Voters Dread Election: ‘It’s Going to Be Hell No Matter What’

“I don’t know where we’re going with this,” Professor Campbell said last week. “I’m more scared than I was.”

Trump supporters are less likely to consider fleeing the country if their candidate loses, which most do not expect to happen anyway. They are more likely to talk of digging in, well-armed, to fend off whatever forces a Biden victory would purportedly unleash.

But a number of people did share the uneasy sense that the country was headed toward some kind of violent break no matter who wins in November. Not in Erie necessarily, they clarified; people here get along mostly. Something more national in scope.

“A lot of people are just dying to have a civil war,” said Mr. Shollenberger, who likes Mr. Trump’s policies but nonetheless fears widespread postelection violence more than he worries about a Biden victory. The level of vitriol right now has grown to a point where some sort of clash seems inescapable, he said. “Honestly I couldn’t name a side that wants it more or less.”

Down in Union City, a little town that has been drained over the years by factory and plant closures, a Biden campaign storefront opened in August. It was the first presidential campaign office to appear in town in a long time, if ever. Within two weeks, a Trump office opened up two doors down the block and huge Trump signs appeared all over the vacant warehouse across the street.

Kelly Chelton, 58, a volunteer at the Biden office, is on friendly terms with most of the people at the Trump office; one of her sons-in-law is a volunteer there. But she said threats and insults have been lobbed at fellow campaign workers over the last few weeks — a lot more tension in town than there ever was around a presidential race.