The results are in, but The Politician is already thinking about the next election
There’s a reason there are far more pop culture depictions of campaigning than there are of governing. A campaign has clearly defined, win or lose stakes— either you’re in office at the end of the race, or you aren’t. It’s like sports, but for people who want political power. The work of governing is, often, less dramatically compelling. It’s full of meetings, difficult decisions, and lots of research, rather than a more explicit, externalized battle of competing visions. So it’s not surprising that The Politician has a decidedly dim view of actually trying to get anything done.
Very early in “The Assassination Of Payton Hobart,” Payton wins the election. Or, rather, he wins the Saint Sebastian presidency—Astrid confronts him with the news that she’s dropped out, turning this entire race into a Pyrrhic victory. Though everyone has invested a ton of time and energy into the campaign, the momentum just falls out of the student body, and Payton and his team are left going to mostly meaningless meetings with the school board.
Each time we see Payton try to govern, he proposes small-scale environmental plans, the sort of thing that is well-meaning but not especially effective in the long term. For example: In his first meeting, Payton announces a plan to replace plastic straws with paper ones, only to discover that the school already has a contract set through 2025 to put plastic straws in the cafeteria. Besides, one of the board members likes chewing on plastic straws, and is concerned they might be keeping kids from getting into cigarettes or vaping. This is unrelated to his electoral mandate (or lack thereof), but it does clarify how little power he actually has. All of his ideas are expensive, and no one seems motivated to push them through—especially without a “mandate” from the student voters.
Eventually, Payton discovers the truth: Astrid won the election by two votes. This information heavily demoralizes Payton, who decides to just sort of spend the rest of his senior year of high school hanging out and doing the school play with Infinity. The two of them reconcile, and eventually joint the school’s production of the very on the nose musical Assassins. In this version, Infinity plays Manson family member Squeaky Fromme, Payton plays John Hinckley, and Ricardo—back at Saint Sebastian as a “continuing education” student—plays John Wilkes Booth. Their scenes of performing, centered on everyone’s memory of Payton singing Joni Mitchell for River way back in the pilot, seem to be intended to suggest a possible path forward, a way for Payton to find meaning that isn’t dependent on the thrill of the campaign. The problem, as in the rest of the episode, is that that search is far less exciting.