Gambling on the Election in Atlantic City

_If you are suffering from election fatigue, may I recommend a quick trip to Atlantic City?

Last week I was in Philadelphia for the Journalism Education Association/National Scholastic Press Association’s Fall High School Journalism Convention. Several thousand student reporters from across the country were heading to town to hear from professional speakers, compete against each other in on-site contests, and generally engage with some of the core values of our democracy.

Looming was the giant hurdle of Election Night, where the country was being asked to decide between a Democratic nominee who had not appeared on a primary ballot and a Republican nominee who had yet to definitively concede losing the last election four years ago.

When I arrived on Sunday evening, ahead of the election, Philadelphia was a town on the march. Signs on every street corner encouraged citizens to “Defend Democracy: Vote Nov. 5,” with photos of three Black leaders: Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, and this year’s Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Pennsylvania was the undisputed prize in this cycle’s crop of crucial swing states. Harris’s final campaign rally was scheduled for the following evening on the “Rocky Steps” in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum. Across the state, Republican nominee and former president Donald J. Trump made his election eve pitch to voters in Pittsburgh.

A friend and I—himself a high school journalism adviser from Kentucky; we’ll call him Larry—had decided to fly in early to take in the scene. We registered for the Harris event just to see the spectacle, and it ended up attracting a standing-room-only crowd in the tens of thousands. Lady Gaga was there. Oprah was there. 

But we weren’t there. By the time Monday rolled around, we’d decided on a different adventure entirely. We were an hour away, holed up at the Ocean Casino Resort, by far the most modern looking property along the aging Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Atlantic City gets a deservedly bad rap as a low-rent paradise. It’s a city where violence and corruption (and the tremendous wealth that went with it) dominated during the golden days of Prohibition. 

It’s also the city where Donald Trump made his first major splash outside of New York City as a real estate developer, opening two large casino properties along—and one nearby—the famous Boardwalk in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

And it’s the same city where, in 1964, Fannie Lou Hamer and a company of other insurgent patriots from my home state of Mississippi protested the state’s all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention. They lost the challenge, but changed the Democratic coalition in the process. Once the party of hardline Southern segregationists, the post-Atlantic City Democratic Party would welcome and depend on minority voters as key members of its voting bloc and seat Hamer herself at the 1968 convention.

Fifteen election cycles later, we were in Atlantic City on the night Donald Trump eviscerated that coalition, bringing large swaths of Black and Hispanic voters over to his bright red MAGA tent en route to a reelection blowout.