Edwins Elected President, Ushering In New Era of Politics

By the Editorial Board

Nov. 2, 2060

Paulus Logan Edwins was elected the 55th president of the United States on Tuesday, riding a tidal wave of dissatisfaction with the established political consensus on automation, rendering incumbent Camila Flores a one-term president.

The election results came as a crushing blow to supporters of Mrs. Flores’ National Liberal party, which has held the presidency for twelve years, controlling both houses of Congress for much of it. Mr. Edwins, an outsider to the Democratic Center party he ran with, represents the heart of the movement that seeks to change how automation integrates with the economy. An Ivy League graduate, he shored up support among a coalition of contradictions; exit polls showed him winning over highschool dropouts and postgraduates by the same margin, with strong support from young people and seniors alike. Mrs. Flores won people with bachelor’s degrees by nearly twelve points, a group that constitutes much of the highly skilled labor yet to be automated.

Mr. Edwins’ unlikely victory began with polls showing him in the single digits. His first attempt at the presidency ended with less than a quarter of a percent of the vote in 2044. But since his last foray in electoral politics, unemployment rates have soared from 7% to more than 15%, validating his predictions of mass unemployment in his popular book Commuter Science: How Machines (Safely) Moving People Changes Everything. He saw a meteoric rise in support after a widely publicized debate with Aswath Patel, co-founder of social media giant MyLife, where a clip of Mr. Edwins accusing Mr. Patel of ignoring the growing body of scientific evidence on the negative effects of social media went viral.

To protest the invasive and addictive nature of social media, Mr. Edwins ran a campaign without having a publicly viewable MyLife account, the first ever. Instead, he chose to promote his blog, started almost fifty years prior as a high school student posting anything from annoyances at school to interactive summaries of his explorations in recreational programming. Though the pre-presidential content is now in a separate archive, Mr. Edwins has continued to post every week, releasing policy and staff details and answering questions selected at random from his email. Though this tactic came off as eccentric to many, it fired up supporters who took this as a sign of his dedication to his values and a new political messaging style.

In the presidential debates, Mr. Edwins’ lack of general charisma became apparent, with his dry humor falling flat to digital audiences, regardless of who they supported. The debate was dominated in tone by Mrs. Flores, who commanded the stage when she signalled her strong hispanic American background in a powerful story about her father emigrating from Brazil, avoiding divisive religious rhetoric along the way. A disruptive electromagnetic pulse generated by an illegal device planted by a staff member interrupted the final debate for two hours, though the exact motive was unclear.

Falling short of most projections, Democratic Centrists saw a gain of three seats in the Senate, two seats short of the 55 seat majority necessary to overcome the legislative filibuster. National Liberals found themselves easily fending off challenges in political strongholds on the West Coast, only for incumbent party superstar Senator Kiara Jayanta to lose her seat in Florida, a state that Flores won by double digit margins. Intraparty critics of Edwins blamed his lack of political experience for failing to gain significant ground elsewhere in the South. In the House of Representatives, the president-elect’s party targeted a supermajority of 300, requiring flipping a net total of 15 seats. Instead, they increased their majority by just four, bringing their total to 289 seats in the 500 member body, eleven seats less than the 60% necessary to expedite some legislative procedures.

Mrs. Flores ran a straggling campaign squeezed by her party’s ideological divisions. Left wing politicians and activists in her party condemned her redirection of money away from Social Security and Medicaid to establish a universal basic income program they viewed as too modest. On the party’s right, citics bemoaned the heavy expansions of other social programs, particularly the lowering of the enrollment age of Medicare to 40. Influential ultra-wealthy donors balked at her platform to effectively eliminate super PACs by capping donations to political groups by any single corporation or person to $1000 a year.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Mrs. Flores emphasized her nine years as the CEO of Click Sprint, an industry leader in general labor automation, claiming at rallies that “no one would be left behind.” But for the first time ever, a plurality of voters picked automation as their most important issue in exit polls from the Washington Outline, with the environment falling from first to third place behind the economy. Of those who selected automation as their top issue, over three quarters backed Mr. Edwins.

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Mr. Edwins is projected to receive 52.2% of the popular vote to Mrs. Flores’ 46.7%, a margin of 5.5%. In the Electoral College, he is likely to win at least 301 electoral votes, though the outcome in North Carolina will remain unclear until a recount is completed in December. Mr. Edwins won every state along the northern border from Montana to Maine. His so-called “citrus coalition” (lemon-yellow for libertarians and lime-green for environmentalists) swept the entire Northeast and stretched down to Tennessee. In recent months, “grapefruits”, or pinks (a more moderate brand of the traditionally red color of socialism and communism), have rallied behind Mr. Edwins.

Though perceived to make up much of his coalition, voters prioritizing the environment supported Mr. Edwins by only eight points more than his opponent. Environmentalists supportive of Mrs. Flores are generally pro-market automation, especially in heavy industry, viewing it as an ideal force to boost productivity and efficiency in carbon-demanding processes. Her loss of majority support from the green base is mainly attributed to reductions in subsidies and tax breaks for renewable energy producers in an effort to reduce the deficit.

Not all news was bad for the National Liberals, however. Mrs. Flores, a child of Mexican and Brazilian immigrants, handily won hispanic voters, particularly in the South. She won all three biggest states, California, Texas, and Florida, states with majority or plurality hispanic populations. In Los Angeles county, where over six million people voted, her margin of victory was nearly fifty points. Despite losing Colorado and Kansas, two states her party previously won for five elections straight, the incumbent National Liberal senators defied polls and won reelection.

From her hometown of San Diego, where she was the mayor for two terms, Mrs. Flores conceded the election to Mr. Edwins, praising his campaign for refraining from personal attacks in an era of heightened political tensions. In return, Mr. Edwins promised to expand her newly established Department of Technology and to work towards her goal of ending “superdonators.”

In a live broadcasted concession speech, Mrs. Flores pledged to support the incoming administration, and called on supporters to embrace being the political opposition for the first time in more than a decade. Her speech was tinged with regret, at one point saying that “[she] could have done more to listen to the American people.” Nonetheless, she struck notes on being proud of her campaign, and ended the speech with a resigned idiom, “nuevo rey, nueva ley.” literally translating to “new king, new law.”

Vice President-elect Renato Steinbeck remarked that the results “proves that Americans have been yearning for change.” Mr. Steinbeck, widely seen as a moderate party loyalist, earned the ire of activists early in the Democratic Center’s primary when he suggested that Mr. Edwins was a “luddite” for focusing on the downsides of automation. Mr. Edwins fired back by noting that unemployment in Mr. Steinbeck’s hometown of Milwaukee was on track to exceed 20%, a figure only briefly reached in the Securities Meltdown of 2027. By the end of the primary though, Mr. Edwins and Mr. Steinbeck had formed a close friendship by exchanging forum posts on Public View, a NGO website for politicians to articulate their positions more clearly. In April, Mr. Edwins selected Mr. Steinbeck as his choice for Vice President, a choice which relieved party heads and irked the left wing in the party.

LGBTQ groups comprised 15% of the voting body and backed Mr. Edwins by 4%, slightly less than the national average. Some analysts attribute this to videos surfacing in August from Mr. Edwins’ teenage years, where he was seen to frequently use transphobic slurs when playing video games. Mr. Edwins responded to the growing criticisms on his lack of strong GRSM policy by claiming he was once arrested in high school for beating up someone who insulted his sister, who is transgender. Willow Pine High, the highschool Mr. Edwins attended, released records showing that Mr. Edwins was only suspended, not arrested.

Both candidates for president continued the tradition of publicly picking their top staffing picks for the executive branch, alongside a go-to Supreme Court candidate. Mrs. Flores largely retained her roster, but promised to cycle out the Secretary of Technology for someone more concerned with unemployment, a move generally seen as subtly moving away from the previous consensus. For his part, Mr. Edwins filled his staffing picks with technocrats, many of whom were derided for not being famous enough to have Wikipedia pages before being announced as the head of a department.

On foreign policy, the candidates differed little. Mr. Edwins supports raising economic aid for education to developing countries, especially in Africa, where automation is perceived as an existential threat to many low skilled workers. Mrs. Flores questioned whether Mr. Edwins harsh stance on Cuban trade was still appropriate given the regime’s willingness to work with diplomats. Neither candidate suggested any desire to intervene in the Middle East, where a political revolution changed the Republic of Iraq into the Ba'athist Republic of Iraq.

The ostensibly sovereign artificial intelligence entity E-Scope was swarmed for statements about the election, but they declined to comment, claiming that nothing they could say would improve the situation from their point of view. On message boards across the internet, disappointment mounted on both sides after E-Scope refused to validate their beliefs about politics, another notch in a long list of conflicts where the entity has remained independent.

Markets remained stable once organizations began calling the race for Mr. Edwins. Green indexes ticked upwards slightly while automation-heavy companies saw moderate declines. Yiannis Vasilopoulos, the CEO of Click Sprint who took over from Mrs. Flores shrugged when asked about the election results, telling reporters, “I have faith that Edwins will do the right things.” Financers on Wall Street did not appear to express worry about any possible structural changes.

On the social media platform Tell, users broke records trending #HLH2, Mr. Edwins’ unofficial campaign slogan: “Humans live here too.”

Mr. Edwins is scheduled to be inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2061.