Washington DC prepares for unrest on America's day of reckoning
Washington DC on the eve before election day felt like an eerie and unfamiliar place to the city which I’ve been coming to for 32 years.
I’d spent the past two days following the frenetic campaign of President Donald Trump as he visited the key battleground state of North Carolina - twice in just two days.
I was returning to the American capital the night before the deeply divided US electorate returned its verdict on who it wanted to govern it for the next four years.
Driving back across the 14th Street Bridge from Ronald Reagan Airport, passing the majestic dome of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial bathed in a warm glow from floodlights there was a reassuring comfort of making a familiar journey into the heart of a city that had always exuded a profound sense of history, political tradition and above all an aura of deep confidence.
This was the city that virtually every country in the world, however small or poor, had an embassy – a city that the rest of the world couldn’t avoid dealing with, whether it liked it or not.
But as I crossed the Potomac River and entered the heart of the city and past Capitol Hill, Washington felt and looked like a very different place.
Almost everywhere, shops, businesses, banks, restaurants and offices were beingboarded up with protective wood screens.
Around the White House a tall concrete barrier ring was being put up – all of it in anticipation of violent clashes in the wake of what many fear will be a contested election.
The city itself, in a strict lockdown because of the unchecked spread of coronavirus across the US, is an empty ghost town in the evenings.
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These two twin fears, born out of the sense of extreme political and ideological divisions that have grown over the past four years, and a pandemic that has so spiralled out of control that it’s left 231,000 dead with nearly 10 million cases, encapsulates why this American presidential election is a generationally defining one - whose outcome will take the United States towards two utterly divergent paths.
Yet despite all this there are aspects of this election that recall the boundless optimism of Ronald Reagan’s famous description that "America is a shining city upon a hill".
Despite the anxiety, the racial tension in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the upheaval of the Black Lives Matter Movement, nearly 100 million Americans had already cast their ballot even before election day – shattering all previous records.
This sort of thing doesn’t happen in a country whose people are paralysed by fear or indecision or lack of determination.
Americans feel that the choices before them are so clear that there is very little evidence of the legions of last minute undecided voters we saw in 2016, many of whom broke for Donald Trump in the critical Midwest states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
It is why both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have criss-crossed the country in the past week, revisiting the same key battleground states that were decisive in 2016, trying to persuade, beg, cajole and urge any possible voter to get out and cast their ballot.
But even if they do, Donald Trump has, in the past 48 hours, made it clear that he has every intention of contesting this election should he not win it outright early on.
He has railed against the length of time it will take state authorities to count the huge number of early mail-in votes, alleging that this would lead to what he describes as “a lot of bad things”.
This in large part is why so many downtown areas of Washington DC and indeed other cities in the US are being boarded up.
Is declaring a willingness to contest the election a sign that the Trump campaign has grown nervous that the sheer volume of early voting points to an advantage for Joe Biden as a number of polls suggest? Possibly.
But having attended Donald Trump’s rallies there is no doubting the huge and committed enthusiasm and support for him amongst his political base.
This country may have to wait several days or weeks before this election is resolved, but when it is – there is no doubt that its outcome will have historical and long terms consequences for what kind of country America will be for many years.
Watch Trump vs Biden: The Results on Tuesday 3rd November from 11pm on ITV and itv.com/news.