723: Squeaker

Announcer

A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of this show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, This American Life. I'm Ira Glass.

Ira Glass

1:00 PM Wednesday, the day after the election-- Democrat volunteer Kim Hood runs a training on Zoom for 500 other Democrat volunteers who are going to go out and cure ballots in Georgia. "Cure" means tracking down voters whose mail-in ballots had a problem with the signature or whatever, and they've been rejected so they don't count. Curing is the word they use for fixing the ballots. Another word you hear a lot-- "rescuing."

Ira Glass

You can see how they could feel like all of this could come down to them. In Georgia, it was so close-- so close all week-- between the president and Joe Biden. Out of nearly 5 million votes cast, at times, the candidates were just 1,100 votes apart. And the trainers explain to the group that there are over 5,000 votes out there that they can cure, mail-in ballots and provisional ballots. So after the training, people fan out, get on phones, knock on doors.

Ira Glass

Trevor is at college, the woman says. It's Wednesday night in the Atlanta suburbs. Marla Cureton is the volunteer who stopped by to find Trevor.

Ira Glass

"So his vote's not counted?" the woman at the door says.

Ira Glass

Marla gives her a packet of materials and explains he basically just has to sign an affidavit and photograph that and his photo ID and email them into the county. Back in the car, Marla describes how she ended up deciding to volunteer for this after seeing President Trump win so many voters, state after state, just the night before on election night.

Ira Glass

It's tedious work. A volunteer named Erika Meyer who's doing this by phone told me that, in her three-hour shift on Wednesday, she reached maybe one person for every 10 calls she made.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our program-- after an election week full of uncertainty, even after news organizations looked at the results and called the election for Joe Biden, there's still MORE uncertainty. President Trump has not conceded, he's called the vote counts fraudulent, so today we have stories of people all over the country living through this weird-- I don't know what to call it-- gravityless limbo of uncertainty that we have all been floating through since Tuesday. Speaking for myself, checking the news compulsively.

The Washington Post called the day after the election this Wednesday "a hump day for the ages." All of us wondering, how is this going to end? Our fellow citizens going through that. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Virginia. So Mike Giglio is a reporter who's been following militia groups for the last year, interviewing the men in them, including lots of guys who've been bracing for civil war. Over the last few weeks, when President Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to go to polling stations and, quote, "watch very carefully on Election Day," Mike wondered if any of these groups and those guys he knew would heed the call. Here's Mike.

Mike Giglio

When I called Joe Klemm, the leader of a militia in Virginia called the Ridge Runners, he told me that's exactly what they were getting ready to do. So I joined them for a pre-election training session in the Appalachian Mountains one chilly Saturday morning three weeks ago. Joe wouldn't tell me the location over the phone, so I met him and about a dozen other guys in camo at a McDonald's and followed them to a large farm. They start the day standing at attention behind an abandoned building with their AR-15s.

Mike Giglio

That's Joe. He's a muscular 29-year-old who looks exactly like the former Marine sergeant he tells me he is.

Mike Giglio

Gray men-- that means men in plainclothes trying to blend into the crowds at the polling stations. Joe tells me what they're looking for is groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, who they believe could disrupt the election, intimidate voters, or commit fraud. They get this from the president. Trump and right-wing media have been raising these fears without evidence for months.

Everyone in Joe's militia is white. The question of whether militias are synonymous with white nationalists always comes up with groups like this, and they almost always reject that label. All of the places that Joe imagines might be hotspots on Election Day are nearby cities with lots of people of color. But he and his members insist they're not racist.

Before January, when Joe started the group, most of these guys didn't know each other. Joe's one the most intense people I've met in the militias. And when he talks, people tend to snap to attention. He tells me stories about fighting as a black ops soldier and losing friends and killing enemies. I check with the Marines, and they tell me they have no record of his service. Joe claims that's because it's classified.

When I ask people what drew them to the group, they talk about Joe, his charisma. Here's a member called Savage.

Mike Giglio

A lot of the day, it seems like the guys are just here to bond and have fun. Joe leads the men through six hours of drills, starting with the PT and then moving to shooting positions and room clearing.

Mike Giglio

They're running a drill here where the idea is that they learn how to cover each other. When I spend time with these groups, I'm always wondering how seriously they take the idea that they might really engage in violence. On the one hand, they're giving each other nicknames, slapping each other on the back, and saying, "bang."

But at the same time, they really do believe the country's in danger, that they might need to turn their guns on their fellow citizens one day. And they buy into all the unsupported claims Trump makes about liberals bent on election fraud and violence and the need to stop them. And they think they're the ones to do it.

Nearly all the militiamen I've spoken to this year believe that Democrats committed massive voter fraud in 2016, and they've been doing it again this year with mail-in ballots and early voting. Joe is worried the 2020 election could be stolen.

Mike Giglio

Sometimes I wish the people in these militia groups could hear how much they sound like people I've covered in countries that have come undone. I spent a lot of time in Eastern Ukraine in early 2013 with the pro-Russian activists who eventually plunged the region into a war.

They would go on social media and tune into Russian propaganda and convince themselves that their countrymen were out to destroy them. They'd tell me that bands of Nazis were coming from Kiev to kill them. I was struck by the way people had to convince themselves that the other side was absolutely out to get them, was bent on their destruction in order to take that step into real violence.

It's not that I think that what happened in Ukraine will happen in America. But talk of violence can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Mike Giglio

It's Tuesday morning, Election Day. Joe and some of his guys are split between two pickup trucks. I'm in the backseat of Joe's. Everyone with me is dressed in battle gear, and they're armed to the teeth. Joe's wearing a bulletproof vest with four or five ammo clips strapped to it and a pistol in a holster.

In the passenger seat, Matt, a lanky guy in his 30s, has a big knife strapped to his own body armor in addition to all the ammo clips. And he's wearing a pair of noise-canceling headphones with skulls on them. Both of them have loaded AR-15s in their laps. The plan is to do as the president suggested-- drive to every polling station in their county in Virginia and look for problems. Joe leads the way.

Mike Giglio

I'd asked earlier what kind of people they were looking for, and Joe said thugs. When I asked what that meant, he said people from Black Lives Matter, from Antifa. I wasn't sure how he'd know whether a person was a member of a group like that or whether there were even that many of them in this part of the country.

Mike Giglio

We pull up to a polling station and sit in a parking lot. Just out there in the open, there are people milling around and then a bunch of guys with guns just watching them.

Mike Giglio

Doug, the gray man, gets ready to go in. He's in his 40s with a beard. He also has an easy demeanor, which is probably the reason they picked him for the job. He's wearing jeans, a fleece, and sunglasses. And you'd have to look closely to notice that there's a wire running down from the back of his hat, which is connected to a radio so he can be in touch with the guys. We hang back in the pickup while Doug goes in. After a few minutes, he casually walks back to us.

Mike Giglio

And we're back on the road, with Joe leading the way. At pretty much every polling station, when Doug walks in, this is how it goes.

Mike Giglio

Most of the day is driving, driving and waiting, waiting and driving. It's a big county spread across winding mountain roads. We drop in and out of cell service, and sometimes Joe gets turned around when his Google Maps goes on the fritz. Matt, the guy in the passenger seat, is good at filling the idle time. He's ready to sound off on just about anything.

Mike Giglio

He talks about cars.

Mike Giglio

The good old days.

Mike Giglio

His love handles.

Mike Giglio

The confrontation they suited up for never happens. We don't see Antifa or Black Lives Matter or anyone blocking the polls or intimidating voters or committing fraud. At our last stop, we do see someone lingering outside a polling station. I walk up to the entrance with Doug and see a woman sitting nearby. She's an older white woman with a bag that has a blue sticker for Mark Warner, a Democratic senator. Doug walks right by her with a polite hello, and then we're inside having another awkward conversation with the poll workers.

Mike Giglio

When we walk back outside, the woman is still there. And I notice her eyeing Doug, a little suspicious that he walked in and out so quickly. She asks him if he needs help.

Mike Giglio

Doug goes back to the car, and I decide to go and talk with the woman. She's Janet Tate, a die-hard local Democrat. She says she comes here every election to hand out campaign literature. She's allowed to do that just outside the white line on the pavement. Like a lot of people, Janet had been anxious about being out on Election Day.

Mike Giglio

I mentioned that I saw her watching Doug.

Mike Giglio

Joe and the heavily-armed guys in the car are probably exactly the kind of people her daughter was worried about. But Janet tells me she's not going to be intimidated.

Mike Giglio

I head back to the truck. I tell Joe that the woman I was talking to is a local Democrat and that she told me Doug seemed like a nice guy. He's really struck by that. He jumps out of the truck, still in his full battle gear, and suddenly determined to meet her.

Mike Giglio

If Janet's intimidated by Joe with his body armor and ammo clips and pistol, she doesn't show it.

Mike Giglio

They talk for a few minutes. He's so big, but Janet just smiles and looks him in the eyes. She even picks an argument with him about the electoral college. At the end, they do a little high five.

Mike Giglio

When Joe gets back to the car, I notice that he's energized by the encounter. It was the only time of the day I saw him drop his warrior persona. "Great day," he tells me.

Not long afterwards, the guys packed it up and went home. They had found no evidence of fraud, no intimidation or disruption. And they never got a chance to protect the vote or engage the enemy. And it was a relief to see that this was totally fine with them.

The next day, I called Joe. It was Wednesday. The news was moving towards a Biden victory, and President Trump was already crying fraud. Joe was, too.

Mike Giglio

The president has been pushing unsubstantiated claims of election rigging in Michigan and other crucial states.

Mike Giglio

Joe tells me he's sure that if Biden wins, some kind of violence is inevitable. He says they'll end up fighting someone. Black Lives Matter, Antifa-- he's not sure.

Ira Glass

Mike Giglio-- he wrote about his experiences covering civil wars overseas in his book Shatter the Nations.

Ira Glass

Act Two, New York and Germany. So four years ago, the day after Donald Trump won that election, reporter Stephanie Foo met two army officers at a diner to talk to them about their new boss. Those guys were in the same unit, close friends. But they did not agree on politics at all.

Ira Glass

At the time, they went back and forth about what they thought the next four years were going to be like with President Trump as commander in chief. Whether it meant they were more likely to be deployed to a conflict zone, how it would affect morale, and the possibility that Donald Trump might start a nuclear war.

Ira Glass

The guy who liked President Trump said the officer with the nuclear football would prevent Donald Trump from randomly nuking somebody. The Hillary Clinton supporter was not so sure. Anyway, Stephanie checked in with two of them again earlier this week. One of them is in the States. One of them is stationed in Germany.

Stephanie Foo

The biggest thing that happened to these guys in the last four years actually had nothing to do with Trump. They both had babies.

Stephanie Foo

These aren't their real names, but Chet and Tom voted exactly how I expected them to in this election. Tom voted for Biden. Chet again voted for Trump. But in 2016, Chet had been a really hardcore Trump supporter. He really wanted an outsider. But now that the outsider is an insider, he feels more agnostic.

And maybe a little part of his indifference is because of Trump's role as their boss. Like the time Trump made the comment saying, why are we having all these people from shithole countries coming here? Chet wasn't crazy about that. Neither was Tom, the Biden supporter, who was deployed in Africa when that went down.

Stephanie Foo

They weren't totally unhappy with his performance. Both Chet and Tom agreed that Trump's strongman personality did come in handy sometimes. They liked that he engaged with North Korea and supported the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. But the thing that's affected them the most during the last four years is the same thing we've all dealt with-- the thing that isn't going to magically go away, no matter who wins.

Stephanie Foo

That's Chet.

Stephanie Foo

One of the moments that bugs Chet the most is from his last deployment. One of his friends was a Black woman who absolutely hated Trump. And she hated all of the white Trump supporting soldiers around her, too. She did hang out with Chet. He thinks it's because he's Asian-American.

Stephanie Foo

Tom agrees. He says that in the military, the mindset should be that there is an enemy, and it's out there, hiding in a cave in Afghanistan somewhere, not in the next aisle at the Stop and Shop.

Stephanie Foo

A lot of international relationships have been tested by the Trump presidency, but not Chet and Tom's.

Tom says that the military creates an environment where people have to trust and communicate with each other, even if you don't like each other, which is not an attitude America seems to have these days about our democracy. I talked to them Wednesday the day after the election. Tom said he'd be pretty horrified if Trump won. Chet just shrugged. If Biden wins, he said, basically, whatever. Both said they'd respect either outcome.

Ira Glass

Stephanie Foo-- she used to be a producer on our program. She's now writing a memoir about healing from complex PTSD. Coming up, somebody who thought his life was going to change a lot depending on who becomes president, though, now, it's not so clear. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "Squeaker." I don't know if I should admit here how many minutes today we spent arguing over whether to call the episode "Electile Dysfunction." "Squeaker" was our classy choice.

Anyway, our show this week is stories from all over about this strange week we've all just lived through, waiting for election results. Of course, for some people, the outcome of the presidential election might have a very direct effect on their lives.

Take, for instance, the people living in the tent camp that's just over the border from Texas, in Matamoros, Mexico. A camp filled with people seeking asylum in the United States who'd been sent there under the president's remain-in-Mexico policy. On election night, they held a vigil all night long until 5:00 in the morning.

Apparently, the pastors who put this together tried to keep it apolitical, stick with prayers and songs. But by the end of the vigil, in the early morning hours, the last pastor who took the stage said the thing that apparently lots of them had been thinking all night. He said, "I hope Joe Biden wins." And somebody who was there said it was like everybody finally had a chance to let out their feelings. They cheered. They danced. They've heard Joe Biden promise to reform immigration in his first 100 days in office.

Which brings us to Act Three. Act Three, Louisiana. Ben Calhoun has this story of somebody else who's not from this country, who's been following the election as closely as he can.

Ben Calhoun

Jonathan, who was in an ICE detention center in Louisiana, told me that this year's presidential race actually solved the problem in the detention centers he's been in. He's been moved around to a few. Jonathan told me the recurring problem was with the TVs. Take the ICE detention center I called him in. It was this small triangular room, he said.

Ben Calhoun

The problem with the detention center TVs, though-- well, sort of the same with any TV in America-- people can't agree what to watch. Should we watch English TV? Should we watch Spanish TV?

Ben Calhoun

Jonathan told me, during the 18 months he's been in ICE detention, one of the few times this wasn't an issue at all was the presidential debates this fall. Everyone, Jonathan said, wanted to see those.

I called Jonathan the week before the election because I wanted to talk to someone in our immigration system whose case could potentially be affected by it. I wondered how the election looked from where they were.

Jonathan said he'd talked to other detainees about the election. He'd been talking to guards, too. Most of them, he told me, were Biden supporters. But yeah, lots of people were wondering how the election might change their cases, including him. Jonathan's 30. He's from Cameroon. And he came to the US in 2019 seeking asylum. He's been stuck in detention ever since.

Ben Calhoun

Under President Trump, asylum seekers like Jonathan are getting deported, even ones with strong evidence that they're political refugees who will be tortured or killed if they return to their home countries. Jonathan-- I should tell you, that is not his real name. I'm calling him that because he has family back in Cameroon, and he has good reason to worry about their safety.

Jonathan is part of an English-speaking minority that's been persecuted by Cameroon's French-speaking majority and its longtime autocratic president, Paul Biya. That whole situation has gotten more and more violent. Jonathan wasn't part of that. He was a businessman, a grocery wholesaler. He bought stuff from farmers to sell in town. And he started the business to support his mom after his dad died.

Basically, Jonathan got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was in this barber shop when it got raided by soldiers. He and 14 others got thrown in jail, and they were beaten and tortured for nearly a month. At one point, a few men were taken out, and they never came back. And the soldier told the rest of them that they were all going to get killed.

Then, one day-- a warning, this is pretty graphic. One day, an officer took Jonathan and one other man at gunpoint, and he led them outside to a truck. He told them to clean it up. And Jonathan looked inside it.

Ben Calhoun

Jonathan says there was blood all over the inside, particles of flesh. He started to clean. And then at some point, he noticed that the soldier was distracted and talking to someone.

Ben Calhoun

Jonathan says he slipped around the corner of the building. And then he ran through a cornfield, and he just kept running. Eventually, he got to a cousin's house and then eventually escaped to Ecuador.

I just want to say Jonathan's account of all these details, it's all well supported by documents and photos and legal affidavits. Among the documents, there's a warrant for Jonathan's arrest for, quote, "terrorism, secession, and insurrection." Jonathan told me if the government gets its hands on him, chances he'll be killed are 100%. That's what he said-- 100%.

Jonathan's attorney told me, under a different presidential administration than President Trump's, he thinks his asylum case would have a much better shot. So after escaping, Jonathan went through nine countries. At some point, someone gave Jonathan a piece of advice that would end up being really important. They said rip your passport up. It will make it harder for anyone to send you back to Cameroon. So Jonathan did that.

In the end, he made it to the US. He made it into ICE custody. I asked Jonathan why he didn't seek asylum in any of the other nine countries. And he told me it was simple. He didn't know enough about any of those other countries to know if they would protect him or if they'd send him back.

Ben Calhoun

A judge ordered Jonathan to be deported. The only reason he and his lawyer thought he hadn't been is because Jonathan had taken that advice and destroyed his passport back in Panama. For months, ICE officers had been asking Jonathan to sign this document that would apparently let them send him back to Cameroon. Jonathan has been refusing, telling them that he'll be tortured and killed.

ICE, in response, told Jonathan they would hold him in indefinite detention until he signed. And ICE, for their part-- well, they started leaning on Jonathan harder and harder. You have to sign this. Recently, he told me that situation came to a head when an ICE agent he knew led him into a room.

Ben Calhoun

Jonathan got on his knees and begged. Said he'd be killed. The officer wasn't hearing it. He said he needed a picture of Jonathan signing. So he repeated.

Ben Calhoun

All of this only stopped, Jonathan says, when a female officer opened the door and asked what was going on. She called the other officers over to her, and they talked where Jonathan couldn't really hear them. Then he was allowed to go call his lawyer.

After Jonathan and I talked, we agreed that he would call me the day after the election at 5:00 PM. I wanted to hear his reaction to whatever results or non-results we'd have by then. But that never happened. Because the morning after the election, when everyone was waking up to a map with eight states still suspended and gray, I got a voicemail from Jonathan's lawyer.

Ben Calhoun

Ruth Hargrove, Jonathan's lawyer, couldn't find him. She'd woken up the morning after the election to see four missed calls on her phone.

Ben Calhoun

Ruth told me the day before, Election Day, Jonathan told her about this unusual incident where ICE had taken him in to identify his belongings at a property room. And they asked about his sponsor-- which, he's got an aunt in Maryland who's offered to take him in while he tries to get asylum. Jonathan told Ruth he was hopeful that that's what was up, that he was finally getting out.

But Ruth was suspicious. She'd gotten this email from an activist group about a deportation flight to Cameroon on November 10. She'd been getting increasingly nervous that Jonathan might get put on it. And so that morning, after the election, when Jonathan was just removed from the Louisiana detention center, Ruth started scrambling, just trying to figure out where exactly he was, where he was going. When we talked, she was still reeling.

Ben Calhoun

Ruth told me she was trying every legal avenue she could think of. She hadn't confirmed it 100% from ICE that Jonathan was being deported, but she was increasingly sure. It had to be that, she thought.

Before I play you this last piece of tape, I need to tell you a few things about Ruth. She's no softy. She's a former prosecutor. She's the wife of a former Navy SEAL and DEA agent. OK, but so, the first time we talked, she told me she had this kind of big worry around the election and around Jonathan. She was worried that even if Joe Biden won, the Trump administration officials would go on a scorched earth sort of tear with detainees like Jonathan and that he'd be deported as part of that.

Ben Calhoun

Thursday, as election results were still gathering in news headlines, I got a call from Jonathan, who was in a detention center in Texas. And he filled me in on what had happened. The morning after the election, he told me, an ICE officer came to see him around 5:00 AM and told Jonathan to take his stuff. They were going to the airport. Jonathan says he begged him the whole way there. Told him that if he was deported, he would be killed.

At the airport, he told me, he resisted. He refused to get out of the vehicle. But the officers dragged him onto a plane, which took him and some other Cameroonians to Texas. He was told he would be there for a few days, unclear how many, but that he was there to be deported.

I contacted ICE about Jonathan's situation. In a statement, a spokesperson said, he'd been, quote, "afforded extensive legal processes and was ultimately found by a federal judge to have no legal basis to remain in the United States," end quote. They declined to give any information about when he might be deported, though an ICE officer confirmed to Ruth that Jonathan would be on a plane early next week.

Before I got off the phone with Jonathan on Thursday, I asked him if he knew what would happen if he arrived in Cameroon. He said he'd been trying to reach relatives who might be able to help him. I have no idea what awaits me, he said. He just kept repeating that. He told me, other than talking to his lawyer, Ruth, and trying to reach family for help, he'd been spending all of his time praying.

Ira Glass

Ben Calhoun is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Detroit. In a bunch of cities around the country this week, Republicans have congregated in election centers where votes are being tallied, protesting, chanting for the counting to stop, or, in the case of Arizona, where President Trump is behind the vote count, chanting for the counting to continue.

We wondered what it would be like to be inside one of those counting rooms trying to do your job with all that chaos going on outside. Emanuele Berry talked to a woman who was inside the vote counting room in Detroit when Trump supporters tried to get inside, chanted, banged on the windows.

Emanuele Berry

Khalilah Gaston lives in Detroit. She's a news junkie. For this year's presidential election, she kept thinking she'd volunteer. And on Tuesday night, she saw her chance, a Facebook post asking for poll watchers to watch the counting of mail-in ballots in Detroit. It was at a big convention center.

On Wednesday morning, she goes through training. Then she walks into the room where there are 134 tables where votes are being processed. She's assigned a partner and an aisle of tables to watch.

Emanuele Berry

Each state has their own rules for poll watching. In Michigan, Republicans and Democrats are allowed to have one challenger per table. Challengers can challenge a ballot. And then there are also poll watchers, like Khalilah, who cannot challenge votes or ballots, but can observe the counting.

And honestly, it's all pretty tame. Khalilah stands on the side of the room, looking around, taking notes, raising small concerns with supervising staff, like if a person isn't wearing their mask properly. That's how her day starts out. She's just one of hundreds of people in a room watching hundreds of other people count ballots. But a couple hours in, things change.

Emanuele Berry

Most of the Republican poll watchers were doing their job without issues. But a handful of them started to become disruptive.

Emanuele Berry

She was told this might happen in training, that people may cause a scene or try and distract or slow down vote counting.

Emanuele Berry

At this point, Joe Biden was starting to take the lead in Michigan. And there were growing rumors and disinformation spreading online about election fraud in Detroit. More poll watchers showed up in the lobby, demanding to be let into the counting room. The building officials refused, saying they had too many people in there already, including over 500 Republican and Democratic poll watchers.

Even more people gathered outside the building. And what you ended up with was a group of mostly white people, chanting, "stop the vote, stop the count," in a city of mostly Black voters. The thing that I have thought about over and over again during this election cycle is that Black people exercising their political will is seen as cheating.

Just this Thursday, the president called two cities with large Black populations, Detroit and Philadelphia, quote, "two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country" with no evidence for this at all, and declared that these cities, quote, "cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race."

Wednesday afternoon at the convention center, as the crowd outside kept getting bigger, Khalilah wasn't aware of any of it. She wasn't near the windows. But then things slowed down at her tables, and she took a stroll.

Emanuele Berry

Khalilah was concerned about what was happening outside. But she had another feeling as she was standing there watching people inside-- pride. They all just kept working, kept counting the votes. Around 7:00 PM, Khalilah headed home. She felt relieved to be done. But Thursday--

Emanuele Berry

But trauma isn't the main feeling Khalilah took away from this experience. She feels emboldened. She says she's definitely going to poll watch again.

Ira Glass

Emanuele Berry is the executive editor of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Five, Miami. So maybe this is going to be the year when everybody gets the memo that Latino voters are not an actual thing. They're not a voting bloc with shared interests and identities and political affiliations who all vote the same. This year, Mexican-Americans in Arizona put the state within reach of the Democrats for the first time since the '90s.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Cuban-Americans and Venezuelans helped seal the deal of President Trump's victory in Florida. And then there's the generational split. Young Latinos tend to be more liberal than their parents. Nadia Reiman talked to a family like that, a mother and son from Miami. They're Venezuelan, and they're split.

Nadia Reiman

When I asked Marco and his mom Ninotchka how often they talked about politics, they were like, oh, it's a topic.

(SUBJECT) NINOTCHKA [SPEAKING SPANISH]

Nadia Reiman

A lot. "We actually invite it," they say. Which can be tricky, because Marco voted for Biden and Ninotchka for Trump. They're part of that Venezuelan voting bloc in Florida that the press has been freaking out about, wondering why, oh, why would Latinos-- as if we were one thing-- vote for Trump?

The family moved to Miami 20 years ago. They all still live together. Marco and Ninotchka actually work together at her accounting firm.

Nadia Reiman

Marco tells his mom, because of Venezuela, I already knew you were going for Trump. Because Biden didn't come out hard against Maduro and Venezuela's socialist government. Ninotchka also says Biden flirted-- her words-- with Cuba too much, and that was all a deal breaker for her, too close to communism. She can't even say Venezuela's former president's name, Hugo Chavez. She called him [SPANISH] which is-- and I'm not even exaggerating-- "he who must not be named," like Voldemort.

Ninotchka really wants you to know, though, that she didn't vote for Trump. She voted for the Republican Party. She doesn't like him-- at least, not a lot. She thinks he's really rude about immigrants, which she thinks is hypocritical, given that his wife is an immigrant. She thinks he's arrogant. She also told me she hated the way he treats reporters, though I'm aware she said this to a reporter.

I asked Marco how it made him feel that his mom voted for Trump. He squirmed. He moved his hands a lot, avoided eye contact.

Nadia Reiman

It's a mess, he says. It's a mental and emotional mess. I feel strange. I don't want to say "betrayed."

Nadia Reiman

He's like, damn. I know other friends and other parents who also came here because of politics, also from Venezuela, and they went for Biden. And so it makes me think, what did these other parents find out that made them make a different decision, one that's more like mine? He said his mom's vote made him feel a little ashamed.

Ninotchka does not even get a little upset about this. She's like socialism, honey. You didn't live through it.

Nadia Reiman

She says, it's like you have a scar, and it doesn't get erased. And it still hurts, and it won't close up. How are you going to understand if you haven't lived it, she tells me. How is he going to get it if he hasn't lived it either? She points at Marco. But those of us who have lived it always feel it here, she says, and she points at her heart, and here, and she points at her head.

I asked her if she thought the people who were scared about Trump, who think he may be the start of a regime itself, like fascism, if she thought they were wrong. She said no. She said she could see it. But that still seemed so far away and unreal, compared to the socialism she did live through. One was a possibility. The other was already a reality.

And then, just as we were wrapping up the interview, she said, we got to just wait calmly for results. And honestly, for the good of the country, maybe Biden should win. Trump makes people so angry. This surprised me. She had been so clear about not wanting Biden. But when she unpacked it a little more, I understood. She doesn't want unrest. That, she knows very well. She knows how that story ends.

Ira Glass

Nadia Reiman is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Six, Massachusetts. So one of our producers, Sean Cole, saw some talking head types on CNN recently, discussing the stakes of this year's presidential election and how both Democrats and Republicans see it as "existential." That's the word they used-- "existential." Like, the very existence of our democracy or even our planet hangs in the balance, which-- it can seem kind of abstract.

In these past few weeks, as we approached Election Day, Sean and somebody very close to him have been dealing with very immediate and real world existential questions. Here's Sean.

Sean Cole

About two weeks before the election, my stepfather, Ed, was admitted to Cape Cod Hospital. He was rushed there in an ambulance with extreme shortness of breath, like he was suffocating. It turned out to be lung cancer, a tumor almost the size of a golf ball that caused all this fluid to build up in his left lung, plus a precarious blood clot on the same lung.

I raced up there from New York before even knowing the diagnosis. Ed's 90 and had already been battling stage four prostate cancer for a couple of years. So there's been this ambient sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When I got to the hospital, two nurses were settling him into the room where he'd spend the next four days. One of them asked him a whole battery of standard intake questions. History of smoking? Yes. Do you drink caffeine? Yes. And then she said, do you feel threatened by anyone at home or just in your life? Ed paused, looked down, and said, the president.

I thought that was really funny-- and also telling. Even in this dire moment for him, Trump and the election still kept bobbing back up to the surface. Ed's a Democrat. He follows the news pretty closely. And back when he was merely contending with stage four prostate cancer, he told me several times that he just wanted to live long enough to see what happens with the election. He's had zero existential dread beyond that.

And at some point during his hospital stay, I realized this was almost certainly going to be Ed's last presidential election. And I wondered if he might be experiencing it differently than the rest of us. So for a couple of my daily hospital visits, I brought my recorder along.

Sean Cole

At that point-- again, this was more than a week before Election Day-- the doctors still hadn't given him a prognosis about how long he might live. They did tell him that the blood clot could detach at any time and go to his brain or his heart and kill him.

He was equally sanguine and philosophical about that as he's been about the cancer. Told me the clot will either kill him or it won't. And if it doesn't, why should he worry? And if it does, he won't be able to worry. He's so placid about his mortality that it doesn't leave a lot of room for me morosely wringing my hands about it when I'm with him.

But now there's this kind of gradient from what he's probably still going to be alive for to what he might be, to what he probably won't be. And he doesn't get to choose, of course. But I thought I'd ask him anyway.

Sean Cole

He went on to talk about this thing he read about possible evidence of life on Venus. As usual, he got excited talking about this stuff, like a kid. I think it's his curiosity that's kept him around this long. The same curiosity-- not partisanship or spite or ghoulish vengefulness, but curiosity-- that's had him wanting to see how the election plays out, which I think is such a pure perspective to watch this whole yucky circus from, especially as he'd be totally forgiven for just changing the channel.

[DIALTONE]

Sean Cole

This call was early Friday morning, three days after Election Day. Ed was back home from the hospital with three new prescriptions, including a heavy-duty blood thinner for the clot, which has actually been working. And while almost everyone else I knew was biting their nails, waiting for the electoral scoreboard to change, Ed was not. In fact, on election night itself, he did change the channel. Didn't even watch the returns come in.

Sean Cole

I told Ed there's this thing I've been trying to square. How he can be so at peace with his own mortality, and yet so concerned for the fate of the country and, really, the world he's leaving behind? Those seem like opposites, I said. And he said he didn't see the conflict. Of course he's concerned. Yes, he's not going to be around a lot longer, but we will. And he still cares about that.

Ira Glass

Sean Cole is one of the producers of our show.

[MUSIC - "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" BY SHARON JONES & THE DAP-KINGS]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Dana Chivvis and Ben Calhoun. The people who together today's show include Elna Baker, Susan Burton, Sean Cole, Aviva DeKornfeld, Hilary Elkins, Noor Gill, Damien Grave, Michelle Harris, Chana Joffe-Walt, Andrea López-Cruzado, Miki Meek, Lina Misitzis, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Lisa Pollak, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor, Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor, Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Rose and Steve Johnson, the Rural Utah Project, Kate Groetzinger, Dilianna Bustillos, Vero Cardenas, Harini Krishnan, Janani Ganesh, Ryan Fisher, Grant Rommel, Josh Mendelsohn, Claire Wardle, Lisa Kaplan, Cindy Otis and Sophie Lawton of the Alethea Group, Elena Cryst, Kyle Vass, Lizzy Johnson, Christopher Rhoads, Joe Certaine, Mel D. Cole, Madeline Heim, Tamara Stevens, Jennifer Jordan, Laura Yellig, Zoe Clark, Sarah Hulett, Ursula Luse, Jared Marcelle, and Taylor Armstrong.

Our website, ThisAmericanLife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He does a really bad impression of a kitchen door that's been left open on a windy day. Here he is, Torey.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week. I wonder if we'll have a president by then. See you soon.

[MUSIC - "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" BY SHARON JONES & THE DAP-KINGS]