USA 2024: – 7, a crucial choice after a campaign peppered with violence and intimidation

Voters going to the polls for USA 2024 must choose between different visions of the United States proposed by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. The outcome of the vote – warns the AP – will tell how the country perceives itself and will determine “how the country will be seen in the world, with repercussions for decades to come.”

Voters seem somewhat aware of the importance of voting and seem involved in it: over thirty million have already made their choice, showing up at polling stations open for early voting or sending their ballot papers by post. One in five who will participate in the counting – predictably between 150 and 160 million – has already expressed themselves. A percentage that could rise to one in three in the coming week.

Although Trump and the Republicans are skeptical about early voting and are openly criticizing it, preparing to use it as a reason to contest the results if they don’t win, some of the swing states, Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan, set record turnout on their first day of early voting, with lines at the polls.

Another battle horse of future protests by Trump and the Republicans, if they were to lose, is the vote of ‘non-citizens’, that is, the accusation that the Democrats are admitting to the polls immigrants who are not entitled to it: the proven cases can be counted on the fingers of one hand, but the ‘Trumpian’ propaganda inflates them out of all proportion.

Given the importance of what is at stake, the campaign, especially the Republican one, has not had a very high tone. Harris brings Beyoncé and Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Spike Lee, sometimes questionable icons of culture and society, on stage with her, Trump surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists and flatterers and entrusts the appeal to vote for him to the legend of wrestling, one of his favorite sports, perhaps because it is all fake, Hulk Hogan, or to the Covid denier and defector from his own family Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It happened last night at Madison Square Garden in New York, where an arrogant Trump wasted electorally useless time – the State and the Big Apple are avowedly democratic – in the ambition of taking back, he, the ‘king of New York,’ “what he created” – in the words of his eldest son Donald Jr. -.

There were also his wife Melania – a very rare presence in this campaign and sometimes critical of her husband, for example on abortion – and his now parsley Elon Musk , in addition to his vice president JD Vance . Inside the arena, tens of thousands of supporters: a red tide where someone, perhaps without perceiving the irony, impersonates the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, almost as if the good relationship between him and Trump is a reason for pride or hope. Outside, thousands of anti-Trump protesters.

It is hard to imagine that the event in New York on Sunday night will shift the voting imbalances in the state. Trump reels off his repertoire, the return of the American dream – he turns it into a nightmare – and of American greatness, tax cuts, “halved” energy bills, liberation from migrant employment; the end of wars; and he attacks Harris, who has destroyed the country and who is so incompetent that “our enemies want her to win.”

In reality, the impression is that those who are, or who should be, the rivals of the US, Russia, China, North Korea , are rooting for or at least are saddened by Trump, while those who are, or who should be, the friends, that is, the Europeans, in their clear majority, fear Trump.

There is anxiety that the climate of opposition during the campaign and the polarization of positions will lead, after the vote, to political violence . In the United States, after the riot incited by Trump on January 6, 2021, there have been at least 300 cases of political violence; and already over 50 this year. Some examples: in York, Pennsylvania, a man attacked a group of pro-Harris people, punching a 74-year-old man in the head; in Michigan, however, a subject hit and injured an 81-year-old man with his SUV who was putting up a pro-Trump sign in his yard.

The data cited was collected and verified by Reuters . The increase in violence is the most significant since the 1970s, the years of the Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Los Angeles riots. The cause is the accentuation of tensions triggered by polarizing figures like Trump. And experts warn that the tense atmosphere of these last days of the election campaign could lead to new violence, especially in swing states.

According to the AP , the Washington judges who are trying and sentencing the troublemakers of January 6 – hundreds have ended up in prison and Trump considers them patriots and promises to release them – fear that the outcome of the elections will herald further violence: the ‘Trumpians’ continue to fuel the false and conspiracy theories that set the climate ablaze in 2020/21.

And the poll workers are subjected to pressure and intimidation and many abandon their duties out of fear. In Nevada , the turnover of supervisors of the scrutineers is almost incessant. The ‘Trumpian’ tactic seems aimed, more than at guaranteeing the regularity of the vote, at discouraging especially the minorities, more exposed and more fragile, from going to vote.

Winning with fear is also this. Harris counters with hope. Which, however, requires courage.