2020年经济学人 列克星顿专栏--美国大选的双重否定(1)（在线收听）

United States

美国版块

Lexington

列克星顿专栏

A double negative

双重否定

Hope turned out black voters for Barack Obama. Will fear bring them out against his successor?

是希望让黑人选民们支持奥巴马。那么害怕会驱使他们反对继任者特朗普吗？

It was interesting to recall, while Lexington was observing some canvassing of black North Carolinians last week, that only three months previously America had been convulsed by the biggest racial-justice protests since the 1960s. On the doorsteps of poor black neighbourhoods in Greenville and the countryside east of the city, nobody raised them.

笔者观察到上周北卡罗来纳州黑人举办了一些拉选票活动，有意思的是，忆起就在三个月之前，20世纪60年代以来最大规模的种族主义抗议活动震动美国。在格林维尔市和城市以东的乡村的黑人社区，却并没有人发起拉选票活动。

Nor did the couple of dozen voters your columnist met—at the side of masked and PPE-clad Democratic activists—mention another milestone, Joe Biden’s decision to put a black woman on the ticket. Asked for their view of Kamala Harris, most of the targeted voters, who were all black and mostly women, merely nodded politely. One praised her “professionalism”; another the fact that she seemed “strong enough to back up Joe”. Beyond such bland statements, few of the voters even mentioned Mr Biden. But all said they were especially determined to vote for the Democratic candidate this year, because of Donald Trump.

笔者曾经遇到过几十位选民，这些选民支持佩戴口罩和个人防护设备的民主党活动人士，但他们也并未提及另一件里程碑事件，即乔·拜登决定让一位黑人女性参选。笔者向一些选民询问他们对卡马拉·哈里斯的看法，这些选民都是黑人，且大多是女性，但大部分选民只是礼貌地点头。一位选民称赞她的“专业精神”；另一位选民称赞她“坚定支持乔”。除了这些平淡的言论，几乎没有选民提到拜登。但所有人都表示，因为唐纳德·特朗普，所以他们今年尤为坚定地投票支持民主党候选人。

“Gotta get 45 out, that’s the only thing that matters,” said Mary Ellis, at her house in Greenville Heights, one of a row of single-storey dwellings thumping with music. “Everything I hear from him isn’t right,” said her neighbour, Magdalene Knight. “It scares me to think we’ve got a generation of young people watching his immorality,” said Ruby Perkins, a retired teacher, with a large “Thank you Jesus” sign outside her door. “That man lied to the nation about a pandemic. You’ve got to be demented to think he’s the answer.”

“我得把45转的唱片找出来，这是唯一重要的事情，”玛丽·埃利斯在她位于格林维尔高地的家中说道，这里有一排单层住宅，她就住在其中一间，屋子中充斥着音乐。她的邻居莫德林·奈特表示：“我从特朗普那里听到的一切都是不对的，”一位退休教师鲁比·帕金斯说：“想到我们这一代年轻人都看着他的不道德行为，我感到很害怕，”她在门外挂着一个大大的“感谢耶稣”的牌子。“在疫情问题上，特朗普对美国撒谎了。他一定是疯了。”

This should be music to Democratic ears. A huge majority of African- Americas will vote for Mr Biden, and they will do so for the main reason Democratic strategists have been inviting them to. They want the election to be a referendum on an unpopular president, not a choice between two old white men, and most of them made that determination long ago. “You could put up a flowerpot against Trump and we’d vote for the flowerpot,” said Betsy Wallace in rural Williamston, 30 miles to the north-east. Yet notwithstanding black voters’ overriding support for Mr Biden, they have recently emerged as one of his campaign’s biggest worries.

这对民主党来说是好消息。绝大多数非裔美国人投票支持拜登，他们这样做的主要原因是民主党战略家一直邀请他们投票。他们希望这次大选是对一位不得民心的总统进行全民公投，而不是从两位年迈的白人之间进行选择，大多数非裔美国人早就下定决心了。“你可以让一个花瓶与特朗普在大选中对决，我们会投票支持花瓶的，”贝特西·华莱士在东北部30英里的威廉斯顿乡下说。然而尽管拜登获得黑人选民的压倒性支持，但这些黑人选民最近却成为拜登竞选活动中最令人担忧的问题之一。