WMG / The Politician

Payton will eventually succeed in becoming president...but not in the way he hopes to.

Payton's future political career will prove more successful than his high school one ended up being and lead to him coming excruciatingly close to the presidential nomination, but in a case of Bait the Dog, he will be edged out by someone younger, more charismatic and/or more ruthless than he is. However, he will get a chance to be this person's running mate, which he will begrudgingly accept. Initial hopes that the ticket will lose, making him the next frontrunner, fail and Payton is relegated to Selina Meyer-esque irrelevance while he attempts to count down the next eight years.

And then the president will turn out to be a President Corrupt and like Nixon be forced to resign. Payton finally becomes president...but only as a caretaker figure as the party, seeking to rebrand and distance themselves from his predecessor, refuse to place Payton as head of the ticket for the next election. Payton thus will get to become president, but he will only do so as a historical footnote-a fate Payton may either acknowledge is warranted (depending on how many Kick the Dog moments he ends up having on the road to this point) or have a breakdown at his one driving dream crumbling around him and the school board chair who likened him to Gerald Ford turning out to be right.

Whether this is a karmic ending or not will depend on how Payton behaves on the way there.

In the world of The Politician, the Republicans won in 2020.

It would explain why the Democratic Senator-elect from Texas in 2022 is planning on a presidential bid in 2024. If a Democrat had won in 2020, that candidate would either run for reelection or the nomination would almost certainly go to their running mate on the off chance tha they stood down after one term. The only plausible way someone who had a Senate seat for just two years would be seriously planning a presidential run and be confident in getting the nomination is if the Democratic nomination for 2024 was wide open, which would most likely only occur if Trump (or possibly Pence if he had gotten impeached, died or resigned) had won a second term.

It would also explain how a Democrat managed to win a Senate race in Texas, as a second-term Trump could likely spark a backlash severe enough to flip the state (which came close to happening in 2018).

Payton legitimately winning season 2’s election was a Motivational Lie.

Given all that was said, it seems extremely improbable that a stolen ballot box full of votes from a senior demographic - repeatedly shown as overall unlikely to vote for him - would have won Payton the election, and by exactly as many votes as Standish was ahead pre-recount, no less.

More likely, after seeing him likely to downspiral from another illegitimate election result “earned” through his opponent dropping out last-minute, his team prepared a lie to save his confidence after how disastrous his high school presidency was. After all, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, right?