2020 Election Aprils In Abandon

https://i.redd.it/kxx1ojfal0x51.jpg Map of Results. Held on November 3rd in all territories occupied by the provisional government’s armed forces, the 2020 United States general election was the first regularly scheduled election in the United States to take place since 2016. No midterms were held in 2018, however, two snap elections were held that year to elect the members of the provisional governments headquartered in New York and Los Angeles. Of the two interim presidents elected that year, Andrew Cuomo became the interim president of the wider Provisional Government of the United States upon its formation, mostly owing to the NYPG’s role in capturing Washington DC, while Nancy Pelosi served as his interim vice president and *de facto* chief executive of the former LAPG territories.

The partisan situation in the PGUSA was complex. Two major parties had risen in the NYPG since it split from the federal government. The Liberal Party was the larger of the two, encompassing a big tent of former Democrats, self-described centrists, and moderate Republicans. The Green Party was a close second in terms of size, with a base made up of former progressive Democrats and members of the original Green Coalition of the prewar political scene. There was also a third, significantly smaller but still sizable party, the American National Party. It catered to the former Republicans who were not willing to dissolve into the broader neoliberal coalition of the Liberals, including right-wing populists and the last bitter holdouts from the Cheney-Romney schism of 2016. On the other side of the country, the LAPG had developed its own party system, one more familiar but divided along similar lines. The Democrats retained their name and party infrastructure and became the dominant party in the seceded states, while a contingent of progressives split off to form the Justice Democrats (no relation to the group of the same name from our timeline). The Republicans also remained active in a diminished capacity.

With the war making a traditional primary season impractical, the parties picked their nominees with less popular input than usual. The Liberals chose to forgo the process entirely, choosing Cuomo as their nominee with a closed vote at the convention. The Greens were a little more democratic, holding primaries in New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania, all three of which resulted in overwhelming victories for Bernie Sanders, who by this point was a perennial candidate for the social democratic center-left (having already run for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and as the Green nominee in the NYPG’s 2018 snap election). After much deliberation, the American National Party agreed not to run a candidate for president to avoid splitting the vote and ensuring a Sanders win, so long as the Liberals allowed them to hand-pick Cuomo’s next Secretary of State, gave them conferential privileges on the remaining cabinet picks, and withdrew their candidates from a handful of congressional races to give them better odds at winning seats in Congress. The Republicans on the west coast brokered a similar deal, while the Democrats, having already formed a caucus with the Liberals, endorsed Cuomo. The Justice Democrats endorsed Sanders in the same fashion. No third parties launched major bids in this election.

According to the rules of the election as laid out by the reconstituted Congress, both the west coast and east coast required representation on a presidential ticket for it to be considered for ballot access, the intent being for the vice president to take on many of the president’s responsibilities in governing their half of the PGUSA, becoming a sort of middleman between the federal and state governments. For the sake of simplicity, both party coalitions chose to have the president be from the east coast and the vice president from the west, so that the president would be able to govern from DC rather than a provisional seat of government in the west. The Democrats nominated Californian Secretary of State Alex Padilla to run on the Liberal ticket, while the Justice Democrats chose Representative Karen Bass to run with the Greens.

What little polling was conducted indicated a tight race, at times even giving Sanders the advantage over Cuomo. It didn’t help that the Cuomo administration was simultaneously launching an offensive against the Eastern American Worker’s Army and attempting to suppress Navajo revolutionaries in the southwest, two unpopular events which threatened to damage Cuomo’s huge boost in popularity from presiding over the surrender of DC, the reunification with the LAPG and the reconstitution of Congress. Cuomo had to walk a thin line between trying to win back the rogue left wing of the Democratic Party from the Greens by hinting at possible progressive reforms and keeping the conservatives in his party and the National Party happy by compromising on his already mild liberal policies. The message he stuck with the most was that America needed unity amidst all that was going on more than it ever had before, and that what mattered most wasn’t what policies the government upheld, only that it was stable and seen as legitimate by all. This “unity now, policies later” approach was off-putting to many, though. Sanders hammered the Liberals on their refusal to commit to any structural reforms, repeatedly saying throughout the campaign that “‘normal’ isn’t good enough—‘normal’ is why we’re at war.”

The most controversial issue of the election was about its mechanics. Although the LAPG had done away with the Electoral College when it seceded in 2018, it was reinstituted when it merged with the NYPG, a decision which angered many progressives. Their anger was exacerbated when Congress outlined the special election rules, which dictated that the states only partially occupied by the PGUSA—Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania—would be allotted the same number of electoral votes they held at the last census. This wasn’t a major issue for Arizona, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, which were administered by the Provisional Government but for a small portion of their land and population, but with New Mexico, North Carolina, and West Virginia, barely half of the usual electorate actually resided in PGUSA territory, meaning electoral representation for voters in these states would be massively out of proportion with their share of the popular vote. In the weeks leading up to the election, the situation deteriorated even further when news broke that the availability of polling locations was abysmal in these partially-occupied states. In Arizona, polling sites were so few and far between that less than half of the estimated eligible voting population had practical access to one. Virginia and Pennsylvania was relatively well-off, with areas in the center of Pennsylvania underserved but the population of both states as a whole represented to a reasonable degree. But it was far worse in the other states: access to polling stations averaged just under 3% in West Virginia, North Carolina, and New Mexico. There was no coverage whatsoever in the occupied areas of Utah, where documented residents were instead allegedly given passes to vote across state lines. (In reality, the circulation of these passes was essentially zero.) The almost comical levels of voter suppression, which the Liberal administration chalked up to simple unavailability of resources, sparked protests the week before Election Day, some of which became violent.

When the results came in on the night of the election, it was even closer than most had imagined it would be. Sanders won the popular vote by a large margin, but lost the Electoral College by forty votes, a virtual landslide when only 208 were on the table altogether. Already an outrage to the left, the situation was made worse by the fact that 36 of Cuomo’s electoral votes—more than enough to flip the election—came from the five states with severe polling station deficiencies. Chaos broke out in major urban areas.

Even as the initial rioting died down, rage on the left continued to burn in the weeks following the election as one damning development after another reached the public. First were the suspiciously large discrepancies between exit polls and vote counts in several precincts in New York, which went to Cuomo by a hair’s width. Then a report came out alleging that poll workers at a station in Brooklyn had turned voters away earlier than the actual cutoff, which was followed by a handful of similar stories. This revelation was enough to provoke students at Columbia to rise up as they had in 1968, forcing staff out of buildings and occupying them. In late November, the last straw was placed atop the camel’s back: a survey of voter rolls and postal data in Virginia, Arizona, and New York indicated that people who had been killed or displaced by the war were recorded as having voted for Cuomo by the thousands. Major newspapers and TV stations refused to cover this last story in the name of national stability, inadvertently adding fuel to the flames. By this point, regardless of whether or not it actually influenced the outcome of the election, it was certain that the results were fraudulent.

The student uprising at Columbia spread to a number of other universities in the northeast and on the west coast, including NYU, Penn State, and Berkeley. Less bold protests across the PGUSA were continuing to pick up steam, and by early December, there was talk of a general strike in the air.Held on November 3rd in all territories occupied by the provisional government’s armed forces, the 2020 United States general election was the first regularly scheduled election in the United States to take place since 2016. No midterms were held in 2018, however, two snap elections were held that year to elect the members of the provisional governments headquartered in New York and Los Angeles. Of the two interim presidents elected that year, Andrew Cuomo became the interim president of the wider Provisional Government of the United States upon its formation, mostly owing to the NYPG’s role in capturing Washington DC, while Nancy Pelosi served as his interim vice president and *de facto* chief executive of the former LAPG territories.

The partisan situation in the PGUSA was complex. Two major parties had risen in the NYPG since it split from the federal government. The Liberal Party was the larger of the two, encompassing a big tent of former Democrats, self-described centrists, and moderate Republicans. The Green Party was a close second in terms of size, with a base made up of former progressive Democrats and members of the original Green Coalition of the prewar political scene. There was also a third, significantly smaller but still sizable party, the American National Party. It catered to the former Republicans who were not willing to dissolve into the broader neoliberal coalition of the Liberals, including right-wing populists and the last bitter holdouts from the Cheney-Romney schism of 2016. On the other side of the country, the LAPG had developed its own party system, one more familiar but divided along similar lines. The Democrats retained their name and party infrastructure and became the dominant party in the seceded states, while a contingent of progressives split off to form the Justice Democrats (no relation to the group of the same name from our timeline). The Republicans also remained active in a diminished capacity.

With the war making a traditional primary season impractical, the parties picked their nominees with less popular input than usual. The Liberals chose to forgo the process entirely, choosing Cuomo as their nominee with a closed vote at the convention. The Greens were a little more democratic, holding primaries in New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania, all three of which resulted in overwhelming victories for Bernie Sanders, who by this point was a perennial candidate for the social democratic center-left (having already run for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and as the Green nominee in the NYPG’s 2018 snap election). After much deliberation, the American National Party agreed not to run a candidate for president to avoid splitting the vote and ensuring a Sanders win, so long as the Liberals allowed them to hand-pick Cuomo’s next Secretary of State, gave them conferential privileges on the remaining cabinet picks, and withdrew their candidates from a handful of congressional races to give them better odds at winning seats in Congress. The Republicans on the west coast brokered a similar deal, while the Democrats, having already formed a caucus with the Liberals, endorsed Cuomo. The Justice Democrats endorsed Sanders in the same fashion. No third parties launched major bids in this election.

According to the rules of the election as laid out by the reconstituted Congress, both the west coast and east coast required representation on a presidential ticket for it to be considered for ballot access, the intent being for the vice president to take on many of the president’s responsibilities in governing their half of the PGUSA, becoming a sort of middleman between the federal and state governments. For the sake of simplicity, both party coalitions chose to have the president be from the east coast and the vice president from the west, so that the president would be able to govern from DC rather than a provisional seat of government in the west. The Democrats nominated Californian Secretary of State Alex Padilla to run on the Liberal ticket, while the Justice Democrats chose Representative Karen Bass to run with the Greens.

What little polling was conducted indicated a tight race, at times even giving Sanders the advantage over Cuomo. It didn’t help that the Cuomo administration was simultaneously launching an offensive against the Eastern American Worker’s Army and attempting to suppress Navajo revolutionaries in the southwest, two unpopular events which threatened to damage Cuomo’s huge boost in popularity from presiding over the surrender of DC, the reunification with the LAPG and the reconstitution of Congress. Cuomo had to walk a thin line between trying to win back the rogue left wing of the Democratic Party from the Greens by hinting at possible progressive reforms and keeping the conservatives in his party and the National Party happy by compromising on his already mild liberal policies. The message he stuck with the most was that America needed unity amidst all that was going on more than it ever had before, and that what mattered most wasn’t what policies the government upheld, only that it was stable and seen as legitimate by all. This “unity now, policies later” approach was off-putting to many, though. Sanders hammered the Liberals on their refusal to commit to any structural reforms, repeatedly saying throughout the campaign that “‘normal’ isn’t good enough—‘normal’ is why we’re at war.”

The most controversial issue of the election was about its mechanics. Although the LAPG had done away with the Electoral College when it seceded in 2018, it was reinstituted when it merged with the NYPG, a decision which angered many progressives. Their anger was exacerbated when Congress outlined the special election rules, which dictated that the states only partially occupied by the PGUSA—Arizona, New Mexico, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania—would be allotted the same number of electoral votes they held at the last census. This wasn’t a major issue for Arizona, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, which were administered by the Provisional Government but for a small portion of their land and population, but with New Mexico, North Carolina, and West Virginia, barely half of the usual electorate actually resided in PGUSA territory, meaning electoral representation for voters in these states would be massively out of proportion with their share of the popular vote. In the weeks leading up to the election, the situation deteriorated even further when news broke that the availability of polling locations was abysmal in these partially-occupied states. In Arizona, polling sites were so few and far between that less than half of the estimated eligible voting population had practical access to one. Virginia and Pennsylvania was relatively well-off, with areas in the center of Pennsylvania underserved but the population of both states as a whole represented to a reasonable degree. But it was far worse in the other states: access to polling stations averaged just under 3% in West Virginia, North Carolina, and New Mexico. There was no coverage whatsoever in the occupied areas of Utah, where documented residents were instead allegedly given passes to vote across state lines. (In reality, the circulation of these passes was essentially zero.) The almost comical levels of voter suppression, which the Liberal administration chalked up to simple unavailability of resources, sparked protests the week before Election Day, some of which became violent.

When the results came in on the night of the election, it was even closer than most had imagined it would be. Sanders won the popular vote by a large margin, but lost the Electoral College by forty votes, a virtual landslide when only 208 were on the table altogether. Already an outrage to the left, the situation was made worse by the fact that 36 of Cuomo’s electoral votes—more than enough to flip the election—came from the five states with severe polling station deficiencies. Chaos broke out in major urban areas.

Even as the initial rioting died down, rage on the left continued to burn in the weeks following the election as one damning development after another reached the public. First were the suspiciously large discrepancies between exit polls and vote counts in several precincts in New York, which went to Cuomo by a hair’s width. Then a report came out alleging that poll workers at a station in Brooklyn had turned voters away earlier than the actual cutoff, which was followed by a handful of similar stories. This revelation was enough to provoke students at Columbia to rise up as they had in 1968, forcing staff out of buildings and occupying them. In late November, the last straw was placed atop the camel’s back: a survey of voter rolls and postal data in Virginia, Arizona, and New York indicated that people who had been killed or displaced by the war were recorded as having voted for Cuomo by the thousands. Major newspapers and TV stations refused to cover this last story in the name of national stability, inadvertently adding fuel to the flames. By this point, regardless of whether or not it actually influenced the outcome of the election, it was certain that the results were fraudulent.

The student uprising at Columbia spread to a number of other universities in the northeast and on the west coast, including NYU, Penn State, and Berkeley. Less bold protests across the PGUSA were continuing to pick up steam, and by early December, there was talk of a general strike in the air.