Red, White & Royal Blue(61)

The biggest bright spot in all the chaos is that his lobbying with one of the campaign chairs (and his own mother) has finally paid off: They’re doing a massive rally at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Polls are shifting in directions they’ve never seen before. Politico’s top story of the week: IS 2020 THE YEAR TEXAS BECOMES A TRUE BATTLEGROUND STATE?

“Yes, I will make sure everyone knows the Houston rally was your idea,” his mother says, barely paying attention, as she goes over her speech on the plane to Texas.

“You should say ‘grit,’ not ‘fortitude’ there,” June says, reading the speech over her shoulder. “Texans like grit.”

“Can y’all both go sit somewhere else?” she says, but she adds a note.

Alex knows a lot of the campaign is skeptical, even when they’ve seen the numbers. So when they pull up to Minute Maid and the line wraps around the block twice, he feels beyond gratified. He feels smug. His mom gets up to make her speech to thousands, and Alex thinks, Hell yeah, Texas. Prove the bastards wrong.

He’s still riding the high when he swipes his badge at the door of the campaign office the following Monday. He’s been getting tired of sitting at a desk and going through focus groups again and again and again, but he’s ready to pick the fight back up.

The fact that he rounds the corner into his cubicle to find WASPy Hunter holding the Texas Binder brings him right the fuck back down.

“Oh, you left this on your desk,” WASPy Hunter says casually. “I thought maybe it was a new project they were putting us on.”

“Do I go on your side of the cubicle and turn off your Dropkick Murphys Spotify station, no matter how much I want to?” Alex demands. “No, Hunter, I don’t.”

“Well, you do kind of steal my pencils a lot—”

Alex snatches the binder away before he can finish. “It’s private.”

“What is it?” WASPy Hunter asks as Alex shoves it back into his bag. He can’t believe he left it out. “All that data, and the district lines—what are you doing with all that?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it about the Houston rally you pushed for?”

“Houston was a good idea,” he says, instantly defensive.

“Dude … you don’t honestly think Texas can go blue, do you? It’s one of the most backward states in the country.”

“You’re from Boston, Hunter. You really want to talk about all the places bigotry comes from?”

“Look, man, I’m just saying.”

“You know what?” Alex says. “You think y’all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head in Bumfuck, Mississippi—there are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy’s money.”

WASPy Hunter looks startled but not convinced. “None of that changes that red states have been red forever,” he says, laughing, like it’s something to joke about, “and none of those populations seem to care enough about what’s good for them to vote.”

“Maybe those populations might be more motivated to vote if we made an actual effort to campaign to them and showed them that we care, and how our platform is designed to help them, not leave them behind,” Alex says hotly. “Imagine if nobody who claims to have your interests at heart ever came to your state and tried to talk to you, man. Or if you were a felon, or—fucking voter ID laws, people who can’t access polls, who can’t leave work to get to one?”

“Yeah, I mean, it’d be great if we could magically mobilize every eligible marginalized voter in red states, but political campaigns have a finite amount of time and resources, and we have to prioritize based on projections,” WASPy Hunter says, as if Alex, the First Son of the United States, is unfamiliar with how campaigns work. “There just aren’t the same number of bigots in blue states. If they don’t want to be left behind, maybe people in red states should do something about it.”

And Alex has, quite frankly, had it.

“Did you forget that you’re working on the campaign of someone Texas fucking created?” he says, and his voice has officially risen to the point where staffers in the neighboring cubicles are staring, but he doesn’t care. “Why don’t we talk about how there’s a chapter of the Klan in every state? You think there aren’t racists and homophobes growing up in Vermont? Man, I appreciate that you’re doing the work here, but you’re not special. You don’t get to sit up here and pretend like it’s someone else’s problem. None of us do.”

He takes his bag and his binder and storms out.

The minute he’s outside the building, he pulls out his phone on impulse, opens up Google. There are test dates this month. He knows there are.

LSAT washington dc area test center, he types.





3 Geniuses and Alex




June 23, 2020, 12:34 PM

juniper

BUG

Not my name, not anyone’s name, stop

leading member of korean pop band bts kim nam-june

BUG

I’m blocking your number

HRH Prince Dickhead

Alex, please don’t tell me Pez has indoctrinated you with K-pop.

well you let nora get you into drag race so