No Adults in the Room: From Election to The Politician

The recent release of Ryan Murphy’s series The Politician on Netflix has inspired endless comparisons to Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election.

- Sarah Skwire

Both works recount the stories of hotly contested elections for the class presidency at a high school. Both take highly ambitious and accomplished students as their antiheroes. Both find the bulk of their dark comedy in the notion that a high school election would or could ever entail the types of campaigning, corruption, and chaos that occur in elections for national office. And both suggest, as a result, that elections on any level and the people who try to win them are fundamentally broken.

Election, however, believes that some people are good, or at least trying to be. The Politician released a tidy 20 years later, gives us a world where everyone runs amok. The difference in attitude between the movie and the show neatly captures a change in the way that Americans have approached politics over the last two decades. In the late-’90s movie, politics is a cynical enterprise threatening a core remnant of earnestness and institutional decency. In the 2019 show, politics is something darker and more empty—a hollow act of power-seeking for its own sake, set in an equally hollow society that cheers it on. In Election, politicians are dead inside. In The Politician, everything is.

WHILE 20 YEARS of American politics have left us feeling that Election doesn’t go far enough, no viewer would ever confuse Election with something like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and its heartfelt story of an innocent and honest politician whose integrity might just change the system.