How to lose an election

tropico-4

I tried my best to be the worst dictator in history of Tropico 4.

  • I set wages for uneducated to 1, high school educated to 2 and college educated to 3.
  • I built not a single housing building, so everyone was living in shacks except for my soldiers and generals
  • Not a single church or cathedral
  • Not a single garbage dump or pollution-reducing edict
  • I declined every faction demand, except when it was something I would have done anyway
  • Every criminal got executed without trial

Some positive things I did out of necessity or laziness:

  • Soldiers and generals got normal wages – I needed a happy military because of unsurprisingly strong rebel activity
  • My military lived in an army base with military modernization, which gave them proper housing and health care
  • I had some entertainment, but priced in a way that only the army could afford them
  • I built one (1) clinic, because critical specialists dieing due to bad health care became a problem
  • I had proper food supply to prevent important workers from starving
  • I admit that I had a grade school, high school and college – I needed these to qualify people for my army and some administrative buildings.
  • I had some police – executing criminals got tedious
  • Some media buildings because the campaign goals required them. I didn't bother to demolish them after the goals were reached

I was following this strategy in campaign missions 13, 14 and 16 and expected that elections might become problematic, but to my surprise people still kept voting for me. Even though I didn't even bother to have a campaign speech or do election fraud I still got over two thirds of the votes.

What else could I do wrong so I need to actually put in some effort to win an election?

Best Answer

Campaign mission 17 and I finally managed to get kicked out of office.

My mistake(?) seemed to be that my avatar had traits (Patriot) and backgrounds (Heir apparent, Fortunate son) which improved the respect of various factions. I replaced these with neutral or respect-reducing traits and promptly lost my first election.