Name: US election 2020: Is this set to be the most contested election? - BBC Newsnight
Uploaded: 2020-11-03T18:35:16.000Z
Duration: 12 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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

Basic passive voice

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.

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.

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.

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.

He's been working with the party for decades.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

US election 2020: Is this set to be the most contested election? - BBC Newsnight

majority

sense

community

strike