I’m terrified about the upcoming election. I have tried not to be, and failed, completely; I have talked to people smarter than I about why I’m merely doomscrolling and panicking in my head, and that the reality is possibly significantly better than I am imagining, and yet none of it sticks: I am convinced of a worst-case scenario purely because I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to turn out badly.
Part of this is, I know, that I’m paying too close attention to the race at this point and getting lost in the weeds. This has been the most disorienting, most frustrating election season I’ve been through, which feels like it’s really saying something, considering 2020; it’s nonetheless true, and that too has added to the feelings of being continually gaslit by reality across the past few months, and especially weeks: how can things be a coin-toss decision after everything that we’ve seen? How can this still be as close as it seems to be, 24 hours out from ending?
That closeness — which might not even be real, but instead the result of people lying to pollsters, or polling being entirely flawed for any number of reasons this time out — is what’s doomed my mood about the whole thing more than anything else: the idea that, in a race between the two candidates where one is so clearly and obviously a danger to all kinds of core ideas of American democracy or even simple decency, there’s an almost even split in terms of support. Who are these half-of-the-country people who are okay with fascism and hatred so such clear display, and what is going to happen to them after the election, no matter how it goes?
I want my very strong sense of impending disaster to be wrong; I want to not feel that 2016 feeling again. But right now, all that I can say for sure is that I’m worried, and I want it all to be over.
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