Ballyshannon man Keith Duggan on the beat for seismic US election

Keith Duggan sat in a corner of the St John Bosco Centre in June 1997 and knew he was witnessing a political shock.

Tom Gildea, a part-time farmer from Glenties, took a Fianna Fáil seat, edging Enda Bonner to a perch that was held by Pat ‘The Cope’ Gallagher.

Duggan covered the Donegal South West election count 27 years ago for the Donegal Democrat.

These days, the Ballyshannon man is back on an election beat in his role as Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times. Duggan’s prose have been telling the story of a seismic year Stateside ahead of a fascinating election next Tuesday.

“It was already shaping up to be a fascinating election with the likely rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump . . . events since then have just taken it into uncharted waters,” he says from New York, where Trump held a rally on Sunday night.

“We’ve had the assassination attempt, Biden dropping out, Kamala Harris completely reviving the Democratic campaign and they’re now locked in this bitter and exhausting ideological struggle and no-one has a clue what the outcome will be.”

On July 13, Duggan was in Cape May County, the most Irish county in the United States where 28.6% of its residents claim Irish heritage. The following day, he was due to catch a flight to Milwaukee where the Republican National Convention was taking place.

Trump, with he convention yet to take place, was the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party when he took to the stage at what should have been a low key campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Thomas Matthew Crooks fired eight rounds from a rifle, Trump took cover and a couple of days later appeared at the convention in the Fiserv Forum with his right ear bandaged. Crooks was shot dead for his failed assassination attempt on Trump.

“It sent the convention the following week into an entirely different dimension,” Duggan says. “It was a kind of a religious experience. There was a messianic quality to how Donald Trump was received in that arena.

“I learned about it the same way most people did: I got a text. I wasn’t in Butler. It was a low-key rally, which maybe explains why what happened happened.

“For that week of the convention, it seemed as if the US election was over. Joe Biden’s numbers were going steadily down in the polls and he had a couple of disastrous appearances on stage.”

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump

Trump survived a further attempt on his life when a suspect, Ryan Wesley Routh, was found hiding shrubbery at Trump International Golf Club in Florida, armed wth a rifle.

The race for the White House took a further twist on July 21 when the incumbent, Biden, confirmed his intention to withdraw his candidacy.

Biden was recovering from Covid-19 at the Rehoboth Beach house in Delaware when he dropped the news.

“That took a lot of Democratic insiders, even those in the inner sanctum, by surprise,” Duggan says. “No-one seemed to know bar the people who were with him in the beach house. It was a complete shock.

“It’s funny how quickly he disappeared out of the day-to-day conversation in the coverage of the election.”

For years, Duggan was an essential read for Irish sports fans through his writing. His Gaelic Games coverage, in particular, was a must. In the summer of 2022, he wrote his final Sideline Cut article and took on a new role as a features writer.

Last autumn, he was appointed as the Washington Correspondent, succeeding Martin Wall, and took up the posting in January.

“It’s a different world, very much so,” he says. “But, people are people and things still happen. I’m still trying to do that same thing: tell stories, given people a flavour of what is happening and a flair of hat it’s like to be where you are.

“People can follow everything online and on broadcast now so it’s really important to give people an idea of what it feels like and not just regurgitate what is said. It’s about telling them what it was like to be there, wherever there may be.”

This week, Kamala Harris speaks at the Ellipse in Washington, not far from the White House. Ellipse was the scene of a speech by Trump that sparked an attack by his supporters at the US Capitol amid riotous scenes.

His role is Washington-based, but Duggan been around states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania lately. These are among the key battleground states.

“There have been weeks in the last while where I haven’t been in Washington at all,” he says. “You can hop in a car and drive and you think you’re covering vast tracks of the country, but you then realise you’re only covering inches of a map.

“America is a vast country. That said, in some cases also it is made up of closely-knit neighbourhoods and towns. I’ve got to se some fascinating places. America has always appealed to me, from sport to suff like cinema and literature. The scale of this and the enormity of it and the fact that it has always been changing makes it so interesting to cover.”

Earlier in the year, he spent a couple of days in New York when Trump went on trial. A jury of 12 in Manhattan found him guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He is not due to be sentenced by Judge Juan Merchan until the end of November. 

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“We have managed to plan features and stories, and especially Irish-related stories, too,” Duggan says.

“There is a lot of planning going into it, but you’re still kind of sprinting to keep up with the pace of events and the sheer scale of it. It’s politics orientated, but it’s not completely confided to covering American political life; you try to give people reading an idea of what’s happening in the States.

“A lot of it actually doesn’t feel like work. It’s busy and demanding, but no-on is forcing me to do it.

“This is a very broad role, but it has a lot of parallels with what I was doing in the Democrat, just on a bigger scale.”