Three nights before Election Day, Philadelphia is a city silence by co vid shut down by curfew.

The shops are boarded up, streets deserted on the National Guard are on the lookout for trouble.

American election season is normally a frenzy of activity and noise.

The slogans talk of American pride or hope and change.

But this time around, this time it's the silence that gets you.

There is an odd kind of darkness to the politics right now.

You can blame the pandemic or that sense of civil public unrest.

But I keep hearing this time that democracy is on the ballot.

I've come to find out what that even means.

We could ask the question almost anywhere in this vast country that we've come to Pennsylvania because, quite frankly, it's the place on everyone's mind.

Battleground Pennsylvania is the biggest of the big blue states President Trump Flip.

Four years ago, the president said to hold rallies in four different parts of the state.

Today, my message is simple.

Pennsylvania is critical in this election, and if we win Pennsylvania, it's over himself.

So we begin our road trip in a place renowned for battle Gettys birth.

Adams County is deep Republican red.

They helped turn the whole state trump in 2016 by just 20160.7%.

We've been invited to meet Walter Kowski, who represents the local Republican Party, at a rally just outside town.

The guest speaker today.

One Donald Trump Jr.

And then we'll fix up roads and tunnels and bridges in Afghanistan that will be blown up two weeks later.

I want to fix the roads in Pennsylvania, but as soon as we start filming there, the atmosphere sours on again.

I've told you to stop recording, and he's been recording again.

Now I need to get law enforcement involved because you're reporting on with that, despite our invitation to attend, were escorted off the premises, something I've never experienced at a political event before.

You know, Pennsylvania has been a battleground state the last several elections back at his officers.

I catch up with Walt.

He's been working with the party for decades.

So is our experience the new normal?

I don't know these guys from Adam.

I've never met them before, although I've seen them at other rallies like Lititz Rally.

They were there to help keep the crowd in their corrals and when he said no foreign press, that made no sense to, and I really don't know what to make of it beyond that.

So what have you loved about the last four years?

What has he done that's made you come back for more?

For me, it's promises made, promises kept.

He has told us what he was going to do in 2016 and he has tried to do it.

Now he's had to fight the Congress.

He's had to fight the Senate.

He's had the fight.

Impeachment.

Just imagine where our country would be today if, instead of the establishment and the swamp fighting him, they would have joined in.

I want to know if Walt himself thinks democracy is on the ballot this time round.

Ah, lot of the Democrats or a lot of voters.

They're really nervous when they hear Donald Trump refused to recognize a peaceful transfer of power.

If he loses, it's a little bit nuanced.

There's a lot of media out there that says he is not going to leave peacefully.

Well, that that was him, wasn't it?

He refused Thio.

He didn't say quite that what he says is we'll have to see with just 72 hours to go.

They're keen for all the support they can get.

Hey, Rita, check this out.

This man has just come in to give us a box of trump hats that we could sell to help pay the rent.

All right.

Michelle has been Republican since she first door knocked as a child for Richard Nixon.

She tells me she fears the liberals on what they'll do to America's freedoms.

Now we just don't want to go along with, you know, socialism.

Now we like our guns.

We like a lot of things, and, uh, I don't wanna have to pay for somebody else's stuff when I've had to work for everything I got.

It's like you're free to go work anywhere you want and get a job and go for her.

Americas Division is pretty personal, her little brothers on what she calls the wrong side.

What happens then?

If you and your brother talk politics, I, um, well, quite frankly, we probably won't talk for a few months and we will yell and scream, and you know, there might be a little even though we're older little pushing.

And I'm thinking about Michelle, her brother and countless other families feeling the strain as we head into the town that lives under the shadow of Republican America's favorite son.

Gettysburg was the turning point in America's Civil war, the clash between Confederate South on them or metropolitan North on without pushing the metaphor too far.

It was bloody, and it was self inflicted to borrow the words often attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

America will never be destroyed from the outside, he said.

If we falter, it will be because we destroy ourselves.

Eso Is America on a course of self destruction right now seems a fitting question to ponder as we head east to Philadelphia, the largest city in Pennsylvania, the cradle of American democracy.

It was here the founding father signed the Declaration of Independence and later the U.

S.

Constitution Here.

In other words, the very foundations were laid.

America always finds a way to come together.

America, after this election, will find a way to come together on it's in a quiet suburb just outside the center that I find Sean Taggert.

He's a white working class male, demographically speaking, the backbone of the Trump vote last time round.

But Sean is a Biden guy and perhaps most controversially of all, a political optimist.

Sure, it's quite striking here.

You've got a Trump Pence sign up there in a Biden.

These are very close neighbors, right?

Yes.

No problem.

No problem.

For the majority of people in the city on from where we're standing right now in Northeast Philadelphia, people, people feel it's okay to disagree.

You know, with politics, everybody has their own interest.

Everybody has their own ideas and ideals.

And for the most part, we generally we get along, we get along, his neighbors in the community, you know, the street we're standing on right now.

Uh, we had a hero.

We lost Officer Jimmy O'Connor on the Philadelphia police Department who was murdered earlier this year.

And that was a big hit, that his community in this street, this neighborhood and he was a friend of all of ours.

So not a lot of the police department, you know, and a lot of the cops of Republicans, and they backed Donald Trump myself and organized labor.

I back Joe Biden.

Still, we all seem to get along.

We all care we'll love each other.

And that's what this neighborhoods all about its community first.

Here, e don't know what this year is gonna be.

It's gonna be It's gonna be quiet.

Thank you for calling.

Shawn's wife, Erin, is more wary.

Whoever wins, I just think there's gonna be It's gonna be problems unless unrest.

Yes, but what kind of I think if Trump wins biting people are going to retaliate and probably protest.

And And if Biden wins, it's going to be the same thing.

Our American democracy was born here and what we do this weekend and this next four days, we're gonna save it here in Philadelphia.

Now, this morning's rally has brought the big Democrats to town to energize the blue collar workers that turn this state red.

Last time I just want to pick up on something that you said on the stage a second ago.

The future of our democracy is at stake.

Why do you say that Donald Trump is the first president in American history who I don't believe in his heart of hearts.

He's a small D Democrat.

You look at the people he reveres on the international stage.

They're all the dictators there, the authoritarians.

You don't think he believes in American democracy?

I don't I don't I genuinely believe that this is the first president in American history who, in his heart of hearts does not believe in democracy, who wishes that he could be an autocrat.

Like the other strong men he reveres, Delaware Senator Chris Coons, now tipped to be the next secretary of state If Biden wins tomorrow has more specific concerns like the Republican Party has honed the tools of voter suppression, Um, and of ballot manipulation.

Over the last decade, federal courts have concluded that in a dozen different states they've changed the laws around voter I d around the number of palette of locations for voting.

The timing of voting.

It sounds from what you're saying, like you fear for democracy in America right now way are defined globally as a democracy that has had free and fair elections and a regular peaceful transfer of power for over 200 years.

Whether we are still the world's leading and most visible democracy is on the ballot on November 3rd here in the United States.

Do you not think that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.

We have a president who, over and over has refused to publicly commit himself to accept the results of the election and to peaceably transfer power.

I'm not concerned by what I'm saying.

I'm concerned by what he said, he said.

Let's see, didn't he?

That was what he said.

Who says that what president has ever said will see as opposed Thio.

Of course, whenever the election is decided by our voters in our courts, I will accept the result.

How is it acceptable for a president of the United States in a national debate to say I don't know, Peaceful transfer of power will see.

Pennsylvanian Law allows posted ballots sent before election day to be counted up to three days after November the third.

But remarks by President Trump suggesting it would be bedlam toe have no result on election night have raised the specter.

He won't wait for legitimate votes to be counted before self declaring victory, which may explain why, in delusion end of days whether the cities dotted with activists manning drop in ballot boxes, telling voters to get their papers in.

Now you have a lot of people that signed up for the Mellon balance, but we need them to drop it off.

Elections Tuesday.

Um, if something's going on with the Supreme Court, a Sfar ballots being counted after Election Day and maybe, you know, with the mail system and they slow it up.

So we wanna make sure we get people to drop it off so that, you know, they get their vote to be counted it and get things done.

Yeah, when you violate somebody right on frustration kicks in, it's gonna be protest is gonna be riots because people are frustrated.

You gotta understand people that died for the right to vote.

So violating that and taking their vote away is going to cause problems.

Can this once great democracy really be held hostage to the fortune of postal deadlines?

Counting speeds on the whim of leaders as the world awaits for its decision, America's third president, Thomas Jefferson, reminded his people, America does not have government by the majority, but by the majority who participate simpler times.

Perhaps the quote needs a 2020 caveat.