Okay, managed to stay away from the "options" screen. I did manage to win my first game.
First take: Really lacking in depth. Really it's a matter of click around and campaign more than your opponent, while remembering to raise funds while in the rich states so you don't end up spending two turns raising campaign funds in poor states so you can afford airfare out. There's very little strategy, at least on the 2cd up difficulty, to it. Take the key battleground states: Texas, New York, California, Florida, and make sure you get at least most of the rest of the northeast, and you'll win. Taking these states seemed almost too easy, and there was almost no interaction with the game in the sense of responding to what your opponent does. In fact, I didn't even pay attantion to what his campaign was - if a state went red, I went there and campaigned and maybe bought a couple of ads, and that's it.
Finally, when I was looking at the results from winning the election, another application decided it was the perfect time to steal focus (even though I have tweakui set to prevent apps stealing focus, they still do so) and brought up an alert window. This yanked me out of Political Machine and to my desktop. When I tried to switch back to Political Machine, I got a black box covering a portion of my window, and the music resumed. It never actually went fully back to the game - I was stuck with the black box. I finally had to kill the process with task manager.
