What's on the minds of some Americans in Montreal on election day

For the last eight weeks, David Shelton's entire world has revolved around the impending U.S. election.

A Democrat, he's been dedicating himself full time to helping fellow Americans vote from abroad through the organization aptly named VotefromAbroad.org.

Like many Americans, he's been following the latest projections with bated breath. Distributing pamphlets, door-knocking and getting information to those who need it has helped relieve his anxiety.

"It has been very stressful for those of us who look at the Trump v. United States decision of the Supreme Court and consider what we're facing in this choice that we have before us," he said.

"That decision just totally knocked me off of my feet."

Democrat, Republican or other, what seems to be on everyone's mind regardless of Tuesday's outcome is how to overcome the polarization that has divided the country.

CBC News has reached out to Quebec-based Republican voters who for the most part didn't want to speak on the record, with one of them saying they had "lost everything" since making their vote public.

For his part, Shelton is voting for Vice-President Kamala Harris a decision motivated by both pro-Harris and anti-Trump sentiments. He thinks that her modest background appeals to most Americans, including himself, and prefers her approach to governing and to the law.

The alternative, he says, would be catastrophic.

"I think a great deal is at stake if Trump were to win this election," he said. "Social security system is at stake, the Department of Education is at stake, women's rights are at risk further with the elimination perhaps of birth control and IVF."

Harris has said at some ofher rallies that these were Trump's positions on reproductive rights even though he says he won't go that far as per his platform.

Originally from Detroit, and based in Montreal since 1990, Shelton has been helping U.S. voters in southern Ontario, mainly Windsor, for the last couple of months. He's usually quite involved during election season but he says that this time around he's sensing a greater engagement from his compatriots in Canada.

"When I experience this election, I'm drawn to parallels to 2016," he said. "At that time people didn't take the Trump candidacy seriously and there were many people who voted for third parties and enjoyed the luxury of not feeling inspired by Hillary Clinton."

He says that election left a bitter taste in his mouth that motivates him to keep knocking on doors, getting people out to vote.

"I can't rest until sometime next week," he said.

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Divisions beyond 2024

Della Waldrop, 24, is a manager at a business services firm and has lived in Montreal since 2018. She says she's noticed a radicalization of the right which has intensified ever since the last election in 2020.

"I think that it makes more sense for us to take steps to converge and find maybe even a more moderate path, if that is what it takes," said Waldrop."But I think that this kind of radicalized right is really dangerous to American politics and its people and its future because I think their decisions are being made based off of things that aren't fact or science."

The vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz offered her some hope of a return to a more standard style of election campaigning.

"Seeing something like that kind of makes me think, 'OK, we're moving away from this like crazy kind of pointed personal attack thing.'Like we are actually talking about issues."

Stephen Friedrich, an American student at Concordia University, says politics is about mediating those divisions rather than eliminating them, because irreconcilable differences between groups will always remain.

"In a normal healthy democracy, that's fine," he said, arguing that it's still possible to make policy and respond to world events while disagreeing on politics.

"What you're never really going to do is make those divisions go away."