexualDinosaur had fewer than 10 posts over the campaign period, at a rate of less than 1 post per day.

This doesn't narrow down any crimes, though. Are these all new players posting the Multiman ads? Instead of sorting new players into "less than 6 hours playtime" and "more than 6 hours playtime", as a lawyer might, I split them based on "Pre-YeahJaron-Video" and "Post-YeahJaron-Video". This felt the most intuitive to me at the time, as I am still noticing a cultural divide between "Pre-Jaronite" and "Jaronite" players. My cutoff for new players became May 23 2026, the day Yeah_Jaron's video was released, and I counted each unique campaigner, sorting them into "new" and "old" player piles.

This reveals a potential divide in the voterbases for the 5 candidates studied. Three of our candidates attracted no new player support, with End and Multiman155 each pulling around 60% of their campaigning base from new players. End and Multiman155 were also the only two candidates actively and openly offering pay in exchange for advertisements. Still, Multiman155 pulls far ahead of the crowd in numbers, with more unique campaigners than the four other tickets combined. We've certainly exposed a bias in new players towards the Multi/Jada campaign, but still... is it exploitation, or just smart use of the lack of regulations surrounding election campaigns?

To judge whether these were well-established players, I decided to compare each unique campaigner's number of mutual friends and number of mutual servers to me to measure their "connections" (3). The sum of each campaigner's mutual friends and mutual servers became the "total connection" figure, and all total connections were standardized to the highest total connection to get the Connection Ratio (total connection divided by maximum connection). The higher the number, the more friends and servers the campaigner has in common with me, juniperfig (2), and the more established the player is assumed to be.

This reveals another clean split between End/Multiman155 and Talion77/AsexualDinosaur/Pepecuu. The two campaigns most attractive to new players also have low connection scores, while the "establishment" campaigns vary but all clear the 0.1 barrier both Multi and End are unable to break. So we have two campaigns drawing on a large base of poorly established new players.

This made me wonder about the loyalty of the campaigner bases. Maybe the new players were double-dipping in multiple campaigns in pursuit of that wonderful paycheque? I compared each campaigner's posts for their presidential candidate to their total posts in #campaign during the study period to get their loyalty score. A loyalty score of 1 means the campaigners only ever post about their presidential candidate. Lower numbers reveal campaigners who post about a variety of topics in #campaign. I expected Multi and End to have low loyalty scores, revealing a campaigner base with a greater interest in cash than in their presidency.

The drop in loyalty for Pepecuu is not due to a campaigner who changed their mind, but instead me (juniperfig) posting 18 #campaign messages in the study period, with only one being even vaguely attributable to the Pepecuu/Juniperfig campaign. Surprisingly, End and Multi both have high loyalty scores, indicating their bases as a whole stick to their chosen presidential candidate. There was only one campaigner who double dipped, in fact, advertising for both the End and Multi campaigns (get that cash, girl!).

At this point I remembered the existence of correlation matrices, and committed the cardinal sin of just dumping all of my data in a grid to see if I could find anything relevant. Don't do this at home, kids, it's terrible science.

Do you see that nice dark purple? That's a decently strong negative correlation between join date and connection ratio, further solidifying my assumption that new players would have shakier political connections than older players. There's also a positive correlation between total #campaign message count and connection, indicating more well-established players post more frequently in #campaign than newer players do. Finally, the negative correlation between the total #campaign messages and the loyalty ratio points towards these more active and established players being less loyal to their candidates, posting about other political topics in between their presidential campaign posts.

I reached out to the presidential candidates (other than End) to ask how much they're spending on their campaigns. Talion77 has spent $20k in total on advertising, Pepecuu has spent around $54, and AsexualDinosaur has spent a whopping $0. Multiman155 did not respond to my request. Instead, I calculated how much Multiman155 spent solely on posts in #campaign, and how much the other candidates would have spent if using the same compensation scheme.

Again, a stark difference, but that should not be surprising at this point. These are lower numbers than I expected for the Multiman155 campaign, considering Talion77 has spent $20k (albeit split over multiple platforms) for only 44 ads in #campaign, but that $20k figure represents the entire Talion/Elysia advertising budget. It is unclear how much funding Multiman155 has dumped into this election, but I believe his in-game ads are significantly more common than his Discord ads, so I'd at least double the $30k figure.

Multiman155 has significantly more new players campaigning for him at a higher rate than other candidates, and he is likely paying a relatively low cost for the team of ad-senders. His campaigning base is poorly established and full of new players. At the same time, his base appears loyal to him based on their posting habits, and the other campaigns have attracted no new players to their sides.

Targeting new players is a time-honoured campaigning tradition, and with Redmont's lack of laws surrounding campaigning ethics, spending your energy on the easily-swayed bright-eyed bushy-tailed newbies proves to be an extremely effective way of getting more #campaign posts than anyone else. I think instead of exposing a sinister criminal conspiracy, Roy has found something even worse: #campaign is undeniably useless politicslop spam, and new players are totally fine with slopping it up for cash. You get that sense from opening the channel, but spending all day with the same 6 posts repeated over and over really drives that message home.

I have no nice conclusion to this post. Enjoy the data.

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(1) All times in PDT.
(2) I think this is a fair enough comparison point as a relatively well-connected DC player. It's also the only easy numbers I had access to.
(3) I am not Discord friends with xEndeavour and therefore identified his Discord friends based on my memory. I am confident that it's a close estimate, but don't put too much faith into those specific numbers.