America on a rocky and uncertain road

Caroline O’Doherty captures the mood as the United States gears up to vote for its next president

The Greyhound bus driver used her sweetest sing-song voice in making the appeal over the public address system.

“Turn off your moo-vie,” she twittered. “Especially the language that is not appropriate for being on a bu-us.” Her appeal, to a passenger talking loudly on his mobile, was heard by everyone but him.

For more than an hour, on the trip through south-western Pennsylvania, he was the star of his own movie and no bus driver was going to tell a leading man what to do.

The movie was the story of his life and it went something like this.

“I wished I’d gone to college. I should go to college now. We could move here and I could go to college,” he said, as the bus passed through a university town.

He was being evicted. “I’m not going into public housing. Do you want to hear gunshots every day? We can see if there’s a family shelter.”

He was in a dead-end job. “I’m bustin’ my ass everyday for nothin’. I can’t afford nothin’.”

He had no time for any of the presidential candidates. “We don’t need these entitled assholes who get everything handed to them. We need a president who’s poor.”

We’ll call him Jason, though his true name and phone number were announced to all when he ordered a calzone, extra mozzarella, for pick-up, when the bus was about 20 minutes from his home town.

“I hate this town,” he said, as the bus pulled into a sad-looking collection of streets that had no visible signs of commerce, beyond a motorbike repair shop and a second-hand furniture store, although a local directory said the ubiquitous Walmart lurked somewhere nearby.

White, mid-20s, wearing a tie-dyed Grateful Dead t-shirt and grubby basketball shorts down past his knees, in the unseasonal heat that has the Weather Channel presenters in a state of hyperexcitability, ‘Jason’ lamented the disappearance of his cigarette pack, which he was sure had four smokes left in it, and mourned his lot generally. “Man, I am done with life.” Obama’s America hasn’t worked for this young man and his weariness and disaffection were plain.

It’s a mood Donald Trump has tapped into with extraordinary efficiency, and not just among the users of Greyhound buses, a group described several times this last week, admittedly with some exaggeration, as poor people and newly released prisoners.

Business people, professionals, factory workers, minimum wagers, the retired, the religious, the rifle-owners — every sector of society has Trump supporters among them, because every sector has some reason to complain.

But if Trump has attracted unexpected support, he has alienated many others, not just from himself, but from the election process, his crude showmanship bringing out less than the best in Hillary Clinton, with both candidates losing appeal as a result.

“I just wish it was done, already,” said the night manager in a rural roadside hotel. “I don’t pry into people’s politics when I’m in work — that’s their own business — but everyone’s talking about how tired they are of it all.”

Her colleague on the morning shift stops by the TV, where the breakfast news show is reporting the latest exchange of claims, counterclaims, insults, and insinuations.

In chorus, diners and staff groan and shake their heads. “It’s a no-win situation. Whoever wins the election, it’s not a win for this country,” she says, to agreement from the table.

Dr Christopher Beem, of Pennsylvania State University, is uncharacteristically downbeat. Politics are his life and elections are like an extra Christmas.

“Last Sunday morning, I was at home and I said I better watch the talk shows, but I don’t want to. And my wife looked at me in alarm and said, ‘if you don’t want to hear anymore about this, how do you think the average voter feels’?”

Record voter-registration numbers, and an early voter turnout that looks like it will beat previous levels, didn’t get him too excited, either.

“I’ve heard the argument that this election is bringing more people into the body politic, but it’s not a given that that is a good thing.

It's a ‘Hillgrimage’ - Following the path of Hillary Clinton on the US election campaign trail https://t.co/Zf0j6GtVJL (SN) pic.twitter.com/LzMlO4Htyi

— Irish Examiner (@irishexaminer) November 5, 2016

“If people are voting who wouldn’t normally vote, but they’re doing it out of fear, if they’re coming in with the idea that I have to do this because, if Hillary Clinton gets elected the country’s going to hell or because this is the last step before armed rebellion, that’s not a good thing.”

If it feels like doomsday for some, it’s a more muted uncertainty for others. James Gorton, a retired oboe player with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, thought things were going well, but he is now on a picket line, demonstrating in support of the current orchestra members, including his harpist wife, who have been on strike for a month.

“I think things are going in the right direction. The economy is picking up. Our ticket sales were up, which is always a good sign that people have some money in their pockets,” he said.

So it’s all the harder for him to accept management demands for a 15% pay-cut (negotiated down from 25%), a drastic reduction in pensions, and non-replacement of retirees and other departing members.

The musicians have been playing free concerts for the public, at venues they’re hiring themselves, to make the point that they believe the city needs its music.

“During the recession, we took pay freezes and cuts, but nothing like they want now. We got a new chairman of the board of trustees and he’s a businessman, so I suppose he sees things a certain way,” Mr Gorton said.

He wondered how the arts would survive if a businessman filled another important post. “I’m pretty sure we might be safer with Hillary Clinton as president. I don’t know if Donald Trump knows anything about orchestras, but I know he doesn’t like unions.”

Trump supporters have their gripes about their candidate, too. Sandra Miller, director of the board of elections in Guernsey County, Ohio, would like a word with ‘the Donald’, but when she got to the end of an online survey put out by his team, she couldn’t submit it without a donation.

“I donate anyway to the Republican Party, but I didn’t like that. He should want to hear our views and not have us pay to give them.” What she wanted to tell him was to stop saying the election was rigged. “I have been in this job for 29 years and I have never come across anything like this,” she said.

“We have an optical-scan ballot and we have a paper back-up, and we do a post-election audit to make sure everything is as we expect it to be and I have never, ever been one vote off.

“It’s very frustrating for us. The two major parties, Republicans and Democrats, appoint the members of the board of directors in equal numbers to their party affiliation, and those members appoint the director.

“Whichever party affiliation the director has, the deputy is the other one and we cross-reference everything. There is no chance of fraud in our office and for a candidate to say that our system is rigged makes me very annoyed.” For some people, however, this election feels like the start of something new and exciting.

In the heart of the Jackson Heights neighbourhood, in the borough of Queens, New York, the streets are lined by sari shops, spice stores, halal supermarkets, and kebab stands.

Dotted between them are money-transfer offices, immigration lawyers, and physicians who carry out the medical examinations for citizenship applications.

The sign over the Ittadi Bazaar supermarket and restaurant tells customers they can buy and eat Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Nepali, and Tibetan — only a small selection of the nationalities who have made their home here.

In a room above the Bazaar, the newly formed American Muslim Political Action group was meeting to formally endorse Hillary Clinton as their candidate but, just as importantly, to start the process of getting Muslim Americans more engaged in the political process, whatever their party leanings.

Among them was Ghazala Salam, president of the American Muslim Democratic Caucus, in Florida, the first such caucus (a group with voting rights on party policy and candidate selection) in any party in the country.

She started organising five years ago, after campaigning against a number of bills put forward in Florida that she says were blatantly discriminatory. There was a racial-profiling bill, a bill to ban the study of Islamic civilisation, and an anti-Sharia bill that was watered down to an anti-foreign law bill.

“As it stood, it would have prevented anyone getting married in their own faith. It would have stopped people practising their faith. Now, it’s against any foreign law being imposed, but that doesn’t mean anything in reality, and it was four years of wasted time and tax dollars getting it through.

“When I was going up to Tallahassee (the state capital) to lobby, I saw a huge disconnect between the legislators and their constituents.

“They had no idea how many constituents they had that were Muslims. I saw there was a huge gap. Politicians weren’t hearing enough from us,” Ms Salam says. Now, the caucus has 11 chapters and more than 1,100 members. “You need to engage in your party. You cannot come out every four years and vote and go away again and think that’s enough.

“Right now, we’re concentrating on getting out the vote, but we also want to expand this organisation and I think people are really ready for it. I don’t like Donald Trump, but he lit a fire under us. He is making my job easier.”

Mohamed T Khairullah, the mayor of Prospect Park, New Jersey, one of a handful of Muslims to hold such an office in the country, also attended. From Syria originally, he was encouraged to get involved in local politics by his colleagues on the volunteer fire service and wants other Muslims to follow suit.

“If we’re going to bring change for Muslim Americans, number one is they need to integrate themselves into society. We need to start thinking, number one, as Americans.

“I am very passionate about Syria, but when it comes to my local community, I don’t think about it from the dimension of my international interests.

“We need to be engaged in our local communities, to volunteer on library boards, the fire department, the ambulance, for coaching. People need to join boards and local political parties and think of themselves as Americans first.

“The American public really doesn’t care about someone’s name and ethnic or religious background, if they think this person is going to provide them with the services they want, or do a good job for the community.”

Back on the bus, ‘Jason’ just wanted to disengage from all around him, not get further involved. He was getting agitated, as a red light stood between him and the stop a hundred yards away, though there was no other vehicle on the road.

“Why aren’t we moving? This is crazy man. If I have to stay on this bus one more minute, I don’t know what I’ll do.” There was a general sigh of relief on board when the doors finally swung open and he stepped off into nowheresville.

Nobody could tell what he would do next, but it’s probably a safe assumption that it wouldn’t be to vote.