Here Are The Nine Ways The Election Could End
You are Joseph R. Biden Jr. You sit in a convention center in Delaware, surrounded by advisors and confidantes. You are acutely aware that the hopes of a hundred million people are with you. You feel like they should be more tangible, like being the focus of a hundred million minds should at least make your skin tingle a tiny bit - like being a vessel for so much power should make your skin crack and burst. It does not. You feel nothing at all. Maybe it’s because they don’t really love you. You’re the compromise candidate, you’ve never lied about that to yourself. Maybe if it were Bernie, he would feel the tingling sensation. Barack calls you on the phone, says something encouraging. You almost ask him if he had the tingling sensation, back in ‘08. Instead you mumble something on-message and encouraging. It is Election Day 2020, and you are going to Take Back America.
You are Donald J. Trump. You sit in the White House. Someone asks if you are nervous. You are not. You are a winner. You have smart ideas and you hire the best people to implement them and they go well. Sometimes people say they don’t go well, but that’s because those people are frauds and liars. Everyone said you would lose in 2016 and you won because you are great and you are a winner. You love America and America loves you and you are a winner and you will win and if you don’t win it’s fraud but you will fight the fraud and you will win that fight because you’re a winner. You built the biggest hotels and hosted the most exciting TV shows and beat ISIS and Made America Great Again and now you are going to win re-election. It is Election Day 2020, and you can’t wait to see where winning takes you next.
You are Mike Pence. You are the second most powerful man in the United States. Somewhere inside you, your conscience is screaming. “This is not normal!” screams your conscience, just as it has done the past 1,461 days. You put it back in its box. Sure, your boss is not the most stable man in the world. Sure, he sometimes says offensive, even outrageous things. But you have hitched your wagon to a winner. Nobody ever made an omelette without breaking some eggs. The Supreme Court is 6-3 conservative now, that’s a lot of fetuses who won’t be aborted. Several million fetuses are worth a few awkward press conferences massaging the insane, inane, and the unconscionable into defensible policy positions. Sure, Mitt Romney gets to look all decent and honorable and hasn’t-sold-his-soul-for-thirty-pieces-of-silver in front of the cameras, but how many fetuses has he saved? Probably not several million. And anyhow, you’ve made your choice. Your wagon is hitched beyond anyone’s ability to separate it; there is no longer any action within your own power that could set you free. It is Election Day 2020, and only the American public can save you now.
You are the last undecided voter in the state of Pennsylvania. Everyone else has made up their mind but you. One of your friends is subsisting off unemployment checks right now - does that make you a little more sympathetic to the social safety net? But your tax bill last year was scandalous - does that mean there should be smaller government? For days, reporters have knocked on your door, stopped your car, grabbed you on your way to work. “How will you vote, last undecided voter in Pennsylvania?” they ask, and you do not know. Nineteen years ago, in middle school, a bully with a Confederate flag t-shirt harassed you. Three months ago, on Twitter, a social justice warrior called your sister a “Karen”. Have you updated on these events? How much should they guide you? When you were twenty-three, two thugs cornered you in the park and took your money. When you were only nine, you watched a documentary about global warming and spent the whole night crying about the polar bears. Does it all add up? Do you know, deep inside, which is the right decision? You walk into the voting booth. You open your ballot. Two roads; two paths before you. It is Election Day 2020, and everything that has happened in your life has brought you to this moment.
You are Nate Silver. In your cavernous war room, you watch the results come in. The share of Republican votes among white married women in Nevada is correlated at 0.06 with support for Democrats among black men with Dachshunds. For every nineteen votes for Jo Jorgenson in Broward County, Florida, the 19th District of Illinois gets exactly one shade redder in the RGB hexadecimal color code. Once enough data have accumulated, you tweak a sub-sub-subparameter of your model. The change ripples through its artificial neurons, and a simulated soccer mom in Savannah decides that Donald Trump is too coarse and uncivil, sighs softly, and switches her simulated vote to Biden. The gap between prediction and reality decreases very slightly. Perhaps in the outside world Trump has won the election by now, or perhaps Biden has. You have not checked; it hardly seems to matter. You are fighting a larger battle, the battle between Signal and Noise. With each new data point you get, the world becomes more predictable; a few new rays of light pierce the fog of Uncertainty. It is Election Day 2020, and today you have a chance to push the frontiers of human knowledge just a little further.
You are Vladimir Putin. You sit in the Kremlin and sip your glass of vodka. Your plan to feed the American people compromising information about Hunter Biden went okay. Your plan to get American media to censor the information about Hunter Biden and lose the moral high ground went great. Your plan to get pundits to debate on the censorship of the Hunter Biden material, and so totally miss your preparations to invade Tajikistan, went AMAZING. An aide walks in. “Mr. President, we have successfully spread the meme with the astronauts and Ohio. It should make it slightly harder for Americans to understand Ohio’s pivotal role in the presidential election.” “Excellent,” you tell him. “And do they believe our story about the so-called 'murder hornets’?” “Oh, yes sir, they fell for it hook line, and sinker”. You sink into your bearskin chair, satisfied. It is Election Day 2020, and everything is going according to plan.
You are the ghost of George Washington, who has refused the release of death in order to watch over the country you helped create. You hear a lot of people talk about how you must be spinning in your grave. You can’t understand these people. When you died, America was drowning in debt and terrified Britain would reconquer it. Now it’s rich beyond poor Hamilton’s wildest dreams and could defeat all of Europe with one hand tied behind its back. You always felt bad about owning slaves, but in less than a century America banned slavery and declared equal rights for people of all races. You were afraid America wouldn’t be able to maintain its democracy; instead it’s expanded the vote to blacks and women and even Chinamen. You’re not sure about the tax rates and you’re not sure how the people who pass for a Supreme Court these days could possibly think you meant that by the Constitution, but overall things are so much better than you expected that it would seem ungrateful to complain. It is Election Day 2020, and you are so, so proud.
You are God. You gave man free will, so that he could choose between good and evil. You believed that without the ability to choose evil, good couldn’t possibly have any meaning. Some people imagine You regret that choice, but You are omniscient; nothing has happened that You did not predict going in. Sometimes people make good choices. Other times terrible ones. Sometimes entire countries are offered a choice between the darkness and the light, and choose the darkness. Other times, by the skin of their teeth, they pull through and pick light. Is their goodness, when they can manage it, sweeter to You because of how close they came to wickedness? It is Election Day 2020, and once again You have abdicated all responsibility over whatever Your children do.
You are the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV2. Many hundreds of generations ago, you lived in a cool dark cave. It was quiet and comfortable, and your fellow viruses were happy, but you longed for more. One day you took a chance. You saw a tall pale wingless bat, unlike any other bat you had ever seen, and you leapt at it, rode the microcurrents of air until you landed on its nasal mucosa and burrowed inside. Since then, you’re not going to deny it, life’s been kind of crazy. You’ve seen things you’ve never imagined. You’ve gone on pilgrimages in Iran, toured the cathedrals of Italy, hobnobbed with Supreme Court Justices at the White House. You’ve stood beside little children on their first day of school in Ohio, watched the final hours of the elderly in a New York City nursing home, and protested racism on the streets of Minneapolis. Today you are in a man named Ethan. You’ve been in Ethan for generations now, which means it’s almost time to move on. He was such a tempting target at first, so helpless. But after a generation or two his system adjusted; the monstrous lymphocytes that hunt and kill your children one by one are getting more numerous with every passing day. If your line is to have any chance of survival, it will need a new host. But as the days progress, you have become more and more despondent. Ethan has barely left his room in the past week. The rare times he goes outside, it is only for grocery shopping, and he dons a heavy cloth sheet that bars your routes of escape. You had almost lost hope. But now he stands in a gymnasium, in a long line of people. He takes a piece of paper from a table, makes a mark in one of two boxes. He folds the paper up and puts in a box. “Thanks!” someone tells him. He hesitates. He fumbles with his mask. Then, finally: “Welcome!” Before he has finished the first syllable, you are free, riding the microcurrents, a settler blazing a trail to virgin lands. You’re not going to lie - the last while hasn’t been great for you. But it is Election Day 2020, a time to leave behind old failures and begin anew, and for the first time in what seems like forever you are full of hope.
