The United States has a Presidential system. The President is not a member of the legislature. He cannot create law, other than by suggesting it to the Congress.

Despite this, Democracy 3 plays being the American President like you're the Prime Minister or something. There is no Congress to worry about, only your own election.

Democracy 3 isn't supposed to be too in-depth a simulation though, and although there are some oddities, the American game still has some resemblance to the problems plaguing modern America. Just not too much.

This guide will take you the player through a game of America. It will point out some obvious traps that can kill you, discern what problems you can likely tackle and solve, and what problems are almost impossible to solve. It's not meant to be greatly nuanced but to guide a new player to some sort of victory.

This guide assumes you play with the default settings for America.

America's situation at the beginning of the game is rather unique. It has a GDP that's staggering, an abysmal health situation, good education, middling unemployment, middle crime, and relatively low poverty. Its Credit Rating is BB, despite it being at AA currently in the real world. This is likely for balance issues. It has a myriad of problems, including pollution, homelessness, vigilante mobs, etc. The one clear advantage that America has is that it has a very high technology rating, and short of slashing all the technology programs or giving yourself Brain Drain, it will keep that.

It also has a staggering deficit that's almost 200 billion per turn. You will need to do some expenditure slashing or tax-hiking to get this deficit reversed. If you ignore it, your credit rating will decline and decline, upsetting your capitalists and sending the economy into a downward death spiral that will exacerbate all the other problems.

You want to aim to keep education high, encourage the GDP, seek to end crime, and try to keep the health situation from completely bottoming out. Poverty/unemployment problems are weakly tied to the GDP and generally will improve as the GDP improves.

You will likely not be able to completely reverse the health situation. It IS possible to stamp out most crime, however.

America has a weak socialists and trade-union faction. Once you get rid of the ministers who like these groups you can almost safely ignore them forever. The socialists will be kept "just happy enough not to shoot you" through eventual taxes you'll put in place.

Capitalists on the other hand are much stronger and you should make attempts to court them. They'll be upset at first because the GDP is slowing and your credit rating will likely slip a little, but they'll come back as long as you don't tax them too much.

Environmentalists should also be courted, but not extremely. Investing in hybrid cars and alternative fuel is good. Stricter pollution standards and dismantling the automotive industry is not, because the GDP will be affected and the Capitalists won't be happy.

The Patriots will generally like you unless you completely slash the military budget. Even then they'll be reliable.

Conservatives are similar to the Patriots only more fickle. You'll have to upset the conservatives to appease the liberals, but you can win the Conservatives back by going fiscally-conservative eventually.

Religious groups are pleased with the laws you have in place. You can afford to upset them a little, but not a lot. You generally don't want to embrace them and go full Theocrat because it might affect your technology advantage.

The liberals (more like what we call "libertarians" in America) are actively dangerous. They start out hating you, and if you ignore them completely, they will eventually attempt to kill you. You can best appease them through choosing the "pro-internet" positions in the national problem decisions that appear, and eventually by throwing a ton of money at the prison system.

The Ethnic Minorities start out middling, but if you ignore them they will quickly organize to kill you faster than any other group.

Parents can be ignored. Youth can be ignored.

Retirees love you, and will only really be upset if you scale back the public-funded pensions. However, since this is your second-biggest expense, you probably will have to do this. Just enough that they don't outright hate you.

Commuters, Motorists, and Farmers just don't matter that much. You shouldn't completely ignore them, but they're secondary thoughts at best.

State Employees will stay pleased as long as you don't privatize everything, which you can't really afford to do anyway.

Given this, our strategy will be to please the Capitalists, Wealthy, and Self-employed. Eventually get the Liberals and Ethnic Minorities on our side. Conservatives and Patriots will be taken for granted. We will especially try to get the Middle Income up when elections come.

The obvious problem that needs an immediate solution is that you have a huge deficit.

America has a deficit. It has had a deficit for about fifty years, except for 1999 and 2000 where it had a surplus. America has yet to default and it has a credit rating of AA. Despite this, in game terms, if you don't get a surplus very soon, your credit rating will degrade, your capitalists will get angry, and your entire economy will spiral to a point that you can't get sustainable taxes. Even if you haven't angered some group enough to assassinate you, you will certainly not be re-elected.

There are three solutions.
1. You have a maximized military spending budget. You can easily slash it by 100 billion right there. The game doesn't simulate things like "American military bases collapse and it can't maintain the War in Afghanistan" or anything. The military budget is just that: a budget that affects certain groups.
2. The public pensions budget. I guess this is supposed to represent Social Security, which is a thing of contention in American politics. You can easily slash about 80 billion or more, and the only thing that will happen is poverty will go up and the retirees won't like you.
3. Raise the Income Tax. The other taxes generally aren't worth it. Raising the income tax to get you another $200 billion sounds like a lot, but percentage-wise it's not too bad. The main problem with this is the middle-class income will go down, which you don't want to happen too much.

How do these work out?
1. The main problem with slashing the military is that it will take many many terms for the changes to go into effect. Also note that your military spending affects unemployment. It doesn't look like a lot, but you can't really create or alter any other program that will pick up the slack you will set off. Poverty will be an almost guaranteed red-problem if you do this. Your GDP will also fall, which will shoot yourself in the foot because the value of your other taxes will go down enough that the rate at which you lower the military budget won't really balance the book for you until enough time has gone by that it's a hard problem to fix. For this reason I recommend leaving Military Spending alone. Possibly come back to it later and cut it back by a little if you have spare points.

2. Not too bad, in theory, but generally speaking I prefer to address the other 'poverty' problems like homelessness, poor wages, etc. before raiding the pension fund, because lowering the pension definitely will exacerbate poverty. Come back to this maybe after you win your first election and really want to get your credit rating soaring.

3. As long as you don't go too tax-happy and combine this with other programs that anger the rich and middle class, this is the best way to address the deficit. Remember: America is run by the rich. You need the support of the Capitalists in the long run. America is just not going to work as a super-socialist utopia.

This is an important part of the game. If you get assassinated, nothing else matters. You die. End of game.

The biggest threat to you at the beginning of the game is the Ethnic Minority group. Hover your cursor over it and you will see that they only care about a few issues: border control, foreign aid, and citizen ship tests. You don't really want to change any of these. You can loosen your border control a little, and if the global GDP is in a boom you will want to up foreign aid to get better relations and more tourism, but those are not going to be enough.

Go to the "Policy Ideas" tab by clicking the light bulb in the upper right. You'll see a few policies related to discrimination. You want to look for the Race Discrimination Act.

In Real Life, America has had one of these since the 1960s when the various Civil Rights Acts were passed. In this game, you have to implement it. Go ahead and do it, and give it max funding. It's a relatively low-cost program and doing this is enough to keep the Ethnic Minorities from assassinating you for the entire game. The conservatives will be a little upset, but not tragically so.

The second biggest threat are the liberals. You start off with bad relations with them, and it will take some time for them to really start to hate you, but it will eventually start. Why? Because there are a lot of "Decisions" you will have to make that will potentially upset the liberals. This will easily tip the scale that they begin trying to shoot you.

The best way to keep the liberals from being angry is to not try to regulate the internet, at all. This means you will always have "Internet Crime" as a problem, but it's better than dying, isn't it? Once you deal with the deficit, a good way to start appeasing them is to increase funding for the prisons and private prisons. You can turn a deficit issue the liberals will hate you for into a positive relations, AND work to end the crime issues at the same time.

Later in the game when you can really start making the liberals into a base, there's one very easy thing to do: make it so only evolution is taught in schools. This will really please the liberals, and they'll very likely turn into a green group after this. Religious groups will be upset, but probably not enough to assassinate you unless you've also messed around with the abortion laws.

For the record, the abortion laws thing is another discrepancy in American law. The Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade guaranteed that all women everywhere in America have the right to an abortion on demand. There are some limitations (fetal development time, some states put waiting periods or have other laws, etc.) but the Supreme Court decision is absolute. Yet the game has America abortion law as "only in certain circumstances," which makes no sense. I am guessing this is another "for the sake of balance," things.

Lastly, if you supremely and consistently upset the capitalists, they will shoot you very quick. This will really only happen if the GDP tanks and your economy spins out of control, in which case you've lost the game anyway.

If you're careful, you can avoid any new "red situations" developing. However, it is easy to fall into a trap where they appear and you can do nothing about it.

An early decision will ask if you should ban fatty foods from school lunches. This seems straightforward, one side will affect the capitalists, one side will affect parents. The parents will generally never like you, so you should appease the capitalists. Except that if you choose the "allow fatty foods" option, and your nation's health situation is bad (which it probably is), you will get the problem of "obesity epidemic." It's not easy to solve this once it begins, so it's better to go ahead and outlaw the fatty foods.

This actually has some relevance to modern america. There were new standards that vegetables would have to be a part of school lunches, so congress passed a law that declared pizza a vegetable. (Because it has tomato sauce.)

As discussed earlier, the first completely new policy you should enact is the Race Discrimination Law. After this, you may need more tax money. It can be tempting to enact the punitive wealth tax. It will provide a lot of revenue and does not harm the poor, who are already barely struggling with poverty.

However, if you enact this tax and combine it with another tax hike, you may get Brain Drain. Brain Drain is a situation where your "skilled wealthy people," decide your country is too difficult to work with, so they emigrate or otherwise leave to other countries that offer them better deals. This is a very bad situation. It can possibly ruin your technological advantage, and it really won't help when you already have the "Skills Deficit" situation. Therefore, you must be very careful when it comes to taxing the rich. Don't increase corporation taxes, don't enact a punitive wealth tax, and don't increase the income tax to the point the wealthy begin to be adversely affected. As said earlier: America is a country run by the capitalists and the wealthy. It's just not going to work as an equality utopia.

One tax you can get away with is the tax on super-stores. When it gets to a point that a green-level of people support this tax, feel free to enact it. It will also please the small business owners, and is a good base to start courting that faction with additional "small business" policies.

Other policies to consider:
Marriage Tax Credit Incentive. This will please your religious faction to the point they will likely go green if you haven't messed with the abortion or creationism laws. A lot of people approve of it too.
Tariffs. A lot of the population approve of this law, and it may help your GDP in the short run. Despite this, I generally recommend avoiding it. If you're lucky enough that the world economy goes into a booming state, then having no tariffs, increased tourism, and some amount of foreign aid will mean that your GDP will be buoyed enough that your credit rating may improve faster and you'll get a good spike in your relations with the capitalists. The America GDP is just too important to deny this boom. On the other hand, if the global economy is consistenly doing poorly, then it won't matter.
Environmental policies, like bio-fuel subsidies. These policies will please the environmentalists without harming the GDP or upsetting the capitalists. Eventually when you have a healthy surplus it's recommended to invest a little in them. The only possible problem to watch for is the affect on the demand for oil, which I'm not entirely sure is of benefit to the GDP or not.
Half-measure health policies, like child-care classes, youth sports, eye exams, etc. These are excellent stop-gap measures to keep your nation's health from spiraling into the red. Not as effective as increasing the state-run health service, but you probably can't afford to do that. You CAN however, afford these cheap programs.
Extreme health policies, like private health care vouchers and banning private health care. Avoid these. You might think the vouchers idea is good because it's similar to Obamacare which is currently taking effect in America, but in practice it doesn't affect much and it's just too expensive. It's better to rely on the half-measures.

You will have to make a few decisions every other turn. It's not too difficult, just think in terms of which side will profit. You generally will want to side with the capitalists, though not always. The first decision is whether to regulate what America called "sub-prime mortgages," loans that had a deceptively high interest rate if not paid on time. In actual America, this spiraled into the government paying out a huge bailout to the banks that practiced this behavior while a lot of common-people suffered. In game terms, it's probably best to allow it.

Several decisions about the Internet and whether to allow 'tracking' or 'net-neutrality' will appear. These issues would seem to be ones that you should side with the capitalists, but doing so will upset the liberals. Upsetting the liberals too much is a quick ticket to the grave, so it's better to choose the side of "freedom" when it comes to the internet decisions.

There are a few decisions that involve deportation of criminals. This can go either way, but I believe it's better to side with deportation. Not doing it will upset the conservatives/patriots (I think) and you don't want to anger them too much either.

Then there's one involving gay marriage. Allowing it will upset the religious groups, but the religious groups are fickle and not really all that important. Better to allow it.

America will also sometimes get events that adversely affect certain groups. Mostly the conservatives, liberals, and patriots. You only really need to be worried about these if they occur before an election.

What about the election itself? By default, America has a two-term limit with elections every four years. This means you only have one election that you absolutely must win. When you get to the end of your second term, there will be another election, but even if you win, the game ends, so I suppose this is intended to show whether your "successor" wins their election. At any rate, America has enough problems you probably won't honestly have a 50% approval rating by the time the first election happens.

America has a very high amount of political apathy. This means a majority of the population just don't bother to vote. This is reflected in game. All things being equal, 58% of the population will not vote. Then it will come down to your approval rating. If you have extremely angered a certain group, they will be counted as an "activist" percentage of the population. The numbers will be decided for the normal 42% of the population that votes, and then a percentage equal to the activist percentage will be subtracted from the apathetic 58%, and these will either vote for you or against you. You are very likely to have more activists against you. If there's a double-digit activist percentage of the population against you, you will almost assuredly lose the election.

This easiest way to win the election is bribe your way to victory. Cutting the income tax is probably the best way to do this. Everyone likes it, it's instantaneous, and it will likely cut your opponent's activist base. The biggest problem with this is you'll have a huge deficit for at least two terms, and it will take a while for your economy to recover. But if the alternative is losing the game, go ahead and do it.

By the second election, you should have enough of your policies in place and improving the country that you can easily win the election without any tricks. Then congratulations. You have won the game. You have served as President and can now retire.

American presidents generally aren't involved with normal country politics anymore once they step down from the presidency. Most dedicate themselves to charity, make speeches for money, and maybe, if they were popular, make endorsements for their party when the next election happens. Feel free to imagine you doing this.

So after the first election and a few more turns, you will probably be at a situation where you have a healthy budget surplus, an increasing GDP, and most of the normal fixable problems are taken care of and none of the groups are actively gunning for your head.

This means you generally have a state where you can afford to poke at laws and enact cheaper policies for no other reason than you want to do so. So, where to start?

You can always throw more money into the justice system. Funding the police and prisons will solve most crime problems. Certainly it's easy to get rid of "obnoxious behavior" and "vigilante mobs." No one's going to get upset if you increase the funding for jury duty.

The environmentalists are easy to underestimate, but even if they do already like you, court them more by throwing money at the alternative fuel and hybrid cars initiative. This improves relations with the motorists at the same time.

There are a lot of small policies that affect small entrepreneurs. Since these are basically proto-capitalists, you can enact most of them to help your GDP and relationship with the wealthy.

You may wish to either lower the corporate tax or allow tax havens for the rich. This will also help prevent Brain Drain if you've raised the income tax.

The welfare-watchgroup law is good because most approve of it and it helps the GDP. Even if it hurts the poor. Furthermore, enforced standards for the unemployed is another good law that most will approve of.

Gated communities are a mixed issue. It lowers crime and appeases the wealthy, but even if you're not actively trying to make America into an equality utopia, you can't let the inequality rate get too high. The economy requires satisfied and alive workers too. Remember the old quote "just smart enough to work the machines."

On that note, you will likely get a message within the first few turns that American workers are suffering from stress from too long a work week. The only cure is to adjust the labor laws. Do not over do this. If you suddenly change the situation from "employer-favored" to "employee-favored" you will anger the capitalists and the GDP will go down. It's all right to adjust this slider, but very softly. Only a little bit for one turn. If the economy tanks, reverse it immediately.

Tobacco laws are another thing to consider. Raising the tobacco tax after the election is basically free money. "Everyone's" approval rating may go down, but health rate will go up because of the lack of smokers. Still, it's best not to overdo this either or you will have no smokers in America and no tax revenue. Make it a middling tax, just enough to increase the health level and get extra money, but not enough to make a huge change in the country's direction.

You will also want to increase the various technology budgets once you have the funds. Your technology advantage must be maintained and it will always help the GDP. You probably won't end the "Skills-Deficit," but you can make a little nudge in the right direction.

Really, do whatever you want. The best part of the game is making it to a point you no longer are putting out fires every turn and have more freedom. Democracy 3 is definitely a game where you should put "real life" politics aside and start thinking like a real politician, but it's also a sandbox. Go for it.

And then maybe choose one of the other countries and give it a try. Many of them let you play the game longer.

This is the end of the guide. I hope this guide helps you, the beginner playing Democracy 3.

I wrote this assuming the reader would be an American and interested in playing the American side, but not sure what to do and would lose and get discouraged as I did at first. I've tried to include points that educate and illustrate to international players as well why America is depicted this way in the game and how this differs from reality so as to avoid confusion.

Democracy 3 is a mere game and should not be thought of as too analogous to reality. As another guide I have read pointed out: leave your real life politics at the door. The game simply does not reward you for taking a "hard line" on any particular issue or even for being consistent. You must react to certain situations.

The best advice I can give for playing this game is: if you enact a new policy or make a dramatic change in a law and the next turn shows a huge change for the worse, then reverse the change. No matter what it was.

Good luck.
-Cally