After eight years in office, the Victorian Labor party, led by Premier Daniel Andrews, is seeking a third term in office. Their most recent term has been defined by the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the state capital of Melbourne became the most locked-down city in the world as Andrews sought to enforce strict policies to prevent the spread of the virus.
For this, his opponents have nicknamed him 'Dictator Dan', and the Liberal Party, led by Matthew Guy, will seek to capitalise on voter discontent surrounding the polarising Premier. Aside from the pandemic, issues of healthcare, infrastructure, transparency, and corruption will also be key as voters decide whether to give the Labor government a third consecutive term. Can you lead Andrews and Labor to victory yet again?
","image_url":"https://i.imgur.com/QxGxrYc.png","winning_electoral_vote_number":45,"advisor_url":"https://i.imgur.com/sjl02ys.png","recommended_reading":"Daniel Andrews retired as Premier in late 2023 as perhaps the defining figure of Victorian politics.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, he was a fairly successful Labor premier -- his 2018 victory against the Liberals was a landslide, and not much had gone wrong for him since -- but it was the pandemic that defined him.
His management of the pandemic -- his lockdowns, his mask and vaccine mandates -- earned him the sobriquet of Dictator Dan, and the ire of the right-wing. Dan Andrews shut down playgrounds. He arrested pregnant mums. When Daniel Andrews was hospitalised after falling down a staircase, the opposition Liberal Party put out a statement demanding an answer to such inane questions as 'which ambulance station was the ambulance dispatched from' in order to prove that there was 'no cover up'.
If you believed half of what was said about him, you would think that Daniel Andrews was a power-hungry wannabe authoritarian who used the pandemic as an excuse to crack down on political opposition and terrorise innocent, law-abiding Victorians.
The Liberal Party certainly believed that they had a winning strategy. Matthew Guy, who lost the 2018 election in a landslide, was brought back to lead the Liberal Party in 2022. Never mind the outwardly racist scare campaign against 'Sudanese gangs' that Guy ran in 2018, or the lobster dinner with a mob boss that meant many voters associated him with corruption. He was surely the man to unseat Daniel Andrews.
The Liberal Party ran a campaign that catered to the lunatic right-wing in 2022. Matthew Guy ran on a 'no more lockdowns' promise. As referenced in a question in this mod, the party ran an ad criticising vaccine mandates and sympathising with anti-lockdown protesters. Guy promised a royal commission into the pandemic. If the media was right about Daniel Andrews' COVID-19 management, the Liberal Party should have won in a landslide.
Up to the day of the election, this narrative still held strong. The Age, a traditionally centre-left publication, published an article calling Andrews 'the disappearing premier', claiming that 'Labor strategists believe that a significant chunk of the electorate has turned off Andrews'. On the right-wing, the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun published a so-called 'exit poll' claiming that Daniel Andrews was about to lose his seat to a food caterer who had his business shut down after a listeria outbreak. Daniel Andrews did have a fairly sizable fandom, especially on Twitter, but it's not as if the 'Dan stans' had any sort of representation in the media.
And then, of course, Daniel Andrews won an even bigger majority than he did in 2018. I'm not a particularly passionate supporter of Daniel Andrews, but the pure dissonance between the media coverage and perception of him and the actual result was a sight to behold. This mod somewhat defies conventional political logic, in that the worst thing to do almost always is to moderate and to concede.
Daniel Andrews, as Premier, bypassed the traditional media, choosing to announce big projects like the Suburban Rail Loop on Facebook. He was obviously dismissive of almost any criticism of his pandemic management. He did actually call a report into government corruption 'educational'. And it was tremendously successful for him. It gave the Victorian Labor Party two landslide victories.I suspect that, given the playerbase of this game, this will mainly be played by Americans. As a Victorian who lived through all nine years of Daniel Andrews' premiership, I do hope you enjoyed this mod, and that it taught you a bit about Victorian politics. Win, lose, or draw, I hope that you learnt a bit about one of the defining figures of Victorian politics, his strategies, and how he defied conventional wisdom to win two landslides in a row.
Also, the closing message to 'Get on the beers!' if you win is a reference to this dance track by Mashd N Kutcher, which remixed comments made by Daniel Andrews at a press conference during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is literally just Daniel Andrews with dubs and wubs around it, and it made it to #12 on Australian youth radio station Triple J's 'Hottest 100' countdown, a ranking of the top 100 songs of the year as voted on by Australian music listeners.
The district of Narracan didn't actually vote alongside the other 87 districts in the 2022 Victorian state election. The Nationals candidate for Narracan, Shaun Gilchrist, committed suicide about a week before the election, after being accused of sexual assault and rape. Under Victorian electoral law, the election in Narracan was declared 'failed', and a supplementary election was scheduled to be held after the state election. This was won easily by Liberal candidate Wayne Farnham, and Labor did not contest the supplementary election.
I included it in this mod because, to be frank, in an otherwise safe seat this is a distinction no-one cares about. It was going to be won by the Liberals regardless, and if Labor did win Narracan, they've already won overwhelmingly. There is no plausible situation where the result of the election hinged on Narracan, so I included it in the mod and ignored the supplementary election.
","has_visits":1,"no_electoral_majority_image":"https://i.imgur.com/3ApZ6mL.png"}}];e.temp_election_list = [{"id":3,"year":2022,"is_premium":0,"display_year":"2022Victoria"}];e.credits = "";e.global_parameter_json = [{"model":"campaign_trail.global_parameter","pk":1,"fields":{"vote_variable":1.125,"max_swing":0.12,"start_point":0.94,"candidate_issue_weight":10,"running_mate_issue_weight":3,"issue_stance_1_max":-0.71,"issue_stance_2_max":-0.3,"issue_stance_3_max":-0.125,"issue_stance_4_max":0.125,"issue_stance_5_max":0.3,"issue_stance_6_max":0.71,"global_variance":0.01,"state_variance":0.005,"question_count":20,"default_map_color_hex":"#C9C9C9","no_state_map_color_hex":"#999999"}}];e.candidate_json = [{"model":"campaign_trail.candidate","pk":16,"fields":{"first_name":"Daniel","last_name":"Andrews","election":3,"party":"Victorian Labor","state":"Mulgrave","priority":1,"description":"For eight years, Daniel Andrews has defined Victorian politics. His top-down style of leadership has been controversial, especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, where lengthy lockdowns and harsh restrictions have earned him the nickname 'Dictator Dan' and the loathing of many Victorians. But as Premier, Andrews has laid out a new blueprint for his party, spearheading the 'Big Build' project which has overseen massive investment in the state's road and railway network, often sidelining the media and announcing these plans personally. Can Andrews lead his party to a third term, and cement Victoria's status as the most progressive state in the nation?","color_hex":"#c03426","secondary_color_hex":"#EFA49E","is_active":1,"image_url":"https://i.imgur.com/l65d7rD.png","electoral_victory_message":"