How can I edit this from plot to world building?

Question

I'm new here, and I misunderstood the scope of the site when I asked my first question.

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/72401/how-does-a-no-body-get-elected-president-of-the-us

Based on the guidance I've received so far, I'd like to edit this to be more on topic. I'm not entirely sure if I can do this effectively to meet the requirements of the site (and I'm ok with it being closed for that reason). However, I'd like to try.

What I've presented in my question is a high level over view of the plot of the story - a nobody runs for president and manages to get elected. I'm interested in showing how such a journey could take place.

My question for you is how can I make this question more on topic? The world I'm operating is similar to today. I'm planning on making the US slightly more isolated globally, but nothing extreme. I'm actively avoiding the doom and gloom the left currently portrays and actively avoiding the image that everything will be great again. After 4-8 years there will be some differences from the previous administration, but I want to make realistic changes.

Answer 1

I think that the general outline of the question is fairly ok; I my opinion, as I mentioned in my comment, it's only borderline story based. However, you ask the question in a way that suggest that you want idea generations as answers, which is outside the scope of the site.

What I suggest is that you either break down the question in to smaller questions or try to give some more premises and ask if they are plausible rather than asking "how can he win" without any limits. What i mean is, there are so many ways to handwave why he would win the election that the question is too broad - either you suggest a solution yourself and then change the question to "is [...] plausible?" or you ask partial questions in the way of "how could he deal with [...]" (with the usual SE way of trying to keep it to one question per question).

Two suggestions of issues he will face that I can think of are:

• How this nobody would finance his campaign? Trump is claimed to be the most cost efficient president candidate, partially because he used free ads through social media, but that only really worked because he already was famous before the start of the campaign. Despite being cost effective, his campaign still used roughly $1 billion. Have you considered how the nobody will pay for ads, travel and promotional items? Either change the question to "how would a nobody finance a presidential campaign" (and ask follow up questions later) or figure out a way and ask if that way is plausible.

• How would an inexperienced nobody win debates/persuade voters? You do say that he has chutzpah, but is it enough? Is he going to be a slick, smooth talking person that will be able to win everyone over to his cause with awesome persuasion skills? Will you, as a writer, be able to write such debates in a believable way or will you simply skip over them by stating "the debate was a clear success"? A potential question could be what he should do to become really persuasive. However, if you plan to ask how you should write believable debates, then that might fit better on writers.SE (and might be off topic even there).