Highway in Death Valley, California. Wikimedia/CGP Grey. Some rights reserved.Hitchhiking is a good means of finding a way to the cross-section of a nation. You spend limited time with your rides, who tend to open up as a result and are happy to talk with the confidentiality of a stranger. Meanwhile the simple and somewhat universal wish to help out or to have some company for a long journey means that in hitchhiking you encounter a broad range of people with different political — or apolitical — opinions.
When I set out through America, between New York and San Francisco, I’d been expecting polarisation to be the main feature of the political conversations I had along the way. This idea of a polarised nation continued throughout the election, with an October poll suggesting around 98% of those likely to vote would not change their voting intention before the election. But on the road, polarisation was far less present than apathy, frustration and political disenfranchisement. A Tennessee man, fairly rare in those parts as a nominal Democrat, had moved to find work (injecting cheese filling into snack foods) in the swing state of Ohio, where he drove me fifty miles towards Cincinnati. He hadn’t voted for two elections, and didn’t see much point going back to it. A truck driver told me he had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but wasn’t sure — somewhat endearingly — if that had been a vote for a Republican or Democrat.
In upstate New York I have heard rock solid and unionised Democrat dockers vituperate against the threat posed by Islam to the US. In Republican Arizona, meanwhile, a railroad worker expressed gratitude at having his decent, unionised job, but lamented that the country was no longer creating such jobs. Moreover, he lauded the culture of Mexico as more humane than that found in the US. In between that were asphalt slaves, truckers hauling rigs cross-country at a cent a mile; occasional sex workers addled by methamphetamine and plying their trade in parking lots; anarchists who had left society altogether and headed into the hills of Appalachia. Apathy or disengagement were far more present here than virulent polarisation. And whatever the numbers of the popular vote Clinton won by half a million ballots, or the demographic assessment of who voted for who, the statistics bear out this impression of apathy: Trump was elected on a turnout of 56.9%, with even this fairly high by America’s consistently low standards. Where his supporters would have dragged waverers to vote, Hillary’s were often so reluctant it was all they could do to drag themselves — precisely the problem that Bernie Sanders’ advocates had forewarned.
