“Nobody’s really asked me how I’ve felt about all this, and I don’t really know either,” said Kevin Clerkson.
Photo by Farhad Taraporevala
In the tightly contested race for the 2024 presidential election, much effort has been made by both major parties to determine the states, municipalities, and groups of people that are most likely to swing the election in favor of one candidate or the other. A series of leaked memos from within the Democratic Party revealed an investment of significant resources into finding the single person most likely to swing the election.
The memos reference a secret initiative known as Project Fence-Splitter, with a budget of over $10 billion. Powered by state-of-the-art AI models and assisted by approximately 13,000 man-hours of inexpensive outsourced labor, the party has determined that Kevin Clerkson, a convenience store manager in Pittsburgh, will be the long sought-after deciding vote.
Memos written by Reginald Specktor, the head of Project Fence-Splitter, indicated that a significant portion of the project’s budget would go to highly targeted advertising towards Kevin and those around him. Kevin’s coworkers, family, and friends are all set to receive dozens of emails and text messages encouraging them to reach out to Kevin and remind him to vote. Campaign staffers, set to visit Kevin’s house every five to ten minutes to ensure Kevin’s safety, have been trained in a variety of stealth pursuit techniques, as well as covert entry methods should they need to enter Kevin’s house. “This man is everything to us,” read a memo written in April. “We must find him and never, ever let go. His safety, well, truly the safety of this all-encompassing vote, is of utmost importance.”
In a series of haphazard interviews conducted after the leaks, Specktor argued that their strategy would still be effective, even if no longer a secret. “Finding Kevin Clerkson has let us focus our campaign funding with a new level of precision. Non-median voters, frankly, don’t matter to us at all. They’re either stuck voting for us or they hate us, and either way there’s nothing we can do about that. We’ve wasted so much trying to appeal to the median voter, but now we actually have the median voter.” Specktor showed little concern for Kevin’s safety, saying, “We just need him to vote blue. He can hate everything about the party we choose to be, but we just need to show him that there’s really no choice. We’ll then leave Kevin alone to pursue… whatever it is he does. It’d be nice for him to send a few hundred our way in three and a half years, but the upcoming endorsement from Charles Koch means we should be set for a while.”
Republicans responded with vitriol after the full scope of Project Fence-Splitter became known. Vice presidential nominee JD Vance posted an extensive list of his objections to the project on Twitter, stating that “If Komrade Kamala gets her way, our country would be overrun by a wave of voters who our political system would care about. A day of deciding which party to vote for is a lost day of beautiful, bountiful fertility. This is a tragedy for Kevin and for our nation.” Donald Trump remained silent on the matter during a Fox News interview, which close allies attributed to the foot-thick bulletproof plexiglass between him and his microphone.
