Claremont 2020 Victory

The Claremont 2020 Victory is the novel's climactic electoral triumph, the night President Ellen Claremont wins a second term and, against every expectation, Texas turns blue for the first time since 1976. The victory is not merely a political milestone; it is the culmination of a year in which the First Son's secret romance with Prince Henry was exposed, weaponized by a rival campaign, and ultimately transformed into a public declaration of love and defiance. The event binds together the novel's central threads—the personal and the political, the private and the public—into a single, overwhelming moment of vindication.

The Road to Election Night

The path to November 3, 2020, was forged through crisis. The Waterloo Letters scandal, which broke in late September, had exposed Alex's relationship with Henry through leaked emails and photographs published by the Daily Mail, throwing the White House into chaos just weeks before the vote. The Republican candidate, Senator Jeffrey Richards, seized on the affair and on the existence of a private White House email server, demanding to know what else the server might have been used for and questioning the president's impartiality on issues of international relations and homosexuality. For five endless hours, Alex was shuffled from room to room in the West Wing, meeting with strategists, press staffers, and crisis managers, the only moment he recalls with clarity being when he pulled his mother into an alcove and told her, "I told Raf."

The conspiracy behind the leak was soon exposed. Nora Holleran uncovered the full digital paper trail: Richards had hired a firm that hired the hackers who breached the White House server and the photographers who followed Alex, and then a third party to buy everything and resell it to the Daily Mail. The goal was to induce a sex scandal to win a presidential race. The story broke in the Washington Post, confirmed by an anonymous source on the Richards campaign, and Senator Rafael Luna—who had been working inside the Richards campaign—tweeted that he was parting ways with it. The podcast host Oliver Westbrook called Luna "perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the 2020 presidential race," noting that the First Son of the United States hadn't actually done anything wrong.

The Decision to Come Home

Election night itself was a calculated risk. There is no rule, technically, saying a sitting president cannot host a rally in Washington, DC, but it is customary to do it at home. The Claremont family chose Austin, Texas, their hometown, despite the bitter memory of 2016, when Ellen won Travis County by 76 percent but lost the state they stood in to make the victory speech. The Lometa Longshot wanted to come home again. There had been progress in the past year: court victories Alex had tracked in his binder, registration drives for young voters, the Houston rally, and shifting polls. After the tabloid nightmare, Alex had thrown himself into an after-hours committee with the campaign's Texas organizers, Skyping in to plan a massive election-day shuttle service throughout the state. For the first time, Texas was a battleground state.

The Night Itself

On the night of November 3, 2020, the crowd in Austin was electric. Alex took the stage and invoked history, reminding the crowd that the last time Texas was too close to call was in 1976, when the state went blue for Jimmy Carter in the wake of Watergate, helping him beat Gerald Ford. He drew the parallel explicitly: a reliable, hardworking, honest Southern Democrat versus corruption, maliciousness, and hate, and one big state full of honest people sick of being lied to. "Well, it sounds a little familiar to me, is all," he said, and then asked the crowd, "¿Se repetirá la historia? Are we gonna make history repeat itself tonight?" The roar of the crowd said it all.

When the projection screen finally showed the result, Texas was gray for five more seconds before flooding beautiful, unmistakable Lake LBJ blue. Thirty-eight votes for Claremont, for a grand total of 301, and the presidency. "Four more years!" Ellen Claremont screamed, louder than her son had heard her scream in years. The cheers came in a hum, in a rumble, and finally in a storm, pressing from the other side of the partition, from the hills surrounding the arena and the city surrounding the streets, from the country itself, and from a few sleepy allies in London. From his side, Henry, whose eyes were wet, seized Alex's face roughly in both hands and kissed him like the end of the movie, whooped, and shoved him at his family.

The celebration was a riot of joy and relief. The nets were cut loose from the ceiling and down came the balloons. Alex staggered into a press of bodies and his father's chest, a delirious hug, into June, who was a crying disaster, and Leo, who was somehow crying more. Nora was sandwiched between both beaming, proud parents, screaming at the top of her lungs. Luna was throwing Claremont campaign pamphlets in the air like a mafioso with hundred-dollar bills. Cash was severely testing the weight limits of the venue's chairs by dancing on one, and Amy was waving around her phone so her wife could see it all over FaceTime. Zahra and Shaan were aggressively making out against a giant stack of CLAREMONT/HOLLERAN 2020 yard signs. They did it. The Lometa Longshot and a long-awaited blue Texas.

A New Family on Stage

When it came time for the victory speech, Alex found himself shuffled toward the stage with his family—his mother, Leo, Mike and his wife, Nora and her parents, June and their dad. He was so caught up that he didn't realize at first that Henry wasn't at his side, and he turned back to see him hovering in the wings, just behind a curtain, always hesitant to step on anyone's moment. That was not going to fly anymore. Henry was family now, part of it all, headlines and oil paintings and pages in the Library of Congress, etched right alongside. "Come on!" Alex yelled, waving him over, and Henry spared a second to look panicked before tipping his chin up, buttoning his suit jacket, and stepping out onto the stage. He gravitated to Alex's side, beaming. Alex threw one arm around him and the other around June, and Nora pressed in at June's other side.

President Ellen Claremont stepped up to the podium and delivered her victory address from Austin, Texas, on November 3, 2020. She recalled that four years earlier, in 2016, the nation had stood at a precipice, with those who would have seen it stumble backward into hatred and vitriol and prejudice. She thanked the voters for choosing her again, and she spoke of her family—made up of the children of immigrants, of people who love in defiance of expectations or condemnation, of women determined never to back down from what's right, a braid of histories that stands for the future of America. "My family. Your First Family." The words gave public, presidential sanction to the love that had been the target of a conspiracy to destroy her campaign.

The second round of confetti was still falling when Alex grabbed Henry by the hand and said, "Follow me." Everyone was too busy celebrating or doing interviews to see them slip out the back door. He traded Liam and Spencer the promise of a six-pack for their bikes, and Henry didn't ask questions, just kicked the stand out and disappeared into the night behind him. The victory was complete—politically, personally, and symbolically—and the two of them rode off together into the night, having made history at last.