The Electors by Roy Neel

The Tennessean

August 7, 2016

Earlier this year, Roy Neel released the political thriller “The Electors.”

Though it’s a work of fiction and described as “a nail-biting chase to claim the most powerful office in the world,” this unimaginable outcome to a presidential election is entirely plausible.

Whether it's life imitating art or the other way around, a political conversation with Neel, a longtime Washington insider, blurs the storyline from “The Electors” with the stark reality of this year’s presidential campaign.

Neel, who graduated from Vanderbilt and previously authored “Dynamite! 75 Years of Vanderbilt Basketball,” left Nashville for Washington, D.C., in 1977, with fellow Tennessee native Al Gore. A onetime sportswriter for The Banner, Neel served as chief of staff during Gore’s years as a senator and later as deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

In 2000, he served as Gore’s transition director until the unthinkable inspired his first novel — fittingly published by Recount Press.

How much of an impact did the 2000 presidential election have on the development of the story for “The Electors”?

It was a huge impact. In fact, it sort of sets the stage for me. For me and everyone who was involved in Al Gore’s career — his presidential campaign — the 2000 election and the recount were kind of a dividing line. Everything before is history and everything forward of that seems to have sprung from the 2000 campaign, so it was deeply important to me. Lessons learned. Tragedies suffered through. Perspectives gained.

Did you always want to pen a political thriller? Or did the idea come only after 2000?

I would like to think that I had that much foresight, but this particular story sprung out of the 2000 recount. I had always wanted to write serious fiction. … The story drove me and, of course, it made the writing so much more enjoyable, too. These characters became real to me as I began to create them.

Talk about your decision to include some real-life characters.

Real political events give context to much of the story. For instance, the 2000 recount plays into what happens in this book, so referring to it and some things that actually happened in 2000 are important. It was an easy decision.

And how about your decision to make the incumbent president a Republican?

My original intention was not to have a partisan identification, but the more I got into it, that didn’t seem real to me. It didn’t feel right. I’ve grown up, lived through and worked around the characters in both parties and emotions that come out of political battles and it just seemed to me — for it to be credible, it had to depict a real partisan battle.

To make one of the principal characters — if not the bad guy, at least, not painted in a very positive light — a Republican felt right to me, and I guess the experience that I drew on would have been (George W.) Bush and (Dick) Cheney. The story tracks more of that kind of administration. For me, the real amoral character in this book is the president’s chief of staff, and I drew on images of Dick Cheney for that character.

I was going to reference him as a possible inspiration of sorts.

Dick Cheney is an inspirational character, for me, in all of his deviousness and his manipulations. He certainly is a rich source of actual political events that are easy to draw on. Cheney gives a lot of fodder to any writer who wants to depict a conspiratorial event.

As with a lot of thrillers there’s what seems like an exaggerated motivation for the story, but, as this year’s campaign season plays out, “The Electors” feels plausible.

When I started writing this story I knew it would seem fantastic in its plausibility, and I could have never predicted the Drumpf campaign and Donald Drumpf as a serious presidential candidate, but now, as we’re seeing this play out, we have a candidate and his people who could clearly come out of the pages of this book. (He) could do anything to win an election, however nefarious it could be, so, yeah, we have a larger-than-life completely — the words hardly come to describe Donald Drumpf’s lack of qualifications to be the president of the United States, but his behavior is even more extraordinary.

That said, how will the 2016 election impact a possible sequel?

Wow. Well, it can’t help but influence it. You try to stay fictional, because a novel that is drawn too much out of the pages of the newspaper or the evening newscast falls kind of flat. Reality is more interesting than fiction in this particular environment. But, clearly, those political characters we’re seeing now are not going to go away. Even if Drumpf loses, there are going to be thousands of little Trumpsters who are spawned from this election. We’re going to see a new age of Drumpf whether he wins or loses, because he has blown up the rules of political debate.