Talk Elections

Hello, dear people of Atlas Forum. I’m JoMCaR.

In this post, I want to introduce you to a story I built up some time ago, for which I told myself, “hey, why not publish it?” And here I am, and I hope you like this story as much as I enjoyed creating it.

This story is, of course, about U.S. politics, which I’ve been fascinated about for quite a while. “Ok, but what else?” Well, let me now introduce you to the main character of this story: Altsomn Stmarken.

Altsomn was born in 1983 in Dallas, Texas. His father was from Alabama and his mother was born in Las Vegas, although she grew up in Dallas. He was very sociable and well-driven during both his school and college years. One day, in early 2014, while he was alone and thinking, he started writing a lot of the ideas he had in a notebook, and then he thought: “Maybe I could share this with other people”.

He decided to start sharing some of these ideas to his friends, who were rapidly impressed. He noticed that not only many of those ideas were good, but that he was good at expressing them. What is more, one of his friends even told him: “Dude, why don’t you run for President?”

Altsomn first chuckled (as expected, because he’d never thought about it), but then realized that it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. He started gathering his friends and some of their friends regularly to make speeches about his thoughts and try to solve some of their doubts and issues. Soon enough, he had quite a number of followers, with which he was projecting to build an organized community, a political movement and even a news network.

That’s how Satellite Network was born. Set up in late 2015 by one of Altsomn's friends in Philadelphia, this news network started airing on both radio and television, delivering news and commentaries focused on politics and the debating of diverse issues.

After thinking about his personal political beliefs, Altsomn decided he could join the Republican Party, but he refused to tell any of his followers to do so. Some of them suggested him to build his own party, although he considered it still to sudden to do so.

Instead, he decided to focus on running for a "low-rank-yet-relevant-enough" office in 2016 and  airing the Election Night of that same year on Satellite Network.

This is where our story really starts. In every chapter of it, you'll see how the Satellite Network's Election Night of the presidential years from 2016 develop. It will be hosted by Joe Turner, a journalist who is also a close friend of Altsomn.

Every chapter will start explaining the background story of the election, including how the presidential candidates were selected, what the general atmosphere is, which are the expectations and, of course, how our main character is doing and if he'll run for any office.

All chapters of the story will be written in the "Election Night format"... for obvious reasons. They will include maps in US Election Atlas format, showing projected states (red for Democrats, blue for Republicans), states where the polls have been closed but have not been projected (gray) and states where polls are still open (green). I'm also hoping to create downloadable audio and video versions of every chapter. Hopes that comes true.

Now, I have some questions for you:

-Would you like the Election Night chapters to include Senate and House races? If yes, which candidates would you like to see running and for which office?

-Would you like to see the Electoral College change through time? I was not thinking of doing that, but I'd like to read your opinion about it.

I guess that's all for now. See you, and hope you enjoy it. I'll leave you with a phrase Altsomn told his friends in one of his first speeches:

"Change doesn't start when a polititian starts a campaign or when a congressman introduces a bill. It starts when a person like you or me makes a decision".