On Monday, December 19, the electors who make up the Byzantine organization known as the Electoral College will meet up in their respective states and vote for the next president of the United States. Based on the results of the November 8 election, the majority are pledged to vote for Donald Trump. But because of circumstances like Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote and unprecedented acts like the United States’ declaration that Russia, by way of cyberwarfare, tried to tilt the election in Trump’s favor, there has been an ongoing debate, conversation, and plea for electors to shirk years of duty and tradition and vote for someone else.
The upcoming Electoral College vote inspired one of the best sketches of Saturday Night Live’s December 17 Christmas episode, as Kate McKinnon reprised her much-lauded Hillary Clinton impersonation to reenact an iconic scene from the classic holiday film Love Actually.
Specifically, it’s the famous cue card scene between actors Andrew Lincoln and Keira Knightley. In the film, Knightley’s character Juliet is married, but Lincoln’s Mark is in love with her. So naturally, because this is the movies, he visits her and tells her he loves her by way of cue cards, because on Christmas you’re supposed to tell the truth, or some nonsense.
Cue SNL’s take, with McKinnon’s Clinton in the role of Mark.
The sketch sees Clinton pay a visit to a member of the Electoral College and profess her love for America and her fear for the upcoming vote. McKinnon is as earnest and bizarre as ever as Clinton tries a number of different strategies, from calling Trump cray to issuing a weirdly sentimental last-ditch appeal:
"You don't have to vote for me,” one of her cue card says, before urging the Electoral College voter to consider the likes of “John Kasich … Tom Hanks … Zendaya … The Rock … [or] a rock.”
In the original Love Actually version of the scene, there was no happy ending for Mark. The same goes for McKinnon’s Clinton in the SNL sketch. As for real life, we’ll soon find out. But as my colleague Andrew Prokop has written for Vox, don’t count on things going Clinton’s way.
