2016 U.S. Presidential Election

The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election marks a rupture in the narrator’s visits to an elderly neighbor. As the campaign approaches, the neighbor grows consumed by political suspicion; after the election, her anger persists rather than subsiding. Through the son’s account of her former Democratic and feminist views, the episode presents political change not as a debate over candidates alone but as a startling alteration in a family’s understanding of one another—and in the human connection the narrator thought her visits had created.

Background and the Campaign

The narrator returns from six weeks away to learn that the neighbor has been briefly hospitalized for what her son describes only as a coronary event. At first, she seems much as before, still complaining about the building and the wider world. But the presidential election is approaching, and her attention increasingly fixes on the possibility that Americans might choose a person she considers manifestly unfit, immoral, corrupt, dishonest, and incompetent for the country’s highest office. Her anxiety is not presented as an isolated burst of campaign-season enthusiasm: her son says she had never before become so worked up over an election.

The neighbor’s political talk grows more extreme as the countdown continues. She describes the female candidate as profoundly corrupt and treasonous, says she has blood on her hands, and declares that she deserves to be shot. She cannot explain how the candidate could have come so far except by invoking a conspiracy. The violence of this language and the certainty with which it is delivered make the election a focus for a broader collapse of the neighbor’s trust in public life. The narrator observes that her faith in humanity has never seemed more shaken.

The Son’s Account of Change

The son’s recollections sharpen the contrast between the neighbor’s present convictions and her earlier life. He says that he and his mother had usually voted Democratic while he was growing up. He also remembers her reading a book he calls The Feminist Mystic and speaking about women’s liberation, including the importance of having more women in political office. He does not describe her as a highly active political organizer; rather, his memories establish that her current hostility to the female candidate sits uneasily beside views she once expressed.

He is equally unsettled by the religious language now entering her politics. Though the neighbor has never been religious, he hears her say that Christians are under attack and that Hillary Clinton answers to Satan. He cannot reconcile those claims with the mother he knew, and he wonders how they emerged. His bewilderment extends to the authority she gives Sean Hannity: when the choice is between Hannity’s account and her son’s, she trusts Hannity. The election thus exposes more than disagreement between generations. It reveals a breakdown in the son’s ability to recognize his mother’s beliefs as continuous with her past, and in his confidence that his own relationship with her gives his words any weight.

After the Election

The son hopes that the neighbor will calm down once the election is over, but the narrator reports that she does not. She remains paranoid and enraged at people she regards as enemies of Christianity and of patriotic Americans. The result is a reversal of the expected political aftermath: the end of the campaign does not close the subject or lower the emotional temperature. The neighbor’s agitation has become a persistent condition of the narrator’s visits.

The narrator’s occasional remarks do little to interrupt it. When she compares Sean Hannity to Lou Costello, the neighbor receives the comparison as an attack on him. Yet she does not otherwise appear interested in the narrator’s response. She does not ask whether the narrator agrees, inquire how she views either candidate, or make an effort to persuade her. If the narrator wants the truth, she can watch Fox News; if not, the neighbor seems content to leave her outside the conversation. Political conviction here is not expressed as an exchange in which opposing views might alter either participant. The neighbor’s rants proceed largely without regard to who is listening.

Consequences and Significance

For the narrator, that indifference changes the meaning of the visits. The coffee and muffins she brings seem almost to have appeared without her, and she begins to wonder whether she has functioned merely as an ear rather than as a friend. Her original intention was to do something good for the neighbor and her son, but the election-era encounters make that intention difficult to sustain: dread accumulates before each visit, and the neighbor’s angry, physically intimidating outbursts sometimes frighten her. The political episode therefore has a consequence inside the domestic setting. It estranges the narrator from the neighbor even as she continues to show up.

The election’s political stakes also extend beyond the neighbor’s household. In a separate conversation about climate change, the narrator challenges a speaker whose bleak account of the future seems to carry grim satisfaction. He calls that stance a defense mechanism and says he has lost faith in people after the election of a climate-change denialist to the world’s most powerful office. He connects that outcome to the earlier failure of oil executives to disclose research about fossil fuels and global warming, and explains that speaking out is partly an effort to answer to his grandchildren for what he did—or failed to do. Set beside the neighbor’s conspiracy-laden anger, this response gives the election a second register: it is a source of political despair grounded in fears about collective responsibility and an approaching climate crisis. The two reactions are not equated; their juxtaposition shows how the same public event can produce radically different forms of alarm, while leaving both the neighbor and the climate speaker unable to recover an easy faith in people.