E It's midnight in New York and I can't sleep. I listen to the Daily, a podcast that recommends not watching polls before bed, and then listen to an hour of poll analysis. When I came to America, I asked people everywhere about their political views, filled notebooks with notes, and found everything. Very interesting.
Now I find it all so bad that in ten days statistically one in two people here will vote for a man who gives reasons every minute not to trust their own cactus under any circumstances, let alone the largest economy in the West. Election anxiety is the name of the fear that is currently spreading across the country. In the US, street posters are not allowed, which is why election campaigns are carried out everywhere else. For example in buttons sold by volunteers in street stalls; Selection will evolve over time. “Swifties for Harris” followed the Taylor Swift endorsement, and “Catlovers for Kamala” followed the Childless Catlady commentary. Campaigns also feature on laptops, water bottles and bumpers with Trump or Harris stickers, signs in front yards, Trump thongs (from $10.99) and Kamala baby onesies (from $9).
Because the claim to an apolitical private life is so important in the United States, election campaigning reaches a remarkable depth of personal space. But with so much of the campaign taking place under your own thumb and on tiny cell phone screens, Obama clips playing on repeat, viral Twitter videos showing mothers in SUVs encouraging other women to secretly vote for Harris, Trump roasts, and the Internet ablaze. If the world wasn't so dark, this election campaign would be an Olympic cabaret.
I have been practicing door-to-door door-to-door campaigning to prepare for the election campaign. I'm learning that conversations aren't about arguments, but remembering to vote, which feels logical and dramatic, and we counter this with a reminder that someone is meticulously planning the destruction of democracy, perhaps creating a shortcut. I'm also learning that under no circumstances should you engage in conversations with Trump voters that will inflame them and then they will surely forget it and vote. It is called an election campaign, but politics at its core is mass psychology, form instead of content, messages instead of debate, marketing competition with precious shares.
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Both fascists and democrats are cast as heroes, people don't vote, they love the candidate, every favorite sausage, every dog photo is seen as a sign of characterization and political correctness. It's not about the election of a superhero, but about so much more, the political conditions in which we will all be working over the next four years that no one is talking about.
On Twitter, Trump falsely announced that he was leading in all the polls and invited me to an election monitoring exercise. The big horror, it seems, is yet to come. It's two in the morning and I can't sleep.
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