It’s a strange feeling not being able to vote in an election which affects your life

After spending the last two weeks reporting on the Democratic and Republican conventions from the comfort of my own living room (which also happens to be my bedroom and my kitchen – thank you, New York real estate!) I’m finally managing to get back to some semblance of a normal sleeping schedule. The rest of the election, however, has no hope of procuring a renewed state of normality (or, as they say in the States, “normalcy”, a bastardisation of the language so hideous that I have been known to scream it during night terrors. It is equalled in hideousness only by “healthful”, the American English equivalent of “healthy”. And you thought “elevator” was bad.)

It’s a funny thing, watching an election unfold which could affect every aspect of your life but in which you have absolutely no agency. There will be no ballot paper with my name on it on 3 November – I am but a lowly immigrant on a visa which can never become a green card, no matter how long I stay in the country – but my life, my livelihood and my relationship (with another non-American) is here. When I watch Donald Trump and Joe Biden wax lyrical about healthcare provision, gun laws, environmentalism, tax brackets and the economy, I’m watching them discuss things which have a direct impact on my own health, my safety and my monthly pay cheque. The feeling must be even stranger for those thousands of undocumented immigrants who quietly make up the backbone of the country, working long hours, paying taxes, educating their children, contributing to their neighbourhoods and hoping that one day, under another kind of government, they will be able to hold up these achievements as proof that they “deserve” to be naturalised.

I’m often approached in the street by political campaigners representing the Democrats (funnily enough, never the Republicans – maybe it’s the 18 inches of out-of-control ginger hair and the left-field fashion sense) and asked to sign petitions or to pledge to vote. When I explain that I’m ineligible, they often do a double-take. I’m not the person they think of when they think “immigrant”. I also have a weird hybrid Atlantic accent that flips between Americanisms and Britishisms on the regular and usually, according to my sister, “sounds Australian”. When I visited San Diego with a friend in January, a Californian cab driver simply refused to accept that I came from the UK and instead insisted that I just had a “New York accent”.

Slipping between the cracks of American experience makes things interesting. In some ways, it’s a relief to stand on the sidelines of such a divisive election and to shrug my shoulders helplessly: sorry, but whatever happens isn’t my fault! In other ways, it doesn’t feel entirely different to how it did when I lived in Britain, voted against Brexit and cast my ballot for Labour. The democratic process hasn’t swung my way for a while, so I guess all I can do is hunker down in this Brooklyn studio, cheer on an admittedly fragile-seeming Joe Biden and a more charismatic Kamala Harris, and hope that in November we’ll see the world begin to turn away from this right-wing rut it’s gotten itself into.

The conventions this year brought tears to my eyes more than once – and left me yelling at the TV a couple of times too (notably when evangelicals started calling abortion racist, and when Trump’s team played a song written by my favourite artist of all time, Leonard Cohen, which I can exclusively confirm made him turn in his grave). I went in prepared to be unimpressed and uninspired by the Democrats, who have committed to a much more middle-of-the-road platform than I would have liked in the name of practicality. I’m pleased to say that they showed me. They put on an excellent show, one that tugged on the heartstrings and provided hope in dark times. The Republicans, in contrast, leaned heavily on wide-eyed, bellowing zealots scaremongering about how “no one will be safe in Joe Biden’s America”. Their Nixon-esque “law and order” vision for the next four years didn’t much sound like a country I’d want to live in.

Then again, as my fiancé always reminds me, New York isn’t really America.