More than 25 years after Alexander Payne’s “Election,” a razor-sharp 1999 satire that took a high school election and turned it into a political microcosm, the filmmaker has offered a fresh update on the long-discussed sequel.
Speaking to MovieWeb, Payne revealed that he and longtime collaborator Jim Taylor are “actively working” on a follow-up inspired by Tom Perrotta’s 2022 novel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, which catches up with the overachieving, endlessly ambitious Tracy (played memorably by Reese Witherspoon) as she claws her way through the public education system after a failed law career. Only one catch: Payne doesn’t want to go back to high school.
“We hadn’t thought about a sequel until Tom Perrotta wrote this fine book,” Payne said. “It whetted everybody’s appetite—Reese’s, mine, Jim Taylor’s, the producers, the studio. The only trouble was that I just can’t go back to high school. I just can’t do it. So Jim and I have reconceived it differently, and we’re actively working on it.”
The original “Election” —a sharp, hilarious political allegory hiding in plain sight as a teen comedy—earned Payne and Taylor an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay and helped launch Witherspoon into a new Hollywood stratosphere. A sequel would see Tracy in a new arena, but Payne seems just as committed to avoiding obvious political commentary now as he was in ’99.
“Maybe what gives legs to a political film is that the filmmakers aren’t really interested in the politics. They’re interested in the people, in the human comedy,” he said. “But here’s where it does become political satire: people act out their individual psychodramas in the public arena. Tracy Flick is kind of an eternal symbol of blind ambition.”
In other words, don’t expect a hit-you-over-the-head political screed. Payne and Taylor are still playing the long game—quietly shaping what could be both a timely and timeless character study.
Witherspoon’s best performance has always been as Flick. She’s never done better work. Payne’s election political satire tackled topics that have, sadly, become all-too-relevant today. I don’t know if a sequel was necessary, but I’m intrigued.