Not surprisingly, the outside world is paying a great deal of attention to our pending election. An additional data point: I did interviews back-to-back Monday with journalists in Denmark and Canada about separate aspects of the cultural and political context for 2020.
The first of those interviews, with CBC-New Brunswick, is included in today’s radio/text/television story on Maine’s Second District, its politics, its differences with the First District, and its potentially decisive role in Tuesday’s vote, as there’s a scenario (however unlikely) under which its single electoral vote breaks a 269-269 Electoral College tie. Add in the race between Senator Susan Collins and his Democratic rival, former Maine House speaker Sarah Gideon, and there’s a lot at stake.
Also, in a scene out of Cold War Berlin or Vienna, reporter, Jacques Poitras also interviews an American voter live across the closed border on the bridge connecting tiny Forest City, Maine (Population: 5) and Forest City, New Brunswick. It’s fitting as Poitras is also the author of Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border, about our federations’ shared frontier.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist. He is the author of seven books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at Maine's Portland Press Herald, he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.