With less than 24 hours until the Iowa Caucus kicks off the mad dash to White House, which candidates will take the early states and the party nominations is anyone’s guess… even yours.

Whether your personal prediction comes from scrupulously dissecting the most recent polls from Rasmussen or taking a looksie into that crystal ball you got for Christmas, a good guess can skyrocket you straight to professional political pundit status this primary season. The policy-minded team behind Fantasy Congress has teamed up with Politico to launch Kingmaker, a virtual competition where betting correctly on contest outcomes can earn you bragging rights and big prizes.

Pop and Politics checked in with Kingmaker co-creator Andrew Lee, a 20-something who says he would rather read blogs in his pajamas than tune in to Monday Night Football, to chat about placing political bets, Hillary vs. Paris and the Internet’s role in promoting civic participation. See the edited transcript of the interview after the jump.

Pop + Politics: So first, to get some background, you launched Fantasy Congress with some help of some friends at Claremont McKenna in 2006, right? So can you bring us back to there and talk about where you came up with that idea— why you launched Fantasy Congress to begin with?

Andrew Lee: Yeah, so I first have to say that Claremont McKenna is kind of like the haven for political junkies. I think Newsweek recently called us the No. 1 college to go to if you’re in a campaign. So it’s really interesting for us because as a political junkie, I have a lot of friends who are also sports junkies. I myself am into sports, but I follow politics almost religiously. So one of my roommates was really into Fantasy Football and I would watch him, screaming at the top of his lungs on Monday night, and I would be just sort of checking blogs on Monday night— kind of alone in my pajamas. Talk about lonely, you know, there wasn’t a community out there of political people whom I shared a lot of interest with and also at that same time that kind of sports fervor.

So I had this idea, what if instead of drafting football players you could draft members of Congress? Instead of being a coach of a football team, you’re a political operative and you’re basically choosing who you think is going to be a winner in Congress. So we launched Fantasy Congress in October of 2006 and one thing lead to another and eventually we were on the New York Times. It was really, it just started out as a hobby because we were a bunch of political geeks who were interested in drafting Barack Obama and then trading him for John McCain or dropping Hillary Clinton and putting her on the bench.

You say that Claremont McKenna is a really politically active college and you kind of had this fervor for politics. Do you think that’s unique among college students today? We students have this reputation for being kind of apolitical and apathetic. Do you think that proves true, do you think you’re an anomaly?

I actually think that maybe it’s the people I hang around with, but I really think that people at least within our generation are starting to care a lot more, they’re taking a lot more civic action. You’ll notice it’s actually kind of trendy to go ahead and wear like a “Stop Genocide in Darfur” shirt or trendy to be able to go to a Barack Obama rally. According to some of my friends that’s the place to go and like meet fine young ladies. I really think that there’s this renaissance that’s occurring among young people. To be fair, I mean we’re still going to care about maybe Paris Hilton than we will about Hillary Clinton, but I think we care a lot more than people think.

I think though one of the main questions with that sort of renaissance of political engagement among young people is Will those shirts, will going to those trendy rallies—in L.A. Obama was at Area and Hillary was at The Abbey earlier this year —will that sort of involvement translate to young people turning out at the polls, either in the caucuses, primaries or next November?

I definitely think so. I don’t know if anyone’s ever shown the math graph of this but among young voters, at least in 2004, there was a bigger increase in young voters than in any other demographic… I definitely think in 2008, you’re going to see a huge turnout from the youth. I mean we’re using MySpace, Facebook… There’s also young people like me trying to increase political engagement through things like internet websites and trying to make it more like sports.

I read at Politico that at Fantasy Congress you’ve had more than 78,000 users, and you said a large portion of those are high school and college students. We just talked about Facebook and MySpace and these sorts of things as vehicles for online political engagement, but what do you credit the site’s popularity among young people to— is it the medium, the media buzz, integration into the classroom, or all three?

So, for Fantasy Congress, I think the No. 1 reason [it has gained popularity] is it’s an educational tool. I mean, it’s way cooler than watching School House Rock in the ’70s, but beyond just that, I think that Fantasy Congress is a lot of fun. We were experimenting with this before, when we play Fantasy Congress to actually turn on CSPAN. CSPAN is typically pretty boring, but [with Fantasy Congress] you can look up the stats of a certain member of Congress and see what’s going on and you can trace them… You’re actually participating in the process and you know what’s going on, versus most of the time, on CSPAN, you have no idea what’s going on…most of the time it’s just people who are grandstanding and sure there are representatives and senators, but at the time, as you’re watching, there’s this disconnect… And what we want to do is always draw out the personal aspect. So as an educational tool it’s a lot better than School House Rock and it’s a lot better than just reading a government textbook. It’s much more interactive.

Besides that, we think it’s a pretty fun game. Having like a [sport-style] draft is always fun, especially if you’re in classrooms, you’re in high school or you’re in college or you’re just a bunch of young political junkies who watch Jon Stewart… you’re kind of competing among each other. It’s about who gets a particular member of Congress, or who’s going to do well in Congress…

Kingmaker sort of plays upon that same sort of competitive edge among young people, putting your two cents in and betting against everyone else. So where did this idea come from?

Fantasy Congress is basically a Congressional game. So if you want to pay attention to Congress and you want to fill your plate with legislative votes and news, you go to Fantasy Congress. Now a lot of people pay attention a lot more to the elections, especially the presidential primaries, so we thought to ourselves, ‘Well, you know it would be really cool to do an election game.’ What’s the No. 1 thing people care about in the elections? Well usually they care about the winning and they rally care about being able to predict the odds, so just like in Football, people care about if the Denver Broncos are going to win on Sunday, or if you can predict the spread if someone is going to win or lose. So we thought to ourselves the same way, can we make something where instead of having an office pool based on football, can we have an office pool based on the elections. That was the small goal, the bigger goal is to find the next big political pundit. We think that person is going to be young, they’re going to be articulate and be a really cool person. He or she is out there. So it’s essentially going to be the equivalent of the ESPN Sports Center for politics.

It’s a fairly simple game, all it is is the primaries and contests are coming up for the presidential candidates, so if you think Rudy Giuliani is going to take 46 percent to 52 percent, you can go ahead and wage that, and if you win, you get a certain number of points, and the person with the most points at the end of the primary season gets to go to the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Are you drawing a lot of users already? Do you see predictable correlations, like, do bets correlate with polls or with the amount of media attention a candidate is getting? Do you have any idea at this point about the rationale for peoples’ predictions?

Yeah I do. We see a lot of correlation with the polls. Predictions actually fluctuate from day to day. They get lower or higher as a result of good or bad news.

Are we taking both the average of overall predictions and individual user predictions as well?

At least the average. So that means that individual users are changing their predictions as time goes by. It’s really interesting because it’s a really good way, first, for people to get engaged with their friends, co-workers, and so on, but also at the same time to really pay attention to politics, there’s motivation because there’s a big payout at the end: you can either win a trip to the White House Correspondents Dinner or like $6,000 from Amazon.com. So we want somebody to win. And we want to find that person out there who wants to be the next political pundit because we think it’s just so difficult to become Tim Russert— you have to go through all of these hoops. [With Kingmaker,] you can just bypass that whole thing and prove that you’re a political junkie because you probably know a lot anyway.

And you can also win points or political cred, ‘campaign cred’ I think you call it, by backing your predictions in a forum?

That’s right. The way it works is you earn points based on how you predict the outcome of primaries, but you can also earn points off of pundit predictions. So we’ll also ask questions such as, “Who do you think is going to be the first candidate to drop out of the Democratic [nomination race] after the Iowa Caucuses?” You build a larger air of credibility by also discussing and sort of justifying why you said those certain things. So that allows us then to be able to find and feature people who are making really interesting discussion and who are really contributing a lot to what they think about the election.

And what sort of user demographic have you seen in Kingmaker so far?

We’re working with a lot of young people. Primarily I think because young people are a lot more savvy with the technology. What we’ve created is totally the first of its kind, and we’re proud of it… I think we’re also seeing some senior citizens, because Politico’s audience is much older. As a result of that, we’re seeing [users] across the board. We’re talking about senior citizens who probably watch Jon Stewart and young people who probably watch CSPAN, or vice-versa. It’s really just anybody who wants to play who really wants to contribute to win or to have fun with their friends.

And in terms of users, are you worried about cyber vigilantes from campaigns flooding the site and putting on high predictions for their own candidates and skewing the results and the spread of the game?

Sure someone can skew the results of the game but that’s not going to change reality. That’s just going to make the user look dumb. Here’s an example: we’ll use sort of the ultimate example of Ron Paul. Whenever he’s on Digg.com everyone ‘diggs’ him up because everyone loves Ron Paul for some reason. He’s like the internet president. But the thing is, what matters is the way voters in Iowa react to Ron Paul? I mean the reality is he might do well because he has quite a bit of money, but the big question is whether or not he translate that into success. If you really sincerely believe he’s going to get 50 percent of the vote, then go ahead, play that way. Our system [calculates] what the real actual vote percentage is and then what your intended outcome is. You’re going to lose a lot of points when you get it wrong.

Have you been able to track users at all by where they’re playing from. Are you seeing a lot of people in early states like Iowa and New Hampshire playing the game?

Oh yeah totally, it’s kind of amazing. If you go from across the board, we just got a guy call from the Midwest and a guy from Tennessee who is playing and he really enjoyed the game. Folks are really interested, I think, in seeing how they do in relation to what’s going on. These things are happening all the time, where people have election pools and compare them with election results all the time. But really we’re providing a medium for something that’s been occurring for a very long while.

In terms of the medium, there’s definitely been a huge trend in using theses sorts of games and interactive media as a vehicle for civic engagement, to draw people, as you said, from across the board. There are games about everything from the crisis in Darfur to the game on gerrymandering. Why do you think these sorts of games are an effective tool for promoting civic engagement and what’s the appeal?

That’s a great question… Here’s the thing, when TV first came out, everybody had previously listened to radio. So on TV they were basically just filming these guys who were reading radio reports. So it was just kind of like they were filming radio the whole time. And I think the same thing is happening with the internet… where people were really thinking “well why don’t we just copy print,” so it was essentially like a newspaper. And then people starting thinking “well why don’t we make it like TV,” so we have less time sitting in front of the television…

The power of the internet is not that it’s just this new distribution network where you can consume more news than you can watch on TV… it’s really supposed to be more interactive. There are possibilities with the internet that have not been realized quite yet. Not only is it interactive and collaborative, but it’s something that’s a really great engaging tool. The internet gives you people in realtime, the medium itself is like a person whom you can actually reach out to… and be able to play a game with and feel like it’s happening just then. That’s what we’re trying for with Kingmaker.

Chris Swain [one of the creators of] The Redistricting Game sees their efforts almost as the new frontier of journalism because it’s using true events and true numbers to educate the public and get them involved, do you see your role at all like that?

For us, our company has always felt that to create a sustainable company and one that truly believes in helping the world, we care a lot about getting people involved in politics and really getting them excited about it. It’s a new frontier for journalism, in terms of creating more content, but at the same time it’s really just another way that we’re able to go and connect people… the issues, the people and the candidates they care about.

That’s something I think that changes the way the election is working in general. You have not only the use of MeetUp.com, but what we’re talking about now, people are actually submitting videos to campaigns and asking candidates questions. It seems to have a lot more interesting buy-in as opposed to things that are filtered by politicians’ handlers.

Have you gotten any response from any of the campaigns? Any feedback on the game?

Not yet, not yet, but I for sure know that there’s at least one campaign that’s playing at least a little bit. But no feedback yet. I think it’s important for them to go and focus on their campaigns, and it’s so great if they want to go out and play, but for all those who aren’t able to go to Iowa or live in New Hampshire, it’s still going to be really interesting to see what these [people] have to say about our game.

The title of the game, the idea of a kingmaker… kingmakers traditionally are individuals with a lot of money or established political allegiances that they can wield to guide or influence an election. Is your game an attempt to stand that tradition on its head?:

First of all, the most important power that everybody has is their vote. Your vote is probably the most important thing that any politician cares about… We’re trying to find that person out there who builds up the most points and who is going to predict how Iowa and other places out there are going to turn out. It’s that simple. That’s the person we’re searching for: the next big political pundit, the next kingmaker.

What are your plans for the site in the future and your involvement in political gaming? Do you guys have more games in development or are you going to work on Fantasy Congress and Kingmaker through 2008?

Kingmaker right now is just a presidential primary, so we’re definitely still going to be working on a larger election version. This is the testing ground to see how it turns out, to get responses from the community, to see how people feel about it. But after that, you’re going to see a big election edition, which we hope will encompass state and local and federal elections. We’re still going to be working on FC and developing that as an educational product. We do have another project that we’re probably going to be working on, but that’s probably going to be after the 2008 elections, [a project targeted at] making government more effective— as we always try to do with our products.

Last thoughts? Anything you want to add?

Sure, just play and let us know what you think. Just click on the red feedback tab on the left or send us a quick e-mail; it’s really easy to do. We love criticism, more than praise most of the time. We just really care about making something that’s useful and fun for a lot of people.

Tags: caucus, fantasy congress, iowa, kingmaker, primaries