John Orlowsky made sure he exercised his right to vote in the U.S. presidential election.
As a transplanted American who put down roots in Prince George as curator of the greenhouse at UNBC nearly three decades ago, he’s not digging what’s happened to his country in the four years Donald Trump has been in power.
Orlowsky is certainly no fan of Joe Biden but he voted for him to do his part to end Trump’s reign.
“I held my nose and voted for him, I kind of feel Biden represents the same old parts of the Democratic party that I’m not happy with,” said Orlowsky. “Like many elections it was the lesser of two evils. Both parties as far as I’m concerned are the war-monger party and I don’t think the Democrats are any better than the Republicans.”
Orlowsky had a choice of five presidential candidates this year. He voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Stein in 2016 but says this time around it’s too important to take the chance and lodge a protest vote, even in a liberal state that usually votes Democrat.
Born in New Jersey, the 63-year-old Orlowsky sent his mail-in ballot to Oregon, the state where he was living in 1991 when he moved in to Prince George with his forestry professor wife Kathy Lewis. He doesn’t share Trump’s views that postal ballots will lead to voter fraud.
“That’s how Donald Trump votes,” said Orlowsky. “I just think it’s so ridiculous because that’s the way he’s voted for a while, but the facts don’t deter him.
“I moved here because I married Kathy, I didn’t move here for political reasons or to dodge the draft or anything like that, but all the time I wake up thinking, oh thank God I moved to Canada. A number of my friends and relatives are saying, ‘If Trump wins again, we’re moving to Canada.’ Of course they said that the last time, too, and none of them did.”
The Ipsos polls released late Monday shows Biden holding a lead over Trump that ranges from five to seven points, but that’s of little comfort to Orlowsky and other anti-Trump voters who remember Hillary Clinton was comfortably ahead of Trump going into the 2016 election.
“I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach that Trump’s going to win, and that’s one of the reasons I voted for Biden,” he said. “I couldn’t face myself the morning after if Trump wins and I voted Green.
“There’s a lot of fear in the United States and I don’t understand it. They spend more on the military than anybody else and they’re still afraid, but they’re not afraid of the right things. They should be afraid of the coronavirus, not the Russians.”
Orlowsky is a registered with the party but he says he’s never voted for a Republican for president. He says Trump’s appeal with voters stems from how the Obama administration handled the 2008 economic crisis by bailing out up banks and big businesses with its policies which he said did nothing to help average Americans, who continued to see their jobs vanish to overseas markets where labour is cheaper.
“There’s a lot of people who are not getting ahead, they’re seeing their standard of living slip or their kids’ standard of living slip and they can’t afford college and they can’t afford health insurance,” said Orlowsky. “They know something’s wrong and they want to change things and they saw Donald Trump coming in as an outsider and not a politician. Even though he’s personally repugnant they were like, ‘This guy’s going to kick ass for us,’ which of course he didn’t. You can’t expect a self-made millionaire, even though he inherited it, to care about your average working stiff, but they fell for that.
“There’s an anger there. The people know they’ve been ripped off. It’s the richest country in the history of the world, everybody should be living great, and look at the problems they have ”
Garth Jarman moved to Vanderhoof from Utah in 1969 when he was 20 and he has dual Canadian-American citizenship. Now 72, he still works as a welder/fabricator. Even though he could, Jarman won’t be sending in his vote, because he says if he registers he would face the threat of getting taxed by the American government. But if he was voting he’d mark his X beside Trump’s name.
“I like that he’s not a politician,” said Jarman. “I don’t like the way he talks but he has done what he said he was going to do. He did a good deal with Iran and got out of that mess and you don’t hear it on CNN but in the Middle East he’s signed four or five peace agreements and he’s pulled out of a lot of the nonsense wars. He got those hostages out of North Korea without spending $160 billion like Obama did.
“(Trump) lowered taxes and got rid of some regulations. When you lower taxes for some of the upper-income people it trickles down and makes jobs for some of the lower-income, blue-collar people.”
As much as he likes Trump, Jarman has no faith in Biden running the country, calling him “the biggest crook ever,” referring to the Biden family’s business connections in China. Jarman echoed Trump’s campaign claim that he’s done more for the U.S. in 47 months than Biden has in 47 years as a federal politician.
“The Democratic party is not the same party it was with John F. Kennedy, they’ve slid way to the left,” said Jarman. “The Democratic party is built on the hate for Trump and a vote for the Democratic party right now is just a vote against Trump, and any party that builds upon hate I don’t particularly like. Before he was even in office they accused Trump of dealing with Russians and they spent $45 million investigating him and didn’t find anything. The left hasn’t accepted the fact he won the election.”
Trump has been vilified for how he’s handled the pandemic but Jarman said he doesn’t deserve the blame for the 9.3 million cases and 233,000 deaths attributed to COVID.
“If you look at the Constitution of the United States, the people in charge of the health for each state are the governors and the mayors,” Jarman said. “If you look at the map, it was all these Democratic cities run by governors and mayors that had the worst of the pandemic.”
Jarman’s mother, three brothers and two sisters and their families now live in Washington state. In 2016 the family was split along Democrat and Republican lines, but not this year.
“They’re all for Trump this time,” said Jarman. “I think Trump’s going to win. I think there’s a lot of people out there who don’t really say they’re Trump supporters but they are. It never has been popular to say that. Even myself, my family sent me a Trump hat and I’ve never worn it in public.”
Trump’s continual disregard for scientific opinions and expert advice on the pandemic and climate change has been a gut-punch to UNBC geography professor Brian Menounos, a native of New Hampshire who is the Canada Research Chair in glacier change. The 50-year-old Menounos is hopeful a Trump defeat on Tuesday will result in an abrupt reversal of many of his decisions to remove caps on greenhouse gas emissions to prop up the fossil fuel industry.
“The loss of credibility for science and for facts and the ability to just say what you want and that news isn’t true, I think we’ve gone backwards several decades unfortunately,” said Menounos. “It’s a tragedy to watch, it’s breaking my heart and I really hope Biden wins by a landslide because we really need to stop this divisiveness.
“The reality is we have to move away from fossil fuels and certainly Trump’s not doing that. The reality is we have to trust science because science is based on fact. You can’t say you’re rounding the corner (on COVID) when you’re having all-time highs in terms of numbers of infections.”
Menounos is also troubled by Trump’s views on immigration and can’t wait to see a more moderate, less racist candidate replace him in the White House.
“It’s hard to understand what the appeal for Trump is, personally, I don’t get it,” he said. “The saddest part is his demonizing of people and people of colour, women, minorities, this is not how the U.S. was formed,” he said. “Sadly, we saw populism rise in the ‘30s in Europe and we saw what happened with that and it’s happening in the U.S., and to a lesser degree in Canada. We have to realize we do work better when we appreciate and work with all people.”
Menounos came to Canada for graduate studies at UBC in 1996 and has been at UNBC since December 2002. He didn’t reveal whether he voted or not. But he’s hopeful a Biden government will make healthcare coverage possible for all Americans and that he will he will be willing to go after the highest-income earners to pay for health, education and social programs.
“The Republican party has clearly been a party that looks out for the wealthy and the religious right,” he said. “The saddest part to me, it’s not about taxes, it’s treating people with civility and this acrimonious interaction with people is just shocking to see.”
Catherine Smith, a 19-year-old UNBC psychology student from Turlock, Calif., was among the 90 million Americans who sent in a mail-in ballot and she voted for Biden. She likes his policies on health and education and as a career politician he knows the ropes in Washington. Her family in central California owns a dairy farm in an area that’s a known Republican stronghold, but some family members are employed in the tech industry in the Silicon Valley. Their politics are radically different and compromises are difficult to achieve.
“I live in a split household, my mom is very Democratic and my dad is very Republican, and I lean more Democratic when it comes to social issues and more Republican when it comes to fiscal or land issues,” said Smith.
“I was 15 in 2016 and the election didn’t affect me that much but my family is in the dairy business and we did benefit from the tax reduction the Trump administration put through. But my mom has a lot of pre-existing conditions and healthcare is of particular importance to me because of that, with her being susceptible to a lot of illnesses.
“Trump dismantled Obamacare and that was really bad for a lot of people and it made getting new insurance really difficult. With a pre-existing condition it makes it very difficult getting on new insurance or it makes your premiums very high.”
Smith envies Canada and its three-party federal politics and believes the U.S. would be much better off if there was a third legitimate contender to choose from in elections so the decisions at the polls weren’t so black or white, right or wrong.
The turnout for this presidential election could reach all-time highs and Smith figures Biden will have enough voters on his side to make Trump a one-term president for the first time since George H.W. Bush got booted from office in 1993.
“I think a lot of people are really upset with Trump so a lot of people will vote against him, so I really hope it’s Biden because I don’t want another four years of Trump, but I also thought Trump had no chance of winning in 2016,” said Smith.
The wild card that could favour Biden is his running mate. If he’s elected, Kamala Harris would become the first-ever female U.S. vice-president, which could be appealing to women voters.
“In my circle I hang out mostly with women and I don’t think for a lot of us that’s necessarily a factor in it,” said Smith. “But I believe in her ideals and what she wants to put through and that being said it is a very encouraging thing to see.”
