Election Reflections

We're getting close...

For the last few years, I've participated as a panelist on the Regent University School of Business & Leadership's annual Research Roundtable. This year's theme is "Human Flourishing—Its Role in Business & Leadership."

Directed Fiction is my research field, and my big project this year was writing the multi-path adventure novel, “Can You Survive the 2024 Election?” So, I’m planning on talking about that.

Here’s the funny thing: Today is August 16^th, the 2024 Presidential election is November 5^th, and the Research Roundtables are scheduled for the 14-15 November. So, by the time I present my findings, the election will be over and (hopefully) decided. At this moment, I do not know who will win the election, but my future audience will know.

Ain’t time travel fun?

Did I Correctly Predict the Winning Candidate?

There is a nearly overwhelming motivation to look at the data and polls and try to foresee who will win the 2024 Presidential election. However, a very difficult lesson to learn and live by is that the purpose of strategic foresight is not to make point predictions about future events. In fact, the cardinal rule of foresight is NEVER to make point predictions of future events.  

If you wanted to do that, you could simply use a FORECAST (not foresight) like this one:

Take a look at the chart above. This Metaculus question has been doing a good job of charting the rise and fall of Presidential candidates. If all I wanted to do was predict the next winner, I would just refer to this chart… I wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of writing a 175K word novel illustrating ten separate plausible outcomes.

What Have I Learned?

This is the question I am wrestling with as I prepare my presentation for the Regent Roundtable. When I designed my scenarios, I used a 2X2 Matrix called an Axes of Uncertainty Table. The two variables I decided on were election fraud for the vertical axis and economic health for the horizontal axis.

However, when looking at this same Metaculus chart, you can see that Kamala Harris has risen dramatically from 1% to 55% over Donald Trump in the span of just a few weeks. All without giving a single press interview or even publishing a policy position!

Call me naïve, but I learned that in this instance, neither election fraud nor economic health is as important as… well, let me just be blunt… as propaganda. I did not factor the importance of the role of propaganda into my Presidential Election heuristics.

What Happens When Propaganda Collides with Reality?

 We recently had a stock market scare (if you can call trillions of dollars a ‘bit of a scare’), with the markets losing over 1,000 points in a single day. But we're okay now, I guess.

We also have a couple of violent hot spots in the world: Ukraine, Gaza, and possibly the China Sea, and probably several others.

It occurs to me that very different skill sets are involved in promoting a particular narrative versus providing leadership in a life-or-death crisis. Joe Biden was brought down after his performance in his debate with Donald Trump because the narrative they had built around him failed to correspond to reality. What would have happened to the Presidential narrative if the stock market hadn't recovered or if one of these wars escalated out of control?

In the face of a Second Great Depression or a Nuclear War, would the "Girl Boss" narrative hold up?

I Would Need to Rewrite the Book

Knowing what I do now, I might write a different book. If I had to do it over again. Instead of "economic health" for the horizontal axis, I might use “propaganda” or “Control of the Narrative” as the horizontal axis. This could be measured in a variety of ways, with the right side of the spectrum for Republican propaganda, and the left side of the spectrum for Democratic propaganda. (Obviously, both sides are playing the game. The question is, to what extent).

The vertical axis would be more difficult. Working on the assumption that a real-world crisis would likely collapse a political narrative, I envision the top of the horizontal axis with something like “Nuclear War” and the bottom of the axis labeled “Economic Collapse.”

It’s not a perfect model, and a thorough reconsideration might require more than a 2X2 Matrix. This would exponentially increase the number of plausible possible future outcomes.

I would also re-imagine the protagonist. In my current novel, “Can You Survive the 2024 Election?” the protagonist, Juan Torres, is of Mexican descent (a target demographic) in Phoenix, AZ (a swing state). Considering my design elements, that makes sense.

If I were to rewrite this novel based on my new criteria, I think I would make the protagonist a Field Reporter at a major “mainstream” news organization. In some scenarios, the reporter would diligently report the facts in a noble search for the truth. In other scenarios, our intrepid reporter would intentionally lie and smear innocent people to mislead the public and achieve a predetermined political outcome.

In the final end states, I would assign praise (or blame) for the real-world outcomes that were either aligned with the reporter’s stories, or misaligned - causing untold suffering.

I would not be gentle in my descriptions of the possible final end states. There is a special spot in hell for those who bear false witness against their neighbors. Judgment is coming – you know who you are.

What is the Point of Directed Fiction?

When you take a deep dive into all the variables and possibilities, it soon becomes clear that predicting who will win the next Presidential Election is a truly wicked problem that defies any simple solution. But there is real value in engaging in the process. Let me give you some examples:

1. People who fervently supported Joe Biden had to face the real possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. What might your life be like if MAGA wins? Will it really be the ‘End of Democracy’ or the ‘Rise of the next Hitler?’ You already lived through four years of a Trump presidency; you had to realistically imagine what Trump 2.0 might be like.

2. If you are a Donald Trump supporter, the time has come to face the real possibility of a President Harris administration. What will her domestic policy have in store for your job or your business? What will her foreign policy mean to your son or daughter serving in the armed forces? I recommend you ask her about that at her next press conference.

3. If you are a Kamala Harris supporter, you should seriously consider what happens when your side wins. Can you imagine how great you feel when the evil orange man is gone from politics forever? Congratulations! Have a party. The next four years are all yours. How might that work out for you?

The value of Directed Fiction is not in predicting the winner of a particular contest. The real value of the process lies in forcing you to think through the process and to generate contingency plans. This is called being “Future Savvy” and being able to navigate different future states. Not being blindsided by the future is the first step towards surviving it.

How Close am I Getting with the Story I Wrote?

I published this in April. Let’s see how close my scenario aligns with next week’s reality (here’s a pro-tip: If you keep reading, you might get a surprise ending):