November 3, 2020

November 3, 2020, is the date of the 2020 United States presidential election, the day Ellen Claremont secures a second term as President and, in a stunning upset, Texas turns blue for the first time in generations. For her son, Alex Claremont-Diaz, the date is the culmination of a year that began with a secret romance, descended into a public scandal engineered by his political enemies, and ended with him standing on a stage in Austin as part of a First Family that has come to embody defiance of expectation. It is the day the Lometa Longshot—the nickname for Ellen's long-shot campaign—finally pays off, and the day Alex, having survived the exposure of his relationship with Prince Henry, can finally stop running and start planning a life.

The Road to Election Day

The path to November 3, 2020, was anything but smooth. The year had been dominated by the fallout from the Waterloo Letters scandal, when the Daily Mail published emails and photographs revealing Alex's romantic and sexual relationship with Prince Henry. The leak, which surfaced less than two months before the election, was a deliberate act of sabotage: Jeffrey Richards, the Republican presidential candidate, had hired a firm that in turn hired hackers to breach the White House's private email server and photographers to follow Alex, then bought the material and resold it to the British tabloid. The revelation sent the White House into crisis mode, with Alex shuffled from room to room in the West Wing for five hours of meetings with strategists, press staffers, and crisis managers. The only moment he recalls with clarity is pulling his mother into an alcove to confess, "I told Raf." The scandal threatened to undermine President Claremont's impartiality on issues of international relations and homosexuality, and Richards seized on it, demanding to know what else the private server might have been used for. But the conspiracy unraveled when Rafael Luna, a senator who had infiltrated the Richards campaign, leaked emails proving the orchestration, and the Washington Post broke the story. By the time the election arrived, the narrative had shifted: Alex had done nothing wrong, Richards had committed a hostile act of conspiracy against a sitting president, and Luna had become the unlikeliest hero of the race.

The Vote in Travis County

On the morning of November 3, Alex casts his ballot in his hometown. He tugs his bottom lip between his teeth, scuffs the heel of his boot against the linoleum floor, and looks down at his ballot. He picks up the stylus chained to the machine, his heart behind his molars, and selects: CLAREMONT, ELLEN and HOLLERAN, MICHAEL. The machine chirps its approval, and to its gently humming mechanisms, he could be anybody—one of millions, a single tally mark, worth no more or less than any of the others. Just pressing a button. The moment is deliberately ordinary, a quiet counterpoint to the chaos of the past year. It is also a homecoming: there is no rule saying the sitting president cannot host her election night rally in DC, but it is customary to do it at home, and the Lometa Longshot wanted to come home again. Austin is deep blue, and Ellen had won Travis County by 76 percent in 2016, but that year no amount of fireworks and champagne corks in the streets changed the fact that they lost the state they stood in to make the victory speech. This year, there has been progress: a few court victories Alex has kept track of in his trusty binder, registration drives for young voters, the Houston rally, and shifting polls. After the tabloid nightmare, Alex threw himself into an after-hours committee with a bunch of the campaign's Texas organizers, Skyping in to figure out the logistics of a massive election day shuttle service throughout Texas. It is 2020, and Texas is a battleground state for the first time.

The Night Texas Turns Blue

The election night celebration unfolds in Austin, in an arena surrounded by hills and streets and, eventually, a country. When the projection screen shows Texas gray for five more seconds, the tension is unbearable. Then it floods beautiful, unmistakable Lake LBJ blue. Thirty-eight votes for Claremont, for a grand total of 301—and the presidency. "Four more years!" Alex's mom outright screams, louder than he has heard her scream in years. The cheers come 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. Henry, whose eyes are wet, seizes Alex's face roughly in both hands and kisses him like the end of the movie, whoops, and shoves him at his family. The nets are cut loose from the ceiling, and down come the balloons. Alex staggers into a press of bodies and his father's chest, a delirious hug, into June, who is a crying disaster, and Leo, who is somehow crying more. Nora is sandwiched between both beaming, proud parents, screaming at the top of her lungs, and Luna is throwing Claremont campaign pamphlets in the air like a mafioso with hundred dollar bills. Cash is severely testing the weight limits of the venue's chairs by dancing on one, Amy is waving around her phone so her wife can see it all over FaceTime, and Zahra and Shaan are aggressively making out against a giant stack of CLAREMONT/HOLLERAN 2020 yard signs. WASPy Hunter hoists another staffer up on his shoulders, Liam and Spencer raise their beers in a toast, and a hundred campaign staffers and volunteers cry and shout in disbelief and joy. They did it. The Lometa Longshot and a long-awaited blue Texas.

A New Kind of Future

The victory is not just political. For Alex, it represents the end of a year of wanting and waiting, of secret rendezvous and nights of wanting, of the whole accidentally-falling-in-love-with-your-sworn-enemy-at-the-absolute-worst-possible-time thing. He had promised Henry they would make it, and they did. Henry is smiling so wide and bright that Alex thinks his heart is going to break trying to hold the size of the entire moment, the completeness of it, a thousand years of history swelling inside his ribcage. When Alex pulls back, Henry tells him, breathless, "I bought a brownstone. In Brooklyn." The future they had only dared to imagine—a life together, outside the constraints of campaigns and closets—is suddenly tangible. Earlier in the year, Alex had dreamed of taking Henry back to the lake house after the inauguration, just the two of them, sitting under the moon and not stressing about anything, cooking migas in the mornings, swimming all day, making out on the pier without caring if the neighbors see. Henry had called it "nice, if unlikely." Now, it seems possible. Alex has also made his own quiet preparations: he snuck off and took the LSAT that summer, a decision he reveals to Nora on the eve of the election. She recognizes it instantly as the simple answer to where he has been unknowingly headed all along, and the two of them begin to plan—law school for him, a master's for her, June becoming a speechwriter-slash-author, Nora becoming the data scientist who saves the world. The night before the election, Alex had gone to sleep propping a pillow on June's knees and stretching his feet out over Nora's legs, a new kind of icon, someone who laughs on even footing with his royal boyfriend on the cover of a magazine, someone willing to accept the years stretching ahead of him, to give himself time.

The Victory Address and the Stage

After the balloons fall, President Ellen Claremont steps up to the podium to deliver her victory address from Austin, Texas, on November 3, 2020. She speaks of how, four years ago, the nation stood at a precipice, with those who would have seen it stumble backward into hatred and vitriol and prejudice, who wanted to reignite old embers of division within the country's very soul. "You looked them square in the eye and said, 'No. We won't,'" she says. She thanks the voters for choosing a woman and a family with Texas dirt under their shoes, who would lead them into four years of progress, carrying on a legacy of hope and change. And she speaks 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. The second round of confetti is still falling when Alex grabs Henry by the hand and says, "Follow me." Everyone is too busy celebrating or doing interviews to see them slip out the back door. Alex trades Liam and Spencer the promise of a six-pack for their bikes, and Henry doesn't ask questions, just kicks the stand out and disappears into the night behind him. The date that began with a single, ordinary vote in a Travis County polling place ends with the two of them riding off together into the night, the future finally theirs.