BTM 2.0: The Eighth Party System

[The_Doctor]

Election Night 2070

Maeve Windham sighed.  New York’s Republicans were calling her from all over the country and she was trying to field multiple calls beamed to her smartband on her arm. News flashed across the band and various messages popped up from all over the state. President Bustos was being repudiated across the country.  

The old Democratic coalition was falling apart. In state after state, a pro-business coalition was aligning with urban voters to repudiate the populist insular Democratic Party. In New York, on Election Night, the Republican Governor had swept New York with 61% of the vote. She had made inroads in the city, winning an astounding 44% of the vote in NYC while taking 65% on Long Island. Upstate, she carried 55% of the vote. The Democrats had made inroads in rural America but tonight, in New York, they were voting Republican.

The world had changed a lot, after all. It was the 2070s and two generations after the Cordray Administration had  changed the world. The old GOP coalition of the 1980s to 2020s was long since dead. For nearly fifty years, the populist liberals had ruled the nation. They had built everything - the hyperloops, the high speed rail, the mass broadband connections, developed out the AI machines that dotted the globe, and interconnected the world even more tightly. And then, as if in fright of what they had done, they had swung towards the insular and become populist … social conservatives and economically, progressive. The descendants of the bra burners and the hippies were frightened of the rapidity of social change and wanted to preserve their gains. Meanwhile, the GOP had fifty years after the historic crash and burn of the 2020s. They had come to bitterly understand that they could no longer be a insular Southern only party. But true to their business roots, they were slowly clawing their way back to the top. The Party was no longer a rag tag team of Southern interests and business leaders but emerging as a true urban party rooted in creating an international global business order. It had been in the foreshadowing Republican Presidency that the Moon and Mars colony had been launched. (To nobody’s shock, they voted like Wyoming and Idaho).

To the lady of the hour, then.

Eliza Arechiga Castile. A lady everyone thought was the leading GOP frontrunner for the White House. The daughter of a prominent one term New York Governor who had died in office, she had been an improbable choice for New York Republicans to be their leader. Tonight, she was demonstrating strength after four years in Albany. Regulations instituted by Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was now considered obsolete and she had chipped away at them - to the delight in many in New York City itself. The old unions were dead, had been for a generation, but stifling regulations and populist liberal policies had caused the city to stagnate.

But tonight was not the night to think of all that.

“Madam Governor?” Maeve knocked on the door. Immediately, the door slid to the right. The Governor and her two children were watching the holographic TV and watching the newscaster deliver the results.

“Maeve,” the governor said without looking up. She was intently watching, taking notes mentally. She was dressed in white. Strange. Eliza always dressed in deep red or blues or whites. Deep, bold colors. One might say, like her personality.

The chief of staff sighed.

“Governor, there are people calling all over the country…” she began.