US’s anxious mood on the eve of the election
for president have made it harder to be optimistic, many Americans say. One candidate said things were so bad that only he could make America great again. The other asked people to consider that the country would be stronger together, but neither captured the hearts and hopes of any broad cross-section of the people. Neither offered any grand idea for a more secure, happier future.
Yet in the final hours before the vote, Americans remain bullish about their prospects, eager to keep plugging, for themselves and their children. In interviews across the country, whether they’re voting for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, anyone but them, or no one at all, Americans almost uniformly say that the politicians are clueless, but the people will do what needs getting done.
Family feuds
Melinda Powers opens the heavy door of the industrial oven and carefully removes a steaming apple crisp. She inspects it meticulously. At 19, her dream is to open a bakery. She worries that Trump and Clinton are her obstacles.
To get from the culinary studies program at Newbury College in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a business of her own, Powers expects she’ll need her parents’ help. But they’re fighting over politics right now, and it’s bad enough that Powers could see them breaking up.
Powers’s parents met at Winchester Repeating Arms, an Irish-American guy who produced gun parts and an immigrant woman from Cape Verde who inspected guns. They fell in love on the shop floor.
But the election has driven a wedge between them. He’s for Trump; she’s for Clinton. “My dad jokingly brings it up all the time,” Powers said, “but my mum doesn’t think it’s funny at all. Trump offends everything she’s ever worked for.”
Powers’s mother is so disturbed by the anti-immigrant sentiment she’s seen this year that she sometimes threatens to move back to Cape Verde if Trump wins. “My dad obviously doesn’t want to leave his Harley Davidson buddies behind and move to a foreign country where he doesn’t speak the language,” said his daughter.
The campaign has also divided Powers from her old friends. Most of those friends are white, and all but one support Trump. “My white friends think they can say racial stuff more than they used to,” Powers said. “They use the N-word a lot more now . . . There is more hate directed toward other races and toward immigrants.”
Powers is still an optimist; no matter who wins, she will work hard to achieve her dreams. She still believes America is the greatest country. But now she sees a hate that masquerades as humour. “We can be driving somewhere,” she said, “and they’ll be like, ‘Melinda, sit in the back’. Then they’ll laugh. After a while, you do feel slightly left out because at the end of the day, we are not all the same. I am the different one.”
Optimism versus pessimism
Optimism, perhaps the most exceptional of American traits, is down. The Washington PostABC News poll found earlier in the fall campaign that only 42 percent of Americans were bullish about the next year, the lowest number since 2004.
Yet here was Sheila Rushing, 67, knocking on doors, even on doors of houses that looked empty, with boards slanting over the windows. Rushing had avoided politics for years, a job requirement: The work that got her through divorce, at the Detroit Museum of African-American History, was a non-profit, limiting her political activity. But when she retired, she canvassed for the first black president, and now for Hillary Clinton.
“I’m doing great,” she said. “Glad and blessed. Glad that the Lord woke me up.”
Rushing, like many Detroiters, was offended when Trump declared that black Americans were living in “hell”. The past eight years were no hell. She had raised her grandson, Armando, after his father died. He turned 26 on Halloween, and Rushing had helped him through high school and on to Wayne State to get his degree in criminal justice. And now he’s working. Rushing took pride in her own ability to pay off her home note.
Rushing learned this fall not to broach the subject of politics with some friends. It was too raw. Still, she knocked on another door. The home was empty, but not abandoned. She left a flier, with a picture of Clinton and Obama deep in conversation in the Oval Office. “Protect his legacy,” it read.
Nearly half of Americans believe the US is “less great” than it’s been in the past; 37 percent said it is about the same and 16 percent said it is greater. The idea that the country has grown less great is much more common among Trump supporters (77 percent) than among Clinton voters (21 percent). Through the years, pessimism about the country’s direction has been stronger among supporters of the party that’s out of power. In 2008, as the economy weakened and the war in Iraq dragged on, an NBC- Wall Street Journal poll found that 77 percent of Obama supporters said the nation was in a “state of decline”, compared with 57 percent of those backing the Republican, John McCain.