US election: Nervous New Yorkers sleepwalking toward polling day

Taking a bus from New York’s John F Kennedy airport and through Long Island provides an insightful snapshot into some of the realities of 21st century America. In the one hour it took yesterday to drive from one of America’s largest airports to my accommodation in Brooklyn, I saw poverty that was akin to that I had witnessed on the streets of New Delhi.
While it wasn’t quite ubiquitous, as it is in India’s capital, the presence of destitute families languishing on the side of the highway was a constant fixture of the sweeping boulevards of Long Island. It was on a scale that I had only before seen in hopelessly underdeveloped countries. While London is a city that is still marked by great social and racial inequality, it still feels like a utopia compared to some pockets of New York City. Covid-19, which has claimed 33,000 lives in the Big Apple, has also undoubtedly added to the level of poverty.
However, in other parts of the city it feels like business as usual. Saturday afternoon in Soho, Manhattan, was a treat for the senses. A beautiful 20-degree autumn day was accompanied by happy go lucky Americans swinging from bar-to-bar among the leafy streets of the trendy downtown neighbourhood. Greenwich Village was a similar scene, with the only thing reminding people of the pandemic was the ubiqutious wearing of facemasks and the half-hearted social distancing.
In both situations, Long Island poverty and Manhattan yuppie-ism, there were no obvious signs that the country was in the midst of an election that has been oft-described as the “most important in generations”. I expected to be greeted with numerous picket fences decorated with Biden-Harris signs in New York, with the occasional Trump placard in between, and chatter about election day. Instead, I have seen one bloke in Manhattan with a facemask that said “Vote” and no other discernible signs that an election was just days away. One friendly kiosk owner told me New Yorkers just did not want to talk about the election. He said they had been traumatised by the twin peaks of a four-year Trump presidency and a deadly pandemic.
“People are sick of it and are really on edge,” he said.
“It’s better to just not talk about it right now.”
New York City is of course one of the liberal hotspots of the US and a place where Trumpism has been met with abject disdain. The memories of 2016 lie deep in the psyche of some. My host in Brooklyn, for example, exuded a kind of paranoia about the election result, with the avowed Democrat grumbling about the number of people who work in the Pennsylvanian fracking industry and how it could affect the election.
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It may be an obvious opinion at this point, but I will try to give the worked-up liberals of America’s East Coast a bit of a breather – Joe Biden will win this election. While I had continued to pick Donald Trump to win even through the darkest of times during the past six months, it is now evident that the President has run out of juice.
In 2016 we saw Trump campaign with a laser like strategy that concentrated on placating America’s disenfranchised working class, however he has not been able to develop a coherent and killer narrative in 2020. While in 2016 he campaigned like a man who had nothing to lose, we now see him literally begging people to vote for him at rallies. Trump’s appeal as a political outsider in 2016 also cannot be revived, after four years in the government’s driving seat.
He looks like a loser less than two weeks out from polling day and there’s little to suggest he will turn it around. All available polling says the same thing – Trump trails by double digits in most surveys and is behind in the majority of crucial swing states. While his acolytes will point to his 2016 come-from-behind win as evidence he can overcome the odds, they cannot deny that the polling deficits are far greater now than they were four years ago.
If Biden does indeed win the Presidency, it will likely only be declared many weeks after the polls close. A record number of postal votes this year means that we are likely in for weeks, or even months, of legal wrangling between the parties. He will also take on the job as Commander in Chief during arguably the most tumultuous peacetime period in America’s history.