In a Rust Belt town rocked by protests, race is the defining issue
Shaquada Atkins sat waiting in her car behind a queue of voters that snaked down the road and round the corner, as the snow started to come down hard in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The 29-year-old had gone to the polling station with two friends who had not cast a vote since Barack Obama was on the ticket in 2012. The women were joined by a number of young, black, first-time voters, who said they saw much more at stake this election.
“It’s not the time to sit back, to sit it out, to sit at home,” said Ms Atkins, a counsellor at a drug rehabilitation centre, when asked why she thought so many black Kenoshians were turning out. “Four more years of Trump and, you’ll see, there will be a race war.”
There are few places in the country where race is more manifestly on the ballot than the quiet Midwestern factory town that became a focus for civil rights protests over the summer after Jacob Blake, an African-american man, was shot seven times by police and left paralysed. Entire blocks were torched in the rioting that followed.
Long-running tensions in Kenosha, where the population of 100,000 is 80 per cent white and 12 per cent black, were brought to the fore by the Black Lives Matter protests and a president who has sought to exploit them.
Donald Trump won Wisconsin by just 1 per cent in 2016, buoyed in part by a depressed turnout among black voters. Fast forward to 2020 and his challenger, Joe Biden, who has a black female running mate in Kamala Harris, is a staggering 17 points ahead in the Rust Belt swing state.
Much of Kenosha’s high street remains boarded up two months after the August riots, with piles of burntout cars sitting where they were left.
Mr Trump, who has pitched himself as the law and order candidate, told the crowd at a Wisconsin rally over the weekend that he sent in the National Guard in their “beautiful, expensive uniforms” to stop the “terrible violence”. Many of his supporters wore “blue lives matter” masks in support of the police. “You wouldn’t even have a Kenosha if not for Trump,” the president said.
Mr Trump has called the Black Lives Matter movement a “symbol of hate,” and refused to condemn the white nationalist group Proud Boys, whom he told to “stand back and stand by” at the first presidential debate in Utah.
Fabio de Bartolo, a 44-year-old shop assistant who watched the rally on TV, said “safety” was now his first concern, as he cast his vote at the county clerk’s office. “We can’t go through what happened again,” he said. He counted himself among a “silent majority” of Trump supporters, who, he claimed, were too afraid to put flags up in case “their houses were burned”.
However, Ms Atkins, who lives in a predominately African American neighbourhood, sees white residents’ conflation of the black struggle for equality with this type of thuggery as thinly veiled racism. All evidence suggests that the rioters, many of whom were white, came in from nearby Chicago or Milwaukee looking for trouble.
Tanya Mclean, a community leader with the Working Families Party, blamed the president for stoking divisions. “All we can do is turn our anger and grief and frustration into votes,” she said.
There are early signs that this is happening. Kenosha has recorded the second largest boost in voter registration of the state’s 72 counties. Mrs Mclean said she had helped register hundreds of people, 80-90 per cent of whom were black.
Mr Biden has managed to attract older black voters, who associate him with Mr Obama, but younger black voters have remained more elusive. While there is palpable excitement for Ms Harris, the first black woman to feature at the top of the ticket, there is more muted enthusiasm for Mr Biden.
“He takes our votes for granted,” said Shaun, a 28-year-old hotel receptionist in downtown Kenosha who did not want to give his surname. “That time when he said ‘you ain’t black’ if you don’t vote for him. Nah man, that wasn’t cool.”
Notably, young black voters do not seem to feel as negatively about Mr Trump as older black Americans. In early July, a poll of battleground states by the African American Research Collaborative found that 35 per cent of black adults aged 18-30 agreed that while they did not always like Mr Trump’s policies, they liked his “strong demeanour and defiance of the establishment”.
It is unlikely that Trump supporters will make up a significant share of the black vote, which could account for as much as 13 per cent of the electorate. However, many pollsters have said racial issues could define the election.
Mrs Mclean, who is black, agrees. “There are people who vote for Trump because of his racism,” she said. “But I ask those who don’t to really ask themselves: what side of history will you stand on?”