My US election experience

With the US presidential election almost upon us, I have been reflecting on my experience with the most recent presidential race, that of 2016 between now President Donald Trump and then-favourite Hilary Clinton.

I was fortunate enough to be in the US at the time of that race, completing the first semester of my yearlong exchange program to Pace University, located in New York City. Interestingly, for the first time I think in history, both candidates operated headquarters out of NYC, meaning that while neither candidate spent really any time campaigning for New York’s votes (they were always going to go on mass to Clinton), there remained plenty of obvious signs of electoral activity around the city.

Further to this, as a political science student (to use the US parlance), my courses almost all focussed on the race, and I had been fairly obsessed with US politics since watching Barack Obama be re-elected from the floor of my family’s lounge room in 2012.

As such, I had timed my exchange in order to be there for a presidential election. I was excited to absorb the atmosphere, and even managed to get involved by volunteering for the Clinton campaign out of its NYC headquarters, calling voters and ultimately, participating in two trips to Philadelphia, a crucial city in the battle-ground state of Pennsylvania.

The first trip was made in order to canvass (door knock and try and convince voters to both turn out to vote and then vote for our candidate) voters in a heavily African American and poverty stricken suburb of Northern Philadelphia. We knocked on over 300 doors over the course of a very long day, speaking to hundreds of families, many of whom, to my amazement, weren’t even aware an election was taking place in less than a week. All said that if they did vote, they would vote for Hilary, but many didn’t know where to vote or if they were registered. We could help them out with that, and hopefully managed to convince a few more people than might otherwise have to vote.

The second trip down was on the day before the election, where we headed down to Philadelphia to attend the Clinton campaign’s final major event – a huge rally outside Freedom Hall in the city, featuring both Michelle and Barack Obama as speakers, with music by Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen. Packed into a grass area with 20,000 other supporters, it was a pretty amazing experience, although in hindsight, the degree of anxiety and tension foretold what was to be a devastating election day.

I watched the results come in the next day from the shared common room at Pace, reacting in horror alongside the other students as they saw a different America, one foreign for most of them, but familiar to some, particularly those who had grown up in rural areas before moving to the city, become apparent. The gloomy mood of the city the next day will always stay with me, as people moved about the usually lively streets of Manhattan stone-faced, still very much coming to terms with what their country had wrought. I had never felt happier to be an Australian and to have an out – this wasn’t my country after all. But it was devastating much the same, for what It meant for the world and the message it sent, particularly to women and minorities in the world’s supposed greatest democracy.