Americans are braced for civil unrest amid scary predictions of ‘blood’ during Tuesday’s knife’s-edge presidential election, reviving painful memories of recent assassination bids and chaos after the 2020 vote.
According to the Daily Mail, Businesses in Washington, DC were on Monday boarding up their windows as security fencing went up around the White House, US Vice President Harris’s residence, and other key buildings in the capital.
Fights have broken out at polling stations and election workers have prepared for gun attacks, amid a flurry of threats to blow up political offices and other sensitive sites ahead of election day.
Washington state has activated some members of the National Guard to be on stand-by, while a Democratic congressman has warned ‘there may be blood’ resulting from clashes between angry voters.
Police and guardsmen are on standby for election chaos in Portland, Oregon, with its record of Antifa violence, and where Mayor Ted Wheeler warns of ‘uncertainty and tension’ during polling.
The 2024 race has already seen bloodshed, with the July 13 shooting at a Donald Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which grazed the former president and left one attendee dead and two more wounded.
The contest has also been marred by damning rhetoric between the rival campaigns. A speaker at a Trump rally spoke recently of the ‘slaughter’ of Democrats, and Trump himself has spoken of ‘shooting at’ former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney.
Meanwhile, Harris has called Trump a ‘threat’ to democracy who must be defeated at the ballot box, while her boss the outgoing President Joe Biden has called the MAGA Republican’s supporters ‘garbage.’
Meanwhile, the specter of January 6, 2021, when supporters of Trump stormed the US Capitol, seeking to overturn the former president’s election loss to Biden – has cast a long shadow over US politics.
This time round, Trump has repeatedly refused to state whether he will accept the election results, and is already alleging fraud and cheating in neck-and-neck swing states such as Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork for what many fear will be more unrest.
Trump supporter Bill Robinson, 65, of North Carolina, says some kind of violence now looks likely.
‘It’s a horrendous possibility, because it looks like there’s no other option than some kind of extreme unrest,’ Robinson told USA Today.
Tensions mounted on Monday as Trump and his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, made their final bid to woo voters, hours before polling stations open on Tuesday in a close-call contest that hinges on a handful of electoral battlegrounds.
The election prediction website 538 slightly favors Trump to win the White House, with a 52 percent chance against 48 percent for Harris — but for many commentators the race is more or less a dead heat.
Tennessee congressman Steve Cohen, a Democrat, Warned on Thursday that ‘there may be blood’ if Harris beats Trump at the ballot box, saying the Republican’s supporters may not accept a defeat.
‘I think Kamala’s gonna win the popular vote by 5, 6 million votes at least,’ he told NewsNation.
‘I think she gets the electoral vote, but I think Trump won’t stop at anything. It will be in court; it will be in litigation. He’ll be telling people, again, to go to the Capitol if you want to have a country and fight like hell.’
