ANALYSIS
Campaign nears end. Now what?
An uncivil war of rhetoric and resentments has scoured the country, unearthing deep ruptures. The candidates are unpopular and disdained for their shortcomings. Voters are fed up, mad at one another and despairing that anything can stem the corrosive animosity that will trail the winner to Washington.
And what happens after Tuesday? Can Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump put a fractured nation back together?
Pennsylvania and Ohio are neighboring states where the two parties held their conventions in July and have bombarded voters ever since, to a sour end. Along the roughly 380 miles from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Cincinnati, dismayed voters abound. Ask them if either candidate can restore tranquillity to the country, and they concur: It's hard to see how.
Taysha Jacko is serious as she ponders the presidential contest at a Halloween festival in Alliance in northeast Ohio. She is 22 and, she said, she does not plan to vote. Neither of this year's options is as appealing as Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, the only politicians she has ever liked. If she did vote, she allowed, it would not be for Trump because he's said nothing in this long campaign about children, and at least Hillary Clinton has done that. Almost nothing Jacko can think of would bind the nation's wounds, except maybe for the candidates to notice people like her.
“I just want to hear from somebody, mainly, about the people.”
Halfway across the state at a pumpkin patch in rural Ostrander, Crystal Shock had similar words. She and her family have been through the wringer — lost jobs, uncertain housing, persistent economic worry. So how does the next president glue together a divided America?
“Come down to our level. Know what it's like to struggle,” says Shock.
Any campaign belongs to its times, and this one fits into a worldwide dislocation of the masses from the elites — those of governments, businesses, religions, media. In Great Britain, those sentiments led to the vote to leave the European Union. Here, it has helped to fuel Trump's rise and limit Clinton's success.
In an October poll by SurveyMonkey, 50 percent of Americans said the country is more divided than ever and the splits would persist “far into the future.”
An additional 30 percent agreed that America is more divided than ever but said the nation could knit itself together in the near future. That left fewer than 1 in 5 people to assert that the country hasn't actually sunk to its most divided state.
A cycle of distrust has bred pessimism. “Even when the news is good, people don't trust it,” said Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and political scientist. The randomness of threatening events — whether economic collapse or terrorism — also “makes people jittery.”
That sense of pessimism and dislocation is particularly strong among America's shrinking white majority. “Whites are feeling like the earth is moving beneath their feet. Whether it's an African-American president or immigrants, they feel the meaning of America is changing for them,” Persily said. “And it's heaped onto the other insecurities.”
All of that can be found in the campaign.
Dave Gedrock was loading campaign signs into his car in Medina, Ohio, southwest of Cleveland. The attorney linked Trump's rise to Republicans such as former House Speaker John Boehner, who he thinks “gave Obama everything he wanted” — a characterization Democrats would dispute.
“America's frustrated,” Gedrock said. “They don't trust the current politicians, they don't trust the insiders, and I think that's why a lot of what Trump says doesn't come back to bite him.” Trump, he said, would unite the country by shrinking government and reversing policies “making it hard for people to make a living.”
Still, Gedrock exemplified another way divisions have deepened: Both sides exist in their own bubbles, listening to their own set of truths, repeated by partisans on social media.
Gedrock's opposite is Sayisha Wall, standing near the Ohio River in Cincinnati with her daughter Arayanah, awaiting the start of a Clinton rally.
Wall, a contractor for the IRS, said she doesn't know anyone who is voting for Trump. Yet her yearnings sound a lot like Gedrock's. “The majority of people are not billionaires, they're just trying to live and have a good quality of life and raise their kids,” Wall said.
What can bring them together? “If (Clinton) gets in there, I'll have all the hope and the faith in the world. I'll be able to sleep at night.” And if Trump wins? “We're doomed.”
A dozen miles from downtown Pittsburgh on a Friday night, a high school football stadium was the place to hear calls for cooperation once the election is over. The Central Catholic High Vikings were favored over the home-field Penn Hills Indians, the team for which Tony Allen's son plays.
Allen, setting up to record the game, thinks America will find itself if people just back off and let it. Any coalescing, however, will have to be neighbor to neighbor, he said.
Allen has watched as friendships have broken up during this campaign cycle. “We are allowing this election to divide us. Why?” he asked. Whoever wins needs to deliver a simple message: “We need to work together, to come together as a country.”
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