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From bona fide swing states like Ohio to traditionally deep-red Texas, Dubliners across America are entering the final days of one of the most divisive general election campaigns in living memory. As part of a series on the race for the White House, TheJournal.ie has been talking to Clinton voters, Trump supporters, and independents in a range of time-zones between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in recent days.
Why ‘Dublins’? We could just have easily have picked ‘Springfields’ or ‘Madisons’ but we are, after all, an Irish website – and many of the towns we chose to focus on have a strong Irish heritage. Add to that, if your peruse any list of communities called ‘Dublin’ in the US, you’ll find everything from booming Silicon Valley suburbs to industrial towns off Georgian highways. Here’s the latest piece in our series (you’ll find last night’s one here). We’ll have further installments in the coming week.
GEORGIA IS FAR from the reddest of red states – but anything other than a Donald Trump win there next week will be a shock.
If Hillary Clinton does manage to win the southern state, then we would most likely be witnessing a nationwide hosing of Trump.
In the last eight presidential elections, only Clinton’s husband was able to turn the Georgia map blue. And he did it only once, failing to do so in his reelection bid.
Four years ago, the state comfortably chose Mitt Romney with Barack Obama only really winning out in the state’s two big cities – Atlanta in the northwest and Savannah along the state’s Atlantic coast.
About halfway between the those two major hubs, just off Interstate 16 linking them, is Dublin, GA.
Being home to about 16,000 people, Dublin is not large but it’s the heart of Laurens County and its Irish connections see it nicknamed ‘The Emerald City’.
In some ways it’s quite mixed, Laurens County has a Republican congressman and Dublin’s sheriff is a Democrat.
Dublin’s make-up is also relatively even, between black and white residents.
But as with many towns across the nation, this presidential campaign has certainly tested harmony between the two main political parties.
If there’s one thing both sides can agree on though, it’s that 2016 is different.
“I’ve never seen an election like this,” that’s the blunt assessment of Ronald Schwartz, a Republican chairman in the area and the county manager for Donald Trump 2016.
Schwartz isn’t a lifetime Dubliner, he’s originally from Indiana and spent time in South Carolina before settling there. His grownup daughter still lives in South Carolina and says the feeling is the same there.
Part of the reason why this election is different from his point of view is that it’s been difficult getting help from the Republican National Committee.
The power structure at the centre of the party usually drives the supply of simple things like yard signs and bumper stickers, this time Schwartz says supply has been scarce:
They set up a campaign headquarters for Trump and locally we had 50,000 signs coming in last month that we could distribute. Then all of the signs all of a sudden went to North Carolina. And every sign that’s in our county and our area we in the Laurens County Republican Party paid for.
Schwartz was a Tea Party Republican. The activist movement within the party that took hold after Obama’s election might not be at the forefront anymore, but there’s little doubt that Trump is benefiting from it.
(There’s a race to be the Laurens County Sheriff running parallel to the election)
Trump was probably the candidate the Tea Party never found. Though he never needed their help to get exposure, his ideals and perhaps more accurately his words are exactly what they were looking for.
“Everybody’s fed up with Obamacare and the economy, ” Schwartz says.
For him though, it was more than that. He describes himself as a passionate gun rights advocate who owns two assault rifles and feels Clinton will ban them in office.
He supports Trump because of his stance on guns but also because Trump’s anti-establishment rhetoric won him over in the early days of the primary.
After campaigning for statewide Republicans looking for their Washington seats, Schwartz felt let down when they got there, even ignored when he tried contacting them.
“Nobody likes what Obama is doing on executive action but nobody’s doing anything to fix it,” he tells TheJournal.ie from his home in Dublin.
So when Trump came out and said we’re going to do this, this and this, I kind of jumped on the bandwagon. That sounded like a good idea to me because nobody could understand what the rest of them were doing.
“When you control the House and the Senate and you can’t pass a bill there’s something wrong.”
Two sides
Looking at the Presidential election from afar, it’s especially hard not to feel that race and racism is the major undercurrent bubbling beneath it.
An ABC News poll showing that just 3% of black voters support Trump makes the choice look incredibly stark. Doubly so when looking back at Trump’s primary campaign.
When the history is written about how he won the Republican nomination, his ‘Mexican rapists’ speech and his pledge to block US entry to Muslims will undoubtedly be seen as the two game-changing moments.
The angry rallies that followed are also fresh in the memory.
But Schwartz feels that, contrary to what is being said, “Trump is pulling minorities” even if some Trump supporters are nervous about doing so publicly.
There have even been cases of Trump signs being pulled down from front gardens.
“A lot of them don’t want to show support for Trump but the ones that do really want to do it,” he says.
I mean usually the politicians campaigning would have signs and they’d give them out but that didn’t happen this year. People actually are afraid to put them in their yard because they’re afraid they’re getting torn out.
Unity in the Community
Part of Schwartz’s job is building the future base of the party in the area, something he says will have to include more minorities because of changing demographics.
It’s going to be very difficult though. Wounds from this campaign are proving to be especially deep, as people from the other side of the fence can attest.
Monique Allen is a young mother and healthcare worker who’s originally from Boston but has lived in Georgia for the past decade.
A Clinton supporter but not a campaigner, she recently set up a neighbourhood group called Unity in the Community to move away from the divisiveness that has been growing in Dublin and elsewhere in the US.
Poor relations between police and minority groups have led to police killings and flashpoint violence in places like Ferguson and Baltimore.
People like Allen don’t want the same happening in Dublin and she wants to highlight that having different opinions doesn’t have to lead to confrontation.
As she puts it: “We teach our kids to be nice to one another but it seems some adults don’t have the same mentality. ”
“It makes people feel like they have to take sides and if they don’t take the same side as another person they’re automatically evil.”
We’re trying to let people know that it’s okay to not agree with the other person, but you have to be respectful. I mean, everyone has their own opinions and that’s why our country is where it is now. Everyone has their own opinions but you have to be civil at the same time.
While Schwartz was clear in his belief that this election is different, Allen was more strident. She says that of the three Presidential elections she’s been in Dublin for, “it seems like it’s the worst one”.
“It’s ugly, it’s really ugly this time,” she adds.
The Dublin branch of Unity in the Community is holding its first big day out just four days after the election. The event will feature typically American events like a pie eating contest and a chilli cook-off.
The Facebook page dedicated to the event says that it’s purpose is to promote friendship “between those from all walks of life”.
Allen wants it to be a day where people can put aside their differences for a few hours. She admits it’s very hard to escape talk of the election these days.
While working with patients and others she has to actively avoid engaging with people who want to talk about contentious political issues. If she doesn’t engage, things can get nasty.
She also feels that the election has brought racism more out into the open. It’s always been there, she points out, but Trump has made it more accepted. Even among friends.
“Personally, not speaking on behalf of my group, but personally yes I do feel that,” she says.
A lot of the people that I call my friends, when I hear they’re supporting Trump and supporting all the things that he says, it makes me think, ‘Well, I mean now I see you for how you really are. This is how you really feel?’
Early voting has already got well underway in Dublin, Georgia. It means that for better or worse the most divisive US election in at least a generation is nearly coming to an end.
With that in mind, groups like Allen’s may be exactly what is need to bring people together after a bruising few months.
“I’m hoping it’s easy to forget but particularly with this nasty election it might be a little hard to,” she explains.
It would be nice for everybody to just accept the results of the election either way and deal with it the best that we can, whether they’re on the winning side or the losing side.
That’s the hope anyway, but there’s a way to go. Not least because the immediate aftermath to the election could be more bitter than anything we’ve seen before.
Trump’s recent refusal to say whether he’d accept the result of the election worried many, including Allen. What it meant to his most fervent supporters is anyone’s guess.
But could it lead to violence in Dublin? Schwartz isn’t convinced.
“It isn’t something that would happen here,” he says.
“But you see people posting that it could lead to a revolution, it could lead to a civil war, it could lead to disruptions on the street. I mean it’s out there, I don’t know how widespread it is. But that talk is out there on social media.”
If that doesn’t worry Schwartz though, what does? Simple, a Clinton victory.
“I would truly dread it for my kids and the future of this country,” he claims.
If we held the House and Senate, the Republicans, we could maybe stop a lot of things, but when it gets into executive action and appointees to the Supreme Court they are lifetime appointments and that’s the scary part.
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RIP. A truly dedicated and great, human being.
Why didn’t he go after Stalin? It’s estimated that that dictator was responsible for the mass genocide of in excess of 10 – 15 million men, women and children (including Jews) prior and during WWII.
@Paul: because the Soviet Union won the war and were on the side of the good guys. Like North Korea and Iran today, you can pretty much kill your own people at will, it’s only when you start on those outside your borders that anybody wakes up.
@Paul Shepherd: the soviet Union won the war?
@Allora: originally they had a non-aggression pact with the Nazis but after Hitler’s invasion of the USSR with Operation Barbarossa they changed sides and joined the allied forces. As the allies were the ultimate victors in WW2 Russia is acknowledged as being part of the winning side.
@Karen Delaney: yes thats correct but the way that that was presented looked as if the soviets won it unilaterally.
@Paul: he was only 27 at the time to be fair. I think if he did “go after” Stalin as well you probably wouldn’t be happy. There’s no pleasing some people.
@Allora: in fairness the soviets counter offensive after the doomed operation Barbarossa was unstoppable.by the time of the Normandy landings the Nazis were incredibly weak and under resourced on that front as Hitler had pulled so many divisions from France to try and stop the soviets.they would have won the war even if the Normandy landings had never happened.
I didn’t know he was that old, watched “Getting away with murder(s)” only last night, highly recommended.
A wonderful man who talked the talk and walked the walk. His determination to bring those involved in the horrific Nazi crimes should be a lesson to all involved in prosecuting crime. RIP
It is perhaps because the issue is so intense when framed as the Holocaust that the majority of readers have turned away yet someone has to demonstrate the ideology which led to the extermination of so many human beings. There is no judge and jury here, just information sharing that the ideology which was behind the actions of an advanced society like Germany still remains within the education system as an achievement-
” Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labour in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes. The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival. Wannsee Conference, 1942
” In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.” Charles Darwin, 1862
I feel sorry for those who died during the invasion, the extermination and fighting on the fields of battle on land, on the sea and in the skies. What can be said for people today who are prepared to maintain the fiction and the sanitised versions of natural selection for the sake of a later science versus religion American variant?
I hope younger readers already know.
@Carrickview: sounds like Palestine
@Sean Padraig O Brien: They fly the swastika in Palestine, so unfortunately you have a point.
Alan, your educational achievements are not determined by your adherence to the truth in the Bible. They are determined by your adherence to the lies espoused by Charles Darwin.
@TheQueenofHibernia:
Darwin was forthright however dangerous and his misguided his and those of Wallace were and remain. It is his followers, even to this day, who try to obscure or lie about the actual conviction and try to say it was social Darwinism that was behind the Nazis and their extermination/invasion policies.
The next time an academic tries to convince you that the Human Race is a social construct or that there is such a thing as social Darwinism, remind them that ‘Favoured Races’ in his main title as an accompanying description of ‘Less Favoured Races’-
‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’ Charles Darwin, 1859
A less favoured ‘race’ looks like this-
” Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts—and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed—and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.” Charles Darwin, 1871
@Carrickview: The quotes in your post about prevailing celts and saxons were not written by Charles Darwin. You basically took someone else’s writing and attributed Charles Darwin’s name to it. Cutting and Pasting someone’s else’s words and then putting “-Charles Darwin,1877” at the end.
@Carrickview: if you quote Charles Darwin in an online forum in 2023 you’re absolutely a mentalist.
@Diaspora’d:
It is from ‘The Descent of Man’ and the statement was modified by Darwin. There is an online book and chapter V is where you will find the statement in context.
Younger people have enough information to now know that natural selection isn’t about evolution as the biological and geological history of the Earth is written by the fossil record in rock strata where older rock show simpler lifeforms. It is an old research area that was hijacked by natural selection where they tried to imply that black complexion humans were closer biologically to gorillas than the Anglo-Saxon ‘race’ -
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” — Charles Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man.
To exterminate a native culture, they first have to be dehumanised and that is what natural selection did. It is how the Nazis proceeded.
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