Last year, Florida's electoral narrative became like those hugely popular Latin American soaps, the telenovelas: highly emotive tales of power, privilege and betrayal staged in a hot mist of unrequited love.
The BBC hopes that Jonathan Ross's exit will mark a turning point and enable it to face the next six months of electoral shenanigans unencumbered by tales of such largesse.
The Socialists, smarting from their electoral rout, think otherwise: the whole tale, they say, is part of a plan to let the president mould the secret services to his liking (as French presidents tend to anyway).
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio successfully ran a "tale-of-two-cities" electoral, declaring economic and social inequality his highest priority.
The genesis of the story predates the current electoral melodrama in the U.S., but no doubt the final tale has been colored by it.
For him, Turkey tells the most compelling tale, and sheds light on recent electoral upsets we've witnessed in both the US and UK this year.
It contains many surprising elements, including tales of riotous debauchery, allegations of electoral malpractice in student politics and, at one point, an intimate encounter with the pop star Geri Halliwell – more of which later.
Cambridge Analytica, while the most high-profile group, is only one element of this sordid tale that sees foreign funds influence our electoral processes.
Otherwise, "there will be no strong evidentiary basis for differentiating propagandistic tall tales from empirically defensible and logically coherent readings of electoral history".
What has been left out of the happy tale is the way Clinton used poor and working-class black people as political grist to rebuild an electoral coalition of old Reagan Democrats and moderate white Republicans.
