2020 Omigodtheykilledkenny presidential election

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Omigodtheykilledkenny presidential election, 2020

2015 ←
March 31, 2020 (2020-03-31)
→ 2025

  Chiang-2020.jpg Sandberg.png
Candidate Jenny Chiang Vernel Sandberg
Party Conservative Liberal
Home state District of Pacifica Marsh Islands
Running mate Justin Grey Brunhilde Bokk
Electoral vote 378 365
States carried 20 15+D.P.
Popular vote 99,194,728 97,210,834
Percentage 50% 49%

The Kennyite presidential election of 2020 was held on March 31, 2020 in all 35 states plus the District of Pacifica. Incumbent President Sammy Faisano had decided not to seek another term in office; therefore, voters chose between Conservative nominee and current National Security Adviser Jenny Chiang and "Liberal" Federal Assemblyman Vernel Sandberg. Also the "third parties" fielded candidates that no one gave a shit about. Chiang defeated Sandberg by a razor-thin margin, both in the popular vote and the electoral college. In the (officially nonbinding) vice-presidential vote, Conservative former Téjas Governor Justin Grey beat teen climate activist Brunhilde Bokk by several percentage points. Chiang became the first woman elected president, as well as the first Asian; where Sandberg would have been the first Jewish person. Had she won, Bokk would have been the first bratty child to hold national office (at least since Manuelo Fernanda or Antigone Morgan).

Candidates

President

  • Capt. Jenny Chiang is a Navy commando who has served as a key WA diplomat and national security official for the past 15 years. Nevertheless, at the top of her KBI file, in bold red letters, it says, "WHATEVER YOU DO, STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THIS WOMAN!!!"
  • Vernel Sandberg, 79, is a long-serving independent Federal Assemblyman, an avowed socialist and crotchety old crank who is openly hostile to members of both parties. He spends his time running for office because he lives in a senior community where they landscape the front yards with rocks and thus he has no lawn to chase the kids off of.

Vice President

  • Justin Grey is the former governor of Téjas who has built quite a reputation for chasing pretty young things since winning a years-long fight with the Vatican to have his first marriage annulled in 2007. His current fiancée (and Second Lady-to-be) was just seven years old when the ecclesiastical dispute was settled. Grey's father is former President Frank Grey.
  • Brunhilde Bokk is a Dutch climate activist who at the tender age of 13 has earned more awards and accolades from left-wing organizations than favorable marks at school (which is not hard to do when you haven't attended school for the past 18 months). She is wise to steer clear from her opponent, considering his last four girlfriends were not much older than her.

Background

It was unclear for quite awhile whether incumbent President Faisano would seek another term in 2020, but several disastrous incidents in 2019 started to make some commentators and pundits doubtful about another run, including when Frowning Street staffers arranged a generous gift of a lifetime supply of Bigcups™-brand brassieres for the visiting Queen of Thessadoria, only to discover upon her arrival that (unlike most of of her countrywomen) she was actually modestly endowed at best; when Vice President Jack Riley suddenly pulled out his trusty AR-15 and opened fire on a squadron of Palentine dolphins in a portable aquarium set up in the Federal Assembly gallery, thus ruining the State of the Union address Faisano was right then delivering; and when the president's visit to London's Tower Bridge was disrupted by a run-in with the evil Mysterio, who had hijacked the late Tony Stark's drone army to target Sammy and his friends whilst unleashing a nightmare of simulated terror upon the city-- well, you get the picture.

In June of that year, Faisano announced that he had had enough and that he would decline another term as president...thus unnerving a significant number of people who knew that without Faisano on the ballot, a fearsome host of psychopaths would be in the running to succeed him. Faisano's friends Jimmy Baca, Antoin Venn, and a number of other State Department officials urged the president to reconsider. Approximately 55,638 members of the dreaded Deep State followed suit. The Palentine's Horatio Sulla delivered a letter signed by hundreds of WA diplomats who feared that if Faisano didn't run, the next Kennyite president would blow up WAHQ. And His Holiness the pope issued a bull proclaiming that Faisano (notwithstanding the fact that he wasn't even Catholic) would be immediately welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven upon his death if he agreed to remain in office "and hold off the impending Apocalypse" that would surely occur if some lunatic were allowed to take his place. Still, Faisano refused to budge.

Conservative primaries

As it turned out, the fears of Faisano's supporters were not without base, as the first prominent members of the president's own party to announce were bomb-throwing neocon hardliners like Vice President Riley, Capt. Chiang and Assemblywoman (and frequent cable-news talking head) Erica Dolittle. In a veritable fit of quasi-desperation, the administration offered up Secretary Baca as a "sensible" alternative. Also former Governor Grey ran, most assume for laughs. Baca (campaigning under the slogan "Jim!") rose to second lace in most polling, while Chiang maintained a modest lead.

In the first primary debate, held in a lavish Paradise City hotel ballroom, the hotel's resident "feline ambassador," Bubbles, quietly wandered into the venue, causing Riley to point and scream hysterically at her for several minutes before finally racing up the aisle for the main exit. So he was out. About a month later, Dolittle was discovered aboard the yacht of billionaire Arab Prince Mohammed Mohammed Hamid Mohammed, lounging topless on the deck and committing acts which are not appropriate to describe to our underage readers. Neither the media nor the voters could care less about the partial nudity or PG-13 sexual content, but the fact that the congresswoman would canoodle with a known Muslim (and therefore a terrorist) was just too much for them. So she was out too. A random floozy lept into Grey's arms during a campaign rally in November and he wasn't heard from again.

Meanwhile, in the race between the actual candidates for president, Chiang put together a strong platform of deriding Baca as "low energy" and mocking the size of his hands. ("No wonder your wife keeps fooling around on you!" she quipped in one debate.) For this, voters awarded her big wins in most key primary contests, while Baca prevailed narrowly in a handful of mostly left-leaning states. He was forced to drop out after Super Tuesday, leaving Chiang as the presumptive nominee.

Liberal primaries

Sandberg did have opponents for the Liberal Party's nomination, but the media and prominent party leaders were too obsessed with the fact that they were all white guys to care. The assemblyman easily clinched the nomination while CNN's analysts were still quibbling over whether Senator Elijah Norman's dubious claims to Xtap ancestry made the field "diverse enough."

Campaign

This election found the candidates lobbying for support under the shadow of the novel Chinese-Mexican Tecatevirus pandemic, so both of them campaigned mostly online with Webcasts, Internet videos, and live-streams of "major" speeches on social media. Chiang did brave to travel some around the country, hosting mainly small gatherings in intimate locales such as voters' homes and community centers; she also greeted individual voters (awkwardly enough, while wearing a facemask and maintaining a safe distance) outside supermarkets, drug stores and other "essential" businesses that remained open. Even more awkwardly, she continued to hold briefings with small gaggles of reporters, despite having tortured many of them in the past and all-but-promising that her tense relationship with the media would be no different if she were president. Sandberg preferred to stick to his tried-and-true method of campaigning that had always served him well as an assemblyman in Marsh Islands: ranting and raving like a maniac on a local streetcorner.

As a sign of the times, the campaign focused mostly on domestic issues like health care and protecting the homeland. Chiang committed herself to completing Faisano's space elevator -- despite complaints that the existing section that had already been built was causing the planet to wobble -- and use it to transport illegal immigrants and "Typhoid Marys from the West Pacific" (referring to the Tecatevirus and its suspected region of origin) to orbital detention facilities. Sandberg pledged to dismantle the elevator, slash military spending to the point of defending the homeland with Gomer Pyle-types bearing popguns, and to direct most national resources to combating his preferred bogeyman: climate change, which he insisted was to blame for everything, from wild weather to the Tecatevirus to sunspots. The assemblyman also promised to redistribute private wealth, by force if necessary, and to compel the "MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES!!!" to "pay their fair share" in practically very respect, including Tecatevirus infections (by force-feeding them diseased bats).

Some foreign policy concerns did come up, like when Chiang complained that the Kennyite mission to the World Assembly had "atrophied" due to "laziness" -- even though she was the mission's security attaché and her boyfriend was the ambassador -- and despaired that the Death Star had been used just once since she and her boyfriend stole it. Empress Jhessan and Prince Consort Perfecto's first anniversary also yielded some discussion on Kennyite-Palentine relations: Chiang promised to host the imperial couple for a State Visit; Sandberg called for the empress's "terrorist" consort to be locked up (and given voting rights). Controversy arose over the proposed Chiang Border Wall...which the Kennyites' neighbors sought to build to keep the Kennyites in, with Chiang supposedly torturing several reporters to reveal their sources. ("Hey Kennyboys! The wall just got 10 feet higher!" taunted the WA ambassador from one of Omigodtheykilledkenny's more disagreeable regionmates, the Imperial States.)

Most polls showed the two major-party contenders running neck-and-neck throughout the general-election campaign, with analysts not able to find trend-lines in favor of one candidate or the other. Chiang's brash rhetoric and nationalist populism had cost the Conservatives the narrow advantage they had recently enjoyed in the popular vote (or the so-called "Fernanda/Faisano coalition," which had elected both those presidents by wide margins in 2010 and 2015). Apparently many of the moderate-leaning independent and Liberal voters who had been receptive to Fernanda's and Faisano's libertarian attitudes were now willing to risk electing even a radical socialist rather than give that crazy chick control over the button.

Debate

With the pandemic preventing a live-audience debate, and neither campaign able to agree on an alternative format, Chiang simply elected to visit Sandberg during one of his ranting-and-raving sessions, and stood on the opposite street corner while heckling him with a bullhorn. The incident went viral and generated a lot of press coverage; however, polls showed the "debate" had not changed many voters' minds.

Vice-presidential race

The candidates' respective choices for vice president suggested a delicate balancing act was at play in both cases. Chiang's internal numbers suggested that for some odd reason her scandalous and unapologetic affair with a convicted terrorist had left voters with the impression that she was weak on "family values," so she picked "Mr. Family Values" himself, Justin Grey, to help firm up her base. At the same time Sandberg was somehow worried that the media wasn't obsessing over climate change enough, so he chose teen climate activist Brunhilde Bokk to assist in raising the alarm. Bokk was praised by her many fanboys in the media for her performance in the VP debate, though it amounted to little more than screaming "HOW DARE YOU????!!!!!" in response to nearly everything the governor said. Pundits labeled it "Reaganesque."

Results

President

Omigodtheykilledkenny presidential election, 2020
Candidate / Party State Electors Pop. % Popular vote
  Jenny Chiang (C) Dist. of Pacifica 378 50% 99,194,728
  Vernel Sandberg (L) Marsh Islands 365 49% 97,210,834
  Others (various) 0 1% 1,983,895

Vice President

Omigodtheykilledkenny vice-presidential election, 2020
Candidate / Party State Electors Pop. % Popular vote
  Justin Grey (C) Téjas 378 49% 97,198,271
  Brunhilde Bokk (L) Nueva Jorge 365 46% 91,247,356
  Others (various) 0 5% 9,918,190

Electoral college

The presidential election is actually 36 separate, concurrent contests, in each of the 35 states plus the District of Pacifica. The winner of each contest is entitled to that state/district's presidential electors, (roughly proportional according to population); the District and most states are winner-take-all. The Liberals won all 49 of the District's electors, the lion's share of votes from Nueva Jorge (which distributes its electors proportionally), nearly all votes from the most populous states (excluding Thorland, Fleurdelisia and Téjas), Marsh Islands' 13, and all 47 from Kennsylvania, which Sandberg surprisingly won by 1,300 votes. Chiang won nearly all of the smaller states, seven votes from Nueva Jorge, plus Thorland, Fleudelisia and Téjas, all typically right-leaning. The popular vote for vice president is nonbinding, and the electors typically honor the recommendations of the voters, but in this instance, the Chiang campaign (seeing it had won the college by just 13 votes) arm-twisted its electors into voting for Grey, even if he lost the preference vote (he won it anyway). Thus Grey emerged with all 378 of the Conservative votes, whereas in most elections at least a few electors will cast "protest" votes.