The Forward Party is a centrist political party formed in Version V of Battle for the Hill. Based on Andrew Yang's political party, it was the most centrist party in the game.
During Version V, the Forward Party was lead by the Esoteric Liberal Caucus, and existed as a big tent party generally accepting of all ideologies. The only official positions of the party were pro-nuclear energy and pro-boozer rights. As of the final Version V election on October 26, Forward was the second largest party by membership.
The Forward Party would later return for the Version X reset, where it is now the largest party.
Version V[]
The Early Party[]
Formation[]
The Forward Party was introduced in Version V to much surprise, as there had been very little demand for the party to exist in the new iteration. The party was created to be a minor 3rd party, mirroring the real-life Forward Party created by Andrew Yang. However, the party quickly strayed from its intended purpose.
Forward Caucus Control[]
The first person to join the Forward Party was Tammy Swanson, who was immediately given Chair by Chavez, and therefore control of the party. Swanson set out on a mission to shape the Forward party to be a progressive party of gay and LGBT people. Over the following day, many friends and allies of Swanson joined the party, all sharing the same sentiment. Swanson gave the positions of Vice Chair and Treasurer to allies who shared her sentiment, initially making it seem as Forward would exist in Version V as a niche party of LGBT progressives. These LGBT progressives all joined the official Forward Caucus, where they would remain for the rest of the iteration.
Rise of the Esoteric Liberal Caucus[]
Unbeknownst to Swanson, a few relative nobodies joined the Forward Party as well. They were Grant, who was Eduard Shevchenko in his first and previous iteration, his friends Polop, Aero, and Price, and a few other people from their community, known as "The Extremist Map" (TEM). This gang of four devised a plan to bring in as many members of TEM as possible and vote themselves into power. This group, which came to be known as the Esoteric Liberal Caucus (which was never a real in-website caucus, but an unofficial association) after a TEM inside joke, made themselves indispensable to the growth and vision of the Forward Party, therefore winning the hearts and minds of the original founders. With the help of increasing waves of manpower, the Esoteric Liberal Caucus secured control of the party easily without losing any of the original members.
Esoteric Liberal Control[]
Early Threats[]
Upon gaining control of the party, the Esoteric Liberals decided the main focus of the party would be medium-sized states throughout the country. This was reflected by Forward turning states like Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington into solid cores.
As the Esoteric Liberals had been part of the Libertarian Party in the previous iteration, the three founding members were weary of backlash from the Libertarians due to them splitting off despite a promise to join the Libertarians again this version. These worries came to fruition when Penn threatened to declare war on the Forward Party for their treasonous actions, and not ease up until Forward had been completely destroyed. After much discussion and debate amongst Forward members and with other Libertarian leaders, Forward decided to call Penn's bluff. The Esoteric Liberals continued with their own plans in Forward, and like predicted, Penn was bluffing and never attacked, as he would later attempt a coup of the Democratic Party to seize its 100% party strength, an attribute quickly reversed by Chavez after massive backlash.
Likewise, the Forward Party also had to dispatch of short-lived Democratic and Democratic Socialist challengers to their power in Florida, Washington, and Colorado. However, the most threatening challenge to Forward's plans was the America First Party, whose candidate for Florida governor Joseph Vargas almost threatened to win over Forward Party treasurer Johnnie Cochran with the backing of James Ernest. Cochran would ultimately triumph, starting a period of one-party dominance for the Forward Party in the third largest state in the game, an impressive feat for a Party that nobody expected.
Coalition Building[]
As the party was finding its footing, the Party's new Chair OJ Simpson was hard at work spearheading negotiations with both the GOP and the DSA, the imminent duopoly of the iteration, with the goal of leveraging the Forward Party's middling position to bargain for cabinet seats for active members of the party. Johnnie Cochran would cover for OJ Simpson in negotiations with the DSA due to his real-life leftist views, while Herschel Walker and OJ's Glove (Price) would assist with negotiations with the GOP due to the trio's conservative views. The simultaneous timing of these negotiations had led to interesting and often contradictory moves by the Forward Party in the iteration's first presidential election, not helped by the tension between the Esoteric Liberal and the Forward Caucuses.
At first, the Forward Party agreed to share a presidential ticket with the Democratic Socialists, with Allyce as the running mate of Amber Altaha. However, BarrelVA, a leading Democratic Socialist figure, was perceived to have been disrespectful of the Forward Party, looking down upon the party and walking back on cabinet promises made by other DSA officials. Because of this blunder, relations between the DSA and the Esoteric Liberal Caucus deteriorated to the chagrin of the Forward Caucus, who had to keep a working relationship with the party to maintain their joint ticket. On the flip side, due to both Simpson's greater presence and the receptiveness of GOP leaders CivilTheFox and Bazyli Wojcik, and in spite of divisive popular opinion within the GOP, an official alliance between the GOP and the Forward Party was finalized.
The Forty-First Presidential Election was perhaps the most divisive time for the Forward Party. The Forward Caucus was funding and supporting the Altaha-Allyce ticket while the Esoteric Liberal Caucus was trying to stop the support of the ticket to use the funds instead on solidifying the core lands of the Party and building a war chest for expansions. The Esoteric Liberal Caucus was careful not to make any power plays on the Forward Caucus or hint at anyway towards the successful GOP negotiations, while the Forward Caucus was trying to balance between supporting their compatriot in the election and placating the dominant Esoteric Liberal leadership to avoid being couped.
The DSA-FWD joint ticket would win the election by a margin so thin that the Republicans, America First, and the Libertarians attempted to impeach Amber Altaha on the charges of election rigging. By this time, the Forward Party had no more obligations to the DSA and has become solidly aligned with the Republican Party. To officialize the alliance, Congressmen of the Esoteric Liberal Caucus voted for the impeachment of President Amber Altaha, outnumbering any Forward Caucus votes that were mustered against the impeachment. Seeing that the Forward Party has openly betrayed her, Vice President Allyce defected to the Democratic Socialist Party. This would be the only major defection away from the Forward Party for the entirety of the Iteration, balancing out the several defectors that the Forward Party had and will manage to peel from minor parties.
One of the most notable coalitions in this iteration was the Grand Coalition, which was comprised of the Republicans, America First, and Forward for much of the iteration. This coalition was formed in response to the Democratic Socialist Party, which had all but dominated the Left due to the utter irrelevance of the Green Party and the Democratic Party. The Grand Coalition would have their own Discord server, elect whips for the entire coalition, and negotiate spheres of influence over the game map, a process that, while novel to the native BFTH players, was familiar with the leadership of the Forward Party who played years worth of Discord map games revolving around this concept. Sometimes these spheres would devolve into control over how the three parties would divide the seats inside a state where at least two of the parties had a significant presence that could not just be wasted away. However, such a dispute over the deeply contested state of Texas, and a misunderstanding with Republicans accidentally moving into the AFP stronghold of Louisiana, had driven James Ernest, the leader of the America First Party, to walk out of the coalition and eventually sabotage it by any means. In retaliation, Ernest would run an AFP presidential ticket while FWD backed the GOP, resulting in a plurality re-election of Amber Altaha of the DSA.
The Ernest Coups[]
With FWD-GOP unable to have majority without the AFP, the Libertarians, or massive growth (which was plateauing for both parties), they scrambled to find a solution. While Ernest flaunted questionable Discord server elections that made a grand gesture of ending the coalition, several AFP leaders who disagreed with the decision were suppressed. One of them, Emperor Joshua, reached out to the GOP and FWD asking for help in launching a coup against Ernest. OJ Simpson, OJ's Glove, Garfield, and Johnnie Cochran supervised the coup while Herschel Walker was left out of the loop to ensure that someone was keeping an eye on the day-to-day workings and logistics of the party.
While manpower from the TEM community was instrumental in the meteoric rise of Forward into a viable supply-and-confidence party, one group of that community that was deemed to be potentially too edgy for Battle for the Hill was left out, in fears that they would drive out many of the natives, especially leftist and LGBT members, if they actually put their back into their usual behavior. However, with a far-right party posing a challenge to the power of the Forward Party, the Forward leadership had no choice but to tap into these "edgelords" to muster a force of "mercenaries" to help Joshua coup the party from Ernest. The first coup successfully drove Ernest out of the AFP as he was losing to Emperor Joshua, but only one of the other coupers successfully gained any power in the party, with all the other coupers losing to the defending establishment.
Irregardless, the TEM edgelords, led by a Wisconsinite named Ryan Gosling (TEM name: FetusLettuce), became a thorn in the AFP establishment's side, ordered by OJ Simpson to remain in the AFP in a ploy to undermine the party to the best of their ability. But without Ernest at the helm, the AFP establishment started to moderate, and Joshua became a liability to the coup organizers as he became known as a traitor to the party so he was abandoned. Irregardless, FWD-GOP's goal of dethroning Ernest was achieved, and they reached out to the AFP establishment to rebuild relations and restart the Grand Coalition. A new treaty called the Peace of Phoenix was written, which along with updating the spheres of influence specified a condition to keep Ernest out of any tangible in-game power, a condition that the AFP establishment agreed to.
Ernest, in true Star Wars fashion, became a much greater threat when "dead" than alive, as he used his connections to Bernard Caldwell, the owner of a Robloxian polsim named American Roleplay, to hastily raise an army of about 50 Robloxians, a move that for once scared the TEMtards and not the BFTHers... initially. Despite fears that Forward would be couped and destroyed by this army, Ernest instead deployed this army to the GOP. Forward offered to help the GOP defend against the Robloxians, an offer the GOP refused due to the initial confidence, but soon the Robloxians proved to be a viable threat as they were matching and sometimes outpacing the GOP establishment in votes. However, there were massive disagreements between Simpson and Cochran over the response. Cochran advocated for leaving the AFP coupers alone to not confuse them and to not sap their morale while sending some FWDists to help with the coup. Simpson chastised him for wanting to uproot FWDists from their positions to become vote drones, instead advocating for the AFP coupers to abort their in-progress coup to defend the GOP due to them having less entrenched capital anywhere. Both camps of the debate could not reach an agreement, and thus Forward could only send one lone man who had afk'd all iteration to help defend the GOP. Ernest's counter-coup was mostly successful; although Ernest himself lost his vote, all of the Robloxians won their votes. However, within less than a day, the Robloxians abused their power so much that the ringleaders were all banned, ending the coup.
There was a period of time after the Robloxian invasion failed where the AFP was led by a collective of establishment figures that had opposing factions. All of them of course were interested in peace, and the Forward and Republican Parties were happy to re-approach this reforming AFP to restart the grand coalition. However, Henry Lodge reappointed Ernest to power in the America First Party, immediately destroying the Peace, and when Lodge remained insistent on Ernest in power despite warnings from both Forward and the Republicans, OJ Simpson and Johnnie Cochran had Ryan Gosling launch another coup against Ernest and Lodge. With Ernest's Robloxians having been banned and the AFP battered and weary, the TEM edgelords successfully couped Ernest, Lodge, and just about every AFP establishment figure remaining, forcing the AFP establishment to flee to the GOP and turning the America First Party into nothing more than a mere "puppet quad" (TEMtards tend to call any team a "quad") for the Forward Party.
Dormancy and Presidential Run[]
The Ernest coups may have ended up a success for the Forward and Republican Parties, and while Forward has gained a new "puppet state" , the Forward Party itself was heavily drained of people and activity. With the upper leadership of the Forward Party, with the exception of Herschel Walker, focused on the Ernest Coups, the Forward Party began losing elections across the board due to the lack of attention and support given to their regular members. Their hold over the great state of Florida for instance was broken by the defeat of Florida House Representative(s) Lana del Rey by rising star Ron DeSantis, the second DeSantis LARPer to challenge Florida House in that iteration. To their credit, the "gang of five" in charge of FWD did appoint a couple of their most active members to become "lower leadership" with the intention of having them take over logistics and whipping should the upper leaders responsible for these tasks be distracted. While they would eventually take over the Forward Party from the senior leadership, they did not do enough to keep Forward going. The TEM community meanwhile had two high-effort games occurring simultaneously that took the attention of the TEMtards who were becoming weary of Battle for the Hill.
The restart of POWER led to a similar sharp decline in activity for the Democratic Socialist Party as many of its weary members flocked to that game. This, combined with the Ernest Coups leaving behind a massive amount of afk Robloxians to create a new tax base, led to the GOP gaining massive control of Congress and Governorships. With an impending reset, it seemed as if the iteration would end with total GOP dominance. However, Herschel Walker decided to launch a last-ditch Presidential campaign to attempt to win a presidential election for Forward. Walker joined forces with disgruntled Republican Vladimir Putin, and worked towards defeating the GOP. Despite facing a much larger party with much more money, Walker successfully matched spending with the GOP through many generous donations by Forward members, and against massive odds, won the final Presidential Election of Iteration V despite losing the popular vote to the Republicans by a whopping 10%.
Accomplishments[]
Under Esoteric Liberal leadership, the Forward Party was able to become the second largest party in the Senate and House of Representatives for much of the iteration. The Party also held the most Gubernatorial seats and therefore control of the NGA until the party decided to shift resources away from governorships. Forward managed to gain around 60 members at its peak, becoming the second largest party. The party was also one of two parties this iteration to achieve a national strength greater than 75% by the final Presidential Election. To this day, the Forward Party's legacy reverberates as a moment where the BFTH community's insular nature was blown wide open, and an example of a group of foreigners finding long-term success in the community from a position of very little.
Version X[]
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