Tennessee becomes ‘crucible’ of America’s divisions before 2020 election

Coronavirus pandemic and protests against police brutality are battles defining presidential campaign in suburban and rural America

Nashville, Tennessee. 

A group of protesters faced a row of uniformed troopers across the road from the Tennessee State Capitol.

Wearing masks as protection against coronavirus, they waved “Black Lives Matter” and “Jail Won’t Break Us” signs and cheered when passing motorists honked their horns in support.

The young demonstrators, many of whom have been arrested during a vigil that has gone on for more than 40 days, were demanding racial equality.

They also want the removal from the capitol of a bust of Nathan Forrest, a Confederate general who shot surrendering black soldiers during the American Civil War and later became a Grand Wizard of the infamous Ku Klux Klan.

A few blocks away, the normally bustling streets of Nashville, home of country music, were eerily quiet with bars and restaurants closed after an alarming rise in coronavirus cases.

On Broadway, police were ordering pedestrians to wear masks.

At the Full Throttle Bar and Grill, a hangout for leather-clad motorcyclists, the unmasked owner fumed at masked officials who had closed his business down for breaching the rules.

“You are violating my constitutional rights,” he told them.

Welcome to the US in 2020 and a long, sweltering summer that is now stretching into the final 100 days of Donald Trump’s uphill campaign to be re-elected.

“Coronavirus, BLM protests and the election,” said Wesley Boyko, 27, a doctoral student at Vanderbilt University and one of the anti-racism demonstrators.

“This is a time when everything's become like a crucible. There’s all these volatile elements really starting to explode.”

Holland Gurley, 23, who lost her bartending job because of the coronavirus, said she was protesting against injustice and inequality.

“This year is monumental,” Ms Gurley said.

Nashville, a city of 668,000 people almost 30 per cent of whom are black, is a Democratic stronghold where former vice-president Joe Biden is already favoured.

But the rest of largely rural Tennessee is Trump territory, where he trounced Hillary Clinton to win the state in 2016, although this time Mr Biden is closer in the polls than the former first lady was.

Almost 50 kilometres north of Nashville, in the pro-Trump bastion of Robertson County, a tall, long-bearded man in his 50s was serving customers at Sad Sam’s petrol station.

The man, Tim, said he believed dark forces in the US seemed determined to foment unrest.

“It’s a good way to start a civil war,.

Tim was suggesting a connection between the coronavirus crisis and the widespread protests, some of them leading to violence and the toppling of statues, after the May killing of unarmed African-American George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

Neither Tim nor anyone else in Sad Sam’s was wearing a face mask.

“I don’t know anybody who’s had this virus,” he said. “I don’t even know of anybody who knows anybody who’s had it."

On the Forrest statue, Tim said: “That stuff about doing away with these so-called racist statues and all – we didn’t get where we are today without him.

"You may not like it but it’s still part of our history.”

The sense of impending crisis is shared by both sides of the widening chasm in American politics

On July 21, the daily number of deaths caused by Covid-19 passed 1,000 for the first time since May.

After weeks of trying to play down the virus and talk up the economy, Mr Trump said: "It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better.”

With total deaths rising towards 150,000, some states, including several in the South, have reported alarming rises in death tolls.

At the same time civil unrest has continued, along with left-wing victories against the police, who Democrats have painted as institutionally racist.

Minneapolis has voted to withdraw public financing of the police and in Seattle, protesters declared an “autonomous zone”, barricading an area from officers for weeks before rising crime prompted the mayor to order it cleared.

Gun sales have soared and conservatives were incensed when a white couple in St Louis were hit with criminal charges for brandishing their legally held weapons at black protesters outside their mansion.

There were cries of hypocrisy from the right when liberals, who were calling for much of the country to be shut down because of the coronavirus, urged people to take to the streets to protest against Floyd’s death.

Government officials in Republican and Democratic state governments have been caught in the middle.

“As we start moving about, we know the numbers will increase,” said one official who works for a Republican governor.

“It’s really, really hard, especially in the South. There's this vocal group saying it’s a hoax, it’s not real, it’s not dangerous.

"You pay taxes, you have a social security number, you wear a seat belt, and this is government control? I just don’t see it.”

With less than four months before election day, the polls suggest the prospects for Mr Trump being re-elected are grim.

With the coronavirus still raging and unemployment remaining at 11 per cent, he trails Mr Biden by nearly nine points, the RealClearPolitics average shows.

But Democrats are wisely reluctant to declare victory yet.

Republicans say nearly all polls indicated Mrs Clinton would win in 2016.

They suggest that Trump supporters are the heirs of president Richard Nixon’s “silent majority”, who rejected the condescending consensus of coastal elites.

Democrats remember that Michael Dukakis, then Massachusetts governor, led vice president George H W Bush by 17 points in July 1988 but lost by eight points that November.

The Trump campaign, which by the third week of July had gathered $891 million (Dh3.27 billion), compared with $346m (Dh1.27bn) raised by Mr Biden, is planning a barrage of advertising showing him as a corrupt career politician on the verge of senility.

Mr Biden, turning 78 in November, would be the oldest American president. Ronald Reagan was still 77 on his last day at the post.

Having been elected to the US Senate about 50 years ago, he tends to hark back to a golden age of bipartisan civility and paternalism that few voters recognise and many doubt existed.

Mr Biden's proclivity for verbal miscues – he described himself last year as “a gaffe machine” – and wild exaggeration has dogged his career.

More fundamentally, the moderate who defeated socialist Bernie Sanders as the coronavirus crisis began is an odd fit for a Democratic party that has moved considerably to the left and has been emboldened by the rise in anti-Trump sentiment, the president’s hard-edged rhetoric and the mass protests after Floyd’s death.

Among the protesters in Nashville, there was lukewarm support for Mr Biden and claims that Mr Sanders had been cheated of the presidential nomination by a Democratic party establishment interested in power and placating wealthy donors.

“He’s a status quo candidate for a non-status quo time,” said Micaiah Johnson, 31, an author and graduate student.

“Now, at a time of revolution, we have these late-1990s candidates.”

Modern American elections are very rarely landslides and the polls will almost certainly tighten.

If the economy improves and the coronavirus begins to wane, Mr Biden will be in a very close fight and battling to energise young Democrats against an opponent whose core supporters are as fervent as ever.

The twin issues of freedom and law and order could prove decisive, Trump supporters hope.

While Mr Trump has chafed against coronavirus restrictions and called for the country to reopen, Democrats have embraced them, successfully pushing for most of America’s schools to remain closed despite widespread dismay from parents.

In hindsight, a turning point in the 2016 election came after the murder of five Dallas police officers by a black man who said he wanted “to kill white officers”.

Mrs Clinton used the occasion to condemn “systemic racism” in American police forces.

Further civil disorder as the election approaches is likely to push some voters towards Mr Trump.

On the campaign trail in Tennessee, Bill Hagerty, the leading Republican in the state’s important Senate contest, has refused to wear a mask or gloves as he shakes every hand he can.

Mr Hagerty has described Black Lives Matter as “a radical political movement that seeks to use this moment to overthrow the government and usher in Marxism”.

Receiving a recent endorsement from Mr Trump, he pledged to defend Tennessee from the “liberal mob” and declared: “We love you here.”