Imagine a straight-A student. She’s perky. She’s generally blonde, from a bottle or otherwise. She understands how to style her hair, how to wear the right makeup and clothes to radiate a seriousness of purpose. She cares. She is fully self-possessed—and there’s something about her that just bugs you.

Maybe it’s that she also seems a bit soulless. Maybe it’s that she wants things. She laps her peers, parlaying dutiful research and kissing up into enviable promotions. She accepts an Oscar with a line that sounds fake and practiced in the mirror. She makes certain men irrationally angry—the type who swear they would totally vote a woman into office, just not this one. She’s a specter haunting all women of ambition, no matter what that ambition may be. She’s Tracy Flick.

Twenty years after Alexander Payne’s Election opened to glowing reviews and middling box office ($15 million, against its $25 million budget), the film has penetrated the national consciousness—especially in regard to its indelible central character, a smiling Slytherin and aspiring high school student-body president played by a career-best Reese Witherspoon. In some crowds, the term “Tracy Flick” has become a pejorative term for a woman who is just too much—too accomplished, too hardworking, too ambitious. Female politicians are especially susceptible; women who have been accused of Flick-ish tendencies include but certainly aren’t limited to Elizabeth Dole (in Roger Ebert’s 1999 review), Elizabeth Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand. Hillary Clinton has borne the brunt of such comparisons—the 2016 election led to an avalanche of think pieces connecting her to Tracy, some about how brutal Election felt in 2016 (“The Very Uncomfortable Experience of Watching Election in 2016,” published in The Cut in September 2016), some anticipating her seemingly inevitable win (“The Triumph of Tracy Flick?”, published in The New York Times November 7, 2016).

“Every four years, when some gal is running for president of something, they dredge out the Tracy Flick comparison,” Payne acknowledged in a recent phone call, from his home in Omaha. “It might be Kirsten Gillibrand, or Hillary Clinton, or who knows who. Then I’m called to make some comment about that. I say, well, it’s like she entered the popular culture, like Archie Bunker. You could never foresee those things.”

Payne didn’t. The director—who won a pair of Oscars for films he made post-Election—never anticipated Tracy’s staying power. “One never thinks that. One only hopes that,” he said. “I wasn’t seeing it so much as a political metaphor. I knew it was in there—I just thought it was a fun little comedy . . . Election’s a film that I still get the most compliments on as a movie from film people, because it has a very good rhythm to it. The stars all aligned to make it a pretty decent film.”

Time has been good to Election, a film based on an early novel by author and screenwriter Tom Perrotta. It’s one of those stories that only seems to become more sharp and prescient with age. “Barack Obama told me twice that it was his favorite political movie,” said Payne. “I met him once in 2005, and he had just been elected senator, and again in 2008 when he was running. Both times when I introduced myself, he said, ‘Oh, Election is my favorite political movie.’”

The story is deceptively simple. Its plot centers on a banal student council race, where junior overachiever Tracy seems to be a shoo-in—until she’s challenged by dumb rich-kid jock Paul Metzler (Chris Klein, in his first on-screen role), who’s convinced to run by a teacher, Jim McAllister (Matthew Broderick), who holds a grudge against Flick. The race is further shaken up by a wildcard third candidate: Paul’s little sister Tammy (Jessica Campbell), who gives burning-down-the-house speeches that hit a now-familiar note: “I don’t even want to be president,” she says. “The only promise I’ll make is that as president, I’ll immediately dismantle the student government so that none of us will ever have to sit through one of these stupid assemblies again!”

Perrotta is on record as saying that the dynamics in his novel were shaped by his obsession with the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, in which Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush was running against young upstart Democrat Bill Clinton, with Independent Texan Ross Perot as a billionaire spoiler candidate. (Though the women compared to her tend to be Democrats, Tracy was based on a Republican, and is portrayed as being to the right of center herself. She writes letters to Elizabeth Dole; in her final scene, she’s seen working for a Republican congressman from Nebraska.)

Every election seems to foreground intangibles—likability, relatability, beer-drinking—over substantive issues, such as policy. That’s probably why it’s so easy to graft the dynamics in Election onto the real-world political primaries and elections that have followed it, from Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama’s out-of-nowhere cool to Hillary Clinton versus spoiled-rich-kid-slash-nihilist Donald Trump. “Speak to a historian,” Payne said, “[and] you can certainly see patterns which iterate themselves in their own unique ways, given the personalities, but following a certain pattern.”

As prescient as it now seems, Perrotta initially had trouble selling Election; publishers couldn’t figure out whether to slot it as a YA book or an adult novel. Producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa eventually got their hands on it, and a chain of events led to his manuscript being both optioned by MTV films and published by Putnam. Payne came on board the film project as director and co-screenwriter, with his frequent writing partner Jim Taylor.

As played by Witherspoon, Tracy Flick is the sort of nuanced character that serves as a tabula rasa for her audience’s feelings about women, especially ambitious young women. Is she a villain? A victim? An abuse survivor? An annoying overachiever? A misunderstood hero? Perhaps she’s all of the above, suggested Payne. “She’s a person. A strong person with a strong personality. But that’s how I see all the characters in my movies. They’re people. Because I have to understand them and see what makes them tick.”

Some aspects of her personality aren’t as up for debate: “One thing we built into the film is that she has some class resentment, because she’s from a lower class family with a single mom. You didn’t see it in the movie, because we cut that specific scene, but she lives in an extremely modest house. The rich kid who’s running, who won, really burned her heinie.”

The late 90s were a fertile period for teen movies. Most featured people in their twenties playing students—“and they all look too pretty, and the high school itself is too well-lit and idyllic, somehow,” said Payne. (Witherspoon had made one of those movies right before she did Election: Cruel Intentions, a cheeky riff on Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the ever-remake-friendly 1782 French novel of sex, power, and intrigue.) But Election stands apart, thanks to its awkward, pimply, teenage sensibility.

That was a byproduct of filming in Omaha, Payne said, on “my turf”—at a real high school that was in session during the shoot. Payne also cast the film with a mix of established actors and non-actors. “All of the extras were students from that high school, which lent to the film exactly what I wanted, which was authenticity,” he said. And though Witherspoon herself “was 20 or 21 at the time,” he added, “she still passed for a high schooler. Had she not, I wouldn’t have cast her.”

Witherspoon’s performance is indelible, the sort that still ranks on best-of lists. Part of her process involved perfecting Flick’s particular Midwestern accent. “Voice was a big one for her. She adopted a clipped, snippy, slightly-verging-on-Fargo-but-not-quite, because Fargo was in our consciousness. She found Tracy Flick’s voice, and then a little tight lip. I remember, before every take, before I’d call action, she would twitch her mouth around, her mouth and nose, not unlike Samantha Stephens in Bewitched. That would help anchor her in what she was doing.”

Witherspoon received great notices and some award nominations for the role—though perhaps her greatest validation came years later, when she met Hillary Clinton. As the actress said in a 2015 Variety interview, Clinton herself acknowledged the Tracy connection: “Everyone talks to me about Tracy Flick,” she told Witherspoon.

Tracy’s real-life avatars—particularly Clinton, Gillibrand, and Warren—also coincidentally happen to be women who grew up in middle and rust belt America, and who initially identified as conservative or centrist—Hillary was once a “Goldwater girl”—before moving politically left as they accrued more life experience. Might that have happened to Tracy as well—or would she have become a Fox News anchor? The film is open-ended enough to imagine a variety of possibilities.

Like Tracy, Clinton has long been a woman whom people use as a mirror for their own projections; their impressions of her often seemed wrapped up in their impressions of themselves, and how they feel about women more broadly. “There’s an unfortunate kind of stereotype,” said Payne, “that when a woman has got a lot on the ball and is in politics, there’s a stick up her butt. But in terms of a larger observation—which has little to do with Election, or maybe it does—you think about Hillary, and what became of her. All it made me think about is that in this country, the white man gave the black man the vote 60 years before he gave it to the white woman. It didn’t surprise me, in a way, that a black man has been elected president before a white woman.”

Election officially entered the canon with a 2017 Blu-ray edition via the Criterion Collection, and will eventually be available in its best movie-geek form via Criterion’s new streaming service. When asked what he thinks of the movie now, Payne demurred with typical Midwestern modesty. But he did say this: “I’m very proud of [it]. I wouldn’t have said that for many years, because I don’t want to say I’m proud of any of them, necessarily—because I don’t want to cast any judgment on them. You want to just put them out there, and to let people have their own reactions to them.”

When watching the film for its Criterion re-release, though, he found himself thinking positively, if in the third person: “This isn’t bad, and its use of music is good. The director was still somewhat under the spell of Casino and Goodfellas about how to link editing and camera movement together with an unending string of songs that change the mood on a dime. It has some of that influence in it. I lucked out with the actors, both professional and non-professional.”

Really, Payne continued, “The other thing I’m proud of is capturing a flavor of a genuine Midwestern high school. The movie was put out by Paramount, a big studio, but it doesn’t feel like a studio movie. It feels like a film with its own integrity. Part of me wishes I could get back to that now. It’s like that Woody Allen movie, Stardust Memories, where they ask him, ‘Why don’t you make more movies like the earlier, funnier ones?’ Well, you hear that from others—but you also hear that from a voice inside yourself.”

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