Jay and Dope's Pathway to Victory

Here's how Jay and Dope can still win.

Last week, I published an article explaining why Presidents Violent Jay¹ and Shaggy 2 Dope of Insane Clown Posse fame would be the best option for the long-term future.² But is there any hope of them actually winning? People are skeptical. As of the writing of this article, their chances on Manifold are just 1.2%. However, I believe there is a clear path for them to the White House, and they will likely follow a six-step plan to reach it. In fact, they’ve already started.

Before I get into the plan, though, I want to address a few concerns. The first one: Are they even running? They haven’t announced their bid for the presidency yet, and filing deadlines are coming up. Well, first of all, they haven’t missed any filing deadlines yet. Even Ohio, which originally had a deadline of August 7, has extended its deadline to Septermber 1. All other states already had deadlines that are after the DNC on Aug. 19-22. So all they have to do is receive the Juggalo Party nomination before August 23, and they should be on the ballot in all states. Furthermore, most states allow write-in votes, and only enough of them to win 270 electoral votes are actually needed to win the presidency. So even if they miss some deadlines, they can still win. And that’s assuming that the states don’t extend their deadlines like Ohio did after seeing the quick ascendancy of the Juggalo Party - after all, every state wants to make sure that all major candidates are on the ballot.

So I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal that they haven’t announced their bid yet. Plus, keep in mind that even in the worst-case scenario for ballot access, they only need to win one electoral vote to have a chance at the White House - if no candidate wins a 270-vote majority, then the House selects between the top three candidates. They could get this through a faithless elector even if they aren’t on the ballot anywhere.

Still, some might wonder why they haven’t announced their candidacy already if they really are running for president. But it turns out there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this. They’re waiting for the perfect time. And what time is that?

That’s right. The next Gathering of the Juggalos is going to take place on August 14-18, just a few days from now, and a few days before the DNC. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. It’s almost like this has been planned out for decades.

So, we can expect them to announce their run surrounded by adoring fans. The 24th Gathering of the Juggalos will be the first ever Juggalo Party Convention. But how can they possibly win? Here’s the plan:

Step 1 (Done): Get Trump elected

The first step was already completed eight years ago. There are a number of reasons why Trump’s election in 2016 helps the Juggalo Party today. First of all, now that America has already elected one insane clown as president, it won’t be so reluctant to elect two. Trump’s election was necessary to make Americans more comfortable with the idea of making entertainers who are obviously unqualified for office into the Head of State.

(source)

Trump’s election also set in motion a chain of events that would lead to Jay and Dope facing weak opponents this year. First, he lost reelection in 2020. This was part of the plan all along - it was orchestrated by Jay and Dope’s allies inside General Mills, who slipped a virus into Betty Crocker products to hurt his reelection chances.³ Then, of course, Trump hurt himself further with his meltdown over supposed election fraud and January 6th, turning an already unpopular president who had lost the popular vote into an even weaker candidate. And all this set him up to run again in 2024, meaning Jay and Dope’s Republican opposition is weak.

On the Democratic side, Trump’s election set the stage for Biden’s presidency. Biden might not have run for president if not for Trump (he certainly wouldn’t have run if Clinton had won in 2016), and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t have won. Democrats might not have even nominated him - it was ultimately because of electability concerns that they did, but those concerns might not have been as great if his opponent was someone less noxious than Trump. And even if they did, his age would have been too big a liability even in 2020 against any other candidate. But because he was facing such a weak incumbent, he was elected, becoming a weak incumbent himself in 2020. This created the perfect situation for Jay and Dope to enter the scene: an almost universally undesired rematch between two unpopular presidents, a great opening for a third party movement to come out of nowhere and offer an out.

Unfortunately, Biden threw a bit of a wrench into this by retconning his status as the Democratic nominee and dropping out of the race. But that doesn’t completely erase the benefits of this step. Jay and Dope still get to face an unpopular ex-president and the VP of the unpopular current president, who’s running on a shortened timetable after a chaotic summer. So I’d say they’re still well-positioned.

Step 2 (Underway): Court the Effective Altruist movement

As I explained in my previous post on the matter, Jay and Dope are the best presidents from an EA perspective. If they can convince the EA movement of this fact, they could have access to a huge amount of campaign funds - after all, EAs have lots of money and are by definition willing to spend it for idealistic reasons. Given how little time there is, this money will be crucial to quickly funding their campaign, allowing them to get their message out as soon as their run begins.

Luckily, this step should be relatively straightforward. There are a few obstacles: EAs are typically Democrats, and they spend most of their money donating to charities helping people in the developing world, animal welfare, or existential risk prevention, so Jay and Dope will have to change their partisan loyalties and convince them that their campaign is the most effective intervention. But the case for that is so strong, and EAs tend to be open-minded, so I don’t see much of a problem there.

Step 3: Appeal to Kennedy voters and the double-haters

Once they have campaign funds, they need to focus on growing a movement. They can start with people who don’t like either of the major party candidates - obviously a good place for any third-party candidate to start. Kennedy might be an issue, since he’s already courting this demographic, but let’s be honest - most of his voters are just voting for him because they don’t like Trump or Harris, so they might be happy to switch over to someone else. The recent bear story might also help pull voters away from him.

Once Jay and Dope have a solid base of support among EAs, independents, and double-haters, they can move on to growing their base until it can rival the two major parties. Eventually, of course, the goal is to make the Juggalo Party the biggest U.S. political party. There’s another group that can help with that…

Step 4: Appeal to furries

Furries have not typically been thought of as an important electoral demographic, but they are an extremely powerful group. For one, they’re rich - how else would they afford those suits? This can give the Juggalos more campaign cash on top of the EA money.

And as is well-known, 100% of IT professionals are furries. If mobilized, they can use their control over the Internet to bring down the other campaigns and fill the airwaves with juggalo propaganda. We already saw earlier this year what a small group of gay furry hackers can do. With how dependent the world is now on the Internet, furries are a terrifying nigh-omnipotent force that cannot be stopped once they are unleashed.

So how can the juggalos unleash them? Well, first of all, Violent Jay is literally a furry.

Violent Jay and his daughter at a furry convention

On top of that, they’ll already have a connection to tech-adjacent and socially liberal spaces through EA, so this should be no problem. The juggalo movement itself has a lot of similarities to furries - they’re a fandom seen as weird and disparaged by outsiders - so they seem like natural allies.

Step 5: Get Guy Fieri appointed to the Supreme Court

Image taken a few months in the future of Guy Fieri speaking at a Jay and Dope rally. The “best buddies” logo represents their status as the first co-presidents. (source)

Many political pundits have called on Justice Sonya Sotomayor to retire during Biden’s term so that he can replace her with someone younger. This is motivated by fears that another RBG situation could happen, allowing Republicans to appoint yet another justice, giving them a 7-2 majority that would impose conservative minority rule for generations to come. Jay and Dope need to amplify these concerns, and their juggalo allies who have infiltrated the Biden administration should convince Biden to replace her with Guy Fieri.

The Supreme Court, soon

What would this gain for the Juggalo Party? With an ally on the Court, they can easily sort out any legal issues with their candidacy, especially if he’s the chief justice. Fieri could ensure that their run as co-presidents is rendered constitutional and fix any issues with ballot access if they do run into them.

He can also put his finger on the scale to help Jay and Dope in crucial ways, for example, by ruling that it doesn’t violate Georgia’s law against handing water to voters waiting in line if you hand them Faygo instead. Guy Fieri himself might help by standing outside polling places in crucial swing states to give voters a taste of Flavortown.

It’s also notable that both candidates’ candidacy has been challenged this year: Democrats don’t believe Trump should be able to run because of the insurrection clause, while Republicans don’t think Harris should be able to run because… well, there’s not really a serious argument, but somehow they think her replacing Biden as the nominee was against the rules. This provides an opening for Fieri and the Juggalo Party to argue that both of these charges are correct, and that the nominees of the two major parties should be disqualified from the race. This could hopefully be done as a mutually agreeable compromise - since Democrats and Republicans each hate the other side’s candidates more than they like their own, they would be willing to take the deal and disqualify each other if it meant keeping the other major party out of the White House. Fieri could hopefully use this argument to convince the liberal and conservative justices to join his opinion.

Now, one might see problems with Fieri actively campaigning for Jay and Dope while at the same time ruling on cases that affect their opponents’ eligibility for office or issues related to their campaign. However, the Supreme Court has no binding code of ethics, so judges are allowed to be as blatantly partisan as they want and have no requirement to recuse themselves from cases where they have a conflict of interest. Thus, once Guy Fieri is on SCOTUS, he’s unstoppable.

Step 6: Survive an assassination attempt

An Aimless Renegade with approximately the same marksmanship as Thomas Matthew Crooks (source)

We saw Trump rise in the polls after getting shot in the ear in July. If Jay and Dope can manage to get themselves almost assassinated, I imagine the same thing will happen to them. Actually, it might work out even better - it would fit perfectly into their campaign message to miraculously survive an assassination attempt.

But how can they make this happen? First, they should inform the Biden administration that they don’t need Secret Service protection. Even if they are not allowed to refuse it altogether, they should insist on only needing light protection - they can say that it’s more important to protect the president, his family, and the other candidates. Second, they should hold rallies outdoors in locations with lots of potential hiding spots for a sniper nearby. This should be done at the same time that other major figures have high-security events so that the Secret Service is stretched thin, hopefully leading them to de-prioritize Jay and Dope. And if they can, they should request that the same Secret Service agents that failed to stop Thomas Matthew Crooks from firing shots on Trump be the ones present at all of their rallies. Third, they should announce the exact location of their rallies weeks in advance so that would-be assassins have lots of time to plan. And finally, they need to astroturf a movement that favors assassinating them. Infiltrate some online spaces for isolated, angry men and encourage them to idolize Crooks as some sort of Saint. Then post the announced location of their campaign rallies from their sock puppet accounts. Hopefully, this will create a small army of incels all wanting to kill them.

Now this leads to an obvious question: What if the assassination attempts succeed? This can be readily dismissed, though - you can’t kill a clown.

The Insane Clown Posse survived a nuclear blast in a previous assassination attempt in 2020, shown above. They were unscathed. (source)

Down with the clowns? More like uppalo with the juggalos.

Outcome

After this plan is implemented, what do I expect the electoral outcome to be? Well obviously, the leaders of the Dark Carnival won’t fail to win D.C. So that’s at least three electoral votes. And Utah is an obvious Jay and Dope state - it has a history of third party candidates doing well there. They also have a home state advantage in Michigan, where I believe they’ll cruise to victory. In fact, I think their margin of victory will be higher here than anywhere else, since it’s the place where their appeal is strongest. As was prophesied, they will be swept into office on a wave of Faygo (a Michigan pop⁴ brand).

Michigan, of course, is highly correlated with many other Midwestern states, and as one would would expect, the Insane Clown Posse’s appeal extends to the rest of the Midwest as well. The annual Gathering of the Juggalos, for instance, has taken place in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois in different years. Ultimately, I expect the ICP ticket to win the entire Midwest, as well as Oklahoma, where the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos took place, and Pennsylvania, which is not considered Midwestern according to Wikipedia but is pretty strongly correlated. And with the massive margin they are expected to win by in Michigan, I don’t think any of these states can really be considered in doubt either.

Easy Jay and Dope states, shown in white

That already brings us to 150 electoral votes, more than half of what’s needed to win. But winning all of those states basically entails that they’re going to win a bunch of others as well, since the results in different states are correlated. From Nate Silver’s model (as of the last time he publicly published these numbers), these are the probabilities of Harris and Trump winning the whole election, conditional on each state.

His model doesn’t include Jay and Dope, and it’s unclear if they’re more similar to Trump or Harris in terms which states affect their chances the most, so let’s just imagine that they’re about the average of Trump and Harris. We can see that, no matter who wins, winning Pennsylvania alone almost guarantees that they win the election. And Wisconsin and Michigan make the chances very high, too. But the ICP is going to win not just one of these states in particular, but all of them and a bunch more, so their chances of being elected basically go to 100%.

I think we can go farther. If they’re winning this bigly in all the Midwestern swing states, they’ll probably just win all of the swing states, so add Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, Maine, Florida, Texas, and New Mexico to the list. This tips them over the edge at 295 electoral votes. Maybe Alaska and Colorado should be added, too, depending on how broadly you want to count your swing states. In fact, according to the current RCP map, even Oregon, Montana, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, South Carolina, and New Jersey are only “likely” states (although three of those were already on our list, as Midwestern states), so they should be included as well.

They would probably also win New York, since this is where Woodstock, which has been compared to the Gathering of the Juggalos by Joseph Bruce,⁵ was hosted. And besides, if they’re already winning Pennsylvania and New Jersey, it would make no sense for them to lose New York. Parts of PA are correlated with rural upstate New York and New Jersey with urban New York City, so it will surely track with those two states. That brings us to a total of 371 electoral votes, and we’re not even done yet:

The lightest shade of gray are the ones not assigned yet. Unfortunately, the black and white color scheme for the Juggalo Party doesn’t mesh that well with political map-making tools.

So, what about the remaining states? To get a picture of how likely Jay and Dope are to win them, we can take a look at the correlations again. In 2020, FiveThirtyEight (still using Nate Silver’s model at the time), released a tool that let you look at how winning certain states affected a candidate’s chances of winning the others. Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t let you assign a state to a candidate if 538 gave that candidate a less than 1.5% chance of winning, so we can’t just put in all the states that we know the Juggalo Party is going to win, but we can get as close as it will allow us.

Here’s what happens when we give 2020 Biden all the states that we’ve guaranteed will go to Jay and Dope, except for Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and NE-3, which 538 didn’t allow me to assign to him:

The model now predicts that Biden is favored in every state except Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and NE-3. But we already know that the Juggalos are winning Oklahoma and NE-3 as well, and West Virginia (which Trump is only slightly favored to win in this scenario) will probably go to them as well due to its proximity to the Midwest. Furthermore, if we had been allowed to assign NE, KS, OK, and NE-3 to Biden, his probability of winning the remaining states would go up - after all, the reason we couldn’t assign them is because he was super unlikely to win them, so any scenario where he does win them would be even more of a blowout than the one shown here. I wouldn’t be surprised if even Wyoming turned blue on a map like that.

Now let’s look at Trump’s version:

This one doesn’t look as impressive - most of the solid blue states are still blue - but again, that was in part because 538 didn’t let me turn Illinois, New York, New Jersey, or Virginia red. If I had been able to, the map would probably look a lot redder. Also keep in mind that the reason those states stayed blue (and the reason a few red states stayed red in the Biden example) is because of political polarization: The blue states will never vote for Trump, and the red states won’t vote for Biden. But this doesn’t apply when we consider the Juggalo Party - no one is negatively polarized against them, so they could sweep through both blue and red states.

What conclusion can we draw from looking at that 2020 tool? If the Juggalos win all the states we’ve already assigned to them, they’re really likely to win the other states as well. If either Trump or Biden would have most likely won those states - despite political polarization - conditional on winning the states the Juggalo Party is definitely going to win, then Jay and Dope will certainly win them this year.

Ultimately, then, I expect this to be the final electoral map:

As you can see, Jay and Dope will be winning all 538 electoral votes. They’ll win by the largest margins in the Midwest and nearby states, as well as Utah and D.C., which are unusually favorable to them. Their margins in the remaining states depend on how polarized those states are - the ones that are bluest and reddest will have the smallest margins of victory for the Juggalo Party since so many people there are already set on voting for either Democrats or Republicans, while the swing states will have large margins.

An objection: I shouldn’t be using these conditional probabilities based on super-unlikely events because the model is likely not accurate about them.

Screenshot from the Manifold Discord, argument courtesy of Conflux, writer for Manifold’s Substack

This is probably true. But if anything, I think these conditional probabilities are underestimating the true probability of the ICP winning (as the “Trump wins D.C.” example shows⁶). They are all based on the states’ Democratic-Republican polarization, which just doesn’t matter in a scenario where a third party is the dominant political force, winning both blue and red states. If the ICP wins one state, that’s much more strongly correlated with them winning other states than it is for the other two parties.

So that’s my final prediction for this election: Jay and Dope win all 538 electoral votes. I would say I’m >99.9% confident in this, though there is an outside chance of something really weird happening that would stop it. Maybe a misaligned AI wipes out humanity before the election, or some other event dooms the timeline.

1. Note: I spell it Violent Jay instead of Violent J because I believe he will start spelling it this way to appeal to voters, similar to how politicians named “Joseph” always go by “Joe”. “Jay” is a more relatable name than “J”.

2. As co-presidents, not president and vice president

3. You thought it came from a wet market? Just what the Batterwitch wants you to think.

4. We’re talking about the Midwest here, calling it “soda” is a crime.

5. It’s on the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia page for the Gathering of the Juggalos, so you know it’s an important aspect of it.

6. I think it’s more likely that that example really is just due to low sample sizes - there were probably only three simulations where Trump won D.C., and they were so insane that the results weren’t really meaningful. I doubt the model was making an inference as sophisticated as the justification Conflux gave for it.