The British liberal elite will never understand the US election

We think we know America, but its people have wild, primal impulses that are alien to us

When I was very little I lived in America. During our time in my father’s home state of Oklahoma, he bought my English mother a nice little ladies’ pistol to carry in her handbag.
We later moved to upstate New York, where the snow was higher than me, and seemed to be of a very different texture to the type that fell in Britain. One day, in an effort to catch my brother before he fell, my mother tripped down the wooden stairs, and told me to go get a neighbour. She had broken several toes. An ambulance came and I remember them asking me about insurance. I was five.
Still, America was the dream – so I went back to live there when I was 20. I did all sorts of jobs. I lived in the South and I lived in New York. (Though never California – La La Land brings me out in hives.) Some of my boyfriends had guns and I would have to look after them, which sent me into a panic. Which, of course, I hid as I didn’t want to appear uncool.
My best friend’s kitchen had tiny holes everywhere where her cousin “had shot himself up”. As you do.
In Louisiana, I shared a house with a guy who was a lawyer. He was always getting up in the night to do stays of execution, as he worked on death row. In America, about 2 million people are incarcerated at any given time – making it the country with the highest prison population in the world.
The mortality rate for this, one of the world’s richest countries, is much lower than for many other lesser economies, even though they spend more on healthcare.
Why am I telling you these things? Because such issues – crime, guns, cars, the death penalty, the right to bear arms, their freedoms, an individualist rather collective outlook – are ingrained in the American psyche. And all of these are awkward issues for British, liberal onlookers. This election is full of these primal impulses, which mystifies many in the UK.
America is a foreign country, more foreign than we seem to imagine, so overloaded are we with their cultural imports. People think differently there. They just do. Which is why those in their ivory towers were so shocked when Kamala Harris said she had a gun and would use it – it doesn’t fit the liberal-elite stereotype.
An American ex-cop once taught me to shoot. He said, if trained properly, children are safe around guns. At what age did he think they were capable of that, I asked him? “Three,” he said.
Of course, I have been back since my 20s, covering politics in Washington, Kentucky, Texas, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Nevada. What is the sum total of my experience? America is such an entirely different country to this one, that we really must stop seeing it through this smeary British lens.
The Republicans are not the Tory Party. The Democrats are not the Labour Party. Not every Trump voter is some sort of racist idiot, not every Harris voter is some progressive headcase. Americans of all persuasions are polite, hospitable, sentimental people.
When I watch the rush of reporters going in to interrogate the undecideds, the left-behinds, the “don’t cares” of this vast country, the only conclusions to be drawn are that this election is close and it is not based on rationality, but on emotion. Vibes. Fear or hope.
It’s the economy stupid – but it is also about striking a bargain between heads and hearts and purse strings and forms of patriotism that we can barely touch base with.
Vast tracts of America are now a wasteland, with little more than the odd shopping mall, homeless encampments and giant prisons built in the middle of nowhere. Then there are some of the richest cities in the world, and mind-blowing landscapes. A hugeness, an emptiness, a sublime vision of endless roads that artists and film-makers sometimes do justice to.
This election, we are told, is tribal: between two sets of people who never meet anyone who doesn’t think like them. That may be so, but America contains multitudes. The pollsters only know what the pollsters get told. Many will not vote. Many want little to do with any kind of governance at all. America is still wild like that. Voter turnout is everything, and Musk, with his canvassing and voter giveaways, is finding that harder than getting rockets off the ground.
Trump seeks further division and Harris an impossible unity. But Trump is a diminished, bitter old man and is no friend to anyone, least of all Britain. He is already talking about a stolen election in his ever-darker ramblings.
The gender divide matters in this contest. My hope is that enough middle-aged women now go out to vote for Harris after they see that their daughters now have fewer rights than they did. My money – I have placed a few bets – is on Kamala. I think she will do it and you can all laugh at my loss when she doesn’t. It will be your loss too.
As Bruce Springsteen said: “I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.”
That distance is ever larger, ever more out of reach. From this side of the pond we catch only glimpses. We, all of us, live in some imagined America, the America of the bi-coastal establishment, the America of self-congratulatory celebrities, the America of an inclusivity that does not include desperate poverty.
The next president will have to live with the grim reality of much of what America has become.
The dream is no longer sustainable. The voters know it. Do the pundits? The pollsters? The politicians? We shall see.