'Smallville': Today, Lex Luthor Was Elected President

The 2018 Presidential election resulted in one of the most shocking outcomes of all time: corporate mogul and mad scientist Lex Luthor was eleted President of the United States.

That is, on Smallville.

In the series finale, Smallville jumped forward to 2018 and, among other things, revealed that Lex had been declared the winner of a Presidential election.

All the ways that it didn't quite jive with continuity and logic can be seen in this breakdown at KSite, but if you just assume Occam's Razor applies, it means Lex would have been elected tonight.

While Presidential elections in the U.S. happen every four years, and 2018 is not a U.S. Presidential election year, it is not uncommon for TV shows and films to fudge those numbers a bit. Even The West Wing, often lauded for accuracy in its look inside the process of American politics, had off-year Presidential elections.

There are a number of reasons for that storytelling convention; it establishes that the politics of a given show are obviously different than our own world, meaning that there is less need to be 100% true to what has happened in the real world at any given time. It also gives shows like The West Wing the opportunity to cite precedent provided by former real-world Presidents while being able to do a "re-election story" if it suits their needs at a time that the real world is not undergoing a Presidential election.

Funny enough, one of the popular theories about Lex Luthor's appearance on Supergirl this season is that he might be running for President. It was not an idea that Smallville pulled out of thin air, after all; in 2000, DC broke with its tradition of using real-world politicians and made Lex the President of the United States. Since then, with rare exception, DC has used ficticious political figures in their stories.

This has the same upside for their storytelling as the fictional cities of the DC Universe does, in that it allows the writers to do anything -- kill the President, make her an alien, etc. -- without anyone thinking that it is an overt political gesture and becoming offended.

The Luthor Presidency was relatively short-lived within the main continuity of comics, but cast a long shadow. The idea of Luthor running for President was reflected in the series finale of Smallville, and used as a plot point in one of DC's animated feature films.

Luthor, who never appeared on-camera in the series, was also named as the President in the short-lived DC sitcom Powerless.

The idea of Lex being President has caught on in other media, as well; it was used in some of the animated DC Universe movies, most notably in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, which was based on one of the first big storylines in the comics after Lex's election.