‘Veep’ Predicted Our Election Day Chaos in 2016

In another case of life imitating art, political comedy Veep seems to have predicted our ongoing election chaos in a 2016 storyline about Selina Meyer’s presidential campaign. The Season 5 arc sees Selina’s team alternately call for vote counting to be halted or resumed depending on which benefits them more at any given moment. As many Twitter users have pointed out, this seems to be the same tactic being deployed by the Trump campaign, which has both called for a recount in Wisconsin and demanded that vote counting be stopped in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The first half of Veep Season 5 follows Selina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) & Co. as they attempt to save her flailing presidential campaign in the wake of an unprecedented electoral college tie. Selina is ahead in the popular vote, but she needs Nevada’s six electoral college votes to win the presidency, so she and her team embark on an all-out assault for the state’s votes.

In Season 5, Episode 2, “Nev-AD-a,” Selina pushes for a recount and sends supporters to the state as a show of strength. The kicker? When the vote seems to be going her way, Selina’s supporters chant, “Stop counting votes!” but when the results shift towards her opponent, they insist that poll workers must “count every vote!”

Two episodes later, in “Mother,” Selina learns that military votes arriving from overseas heavily favor her opponent. “You guys have to stop the recount,” she tells her staffers, changing her tune. “You’re going to cancel this recount like Anne Frank’s Bat mitzvah!”

On Wednesday, with Trump’s lead shrinking in key battleground states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (which ultimately went to Joe Biden), the president’s supporters converged at vote counting centers to demand that workers “stop the count.” Later in the afternoon, Trump supporters gathered in Arizona, a state where the president is trailing Biden, and insisted that votes continue to be counted well into the night.

The similarities between Trump’s election strategy and Selina Meyer’s didn’t go unnoticed to Veep fans. “Too real,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Molly Jong-Fast alongside a clip of Team Meyers’ lawyer arguing against their previous position. “Strong Veep vibes from Team Trump,” said pollster Matt McDermott.

Even Veep star Julia Louis-Dreyfus got in on the fun when she retweeted a YouTube clip titled “Selina’s Nevada freakout.”

For what it’s worth, Selina’s electioneering backfires spectacularly, as the incumbent president falls to former running mate Tom James, and then — in a wild turn of events — Laura Montez. She leaves the Oval Office in disgrace with no sense of where to go next. Just sharing for no apparent reason.

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