Atlantans extra involved with street closures than Trump vs Biden debate

As Joe Biden and Donald Trump prepare to take the main stage on Thursday night for the first presidential debate of the 2024 election season, Atlanta residents aren’t exactly waiting with bated breath to hear what the candidates have to say.

Instead, they’re “eye-rolling,” upset at the shut-down roads that are impacting the flow of traffic in one of the South’s business cities, a local barista said as she added that most people seem to be “unfazed” by the notion of the major political event happing on their doorstep – they’re burnt out and simply don’t care about either candidate.

“A lot of my customers are like, ‘Tell me about it tomorrow because I’m not going to watch it.’ They’re bothered by the traffic. That’s it,” Samantha, a barista at Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee in Midtown, told The Mirror.

“I think it shows how unfazed we have been conditioned to be around politics in America,” she explained. “People are becoming less and less interested, less and less trusting, less and less concerned when the government, a democracy, is supposed to be by the people. But if the people aren’t voting, is it a democracy? It doesn’t sound like it.”

“And maybe that’s part of the tactic is trying to get people to be discouraged to vote so that the only voting goes to people that they’re really targeting online through their ads and stuff,” she concluded about Biden and Trump, candidates she and many others are none too enthused about as the November election quickly approaches.

“Talking to my customers today, everyone’s disappointed. Nobody’s really that enthused,” she said. “A lot of the sentiment I’ve been picking up on from my customers is, ‘This is just going to be entertainment.’ And also, there are other customers who are like, ‘This is just making me sad.’ I have customers telling me that they feel like they’re in an alternate reality, and they’re just shocked that this is happening.”

She explained that many are simply planning to tune into the debate to see what horrific gaffes either candidate will make as they lob personal attacks against one another and discuss a few of the topics at the forefront of Americans’ minds, including immigration, abortion rights and, inevitably, both candidates’ advanced ages – Biden is 81, turning 82 in November, and Trump just recently turned 78. They are America’s oldest presidents.

“We have Biden and Trump. People are their supporters. But it actually feels like there’s just anti-Biden supporters and anti-Trump supporters,” she said. “I don’t actually feel like anybody’s actually wanting either party to get in.”

Watching the debate likely won’t sway her opinion or anyone else’s on the candidates, she said, adding that it’s “entertainment at this point,” not an actual, valuable discourse on American politics, which she said is “pretty sad” as she added that “our American government is becoming a puppet show.”

“I’m seeing that in my customers, everybody just doesn’t care. Nobody’s inspired. Nobody’s encouraged. Nobody’s empowered,” she said. “I am also not seeing people that are frustrated or mad. It just feels like we’re used to getting run over by our government at this point, which is pretty sad.”

A closed debate

Part of the problem, Samantha theorized, is that the debate on Thursday night won’t feature a live audience, which means the public won’t be able to participate in it. She believes that might be turning some Atlantans off of presidential politics this year, as it’s certainly doing so for her.

Samantha moved to Atlanta from Chicago about a year ago, and she said she was really excited when she found out the first of the presidential debates this season would be held in her new hometown. But she was quickly disappointed.

“I was kind of bummed because I’m living here and I could have gone to this debate because it’s so close, but obviously, there’s no people. There’s not going to be an audience,” she said as she added that others might feel the same way.

“It feels like a lot of movement and things happening, but nobody’s really participating or being part of it. I feel like I’m just hearing people complain about the road closures, really. They’re just frustrated about that,” she said. “It’s kind of disrupting the flow of Atlanta.”

Over the past several days, Samantha said she’s spoken to several media personnel who traveled far and wide to cover the debate, but she said even some of them are a bit disappointed at being unable to actually view the debate from inside the studio where it will take place at CNN’s Techwood campus, located across the street from Georiga Tech in Midtown, Atlanta. Only a select few photographers will get a few moments to photograph the candidates as they sit on the main stage with moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

But it’s not just spectators who have been barred from the debate – there will be no third-party candidates on the stage with Biden and Trump, which she said is “unfortunate.”

“I’m mainly disappointed in the fact that this debate seems to be choreographed to block other candidates out of the debate, which I think is really unfortunate because there are some people who are running and have the potential to win that don’t get that opportunity because of certain restrictions and rules. They don’t get the opportunity to participate in the debate,” she said. “I’m really disappointed but also not that surprised. I feel like I understand why both candidates see this as an opportunity for them to say what they want to say.”

She said the rules of the debate hinder valuable discourse about the state of American politics, which her coworker, James Patton Graham, told TheMirror.com is what he perceives to be the generic issue most Atlantans – and Americans – care about.

“They don’t really care about the candidates anymore,” he said. “They just really are about the state of things.”

The most important issue for him in American politics, he said, is getting rid of the toxic two-party system that forces repetitive matchups between candidates like Biden and Trump, who he said Americans don’t favor.

“In the days leading up to this [debate], a lot of people that I’ve noticed on both sides just really particularly don’t like either candidate right now,” he said. “These candidates that have been chosen – a lot of people are not in favor of them. They wish they had better choices.”

“I’d like to see a lot more candidates. I’d like to see a lot more people running, honestly,” he added. “They’re censoring other candidates running. And even though RFK Jr. is not really the most sane candidate I’ve ever seen, he still shouldn’t be silenced like that. I just want more people from more parties just being on the debate floor because a lot of different parties have different ideas.”

Samantha echoed that sentiment and said Thursday’s debate is “a great opportunity for the American people to look at these candidates and scrutinize them and realize that there are other people running.”

She wants people to “start having conversations with one another and learning about who else is running, who else is available for us to mark on the ballot or write in the ballot” as she said that she hopes Americans could “maybe even make history” this year if enough rally behind her belief that neither candidate is ideal.

As far as the debate rules go, however, she said she’s hopeful that other candidates will be allowed to participate in the ABC News debate, which is scheduled for Sept. 10.

“There’s potential for us to see and hear from other viable potential presidents of America who haven’t already been presidents. I’m looking forward to that, and I’m hoping that [after] tonight, I come into work tomorrow and everybody tells me, ‘Yep, never mind, I’m gonna go vote for somebody else. Neither of these.'”

The issues on Atlantans’ minds

Working at a local coffee shop, both Samantha and Graham hear lots of chatter about what Atlantans care about most when it comes to political issues. They also have their own ideas of what the country needs to work on.

For Samantha, the biggest issue is the regulation of technology, which she said is “not moving as fast as our tech is.” And that, she said, is perpetuating issues derived from capitalism that in turn perpetuate oppression, which then impacts the economy. It’s all connected, she said, adding that many others seem to feel that way, too.

“Modern technology can really help us, but if we don’t have our government to trust for even understanding it, understanding its potential, both consequence and possibility, how it can actually help people – if they don’t understand that and are not building policy around it, I feel like people are going to be using it like they’ve been, which is just for their own benefit,” she said.

“To me, that’s what we need to focus on, and we need to make it so that there’s less people that are suffering,” she continued. “And there’s a lot – a lot of suffering. People need help. People need healthcare and just care. People need a candidate who will actually listen to them, and I feel like it’s proof that neither of these candidates are listening to their people by the fact that they’re doing this – by the fact that they’re even running when there’s such a huge amount of sentiment, at least where I am here in Midtown, of just people not wanting either of them. There’s just a lot of disappointment.”

She boldly called both politicians “gross and vile” as she said they’re playing a “dirty” game of politics that’s pitting Americans against one another.

“Their campaigns are built on putting each other down instead of focusing on the real issues that we’re facing at this bottom level, where people have jobs and drive to work and have lives and need to afford groceries. I just don’t think that the candidates are concerned,” she explained. She just wants people to help each other, to live in communities that support one another and realize that other people with differing views and backgrounds aren’t their enemies.

“We need to stop pitting ourselves against each another, and the campaigns need to stop pitting us against each another because that’s really what’s happening,” she said.

For Graham, who went to Georgia State and who has been in and out of the state for a decade, the issues he says people seem to care about the most are the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, specifically “the genocide right now and the U.S. support of it,” as well as abortion, access to healthcare and student debt relief.

He said he feels that Biden is doing better than Trump right now when it comes to the latter of those issues, but he said “a lot of things become deadlocked” because of the American two-party system as he reiterated his stance that the debate should be open to third-party candidates.

Like Samantha, Graham said he feels that most people are “starting to feel a bit of disenfranchisement” because of the state of American politics as he griped, “I’m going to have to vote in November about this.”