Virginia and New Jersey Elect Governors Totally Lacking Reality-Show Experience

By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker

10 November 17

The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."

hrowing caution to the wind, voters in Virginia and New Jersey on Tuesday night overturned the political applecart and chose as their new governors two men with no reality-show experience whatsoever.

Republican officials were staggered by the voters’ decision because, historically, reality shows have been a reliable proving ground for the nation’s finest leaders.

Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said that the voters’ risky bet on two men who had never set foot on a reality-show stage showed that the electorate was acting “emotionally and not rationally.”

“You look at the résumés of these two men and you won’t find ‘Survivor,’ you won’t find ‘Big Brother,’ you won’t find ‘The Bachelor,’ ” she said. “What we have are two individuals who are, to put it mildly, unfit for office.”

“This is not normal,” she said.

She gave both winning candidates credit for tapping into the angry voters’ anti-reality-show mood, but she warned, “Once these two have been in office, I think voters will start longing for someone who had at least won an immunity idol or swallowed a live caterpillar.”