West Wing writers changed election results

I suspected as much, but now it's been confirmed. The writers for the West Wing had initially planned to make Republican Arnold Vinick the winner of the election on the show. Those plans were altered though after the death of John Spencer.

Instead, Lawrence O'Donnell, an executive producer of the show, said he and his fellow writers had declared Santos the winner only after the death, in December, of John Spencer, who played Santos' running mate, Leo McGarry. At that time, the plot for Sunday night's episode had been set: The election was to be won by Alan Alda's Arnold Vinick, a maverick Republican (modeled a bit on Sen. John McCain), whom many Democrats (including the Democrats who write the show) could learn to love.

But after Spencer died, O'Donnell said in a recent interview, he and his colleagues began to confront a creative problem: Would viewers be saddened to see Smits' character lose both his running mate and the election? The writers decided that such an outcome would prove too lopsided, in terms of taxing viewers' emotions, so a script with the new ending - including the election-night death of Spencer's character - was undertaken by John Wells, the executive producer of The West Wing and ER.