a column by Colleen O’Brien
The election is under way – Americans have been voting in some states for 45 days ahead of next week’s November 3 physical voting day. The 2020 general election is looking to be one of the high-voter turnouts of our history. This is because the country has been divided daily by rhetoric pronouncing us a country of Red states and Blue states; the Blue states accused of being the sanctuaries of all crime, Coronavirus, burning forests, street protests, illegal aliens, poor people; and oddly, intellectuals and the not poorly educated – and the people, the voters, seem to need to speak up to deny – or uphold – this division.
The election is between two white men in their seventies, one with 20,000 lies in four years on his record, the other with 46 years of political votes on his record.
One of them plans, the other one talks about plans; and it remains an election tangentially about COVID-19 or racial justice or gender equality or the economy or schools opening or small businesses closing or people evicted because they get no paycheck or wind power or pollution or selling public lands or the wealthy able to afford healthcare. Oh, and a niggling guilt about babies taken out of their parent’s arms at the southern border.
It’s an election about honesty, decency and paying attention to all of the above things – the general welfare – that democratic governments are beholden to address.
It is because of slippery integrity that this election will be about each candidate’s character, his history, the language he uses, his goals, focus and general attitude toward life and responsibility.
According to Gallup polls taken in May of this year, when asked their party affiliation, 31 percent said Democrat, 25 percent said Republican, 45 percent said Independent; in a follow-up survey of the no-party affiliation surveyed, in which the question was “Do you lean more to the Democrat party or the Republican party?” the result was that 50 percent lean to the Left (considered to be the Democrat party), and 38 percent lean to the Right (the Republican party).
A June 2020 poll by Pew Research Center asked people what they thought of the state of the nation from 2017 to the present. That 46 percent were hopeful is, well, kind of hopeful. The rest of the numbers are dismaying:
- 71 percent were angry;
- 66 percent fearful;
- 17 percent proud;
- 12 percent were satisfied; and
- 87 percent were dissatisfied.
Except for the chronic gambler, all bets are off when it comes to this election. Will the presidency be won by a wide margin? Maybe there will be a whopping vote for the man who wants to help; maybe it will be for the one who wants to help himself?
We await what we hope will be a decisive vote and a graceful handing over of tenure to the Oval Office. The babble on one side makes lots of us shudder and hope simply for a peaceful, traditional, democratic transition, the kind we’ve had since George Washington handed the job to John Adams in 1797. No temper tantrums, no whining, no accusing, no fake data, no bullying. Just a gentlemanly relinquishing of power.
We dream it.
