So as you can probably tell, I burnt out a lot more than I expected, and I don't think I'll be doing the promised wiki boxes. Work has also been extremely distracting from this; let's say that I've chosen to prioritize protecting real-world elections above writing about fictional ones, and leave it at that. The story is considered concluded as is, but I wanted to end it with some final thoughts, including what I had planned.
What I had planned for the wiki boxes:
- The Warren/Kaine administration is in power from 2020-2024. One of their first orders of business is to revamp the legislative filibuster into a delaying mechanism that requires actual talking [rather than a complete blocking mechanism.] They obtain the effective assent of the Moderate Party by passing a bill requiring instant voter runoff for election to federal offices.
With the end of the filibuster, the Warren/Kaine administration is able to pass single-payer healthcare, immigration reform, basic income [funded by carbon tax + financial transaction tax], and a number of other leftist agenda items. However, this sparks a backlash of its own, focused around the carbon tax [think yellow jacket protests, except I didn't actually know that was going to happen] and the perceived social engineering of taxing sundries such as fuel and meat. [As it turns out, red meat-conservatives don't like it when you tax their red meat.]
For those curious, Trump's pardon is accepted by the DC court [and the Supreme Court declines to examine the case]; he is never charged with anything, in large part due to the vested interest of all parties in preventing the perception of a witch hunt.
- The 2022 midterm election sees Democrats lose a stunning 60 House seats, barely keeping a majority. Republicans fare even worse, as the implementation of instant runoff turns them into a third party, unable to defeat either Democrats or Moderates in an effective head-to-head competition except in the reddest of districts. The distribution of House seats becomes something like 224 D - 163 M - 51 R, causing a massive slowdown to the implementation of remaining Democratic agenda items. Republicans, meanwhile, continue shifting even further rightward as only members in ultra-conservative districts survive.
- By the 2024 election, Elizabeth Warren chooses not to seek re-election due to a case of inoperable breast cancer. This is a significant loss for the Democratic party, as she remained relatively popular. After competitive primaries, the general election shapes up with Democrats nominating a ticket of Eric Swalwell/Tim Kaine, Moderates nominating Charlie Baker/Tim Kaine, and Republicans nominating Debra Fischer/Ivanka Trump. [Yes, Democrats and Moderates both nominate two white men, while Republicans have the women-only ticket.] After the allocation of Republican votes, the Baker/Kaine ticket is elected President by a 52-48 margin over Swalwell/Kaine, making Tim Kaine the only individual to serve as Vice President for three Presidents of three different parties for three terms.
Some additional notes on my thoughts on the timeline in general:
- I'm rather amused and pleased to note that someone put together a TVTropes for this timeline [link
here, if anyone wants to take a look or fill it out more.] Achievement unlocked?
- American politics tends to behave as a pendulum; it's very hard in the modern day and age to receive mandates in *support* of a platform, and so decisive elections happen more in opposition to an existing unpopular President than in support of anything specific. I wanted to write a sketch of an in-universe alternate history timeline ["The World Turned Rightside Up?", to lampshade it] as an in-universe examination on what could have been, if Hillary was elected President instead. It goes something like this:
- PoD [from Upside Down]: Republicans refuse to confirm Merrick Garland.
- As a result, faithless elector David Mulinix thinks that the Supreme Court is important enough that he bites the bullet and votes for Hillary. By a 270-268 margin in the electoral college, Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected President.
- With an opposing Congress who refuses almost anything Hillary does [including confirmation of any judges], President Clinton's agenda is restricted to stymieing the Republican agenda.
- 2018 is a massive pro-Republican landslide, with them keeping all their Senate incumbents and winning MT, IN, WV, MO, FL, NJ, OH, MI, and WI, gaining a filibuster-proof majority. Similar circumstances occur in the House, gubernatorial elections, and state legislative elections. Although the Supreme Court stops the gerrymander 4-3, this is delayed until 2020 [as in this timeline] where Democrats have their hopes pinned.
- Unfortunately for Democrats, Hillary is defeated in a landslide election in 2020. Republicans proceed to fill the Supreme Court once more.
- In 2021, the filled Supreme Court overturns the previous decision stopping the gerrymander, and Republicans immediately redistrict everything to the point where Democrats need to win by a 10% margin to have any hope of winning the House. Further, they implement electoral votes going to the congressional district victor on a selective basis [in competitive states such as MI/OH/WI/PA/MN that they control], making it almost impossible for Democrats to win the presidency.
- By 2024, the U.S. is essentially no longer a democracy, as Republicans have stacked the deck to the point where it's essentially impossible for a Democrat to win. Republicans win the Presidency despite losing the popular vote by a 45-52 margin. California votes in a referendum to secede from the United States, and a constitutional crisis looms.
- Part of my intent for writing this story was to examine the idea of consequentialism as a moral theory. Was it the right decision for David Mulinix [given his political beliefs and moral views] to throw the election to the House of Representatives and effectively elect Trump? There's indeed a strong argument in-universe that he makes the right decision here. But at the same time, there's the question of "at what cost?" In the single-term Trump presidency, the world has teetered at the brink of nuclear war, and the democratic traditions of the country have been stripped to the bone - things that could easily have resulted in catastrophe. This was going to be lampshaded by a brief piece in which an anonymous writer posts an op-ed praising Mulinix for effectively saving American democracy - and receiving a million comments criticizing it.
But it also highlights a very real question. If I were a Democratic elector in this world's 2016 election, I'd have to think very very hard about which way to vote.
- Part of my intent was also to examine my own understanding of American politics. I like to think that I'm reasonably informed, but obviously everyone's biased and so writing a fictional piece such as this allows oneself to effectively test their predictive capabilities with the caveat that it occurs in a similar-but-different universe [due to the PoD of course.] Overall, I think I've done reasonably - the area I think I was most successful at [that people haven't really mentioned] is the general psychological prediction that Trump tends to say a lot of outrageous things and throw out ridiculous ideas and not actually follow through [which we've seen quite a bit of in-universe.]
I do feel like many readers have vastly overestimated my predictive capability though at least based on the comments of commentators- there's a confirmation bias/data dredging effect in that when you make enough predictions, some of them are going to seem uncannily correct if you discount the incorrect ones [which can easily be blamed on the PoD.] For every VA-Gov [which I got almost on the nose], there's a NJ-Gov [where I was off by about 20% - and probably should have known better given that of these two states, I actually lived in NJ.] And of course, Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine, there's no Turkish civil war in sight, Trump has pushed on tariffs way more than I expected at the start, Congress was less completely ineffectual than I expected, and a host of other items.
- The random number generator also frankly stacked the deck a ton towards Democrats [as I said, sometimes I thought it had an agenda of its own.] I went into this piece not knowing that we'd get Vice President Tim Kaine - that was an accident of the metaphorical dice. I went into this piece expecting the Supreme Court to turn solidly Republican, with a massive source of conflict as the far-right Supreme Court stacks the deck against Democrats on every level possible. Then the RNG decided to have Republicans confirm Merrick Garland and only have conservative justices need replacement. So this is a lot more of a left-wing universe than I was expecting when I went into the piece [a fact which adds additional nuance to the "was this the right decision for David Mulinix" question.]
- For those curious, I did include a minor cameo by myself in the story. MichiganLiberal is my handle on Dailykos [though I haven't lived in Michigan in six years.]
- Overall, this piece was a successful attempt to vent a lot of thoughts I had on the 2016 election. It also served as a reasonably effective exercise in writing. I have a lot of shortcomings as an author - I can't do descriptive writing at all [which is a reflection of the fact that I can't do descriptions at all in real life. Ask me to describe someone's physical features and I wouldn't know where to go beyond the obvious.] This cuts down a lot of what I can write effectively - both of my timelines have used a news article-style format as a result.
In addition, I'm mentally lazy and tend to take shortcuts. This can be most easily seen by my last timeline - Hope, Change, and Nutmeg [which you can find in my signature] - it was reasonably popular and many people liked it, but it was also extremely uncreative/lazy in that it kept rehashing real-world events to a large extent [and of course it mostly stopped after I couldn't do that anymore.] Forcing myself to write about the near future was not just an attempt to vent about 2016 and test my predictive capabilities, but also a way to force myself to actually get creative. Which I think I did reasonably. Part 1 and 2 of this timeline were rather derivative [I like the original parts there], but I'm quite fond of what I did in Part 4 and the first part of Part 5 [by the end, I was getting pretty burnt out.] If you're wondering on the profusion of numbers in the election results, I'm the sort of person who actually likes building a complicated election model and showing it off - I did the same thing in Nutmeg.
Like I said, the timeline is concluded. But let me know if there are any questions I didn't answer here that you'd like to ask. I reserve all rights to refuse to answer though
