Voters will head to the polls on Tuesday to cast their ballots. Credit: Diy13

This week, Epicenter NYC publisher S. Mitra Kalita asks Felipe election questions she’s been hearing from voters. This conversation has been slightly edited and condensed. 

Mitra: Felipe, thanks for doing this. So it looks like New Yorkers are turning OUT in early voting, as are folks across the rest of the country. What can we read into this?

Felipe: During essentially every single presidential election in recorded history, there have been candidates and political operatives pushing some form of the message “this is the most important election of our lives,” or “our future depends on this.” To some extent, these arguments are never necessarily wrong; presidential elections determine much about the trajectory of the country, and their outcome means wars may be entered into or not, swaths of federal policy affecting every aspect of our lives will be determined, and so on. What world would we live in today if Al Gore had triumphed over George W. Bush in 2000? Or Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan in 1980? Or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Yet I think there’s some additional salience to that argument now. The Trump campaign has been crystal clear that it intends to win by any means necessary, and when it does, the 47th president will remake American society in ways that democracy might well not survive. Many of the plans outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere in MAGA world would be out-and-out fascism in a way that would be unrecoverable, and this is increasingly an understanding that transcends petty party politics. To describe the idea of a nationwide deportation force — rounding up people, city by city, millions more than even the higher estimates of the nation’s undocumented population, to ferry them to camps for summary trial and deportation — as the demise of the last six decades’ push for civil rights and protections is not a matter of mere opinion. It’s a fact, and many voters understand that.

There is, in a fundamental way, the possibility that there’s no going back from this election. Some commentators will call this position alarmist and point to the fact that Trump was president for four years and our institutions held and power was ultimately transferred to his successor, but this ignores a few key complications: our institutions held under extreme pressure, and only because his attempts to collapse them failed, including the January 6 coup attempt. That Trump isn’t currently a caudillo in a totalitarian White House isn’t a result of his disinterest in this outcome, it’s because he didn’t succeed in getting there.

He and his most hardcore allies have now spent months talking about how their big error was letting themselves be constrained by the courts and the more traditional Republicans in the administration, who stifled some of the most authoritarian tendencies. This time around, they’re not only going to ignore these guardrails but work more actively to undo them, such as with the Schedule F plan to make a much broader part of the federal civil workforce politically appointed — think everyone in agency management across government having to effectively declare political loyalty to Trump.

Many of his own supporters, meanwhile, are convinced that Trump is the victim of some sort of widespread, “deep state” conspiracy to rob him of the election. They believe, falsely, that he was robbed in 2020 and that there will be millions of ineligible voters and other chicanery this time around. My theory has long been that this would be counterproductive for the campaign as chunks of the base basically stop believing in elections altogether, but it is also possible that this is energizing to them.

They also realize, probably correctly, that an electoral win here is likely the only thing that’s going to keep Trump out of prison; he’s been able to maneuver and delay his federal election interference and classified documents cases until past the election, but those haven’t been dismissed, and there’s there are piles of evidence for each. So perhaps some strong turnout is being driven by these realities.

Mitra:  So that MAGA rally… What gives? Are there that many Trump supporters in New York City? Also why didn’t Kamala Harris do anything bigger or on this scale in NYC?

Felipe: As a journalist but also media observer and journalism academic and lecturer, one of the things that I found most interesting in the aftermath of the rally was the coverage. The notoriously staid New York Times, whose passive-voice and both-sides headlines often draw a lot of mockery from particularly left-leaning observers, went with calling it “a carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism” in the headline; while the article could have been more forceful, it was at least clear-eyed about what it was looking at. This pattern repeated across news outlets, with what felt like a fever breaking as they uniformly emphasized the rally’s open and naked fascism. Some might consider it too little, too late, but this is the kind of thing that can move the needle in the final stretch of an election.

As for why they did this here, now, there are some theories. Among the more out-there ones is that this was meant as some kind of spiritual successor or reference to an infamous 1939 Nazy rally organized by the German American Bund at the same venue. This strikes me as a bit too convoluted and ham-fisted of an explanation. What seems more likely is that Trump, an outer-borough real estate inheritor who spent his youth pining to be part of the elite Manhattan scene and who has reportedly long wanted an MSG rally, finally got his wish to feel like a rock star in the iconic arena.

Then there’s the more practical theory, as laid out by New York Rep. Dan Goldman, that this is all about the down-ballot races. As I wrote last week, there’s no chance Harris loses the presidential races in New York, but there are about seven pretty competitive House races in the state, many in the NYC suburbs, that could cumulatively determine control of the legislative body. Beyond the simple fact that having the House would enable either potential president to more fully realize their agenda, Trump hinted at having some sort of “secret” with current GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson, which seems very obviously to be an effort to dispute the election results and toss it to the House, which could then anoint Trump president regardless of the vote.

Harris, for her part, is probably picking her battles and has written off NYC to focus on battleground states where she’s neck and neck.

Mitra:  Even the NYT called the comments on Latinos racist.  I feel the pain and outrage. But also, it doesn’t surprise me,  and perhaps all the people sharing the video on Puerto Rico and la basura, and the comments on Latino men, are just amplifying racism. Am I jaded? Am I wrong? Your thoughts on this?

Felipe: The thing I think a lot of us forget is that the average voter is a low-information one. Most people are not really paying attention to politics, certainly not like we are, and tend to tune in relatively late and with little in the way of policy knowledge and analysis. For good or ill, elections are by and large about vibes, and the closing vibes are what’s on people’s minds as they make their way to the voting booth. The comments on Puerto Rico were, as Politico reported, “spreading like wildfire” in Pennsylvania, a battleground state with about half a million Puerto Rican voters. Oops!

Mitra:  My group chats are abuzz with this query, over and over: How do we vote on the ballot questions? Is there anywhere we can go to see them laid out a bit more thoroughly? And is it true that the first one is potentially anti-trans and the second one anti-street vendor… and many of them are expanding the mayor’s powers? Break it down for us.

Felipe: I’m surprised to hear that people are calling the first one anti-trans, which seems like targeted misinformation given that this modification to the state Constitution’s anti-discrimination provisions is actually intended to be pro-trans, so much so that the GOP is trying to defeat it by fearmongering about its implications.

As I detailed last month, the push began as an abortion rights amendment before landing on language including protections for “ethnicity, national origin, age, disability” as well as “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy.” Part of the problem is that this doesn’t guarantee anything specific, which makes it difficult to say what exactly the amendment does or doesn’t do; it might, as at least one state judge hinted at, not even fully protect abortion altogether. It also certainly doesn’t inherently do any of what the Republicans are claiming it does on trans rights, though it certainly aims to more fully safeguard these rights in the state.

As for the other ballot proposals, the truth is that they are kind of beyond the point. The reason that we have them at all is because the City Council was attempting to institute its own ballot initiative to give itself more control over the appointment of municipal agency heads, and Mayor Eric Adams took advantage of a provision in the law that allowed mayoral ballot measures to essentially supersede council ones. This set of initiatives was a rush job meant to derail the council effort, and that it did; there’s a reason the administration is expending very little effort pushing for their passage. No one really cares all that much about them, which is why I think they’re likely to get voted down.

Mitra:  Finally, can you tell our communities how they might stay safe between election results and Inauguration Day? Do we need to come up with plans for our families, our children, our neighbors who might not be citizens or native born or… white? Just trying to plan and not panic.

Felipe: Well, it depends on the results of the election. I’ve said this before, but our natural human tendency towards optimism paired with the whole notion of American exceptionalism has been in many ways a boon, but is also a curse. I don’t think most people truly believe that it is possible for the country to descend into fascism, but it is. It always is! Our systems of government are just agreements we have with each other, and they can collapse, especially if the organized people with the guns decide that they’re going another way.

I’m not sure it’s necessarily productive to dedicate too much organizational energy towards that prospect just yet. Ultimately, I do think — for a variety of reasons of polling, margins of error, trends, and just general gut feeling — that Kamala Harris will win the election. I also know that Trump and his allies will try to take the election by force in that case. I don’t know what exactly will happen, but it’s all too chaotic to lay out a path yet. If he wins, there’s no reason to think he won’t do the things he’s promised to do. He promised to overturn Roe, and he did. He promised to try to stage a coup, and he did. He’ll do the raids and the camps if he gets his way. Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, but yes, we will quickly learn what it means to actually resist authoritarianism at home.

See more of our election coverage here.

Felipe De La Hoz is an immigration-focused journalist who has written investigative and analytic articles, explainers, essays, and columns for the New Republic, The Washington Post, New York Mag, Slate,...

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