A Tracy Flick doesn't come around every four years

This May, Glee turns 15. For better or worse—often both, within the same episode—the series is singular. It ushered in a wave of musical TV shows, and with it a new era of merchandising. Its young cast might not have become Euphoria famous, but they were household names for a generation and a constant presence in the pages of tabloids. There’s a case to be made that Glee is the ultimate Obama era show, running from 2009 to 2015 and championing inclusion and difference. But its pilot, the thing that made the show an overnight success, is a throwback—one strikingly similar to Election.

Election, the 1999 Alexander Payne film, remains one of the best of its genre (and a favorite of President Obama), and what Glee creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuck, and Ian Brennan saw in Payne’s script is obvious. Election is set in high school, but it is firmly a movie for adults. Glee, too, was firmly for adults, at least at the beginning. Both the film and the pilot see high school as a messy, cutthroat, downright despicable environment where some teachers deceive students into joining their extracurricular activities and other teachers sexually assault students (or are at least accused of it, in Glee’s case). At the center of both are ambitious teenage girls who possess such intense clarity about their goals that they’re both oddly endearing and completely terrifying.

Glee’s Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Election’s Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) are introduced identically. Tracy wants more than anything to win student body president and go on to a political career; Rachel wants more than anything to lead a winning show choir and have a career on Broadway. After hearing from both of their teachers, we’re introduced to them via voiceover where they state these goals clearly. Both introductions see them storm down their school hallways and voiceovers about their goals. (Glee also recreates Tracy’s yearbook sight-gag via Rachel later in the season.) Whether the Glee audience knew they were watching an Election riff was beside the point; Payne had introduced Tracy in such an effective way that the signifiers worked as shorthand a decade later.

The difference between Tracy and Rachel, though, is that Glee takes pains to redeem Rachel over the course of its six seasons. Sure, she is ambitious to a fault, and sends a prospective glee club member to a crack house because she perceives her talent as a threat. But by the end of Glee’s (wildly uneven) run, Rachel has been humbled and purified, striking out on her big Broadway and television career, sending her home to coach her former glee club to victory. She still gets a Tony anyway, achieving her dreams in what felt like a toothless wish-fulfillment fantasy even as the finale was airing.

Tracy achieves her dreams, too, but Election never softens her; if anything, she hardens upon the realization that the world is cruel, and that people are in fact out to get her. The thrust of Election’s conflict comes from Tracy’s relationship with Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick). Mr. M is the advisor for the student government, and Tracy is running for president unopposed. He has a personal vendetta against Tracy because he holds her partially responsible for his work bestie, Mr. Novotny, getting fired for statuatory rape. (Election takes pains to paint Tracy as an active agent in the relationship with Novotny, but there is no scenario, no matter how mature Tracy may think she is, where an adult teacher and an underage student are on equal footing.) Mr. M recruits popular jock Paul Metzler to run against her, and when the results are close, Mr. M attempts to destroy the ballots that would secure Tracy’s win. Tracy doesn’t behave completely ethically—for example, she allows Paul’s sister Tammy to be expelled for Tracy’s bad behavior—but Mr. M’s actions are unambiguously worse.

In the 25 years since Election premiered—even over the years that Glee was airing—our culture was reappraising the way it treats ambitious women, women for whom Tracy had become something of an avatar. In a 2001 review of Legally Blonde, critic Michael Shilling, complimenting Witherspoon’s performance, compared Tracy to Lolita narrator Humbert Humbert; in 2019, New York Times critic A.O. Scott likened Mr. M to the same character. We as a culture are only just moving past the impulse to slot Tracy Flick in the easy role of the villain; her misdeeds are minor compared to those of the grown men around her. It’s not her actions but her personality, compared to the mediocre but friendly men around her, that earns her scorn. She does not fit the male fantasy thrust upon Lolita. Tracy’s greatest crime is that she has, as the kids say, bad vibes.

And Tracy’s impact hasn’t been locked to fiction either: Hillary Clinton, a woman whose own reputation, public image, and approval rating has fluctuated wildly over the past 35 years, has long weathered comparisons to the character, especially during her 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns. This isn’t a compliment; Tracy was still firmly in villain territory here. But it’s indicative of how rare and how derided this female archetype is that both Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Dole, two women who have little in common with Clinton, earned the same comparison. Election itself, though, gives us a pretty straightforward analog to the real world. Tom Perotta, author of the novel that the movie is based upon, modeled the scenario off the 1992 presidential election, and it doesn’t take a detective to figure out who is who. Tammy is the spoiler; Ross Perot. Paul is the popular, affable guy who sounds a little doofy; Bill Clinton. Tracy is the wonk, the bad-vibes inevitability; George H.W. Bush.

What makes Tracy such an enduring character, and where imitators like Rachel Berry have faltered, is the refusal to make her anything but a shameless careerist. There are no warm fuzzies in the epilogue where Tracy discovers the power of friendship. At her dream school, Georgetown, she is just as alienated from her classmates as she was at Carver High. The last we see of her, she’s getting into a Republican congressman’s limo. Tracy may have grown up financially insecure with a single mom, and may have been mistreated by powerful men in her public school, but those experiences clearly didn’t turn her into an activist. They turned her into someone who put her own security above all else, even when that “security” involves orbiting the same older men who have dismissed and despised her. While “Tracy Flick” has become shorthand for a caricature, those are the details that make her feel all too human.

Tracy isn’t a character that wins a ton of sympathy, though she deserves some. Bad things happen to and around her, and they don’t make her better. She doesn’t turn the other cheek, she accumulates power. She doesn’t slot neatly into hero or villain, agent or victim. She is so self-assured that the men who mess with her know they were actually just footnotes to her life—that she has surpassed them, and they hate her for it. Maybe you know a person or two like this, but in pop culture, a character this real (especially a female one) is rare. When they do exist, like Rachel Berry, they always seem to get softened sooner or later. Maybe we really are scared of Tracy Flick after all.