People in Washington Are Fleeing Town for Election Day

Kate Brown moved to Washington for politics. But on election week, she’s leaving town for the same reason.

“I just want to get the eff out of dodge,” Brown told me recently. “I don’t feel like dealing with it.”

“It,” in this case, doesn’t mean the tension of working an election. Brown does marketing and communications for mostly libertarian policy wonks, and election week isn’t exactly a busy time for book talks and white papers. Instead, she’s worried about safety — though she can’t quite picture exactly what the threat looks like.

“I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen,” Brown said. “My best friend in the world was on Capitol Hill on January 6. He’s in a wheelchair. I was very worried. You think about stuff like that. Do I think there’s going to be another January 6? Honestly, I’m also a bit worried about if the other side wins. People really hate Trump. I just don’t know.”

All of which, in Brown’s mind, makes it a great time to get away. “We’re going to go to Vegas, see some concerts, play some poker,” she said. “I can’t imagine that we’re the only ones.”

She’s right. As Washington reaches the end of a fraught election season — and prepares for a potentially even more fraught interregnum — people across the political spectrum are expressing worry about a violent display by the losing side. For liberals, fears of a Jan. 6 rerun are baked in, based on very real history. But conservatives also worry about antifa-style outrage.

Which means all kinds of people are scouting conveniently timed vacations: The policy scholar who was happy to find he had business in Los Angeles and his wife would be in Florida. The former Hill staffer who decided months ago that election week was a good time for a Mediterranean voyage. The liberal think tanker who planned an Arizona bike getaway.

“January 6th was a very scary time,” said Shreya Tulsiani, a policy researcher who has been in the capital since graduate school. “I used to live right off of North Capitol Street, so I could see the Capitol. There were Proud Boys petting my dog that day. I don’t want to be a part of it.”

Though the Capitol building’s role on Election Day is minimal, she sees Nov. 5 as dicey as well. “I feel like election week might be crazy too,” she said. “I don’t know what’s planned but I don’t want to be near it. … I know that the response here is, like, let’s bring out the tanks, let’s bring out the people with guns. That doesn’t make me feel safe either.”

If you’re in Washington, you’ve probably been privy to the same sorts of conversation. Some of the getaway planning, I suspect, represents a perennial case of nerves: Partisans worried their side will lose want to find an excuse to be far away from the gloom when it finally happens. But more of it involves a post-2020 idea of what an election could bring to a capital where “partisan warfare” never used to be a literal term.

Now, with memories of the last election still fresh, Washington is awkwardly coming to grips with the idea that there’s a not-zero chance that the national election could spiral into the sort of violent chaos that locals used to think only happens in a politically unstable banana republic.

The odds against a cataclysm, public-safety pros tell me, are long. Yet they’re not long enough for some. In a city accustomed to large political gatherings, there’s not a lot of muscle memory about what to do about the kinds of chaos some are imagining.

At a Tuesday election-preparations breakfast briefing for D.C.’s mayor and city council, legislators raised a variety of worries that might have seemed fantastical in the innocent days before 2020. “We’re already getting requests from businesses, should they board up?,” said Brooke Pinto, whose district includes downtown and Georgetown. Regular residents, she added, were asking whether they should move garbage cans indoors lest they be lit on fire by a mob. Her colleague Charles Allen, whose district includes the Capitol, told the group that he’d been fielding requests about nearby school closures on Jan. 6.

At the museums near the National Mall — mostly free to the general public — there’s been worry about what will happen if rioters get turned away from the Capitol complex and go looking for soft, elite-seeming targets. There’s little precedent for that, yet the conversations around unlikely scenarios reflect the broader mood of worry about the next 10 weeks.

Earlier this month, D.C.’s Golden Triangle Business Improvement District — which represents employers on the office-dense western side of downtown Washington — gathered members along with officials from Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the U.S. Park Police and the local Metropolitan Police Department to walk through a tabletop exercise about what might happen if the core of the capital was convulsed by election violence.

On the one hand, the exercise was exactly what a business district ought to be doing: They’ve also had tabletop exercises on natural disasters, active shooters and terrorism. The idea is to help employers understand who reports to whom, what happens in an emergency and how to keep their staffs safe.

But the subject matter, unimaginable before 2020, was telling.

So was the specific role-playing scenario: Concerned that an exercise about inter-party chaos would appear partisan, the group asked participants to game out what would happen in the event the “Beagle Party” and the “Dalmatian Party” were at each other’s throats following a disputed election.

In the scenario, security staff and HR honchos had to make decisions while wading through deep fakes, reports of mayhem in other cities and images of unknown people popping up on building security cameras. When to send staff home? How to secure the door? Who to call for help?

“It was a range of decisions on the kinds of things they would do,” said Leona Agouridis, the business group’s executive director. “Where the learning occurred was them thinking it through. And then, rather than having me or our head of security teach them, we had the police explain what happens in situations, how they deal with them.”

If the exercise left participants feeling a bit less confused, the very fact that it was necessary remains a subject of embarrassment in a country that thought itself as being better than the fragile democracies whose elections descend into violence.

“I said to the guys, ‘I want you to call Lowe’s and Home Depot and ask what it takes to buy six or seven pallets of plywood” to cover storefront windows, the leader of another D.C. local business organization told me. Ideally, the organization leader quickly added, the stuff would be returnable. “I want to be prepared, but I hope we don’t need it. It sends a terrible message the minute you board up a window.”

Days before the 2020 election, which fell just a few months after the summertime racial justice protests, every CVS pharmacy in Washington was boarded up as a precaution, lending the Covid-stricken city a grim, besieged vibe. It was, as people back then liked to say, not normal.

The pharmacy chain told me that it hadn’t decided precisely what measures to take this time, but the boarded-up look is something the local government is eager to not replicate.

“People have certain risk tolerances, and I don’t think they should be boarding up their businesses, but we’re not going to give them that advice,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said this week. The city’s police chief, Pamela Smith, said her department hadn’t picked up any specific threats for election week or the months beyond.

Instead, local officialdom’s planning is focused more on communications: How to have credible public-safety messaging break through what could be a cacophony of misinformation and rumors. “We need to make sure we’re countering it quickly and pushing our residents towards vetted and valid information,” said Christopher Rodriguez, an assistant city administrator. “In many respects, our preparation for 2024 started on January 7, 2021.”

Among other things, Jan. 6 — the day Congress again meets to certify election results — has been designated a National Special Security Event, which gives law enforcement access to a bunch of extra federal resources.

Anxieties notwithstanding, the capital has actually not been a scene of significant political violence in the years since the insurrection. According to data from local police, there have been zero reports of bias-related crimes around political affiliation in the first nine months of 2024, and there were none last year, either. In 2017 and 2018, there were 10 reports each year. There were six in 2020.

That’s no surprise to Jared Holt, who studies hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and closely follows the plans and politics of online radicals. Holt told me that, on the far right, it has become an article of faith that anything in Washington is a deep-state ploy, a honey pot designed by perfidious feds to entrap MAGA believers.

“The types of online communities and the portions of the die-hard Trump base that would be the theoretical foot soldiers in an event like that view D.C. as hostile territory,” Holt said. “I think it was a little different when Trump was in office. There was a perception that he had final say in terms of policing there. That it might work.”

“We’re not seeing a lot of them openly talk about organizing around the election right now,” Holt told me. “But that’s also what it was like in 2020 until the results came down.”

As for the scenario of a Trump victory leading to marauding crowds of left-wing protesters, Holt said he wasn’t hugely concerned about that, either. Much of the organized groups’ passion, he said, is tied up in opposing the Israel-Hamas war — an event that has also leant a pox-on-both-your-houses vibe to their understanding of the Harris-Trump contest. “A lot of the radical left groups that I keep my eye on seem to be mutually disgusted with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump,” he said. “That energy has largely been spent elsewhere.”

Which is all to say that, if America is about to witness a spasm of post-election violence, it’s far less likely to happen in Washington than in some swing-state county seat or legislature.

Or maybe not. After two centuries of stable democracy, Americans just aren’t very good at gaming out the odds around questions of election-related personal safety.

If you ask me, people who study extremism sound like they’re on solid ground when they say Washington is unlikely to be the scene of a post-election riot. And people responsible for public safety sound like they’ve done their homework when it comes to incorporating 2020’s lessons in order to keep residents safe. But I have a hard time blaming folks who are gripped by worry about the long-odds alternative scenarios. Politics has changed, and a capital whose culture is built on process and credential isn’t really built to deal with it.

Source link