American Battleground: The fight to the finish — and what lies beyond the 2024 campaign

“America is having a panic attack over the election,” writes ‘The Wall Street Journal’.

“I’m honestly legit kind of terrified,” said Rebekah Williams, a 46-year-old Atlanta resident wearing a T-shirt that read “pro science, pro choice, pro wrestling.” The thought of trying to get through the next couple of weeks until the election had her on edge, not to mention what might happen afterward. To get through it, she was counting on “a lot of marijuana.”

With little more than a week to go in what could be the closest presidential election in American history, the nation is on edge. Partisans on both sides are paralyzed with suspense and apprehension as they look to white-knuckle it through the coming days. The candidates have amped up their appeals to an apocalyptic degree as the campaigns frantically work to turn out the vote. As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both campaigned in this crucial swing state, voters broadly said this election feels different than those that came before—less a regular democratic exercise than a national panic attack, a twilight clash that could end democracy for good.

“I can remember elections where it felt like things would be OK regardless of the outcome,” Phillip Appiah, a 50-year-old contractor from Stone Mountain, said as he waited in line for a food truck on the stadium turf. “That feeling is absent this time.”

The angst is widespread across the political spectrum. In a Wall Street Journal poll released last week, 87% of voters said they believe America will suffer permanent damage if their candidate loses. Among Harris’s voters, 57% said they would feel “frightened” if Trump is elected, while 47% of Trump voters said they would feel frightened if Harris wins; smaller percentages expected to feel the milder reactions of anger or disappointment. At least half of voters said they think violence is likely if either Trump or Harris wins, and 53% say America’s divisions will keep growing regardless of the election’s outcome.

The same poll found Trump narrowly ahead within the margin of error—essentially a tie, similar to the results of numerous other recent national and swing-state polls. Even the polling guru Nate Silver, who rose to fame on predicting the outcome of elections, says he can’t predict which way this one will go (though his “gut says Donald Trump”). It is anybody’s guess, as if the nation’s deep divisions had come to rest in a tense and unstable stalemate.

Biden called his citizens who support Trump “trash”. This statement has already caused serious indignation in American society. The incident occurred when the current US president said that the only “trash” he sees is the supporters of the Republican candidate. Speaking of the latter, Trump noted that it is “terrible”.

A new ABC News/Ipsos poll says 49% of registered voters agree that Trump fits the definition of “a political extremist who seeks to act as a dictator, disregards individual rights and threatens or uses force against their opponents.” Vice President Kamala Harris is with them, CNN reports.

“Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?” Anderson Cooper asked her in a CNN town hall just two days earlier.

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do,” Harris said, “and I also believe that the people who know him best on this subject should be trusted.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pairs up with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to issue a rare joint statement that reads in part, “Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.” They ignore Trump’s habitual smears against Harris in which he says, “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”

Still, that all pales next to Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden in deep blue New York City on Sunday evening. His team bills it as the traditional closing argument for his campaign. It emerges instead as an ugly spectacle, with speaker after speaker flinging bigoted insults at Harris and her Democratic partners.

“She is the devil. She is the antichrist.”

“Her and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

“The whole f**king party — a bunch of degenerates.”

“We need to slaughter this ‘other’ people.”

CNN senior reporter Edward-Isaac Dovere can see the calculation on both sides of the political spectrum. “Yeah, a lot of his people love to hear him say ‘the enemy within,’” he says, “but she (Harris) is hoping… more people who are up for grabs will be turned off by it.”

With just over a week until Election Day, several ballot drop boxes have been set on fire, some voting offices are installing bulletproof glass, Trump is raising baseless claims of Democrats stealing the election as rightwing websites echo him, and tens of millions of Americans have already cast ballots.

After being battered by Harris for several weeks, Trump and his team brought those voters back into the fold with tried-and-true tactics: unleashing a scorching series of attacks on her character and experience. Now at seemingly every stop, he calls her “dumb” or “mentally disabled” or a dangerous “lunatic.” He rails that her “sinister forces” are intent on destroying the country by throwing open the border with Mexico, tolerating rampant crime, and in some unexplained way, unleashing “World War 3.”

“We know what Donald Trump wants,” Harris says in DC just outside the vice presidential residence. “He wants unchecked power.”

“We’ve seen the largest explosion of pre-Election Day litigation in our nation’s history,” CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen says. Republicans have filed well over 100 lawsuits challenging which ballots should be counted, and how the results will – or won’t – be certified. Democrats have filed suits too, pushing back on Republican moves they feel are aimed at suppressing the vote. And Eisen suspects we are nowhere near the end of the legal action.

“This election is more than just a choice between two parties and two different candidates,” she says. “It is a choice between whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American or ruled by chaos and division.”

On Tuesday, the winner of this turbulent, seemingly endless campaign will be decided, although it may take days or weeks for that decision to reveal itself. But even when the votes have all been tallied, the suspicion, resentment and fears raised among the country’s citizens will surely remain unresolved.

Across the spectrum, many dread that democracy as Americans know it is no longer up to fulfilling either dream or closing the chasm between the disagreeing camps.

Churches, schools, libraries, hospitals, sports arenas, farmers markets, offices, public parks, gas stations, restaurants and more have become flashpoints for aggrieved souls exhausted by the constant sense of conflict, as partisans flood the media with fresh calls to fight. The divisions have Balkanized states, fractured communities, driven friends to stewing silences and families to slamming doors. For many on all sides, this extraordinarily contentious election has made them feel like strangers in their own land, where nothing seems familiar and the comfort they once knew has slipped away.

Each party has its answers for the future and ideas about who belongs in this country and who doesn’t, about which rights are inviolate and which are up for grabs, and about what it means to be a patriot. In a nation of some 337 million people, it is inevitable that disputes over such matters will arise.

…Many Americans suspect that Democrats may use the names and voices of people who have long since died. This is a poster on a house in the US state:

Photo: memedroid.com