Okay fine then, the game cheats and you should ask for a refund. Is that what you want to hear? I want to help you but you seem insistent on an answer such as "the game is cheating" or something. I suspect the traits were the key there.  I'm not ruling out a "bug" either btw. You're using a custom candidate so that's always a possibility.

The formulas on the states are fairly straight forward.  I will tell you that you get diminishing returns on issues. I.e. take the square root of those numbers and you'll have a better idea of what the numbers it looked at were.

For instance, your first stat: 10 vs 8 (when you take the square root) isn't quite as close as you might think and you had the same position. So on that issue, even though you both screamed at the top of your lungs on the issue, it was essentially a draw.

Meanwhile, on abortion rights, he had 4 going for him and you had 3 points going against you since independents are going against you on that one.

I agree with you that based on what I see on the screen, it should be you winning the state. But I can say from looking at it that you're NOT creaming him.  Once someone has definitlively made their position known on an issue, you get into diminishing returns.  So you being very strongly for public education gives you more points than Richardson but from the people's point of view, they see that you're both for it, just that you're more for it than he is.  That gives you an advantage on that issue but it's not like it's "103 to 5" points.

What would a real voter think? They see you're both for the issue. They see that you're more enthusiastic about it than your opponent is. And they do care about it so you get a big advantage there.

But  if you gave yourself a 2 on compassion, a 2 on charisma, a 2 on religious, a 4 on credibility (you won't bothe rto explain so I can't really help you) then that would probably be enough to make quite a difference since these core values matter -- a difference of 1 does matter in the traits.

Richardson's integrity is a 6, his compassion is 6, his charisma is 6, his credibility is 5, his media bias is 6.  What are your ratings on these things?

Judgment on both candidates is equal at the start. But yu can gain/lose points on that based on your answers on the interview questions. 

Go ahead and post up your file here and I'll look at it.

It gives me an idea that we should do a feature or soemthing where if you have a campaign HQ you can commission a "detailed study" that basically puts this info in a window in the game so you can look at the content more closely.

BTW, if he beat you on Republican loyalty, you must have answered some of your interview questions very strangely AND gotten some odd endorsements. 

I saw elsewhere that you didn't think there was much of a penalty for getting the endorsements of the special interests of the other side.  That's not the case. Party loyalty DOES matter as you can see.

It may not seem like it when you're getting started but the game has a lot more depth to it than first appears. 

Based on what you've told me though I think there's a bug.  Because your judgment sounds like it started at 0 instead of 5.