Linda Tirado nails it (Opinion, 31 October). My wife and I have just returned from travelling across America for six weeks. We looked for election signs all the way. The only Trump sign we saw was on the Trump Tower he once owned in Chicago. We saw one Clinton sign, a damp A4 print in a front yard in the lefty area of Portland the night of the second “debate”. We saw one Sanders sign, same night, same area. We did see two Feel the Bern bumper stickers on a car at an Oregon surf beach. This was the only bumper sticker we saw.
We began in Chicago, travelling across the midwest and west to San Francisco. We travelled through Illinois to St Louis, then through central Wyoming up into Montana, then to Portland, across Oregon and California to San Francisco, where I mailed my absentee ballot. Yet most significant was what we never saw: the word Republican nor the word Democratic, anywhere on any sign or poster. Everywhere we saw posters and signs for candidates for Senate, the House, for governors, state senators and representatives, mayors, councils, judges, and sheriffs. All avoided listing their party.
Nick Jeffrey
London
• Much attention has been focused on the timing of FBI chief James Comey’s letter to Congress saying his agency is investigating more emails potentially related to Hillary Clinton. He chose to issue the letter just 10 days before the hotly contested election. But it is the scheduling that reveals the letter to be political meddling, released as it was on a Friday afternoon. That timing guaranteed no new information would be revealed at least until Monday – giving speculation and hyperbole a two-day head start on the facts. And it teed up the issue for the influential Sunday morning political programmes. That timing is a PR’s dream.
M Colleen Burns
Norwich
• When Hillary was running against Barack for the Democratic nomination, the popular narrative was: first female president versus first African American president. Trump’s excessive personality triggered a different narrative: about two maniacs running for president. The fact that some of the original narrative has been lost – that we’re a week away from potentially seeing the first female president of the United States – is a shame. I don’t follow politics much, but seeing the US elect a female president is an important and exciting sign of progress that seems to have been lost in the frenzy.
Dave Keystone
Toronto, Ontario
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