Did Election (1999) Foreshadow the Absurdity of the 2000 Presidential Election?

Hello reader! Today’s newsletter gets into some spoilers for Election, so you’re welcome to steer clear until you’ve caught up with the film. I must say that now would be a great time to watch Election, though!

Most people don’t realize this, but a month from tomorrow, we Americans will be electing a new President. I, for one, can’t wait for election season to be over. But I’ve also found myself thinking back on past presidential elections.*

When I think of the 2000 presidential election—the last one that I was too young to vote in—a lot of things come to mind. I think about how my mother voted for Ralph Nader and I thought that made her the coolest person in the world. I think about the Saturday Night Live skits where the candidates each summed up their campaigns with a single word.** And I think about how my scoutmaster Mr. Snow made damn sure that our Boy Scout troop understood how historic the whole thing was.

But I can’t help but think of two pieces of politically driven art as well—both, incidentally, from the year prior.

The first is a one-song EP from NOFX called The Decline. This band was a key figure in my punk rock adolescence and also a gateway drug to my budding political ideology, from 2003’s The War on Errorism to both volumes of Rock Against Bush. For a band that had made a living mostly on 3-minute skate punk songs wrapped in a juvenile sense of humor up until that point, this 18-minute musical saga wasn’t just a radical departure in format—it was rather prescient. Especially when considering it was recorded 19 months before George W. Bush took office. (It might be a masterpiece.)

Sometimes I wonder if Fat Mike and the rest of the band took a songwriting break in the spring of 1999 to see Election.

Despite its title, Alexander Payne’s sophomore feature isn’t about national, state, or even local politics. It’s about the only form of political action that a teenager like myself could’ve taken in 1999: student government, of course.

The film centers around Tracy Flick (played brilliantly by Reese Witherspoon), an overly ambitious outcast who is obsessed with padding her extracurricular résumé in hopes of attending law school—and the SGA presidency is the shiniest feather that she wants for her cap. And though she’s running unopposed at first, history/civics teacher and SGA advisor Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick playing nicely opposite his Ferris Beuller type) dreads working closely with her and wants to “teach her a lesson,” so he convinces Paul Metlzer, the school’s injured star quarterback, to run against her.

As a political satire and a black comedy, Election is thematically rich. And the setting of a high school is perhaps the film’s biggest strength because it doesn’t reduce the story to a simple or obvious allegory. These high school juniors don’t belong to a political party; in fact, one of them just wants to party. And even though the source material was published in 1998 and set in 1992, it’s not an obvious reflection of America in the time of the Clinton presidency either.***

What it is, though, is a story about mistrust of the electoral process altogether. And it’s fascinating to me that both the film and Tom Perrotta’s novel predate the messiest presidential election…ever? (Maybe?)

I will not be re-litigating the aftermath of Election Day 2000. We all remember (or at least learned about) the reneged concession and the hanging chads and Florida’s 36 days of fame. But even though I was only 14, it’s hard for me to forget how confused and exhausted everybody seemed over the whole thing. It felt like most of the adults around me had lost their faith in the political process, and I’m sure many of them never gained it back.

Election couldn’t have predicted this, of course. No one could have.**** But in my mind, the most effective angle of the satire is the glimpse at who’s pulling the strings and holding the whole thing together.

In the third act of the film, the race for SGA president comes down to a single vote—in favor of Tracy. But Mr. McAllister convinces himself that he’s the only person who can prevent Tracy’s rise to power, so he makes the “moral” (but perhaps not “ethical”) choice to throw out two ballots during a recount and hand the election to Paul.***** And he would’ve gotten away with it too had he not pissed off the wrong janitor at the beginning of the film.

The brilliance of Election is that it shows a domino effect of actions and consequences. Sure, Mr. McAllister decides to steal the SGA presidency away from Tracy, but so many choices (“elections,” if you will) made by various characters lead him to that point. Had one or two things gone differently in the years, even decades leading up to the 2000 election—a supreme court justice appointment here, a local or state race there—the outcome might’ve gone differently. Which means the last 24 years would have looked very different as well.******

Perrotta and Payne didn’t have a crystal ball in 1999. Neither did NOFX. But they all knew that there’s nothing new under the sun and that history continues to repeat itself. They just recognized the patterns and understood what America is capable of—for better or for worse. And reader, I hope you’ll do the same as this election season comes to a close. (While continuing to watch great movies, of course.)

*Jimmy Carter’s recent 100th birthday also had me in my political feelings. As a lifelong Southerner, I dream about a day when we can return to the 1976 electoral map. (Well, maybe not all of it.)

**”Lockbox” was a pretty funny gag for Gore at the time, but Bush’s “strategery” will live forever in my mind.

***I am by no means a political scholar—I never even took a political science class after high school—so I welcome anybody to tell me that I’m missing some clear Clintonian parallels here.

****No one outside of Florida, at least. There’s some weird dark mysticism going on down there and I don’t trust it. (I will be in South Florida in four days, by the way. Please pray for me.)

*****Mr. McAllister’s act of sabotage here reminded me of The Dead Zone quite a bit. Now that’s a great film right there.

******This seems like a good place to point out that Barack Obama told Alexander Payne that Election is his favorite political film. Make of that what you will.

Election is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, Paramount+, and MGM+, and it is available to rent elsewhere.