I keep remembering that, by chance, I was in the States four years ago on Election Day, having supper in a small Iranian restaurant on Beacon Hill. We pretty well knew what the result was going to be by the time we left the restaurant at 10.30 from intermittently watching the results come in state by state on a small television screen behind the bar; but not in any way how cataclysmic the result would be for America’s standing in the world. That weekend I drove through rural Pennsylvania from Cleveland to Falling Water and remember all the Trump signs by the road. I wonder what those rural communities will be voting today.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
For what it is worth, I stood in the pouring rain on Thursday to cast my early vote here in New York. It may not make much of a difference here in the place where they know Trump best and therefore despise him the most, but it was important to get my vote for Biden in.
I see there’s a huge turn-out of young people which is good. Charles
I was in the south of France for the 2016 elections, with an American friend — we went travelling in the next days (deeply upset and depressed) and were shocked by the number of French people who overhearing us speak “American” expressed both their dismay and sympathy to us. When people asked us if we were Americans we decided to say we were Californians, something I still do.
Those rural Pennsylvania communities appear to be voting pretty much the same way they did in 2016, soberingly. Whatever the precise electoral outcome in the next day or so, that broad answer is, alas, already clear.
Yes, I guessed so: poor-ish, rural, anti-east coast liberals. Charles