It’s always dangerous to take active forum users as a barometer for an entire userbase. They tend to be more enfranchised and informed, but this also tends to skew their opinions.
To give a non-London example: Many moons ago now, the card game Magic produced three sets called Time Spiral, Planar Chaos, and Future Sight, which were full of creative and mechanical references from the game’s entire history. They were built with enfranchised players in mind, who would get all of the in-jokes and appreciate the nostalgia. When the sets were released, that top tier of players really enjoyed them. Casual Joes, however, did not. It turns out that without deep knowledge of the game’s history, they were just too confusing. Time Spiral therefore marked a low point in the game’s history from a sales perspective, which it took several years to recover from. (Interestingly, its stock has risen since; Time Spiral is about a decade old, so most players never run into it until they’re enfranchised enough to appreciate it.)
Now back to Fallen London: If you’re interested in, say, Exceptional Stories, then the forums probably give you a pretty good barometer. The same factors which draw people to the forums - e.g. greater engagement and longer-term commitment - also draw people toward Exceptional Friendship, and there is consequently a high percentage of Exceptional Friends among active forum users. Seasonal content, on the other hand, has the opposite tendency. Some players are only fully active during seasonal content, and these players do not generally bother with the forum. (Even if they do, they tend toward ghosting, not posting.) Therefore, the more successful a seasonal event is in engaging these semi-active or inactive players, the less reliable forum activity is as an indicator of trends in the entire player base.
Now, the election is in a strange middle position. An uninvested player who only gets a few levels in campaign activities will have much less of an impact on the election than a deeply invested, maxed out endgame player who campaigns hard for his or her preferred candidate. On the other hand, that uninvested player is probably much less likely to change candidates, and therefore tends toward inertia. Because such players play less, they are less likely to discover worrying data like Feducci’s inability to turn his campaign slogans into practical action. They are also effectively insulated from all the argument and campaigning going on in venues like this. Finally, if they are contributing less effort overall, semi-active players may be reticent to endanger those efforts by changing candidates mid-stream.
It can therefore be surmised that Feducci’s apparent popularity among less active players isn’t likely to change, no matter what we see on the forums. On the other hand, less active players individually count less than a maxed-out, high Notability POSI, so the arithmetic starts boiling down to how many half-hearted supporters it takes to equal one high-profile defection. It’s all speculation at this point how it will play out, but I for one will be looking forward to getting my hands on post-election data.
(Lagniappe Electoral Prediction: Feducci, despite his bluster and vaguely anti-Master stance, may actually produce the most Master-friendly administration. If current information is anything to go by, Feducci has no idea how to actually get anything done, and perhaps no real idea of what he wants done. If that’s true, he’s likely to leave his party leaderless, which could paralyze the Revolutionaries and his other supporters. I suppose that would be an appropriately Neathy irony, no?)