I admit it: election coverage? Not really my thing. Personally, I’m part of the team Nice hard shovel. That’s why I’m thrilled to report that today’s Slate Crossword has achieved the impossible. He saw into the future and determined with 100 percent accuracy the names of our 47^th president.

Yes! It’s true ! Go ahead and see for yourself! I will give you a moment to resolve the puzzlewhile I slowly drink from a coffee cup filled with investigators’ tears.

(Spoilers below.)

OK, OK, I admit it: the puzzle is hedging its bets. You will notice that four of the clues in this grid are just vague enough to have two valid answers that differ by one letter. For example, a LEAK and a LEAD are accurately described by the clue (one could help a journalist break a big story). The end result of this strategic vagueness is that whether you placed DONALD or KAMALA in the middle of the grid, your answer is valid.

Dedicated Slate crossword solvers will notice that a similar gimmick was used in our September 24 Puzzle (A West wing tribute which claimed to have the “correct” spelling of the name of Mouammar (G/Q) Addafi), as well as the July 19 Puzzle (a game where you can “check with the queens” can be solved like CHESS or POKER). Crossword constructors call grids like these “Schrödinger puzzles,” and today’s Slate crossword is part of a long line of not only Schrödinger puzzles, but also Schrödinger puzzles that claim call the presidential race.

The story begins in 1980 with a man named Jeremiah Farrell. Farrell was a math professor at Butler University who was building crosswords on the side, and he had just made a real puzzle. Considered the winner of that year’s election, 1-Across could be CARTER or REAGAN. He submitted the riddle to the New York Times, where it was rejected by then-editor Eugene Maleska (who apparently really thought John Anderson, the RFK Jr. of the 1980 race, had a chance at the presidency). . Farrell then sent his puzzle to Games Magazine, where it caught the attention of a young associate editor named Will Shortz. Shortz loved the grid, but he received it too late; Farrell’s CARTER/REAGAN grid was dead.

Sixteen years later, Farrell revamped his concept, creating another Schrödinger presidential puzzle that cemented his name in cruciverbal history. On Election Day 1996, the New York Times crossword made national news when a clue claimed to predict the outcome (lead story in tomorrow’s paper(!)). It was, as you might guess, a diabolical ruse. Farrell (with the help of Shortz, who had by then taken over as puzzle editor of the Times) had written a puzzle where the middle of the grid could read both BOB DOLE ELECTED and CLINTON ELECTED. Among the solvers upset by this puzzle were Dole and Clinton themselves, as they recounted in the 2006 documentary. Pun.

Puzzle Farrell’s Election Day 1996 is, by just about any standard, the most famous one-on-one crossword game of all time (as well as Shortz’s personal favorite!). As such, it has inspired its share of homages and parodies. The funniest of these, in my opinion, is the puzzle that my AVCX colleague Francis Heaney made for Election Day 2016, which takes Farrell’s grid layout and reuses it to a Schrödinger puzzle about another Clinton eyeing the White House. Today’s Slate crossword is more of a loose homage to Farrell than a parody, but I attempted to mimic the layout of his puzzle, with its entries spanning a grid at the top and bottom of the puzzle. (I also added a little Easter egg to our eagle-eyed resolvers: did you spot it?)

The Schrödinger puzzle is a versatile format and every two years a puzzle featuring a similar concept goes viral. In 2016, Ben Tausig Makes Headlines With GENDERFLUID Grille in which the squares could be filled either with an “M” or an “F”; a Sunday Times 2022 puzzle by Steve McCarthy politely trolled sci-fi fans when they questioned whether STAR TREK was better than STAR WARS.

Puzzles like this are difficult to pull off, and I’m impressed by the handful of builders who can make it seem effortless. I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t really know who our next president will be. But I’m confident in predicting that this won’t be the last time Slate Crossword runs a grid like this. This.