Essay for The Currency on the 2020 election
Cable news in the United States is loud in every way. Congressional hearings are packaged up like soap operas and presidential debates promoted in a style typically reserved for action movie releases. To the uninitiated, the exertion could reasonably seem unsustainable. Americans, though, know better.
And so it was, last Thursday, that on the third consecutive night of nonstop US presidential election coverage, footage of MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki leafing through sheets and dragging maps across screens (the “Kornacki Cam” even visible inset during ad breaks and reminiscent of the kind of passive, novelty broadcasting carried out by zoos) was still being watched by millions of people.
“Election night… CONTINUED,” CNN hosts announced at every interval to millions more, serialising the drama, insisting it was something to be binge-watched. John King gestured and rattled like an auctioneer for hours on end. “Seizures Induced as CNN Map Strobes Wildly Between Blue And Red,” came a headline from the satirists at The Onion. Satire?
A click away on Fox News, watched by millions more still, the president’s most dedicated defenders lined out in a Shakespearean display of fealty. Ted Cruz, raising his voice about Democrats “clouding vote-counting in a shroud of darkness”. Newt Gingrich (77) declaring himself the angriest he’s been “in six decades”. Lindsey Graham pledging half a million dollars to a newly-minted “official election defense fund”. All of them at home in front of their bookcases.
“I’m for free, fair, open elections,” said Fox’s Sean Hannity, playfully rolling an arm of his glasses in one hand, fluent in doth-protest-too-much. Hannity and his guests railed against abstract law-breaking, partisanship and “illegitimate” votes. They spat count updates as if the numbers were themselves incriminating.
No broadcast came close, however, to the one that aired at about 7 pm on the east coast that same night, starring as it did a seasoned ham, an old hand: a flailing incumbent candidate ready to denigrate the democratic process with all his might.
President Trump, in the eleventh hour of his four-year term, delivered a patronising speech riddled with untrue allegations of fraud, “illegal” voting and miscellaneous corruption. The president stretched the truth on litigation (both instituted and promised). He falsely claimed victory.
The remarks were singular in their timing, tone and subject matter. Attacking institutions like the Federal Reserve and the US Supreme Court is a hobby of the president’s. The strength of the aspersions cast on democracy itself, however, broke new ground. Despite being staffed by the most prepared people on the planet, several TV channels, unprepared for this apogee of prime-time Trump, cut the feed short.
“Why is he doing this?” a frustrated CNN pundit demanded of former Republican senator Rick Santorum. The network would shortly call it the most dishonest address of the entire presidency. Twitter had been placing health warnings on the president’s tweets for successive days. It was as though some kind of sand timer had run out for Trump. Santorum looked away.
“Emotions are running very high right now,” he said weakly.
***
The day prior, Wednesday –– though it’s difficult to say for sure –– the U.S. reported a record-breaking 100,000 new cases of Covid-19. Covid-19, the catalyst for the mail-in ballot, the virus that shifted the 2020 presidential election out of the ballot box and into the mailbox. The virus that forced more than 20 million Americans out of jobs. The virus that made the count last for the best part of a week.
The virus prompted any number of other moves nationwide. On September 30, I requested my absentee ballot from the New York City Board of Elections. The following day, movers came to my Brooklyn apartment to gather up my furniture and my personal effects and cart them to a storage unit I’ll never see, and I, joining the pandemic unmoored, moved a few hundred miles north to a cottage on the water in mid-coast Maine.
It took several feats of engineering to induce the US Postal Service to deliver mail to the cottage. I paid a fee for mail forwarding, affixed medical tape with my name on it to the mailbox and signed up to an over-the-top service that emailed me photographs of letters I might expect. Even then, no ballot came. As November approached, the missing ballot became the locus for my every anxiety. I checked for it with a regularity that alarmed those around me. My disquiet about its whereabouts built.
In late October, I called the elections board in Brooklyn, at that moment faced with either not voting at all or attempting to offer a two-month lease to a Maine polling worker as watery grounds for registration in the state I had just appeared in. That dubious workaround played on a tortured loop in my head, looping more furiously once the New Yorker who took the call told me there was nothing that could be done about the missing ballot, that it was too late for them to issue me a new one.
If I, with all this stability, these few and meagre obligations, these ample resources, could not organise a mail-in ballot, I thought, who the hell could? The incredulity gave way to anger. I contemplated channelling that anger into a 12-hour round-trip and I added to it by contemplating all of the members of the electorate for whom a 12-hour round-trip is totally out of the question.
“A concern from day one,” Vice President Mike Pence once said of the mail-in ballot, suggesting Democrats had “used the backdrop of the coronavirus to send millions of ballots all across the state and the country” in an arrangement “ripe for fraud”. To me, it seemed more likely that thousands of ballots were lost in limbo, unaccounted for, with no recourse available to those whose names were on them.
On the morning of October 30, the Friday before the election, a grainy image of my incoming ballot arrived via the aforementioned email service. That afternoon I fished it out of the mailbox and drove to the post office in my rental car. The clerk took it from my hands and thanked me. Traditional mail, a miracle in ordinary times, seemed to me too perforated for the purpose.
New York, as expected, was called for resoundingly for Biden by Tuesday night. By Friday morning, Biden’s tally in the state came to 4.2 million; Trump’s hovered at 2.9 million. My vote –– unlikely to feature in that count and arguably not critical to New York’s electoral college votes –– was never going to be one of those contested thousands in Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina or Pennsylvania, but it was my vote; it was the only means available to me to formally register my alarm and my opposition, to say something about observations I made in the four years since Trump was sworn in.
Living in New York City can make it difficult to have any appreciation for the deep and entrenched division that characterises the US today. Only by departing or going to the outermost edges of its boroughs will you see evidence of the national picture emerge, and even then, only because of banners and flags, because of car stickers and Walmarts and the tell-tale way housing is laid out. You drive a little further and you come into closer proximity to the t-shirts and pick-up trucks you’ve seen on TV, to the nationalist slogans and the red hats and the racist yard signs.
***
The coastal town of Wiscasset in the US state of Maine is small (pop. 3,700) and from a distance resembles a scene in a pop-up book. Three white New England steeples punctuate a canopy of rust-coloured leaves.
To walk beneath those trees and along the streets of the town is to be met with American flag after American flag, tidily painted clapboard, charming Cape Cod houses and old-world Regency accents. It also brings you to –– at least, it did until Wednesday and Thursday of last week –– Trump and Biden homes, clearly demarcated, sitting cheek by jowl. A Trump household, a Biden household, a Trump household, a Biden household, a Trump household, a Biden household with a life-size cardboard cut-out of George Clooney on the deck, an innocuous house with windchimes jangling out front and a Tesla with a Trump/Pence plate parked at the rear, and so on.
“KEEP AMERICA GREAT,” was the message on many Trump textiles. “STOP THE BULLSHIT,” read others. Which was it? Throughout October I walked the streets of Wiscasset marvelling at the seeming 50/50 split, a world away from the neighbourhood I was used to.
The aforementioned cottage, on the opposite side of the river, has a screened porch that’s good to sit and work in on mild evenings. Sometimes the distant, appreciative bip-bip of horns can be heard from the bridge leading to the town.
Every weekday evening, a wiry Vietnam war veteran named Stott Carleton crosses it with his black labrador Skip. Carleton wears a harness that resembles a baby carrier from behind but has a slot into which to sit a large flagpole at the front, and in that slot he carries an enormous American flag.
On Thursday evening, alerted by the traffic, I ran to the bridge. Catching up behind him, I took in the mix of the drivers and passengers energised by Carleton’s flag. There were obvious candidates: GMC Sierras festooned in their stars and stripes; industrial trucks with horns that sit up on the tops of their cabins; sheriff and cop cars subtly flashing blue lights. But there were surprising honkers and wavers, too. Women, groups of young people, station wagons with a couple of children in the back.
Other than saying he was walking in his friend’s memory, Carleton didn’t seem to want to talk. It’s not a political statement, he told a local newspaper earlier this month.
“We’re there because right now our country is deeply divided and the hatred is palpable,” he said, speaking about himself and Skip. “We’re there because we need to heal and start talking with each other again with honesty and compassion. And yes, I am surprised by the positive reception we have received on the bridge.”
That depth of division was in the end laid bare in Wiscasset, where the seeming 50/50 split was reflected in a presidential race that, with 96% of votes reported on Friday, had just two (2) votes between Biden (1,114 or 48.2%) and Trump (1,112 or 48.1%).
In 2016, the election of Trump came as a shock to many. Four years on, any doubt or ambiguity about the meaning and consequence of a Trump administration has been removed. And even so –– or, to be more plain about it, secure in that knowledge –– 70 million American voters went to lengths to renew their confidence in President Trump. That Joe Biden will succeed him in office is, at the time of writing, the all-but-certain result of this election. Interpreting the election as a referendum on the United States, we can also be certain about distrust, division, mutual suspicion and in places, as Stott Carleton said, palpable hatred.
As the sun set over Wiscasset on Thursday night, I squinted from the porch as Carleton turned for home. Against the pink-blue dusk, he switched on a torch to illuminate the flag. Passing drivers kept beeping.