Fractured and anxious, the American electorate votes for two polar opposite candidates

In the seven pivotal states which will decide the outcome of the American presidential election, voters interviewed by AFP on Tuesday say they are terribly anxious about the future of their country and completely divided in the face of two candidates with polar opposite world views.

While more than 80 million Americans have already voted early, long lines have stretched since dawn in key counties in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

At the end of a crazy and violent campaign marked by the resounding withdrawal of President Joe Biden in favor of Kamala Harris and two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, millions of voters are patiently lining up in front of polling stations — often schools and gymnasiums — displaying their choice on their caps and t-shirts or simply waving the Star-Spangled Banner.

“This election is fundamental for the future of our 250-year-old democracy,” summarizes Sam Ruark, a 50-year-old environmental activist in Asheville, North Carolina, ravaged and bruised this fall by a hurricane.

– The future of the free world –

In New York City and the state of the same name, which is predominantly Democratic but where Republicans are making progress, Brockett Within, 65, “thought about the future of this nation and the free world” before voting for Harris.

Because Donald “Trump is a retrograde who takes us back to a country out of his imagination” and “I don’t want an autocrat”, he rejects.

The campaign between the 60-year-old vice-president and the 78-year-old former president focused, on the Democratic side, on the defense of democratic institutions, the rights of women and minorities and, on the Republican side, on the economy, inflation and immigration.

In Wisconsin, Marcy Davis, 18, is voting for the first time and would find it “super cool to have a woman president”, Kamala Harris – a former judge and senator from California of Indian and Jamaican origin – having promised to restore the federal guarantee of the right to abortion dynamited by the Supreme Court in 2022.

But Darlene Taylor, 56, met in Erie, on the shores of the eponymous Great Lake in Pennsylvania, on the contrary, “does not want four more years of high inflation and high gas prices, nor lies.”

Erie is a key county in this rural and industrial northeastern state, considered the most crucial of all. Its 270,000 voters received visits from Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

– “Close the border” –

Ms. Taylor proudly wears a t-shirt bearing the names of her champions “Trump” and his running mate “Vance” and thinks that the central issue of this presidential election is to “close the border” to the millions of illegal immigrants that the populist tribune has continued to call him “criminals” who are “poisoning the blood” of Americans.

“America must come first and (Kamala) Harris will not support that,” protests this woman who says she lives on disability benefits.

A far-right nationalist rhetoric that makes Ken Thompson, 66, who voted for Harris and his running mate Tim Walz jump.

Certainly, he recognizes, “industrial jobs have disappeared in Erie” and “it’s a big problem”, but Donald “Trump didn’t help anything” when he was in power between 2017 and 2021.

“Kamala (Harris) will help young people with housing,” believes this sixty-year-old wearing a traditional baseball cap decorated with the star-spangled banner.

Also aged 66, Pennsylvania teacher Candyce Sandusky recognizes that Donald Trump “is tough” but it is so that “the world knows what he means”.

The New York real estate billionaire, who has shaken up American democracy and international relations, made numerous inflammatory statements during the campaign against “enemies within” but also against the traditional partners of the United States.

So, Whytne Stevens, a 28-year-old urban planner from Atlanta, the immense metropolis of Georgia, “hopes that things change on inflation and employment but (is) also worried about more existential questions about the future of the country” .

At 27, Ludwidg Louizaire, former Miss Georgia, is also very aware of what is happening on Tuesday in the United States: “History is in the making,” she whispers.

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