Your First-Hand Look On How Our Neighbors Across The Pond View American Politics

By: Hafeezat Bishi

Back in November, REFINE collaborated with Trent University’s Platform Magazine, located in Nottingham, England. We helped them with reporting on what was happening on the ground here during election day. Some of our staff joined the team to help report with Platform Magazine, and we interviewed voters in our respective towns, took photos of polling places, and live-tweeted on behalf of Platform Magazine the day of. Their editor-in-chief, Faith Pring, and news editor, Olimpia Zagnat, sat down with me via Zoom to reflect on the collaboration. 

Hafeezat Bishi (HB): “What was it like working to cover the U.S. 2020 elections?” 

Faith Pring (FP): “We wanted to report on it just because it was such an international event. American politics has influence right across the world. No matter what happens in American politics it is going to be felt in loads of different countries, especially with the U.K.  and the U.S. having such a close relationship. It’s definitely something really important for us to understand, and to get our readers to interact with it and understand how American politics will affect UK politics as well.” 

Photo Credit: Faith Pring

Olimpia Zagnat (OZ): “It's really important for young journalists to have this experience while they're training. There was a lot of work behind the scenes. I think I've been working on this, you know, a week before the election started because you know all the video editing, all the graphics, all this stuff that went on social media, you know someone had to do all of them.”

Now that we’re online, the process of producing content has taken a complete turn for all types of careers. Everyone is, for the most part, working virtually, meaning workflows have had to experience adjustments and overhauls.  

Zagnat explained to me that having this experience was helpful for the aspiring journalists on their team. They were able to learn how to ideate and create content in a completely virtual setting, which aids them in their budding journalistic careers as we continue to shift towards a more digital culture. 

OZ: “We got really good feedback from both teams, the American one and then our team. They were all so happy to get involved in it...we have some political enthusiasts, whether you know right-wing, left-wing, mixed opinions, and that's really good.” 

HB: What is something about the U.S. elections process that you found interesting that the U.K. doesn’t have?

FP: “The U.S. elections baffle me, I still don't understand it yet I think. But for me, it's the whole the results just take so long to get. In the U.K. general elections, we knew, six hours after the ballot closed who had won.”

FP (Cont.): “I think that was the biggest thing to get our heads around, was that it wasn't going to be ‘we're working on this overnight and we're going to know who won by the morning,’ you know. Like weeks later we know who won now but it took weeks to get to that point.”

Pring also shared confusion with the electoral college and how it operates. If you’re confused as well, the electoral college is a group of individuals chosen by the state in order to cast votes on the behalf of the constituents. Usually, the electoral votes swing the same way the popular votes (the individual votes of each citizen) do, but in 2016 we saw the opposite, with Hillary Clinton gaining the popular vote but Donald Trump receiving the number of electoral votes needed in order to be elected into office. 

Photo Credit: Olimpia Zagnat

OZ: “Your elections are really spectacular like everything is just very out there and it's like a show. Every time a state got the final results in, everything was just so out there and I think someone said something like, ‘the British elections are so boring compared to yours.’”

HB: “I will say an election like this has never been seen before. It typically doesn't take this long for our results and all of those things to happen. But, we have Trump as the President, and then also there was COVID and everything so there was a really large increase of mail-in ballots and having to verify all those things.” 

HB (Cont.): “We usually find out at midnight or a couple hours after the booths have closed as well, but this year was completely different. And with President Trump continuously denying the fact that he lost, they had to repeatedly confirm that Joe Biden won.”

Calls of fraudulent ballots, ballot stuffing, and a president unwilling to concede gracefully all impacted the procession of this year’s election. To the point that there were insurgencies across the country, the main one being at the Capitol Building in D.C., where Trump supporters who were in denial of the election results came to “take back their country.” 

HB: What is something about the U.S. elections process that the U.K. does have? 

FP: “When we vote in our general elections we’re voting for a local member. Like in voting for them, you're voting for the leader of the party as well. So I think in a way that's quite similar.”

OZ: “We vote for our local Members of Parliament and then the local MPs are either conservative labour or whatever party. And then that will come as a seat in our government, and then whoever gets the most seats wins at the end of the day, you know it's a game of politics at the end of the day, really.”

OZ (Cont.): “And I think in England, it is very polarized because you basically either vote for a party or the other. There are other parties as well, but basically, if you vote for another party your vote is just, you know, it doesn't count it doesn't change anything.”

The U.K. and U.S. both have two major parties that are both liberal and conservative in nature. For the U.S. it is the Democratic Party vs. the Republican Party. In the U.K. it’s the Tory Party vs. the Labour Party. These parties usually make up the majority of the government in both countries, with few independent or third-party leaders present causing a stark division between political ideology. Whereas in countries such as France, their government is multi-partisan, giving room to multiple ideologies in the government.

““Your elections are really spectacular— like everything is just very out there and it’s like a show.” - Olimpia Zagnat”

HB: Are there any similarities you can currently draw between the leadership of the U.S. and the U.K.?

FP: “I know people do make a lot of comparisons between the way that our countries are run like the leaders themselves. There’s political graffiti depicting both [Boris] Johnson and Trump kissing or whatever because they run things similarly. We do have quite a negative perception of the way [Trump] run things, but I just think that’s because of the negative connotations surrounding Trump, and because people are making these comparisons between Trump and Boris Johnson, you get kind of a negative perception of the way our government is run as well.”

FP (Cont.): “The problems are more complex than whoever runs the country. I choose to believe that we're all citizens of this world, and just because Black Lives matter, for example, started in America, or feminism started elsewhere, that doesn't mean that this movement doesn't apply, or racism doesn't exist in the U.K. I don't rely on leaders like Boris Johnson [to make] the greatest decision for this country, At the end of the day we need to save ourselves and make the changes that we want to see in the world.”

HB: Any final thoughts? 

OZ: “I think we're gonna start seeing a new and brighter America than before. I'm very positive about this, and I think I feel like it's what we need during COVID, during everything that happened this year. And I'm just hoping that Biden is going to do well for your country and for the entire world because we've been waiting for this.”

FP: “I thought it was a quite interesting thing to see the type of coverage that different news publications did. Seeing the angles that they took on things whether they were kind of pro-Trump or anti-Trump, or that kind of pro-Biden, or hovering in that middle area and whether that kind of links to our politicians. So, if they supported Johnson, but didn't support Trump-- that kind of thing I thought that was really interesting. 

FP (Cont.): “But yeah, just like some of the things Olimpia just said, I really hope from all of my being that Biden is the leader that we do need. And then he can kind of correct some of the mistakes that Trump may have made over the past couple of years, and try and unite America again.”