Newall: On Election Day, fear and loathing in Philly

The Woodses vote as a family.

Darlene Woods, 48, a lifelong Democrat, works in the publishing industry. Her husband, Andrew, 53, a chemist, is the family's sole Republican. Darlene always sends in one of their teenage daughters to vote with Dad, joking that they'll keep him from pushing the GOP button.

For this upper-middle-class black family in East Germantown, the ritual is as much an act of civic tradition as it is a fun family outing.

This year wasn't fun. This year was scary. This year, Dad didn't need anyone to tell him to go Democrat.

The couple's 18-year-old daughter, Dejah, has special needs. On Tuesday, she cast her first ballot. One against a man who mocked people with disabilities, just like the kids at school sometimes belittle her.

"This will be a special vote," Darlene Woods said Tuesday morning, her hands on her daughter's shoulders at their polling spot inside the Ladder 8 fire station.

It was a special vote for many Tuesday. At last, in this poisonous, destructive election, something to do. A day to vote.

There was a sense of exhausted relief at the polls I visited across the city, from West Oak Lane beauty salons to East Mount Airy churches to Fairhill grade schools and South Philadelphia rec centers. After so much divisiveness and meanness, so much tearing apart, the end had come: Election Day.

And with it, fear. Fear, mostly, of Donald Trump. The fear that came with the reality that, for the first time in modern politics, it did not feel like exaggeration to say the fate of the republic hangs in the balance.

There was also shared recognition: that even if Hillary Clinton won, this day did not represent finality. How could it? Too much damage has already been done.

Trump appealed to the worst in us. So many embraced the hatred he stoked. That's not something we just stumble away from.

It was a common refrain:

"There is so much damage to be undone," said David Kramer, 45, a cartoonist and a Clinton supporter who arrived a half-hour before the doors opened at the polling spot at Philadelphia Hair Artistry in Germantown. "Now we have to address all of it."

"It was horrible; the smallness, the meanness, the pitting of one group against the other," said Sharmain Matlock-Turner, 66, after casting her vote at the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in East Mount Airy.

Still, she did not want all the ugliness and the fear to ruin what for her was a historic day: a day to vote a woman president. In the booth, she paused before pushing the flashing red button for Clinton.

"To savor it," she smiled.

There were signs that the racism that fueled Trump's campaign would be its downfall.

Latino turnout was surging at Potter-Thomas Elementary in Fairhill, poll workers said.

Jennifer Sánchez, who attends Community College, and her boyfriend, Juan Navarro, who works security, talked of how Trump dismissed neighborhoods like theirs as uninhabitable war zones. What did they have to lose? he asked. They answered him with their votes for Clinton.

"What little we have left, we cherish," Sánchez said.

On Two Street in South Philly, the guys hanging outside the polls at Herron Playground at Second and Reed said they didn't want to share whom they were supporting. It's a white, working neighborhood. The votes Trump needs to win.

Everyone's mum, said Vinnie Tabita, a poll worker.

He said he did hear something about a Clinton rally Monday. That true?

Yes, there was a rally. I was there.

It was on Independence Mall. In front of 33,000 people, on a stage overlooking the building where our imperfect - and now threatened - experiment of a nation was founded, and just a football toss from the house where our first president lived with his slaves, a black man passed the baton to the woman he hopes succeeds him: a woman who then talked of moving forward together.

America, we can move forward. God help us if we don't.

mnewall@phillynews.com

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