In Brits Abroad, a series from i, we’ll be hearing from Brits living all over America on what life amid the 2020 US election is actually like, how it compares to the UK and whether the result will make them reassess their lives across the pond.
In April 2019, I packed up my life in Bristol and moved over 4,000 miles across the Atlantic ocean to live with my granny in Waycross, Georgia. The last time I had lived in the US full time I was a baby; my dad was in the US Navy and I was born in Virginia, so I had two passports in my back pocket. He was stationed in London in 1994 and we moved over to the UK, near my mum’s family in the East Midlands. I lost my American accent in three weeks.
I have always had a transatlantic existence but with a mostly British upbringing, the move over to the States has been an intense and often overwhelming cultural shift. The political tensions throughout the country reverberate every day.
I now live in Upstate New York and while it’s easy to surround myself with progressive thinkers, I still pass Trump signs and flags daily. As someone who has always thought of health care as a human right and understands the urgency of a Green New Deal, I knew that it was imperative to get Bernie Sanders elected as the 2020 Democratic nominee and so, I started volunteering for him at the beginning of this year.
Phone banking – ringing up potential supporters – allowed me to have (mostly) meaningful conversations with voters. What really surprised me was how so many Americans feel like Medicare for All is an unrealistic, utopian dream. As someone who has benefited from the NHS throughout the course of my life, it’s staggering how many people over here see healthcare as a privilege, not a right.
According to a recent survey by Salary Finance, almost a third of working Americans have medical debt and about 28 per cent of those owe $10,000 or more on their bills. A friend of mine, with private insurance, only just paid off his A and E bill from 2018. His illness? He couldn’t get a fever to go down and they tried to treat him for a panic attack.
The Democratic Party as a whole only appeals to comfortable, middle-to-upper-class apathetic voters who will happily “vote blue no matter who.” That’s not democracy to me
When Bernie dropped out of the race, I was devastated, just as I had been in December 2019, when Jeremy Corbyn lost to Boris Johnson. As someone who has also volunteered for Labour, with life-long Labour-voting family members, the past decade has been a struggle. The Tories came back into power the year I graduated from university and I’ve been voting to overturn that ever since. When there’s a glimmer of hope for a better, more equal world and the friends and family around you have that same outlook, the reality of recent results is gut-wrenching.
Joe Biden is absolutely not my number one choice. To me, the Democratic Party as a whole only appeals to comfortable, middle-to-upper-class apathetic voters who will happily “vote blue no matter who.” That’s not democracy to me. They absolutely do not speak for those of us who are fighting for those we don’t know; the vulnerable, the oppressed and the shut-down. And yet, this moment calls for me to use my voice in a way I’ve never been asked to. Four more years of Trump will be devastating on a catastrophic level and so yes, I will be reluctantly voting for Biden.
However, deep systemic solutions are needed. The American political environment cannot continue in its current form and even if Biden wins, I’ll be doing what I can to push him away from his centre-right policies. There have been big wins on a smaller scale, including primary election wins from Jamaal Bowen, Cori Bush and Ed Markey. I’m especially excited for Paula Jean Swearengin, the 2020 Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in West Virginia, and over the next few weeks, I’ll be volunteering with Betsy Kraat, a progressive running for State Assembly in my local county. Systemic change starts from the ground up.
If Trump wins another term, it would be easy for me to run back to the UK and hide under my duvet but I know my voice and my energy will be needed more than ever, so I’ll absolutely be staying put. I’m here to help uplift those that need it most, no matter how ugly it gets.
Sammy Maine is an editor living in New York
Read more from our Brits Abroad series:
‘I became a US citizen so I could vote in the 2020 election’
‘I have always voted Conservative in the UK, but right-wing values are not the same in the US’
Maurice Saatchi: I used to adore capitalism – then I had lunch with Margaret Thatcher