Jude Wheeler is a hotshot mayor from West Virginia, so young he’s just barely eligible to run for president. After gaining notoriety from appearing on Fox News by going toe-to-toe with their hosts, Jude is leading the race nationally. He’s shocked when another thirty-something enters the race just minutes before the filing deadlines, a Rhode Island senator named Collins Ramsey.
Collins is fierce, frank, and female. When Jude starts implementing bold fundraising tactics, she takes his lead and goes her own unorthodox route, pioneered by her campaign manager Britt Baxter.
An article drops an hour before the Iowa debate, describing brutal hazing Jude participated in while attending the University of Michigan. When Collins attacks him onstage with these accusations, Jude takes full responsibility in a deeply un-politician-like way, and he winds up winning the night. However, he can’t shake the feeling that someone is out to get him.
Bits of Jude’s true personality begin to slip through, and his team begins to wonder if he has a moral code worthy of the Oval Office. His campaign manager Emily gets a tip that a photo of Jude with date-rape drugs is about to leak. Emily stops it by offering the reporter something better-- Jude’s supposed blue-collar upbringing is a lie.
On caucus eve, Jude gets a letter from the College Board: they’ve sent him his SAT score, out of the blue. Almost like someone requested it. He confesses to Emily that when he was in his early twenties, he helped operate a large-scale LSAT cheating ring. He thinks the girl who ran it with him might be the one targeting him but he can’t be sure: he ghosted her years ago.
Britt makes a donation to Jude’s fund, and with it there’s a message to Jude to meet her at an Iowa City diner in the middle of the night. There, he learns Britt is the ex-girlfriend-- she went by “Elle” in college”-- and is determined to drag him down, threatening to go public with the cheating ring. Britt tells Jude he sexually assaulted her while drunk one night in college, and he doesn’t believe her until she reveals she got a rape kit done the next day.
Jude drops out of the race, and is chosen by Collins (at Britt’s request) to be her running mate just before Super Tuesday. He obliges, and back on the campaign trail, he and Britt strike up an unlikely, loaded friendship. It all comes crumbling down when he drunkenly lets it slip that he still doesn’t believe he actually raped her, and he believes he could have won the Democratic nomination on his own. Britt realizes Jude is still an awful person, and hasn’t learned a thing. An investigation on an old LSAT client of theirs links Jude to wire fraud, and Jude is indicted in Michigan. In line with her brand of unorthodox, youthful politics, Collins picks Britt to be her running mate, as Britt turns thirty-five the week of the election.
