Last weekend, I travelled to the Adirondack Mountains of Hamilton County, in upstate New York, for a Columbus Day vacation. Since the second presidential debate was scheduled for Sunday night, I’d planned to watch it in a local bar, hoping to gauge audience reaction.

Everybody I knew from New York was on tenterhooks about the debate — taking place just days after the release of the shocking video in which Donald Trump spoke about groping women. I had unthinkingly assumed that, at this critical juncture in the election campaign, the debate would be airing on bar screens everywhere.

Wrong. As I visited the main drinking joints of the local town, I was repeatedly rebuffed. Finally, the burly, mustachioed owner of one of the bars explained why: the local bars had agreed that they would not tune their TVs to the debate since they did not want to “create trouble” — or stir up argument in a region where most people already backed the same party (Republican). In any case, there was more interest in an American football game scheduled that night, featuring the New York Giants, than Trump and the scandal about the video.