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The way Donald Trump talks about January 6 has evolved over time. Directly after the insurrection, he condemned the rioters, although he added that they were “very special.” For the next few years, he played around with different themes, implying that the protests were peaceful or that the people jailed for their actions that day were “political prisoners.”

But these descriptions are mild compared with the outrageous ways he’s been talking about January 6 in these weeks leading up to the election. Recently, he described the day as “love and peace” and upped the metaphor from political prisoners to Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II. Why is he leaning so hard into the political revisionism? And what exactly should we be afraid of?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who has a unique view of that day. Raskin explains what January 6, 2025, might look like and what is historically unique about Trump’s claims. And I ask Raskin the question I’ve been pondering: When might it be appropriate to let January 6 go?

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Over the last many months, I’ve been thinking a lot about January 6 and about how memory can become a weapon in an election. Just the other day at an economic forum in Chicago, candidate Donald Trump described that day as “love and peace.” Love and peace! Can you imagine? You wanna hear some sounds of “love and peace” from that day?

[Noises from January 6]

Rioter: Start making a list. Put all those names down. And we start hunting them down one by one.

Person on bullhorn inside Congress: We had a disbursement of tear gas in the Rotunda. Please be advised there are masks under your seats. Please grab a mask.

Rosin: In the last couple of weeks of the campaign, Trump has been really digging into this bizarre sentiment. He compared the jailed rioters to Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II. He reposted a meme, saying January 6 would go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up a fraudulent election. He said, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns.”

Now, if you follow the work of Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, who was on this show just last week, you know what it means when a leader starts to rewrite history in such a shameless way. It’s a thing that wannabe dictators do and have always done.

But January 6 has also been on my mind because, for the past year, I’ve been spending a lot of time with people who are hard at work doing what Trump has been doing—distorting our memories of that day.

It started like this: Last fall, my partner and I were walking our dogs, and we passed a car in our neighborhood that had a bunch of militia stickers in the back window and a huge j4j6, which means “Justice for January 6ers.” And at first, we had a nasty altercation with the person in the car. And then we decided to get to know her and her friends.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. If you want to know how that attempt to get to know our neighbors worked out, you’ll have to listen to the podcast series we made about it. It’s called We Live Here Now.

This episode is about the bigger picture. We, in the U.S., have not had a lot of experience with this kind of real-time memory distortion. And there’s only one person I want to talk to about how that might play out in this upcoming election: Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, who was a member of Congress’s January 6 committee, and his memories of that day are more potent than most people’s. Raskin’s son, Tommy, had died by suicide about a week before, and in the months of sleepless nights that followed Raskin wrote a book called Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, which interweaves his son’s suffering with the nation’s suffering, which he believes drove thousands of people to the Capitol that day.

I started by asking Raskin what was foremost on my mind, which is what we should expect this coming January 6, 2025, which is when Congress will certify the next election. Here’s our conversation.

Jamie Raskin: I mean, I’ve been to Arizona, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, California, Colorado—and everybody is asking about January 6 and whether we will see a repeat.

But we will not see an exact repeat of January 6, 2021. For one thing, Donald Trump’s not president. Joe Biden’s president, which means, if you had a similar scenario unfolding, the National Guard would be there. Joe Biden would not be eating hamburgers and french fries and watching it on TV like an all-pro-wrestling match.

Rosin: And saying, So what?

Raskin: And saying, So what? And in general, we are physically fortified in a way we weren’t. We will have nonscalable fencing, and we’ll be ready for violence like that. But fundamentally, what was January 6, 2021? It was a certification crisis. It was an attempt to block the receipt of Electoral College votes in the so-called certificates of ascertainment sent in by the governors.

And we will see multiple certification challenges by Donald Trump, because they’ve already begun, in essence. They’re already suing. But it won’t happen at the end of the process, which is what January 6 is. They will happen at the beginning. They will be at the precinct level, at the county level, at the state level. They will try to dispute the authenticity and the veracity of the vote, and there will be challenges to, you know, any popular-vote majorities. And I’m assuming and hoping there will be many of them across the country for the Harris-Walz ticket.

Rosin: Okay. You started by saying people ask you, so clearly people are worried. And then you answered by saying it’s not going to be the same. So is your general answer to them, No need to worry? Like, Don’t worry. There won’t be violence? Is that how, like—do you feel secure? It will be okay?

Raskin: It will not be an instant replay of what happened on January 6, 2021. It will look very different. In some sense, the new crisis has already begun, with lies that are being told by Donald Trump about the hurricanes and about FEMA. This is equivalent to the lies he was telling about COVID-19 last time to try to condition his followers to accept his Big Lie about the election. And he’s already trying to undermine people’s faith and confidence in the electoral process in the electoral system.

So that part of it has already begun. When I’m out campaigning around the country, I say we have two urgent tasks: One is to win the election, and two is to defend the election. Because as we saw from the last time around, Donald Trump doesn’t remotely consider it over once the ballots have been tallied if he loses the election. And that, of course, is a hallmark characteristic of an authoritarian, and an authoritarian mindset. Authoritarian political parties don’t accept the results of democratic elections that don’t go their way.

Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, is not running what I would recognize as a real election campaign, which is about canvassing, door knocking, organizing people. I don’t see that happening. I see it happening on the Democratic side everywhere I go. I don’t see it on the Republican side almost anywhere I go. They’re running a campaign of raising a lot of money. A lot of it disappears into different mystery boxes, but basically, they’re running a campaign on TV and then getting ready to attack the election process.

Rosin: Yes. He says, Cheat like hell, in almost every state. If we lose these states, if we lose this state—Wisconsin, Michigan, whatever state—it’s because they cheat like hell.

So I’m trying to give listeners an accurate picture. There’s one picture: Oh, we’re just going to have violence the way we had before. There’s another picture, which is: It’s going to be fine. So I’m just trying to prepare readers, listeners for what is realistically the thing that you should be vigilant and watch out for and what might actually happen.

Raskin: Well, I think it’s going to be a fight to certify the actual election vote. And remember, this is something that, for most of our lifetimes, we’ve taken for granted: simply that people will vote and that the votes will be counted fairly—they will be tallied fairly—and then the majority will be translated through an electoral system that has integrity to it.

You know, the Trump methodology here is to attack the electoral system, to disrupt the electoral system, and then try to blame everything on his opponents. I mean, this is an absolute historical anomaly. And so we need to have clarity about what’s going on.

And we have to, as citizens in a completely nonpartisan way—we have to be defending the integrity of the electoral process against this kind of attack.

Rosin: He has said many times that he would pardon the J6ers. He could pardon the J6ers, right? There’s nothing, if he wins, that would prevent him from doing that.

Raskin: Certainly not under the Supreme Court’s decision. I mean, the pardon power would be a paradigm example of a core function of the presidency that the president could exercise without any fear of criminal prosecution. I mean, when Trump figures that out, he’ll probably end up selling pardons.

They came close to doing it last time, but there’s no reason he wouldn’t go on eBay and just start selling them under that rancid opinion issued by his justices.

Rosin: I didn’t realize you could do that. You probably just gave him an idea.

Raskin: Yeah. (Laughs.) But look—let me say something about that. They call the January 6 insurrectionists convicted of assaulting federal officers or destroying federal property or seditious conspiracy, which means conspiracy to overthrow the government, “political prisoners.” So they liken them to, you know, [Alexei] Navalny. They liken them to [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn or to Nelson Mandela. These were people who were fighting for freedom and democracy against authoritarian regimes. These people were fighting for an authoritarian coup against a constitutional democracy, and they’ve had every aspect of due process, and they’ve been convicted for their crimes against us.

A lot of the Trumpian revisionist assault on January 6 is internally contradictory. It’s just illogical. Half of the time, they’re saying that the people who attacked the police and who attacked the Capitol were not MAGA—they were antifa dressed as MAGA. Then the other half of the time, they’re down in the D.C. jail demanding the release of these alleged antifa fighters. Why are they demanding the release of the antifa fighters? It makes no sense. So there’s just incoherence replete throughout the propaganda assault on January 6. The point for them is to confuse people and to destroy the moral clarity of what happened, but it was perfectly clear what happened on that day.

There were people of both political parties and all political persuasions standing by the rule of law and acting under the Constitution, and then people trying to destroy the Constitution in order to overthrow an election and put Donald Trump back in power unlawfully.

Rosin: I mean, yeah. If you’re a student of autocracy, like The Atlantic is, the point is to say something, in some ways, as an autocratic leader that’s patently untrue and dare you to believe it as a loyalty test. I mean, that’s one, as Anne Applebaum—she’s been doing a series about that. It has really enlightened me on what the lies are about. They’re a test, you know? And so the more absurd they are—like, they’re about Haitians eating pets or whatever—like, the more ridiculous they are and the more you are willing to believe them, the more that seals the lock between the leader and the follower.

So that’s why I sometimes get a little despairing around, like, Well, we’re just going to keep telling the truth, because that’s not the game they’re playing, you know? So what does fact-checking and journalism and, like, recording things really help? Sometimes, you know, I feel that way about it.

Raskin: I mean, Trump’s lies are not about illumination or even contests over the facts. Trump’s lies are about coercion and obedience and submission of his followers.

Rosin: But that’s difficult. That’s difficult to counter. Like, how do you get in between it? The truth doesn’t really get in between it. The truth makes you an enemy.

Raskin: Well, when you look at the way that cult leaders operate, they tell lies all the time. Nobody really feels like it’s necessary to contradict their lies, because they’re so self-evidently ridiculous. And we can see the way that their lives are just meant to regulate and control their followers. And so it’s just a question of naming what’s actually happening.

Rosin: And continuing to do that, with some faith that the majority of people will eventually sort of drift over to the side of truth.

Raskin: Yeah, and also to make sure that a majority of the people are going to stand up for the facts, the truth, and for democratic institutions.

Rosin: Jack Smith’s case. Any thoughts about that?

Raskin: Well, Jack Smith is now paddling upstream because of the Supreme Court’s outrageous ruling that the president has immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits under the rubric of his office.

You would think those would be the worst kinds of crimes, but no. Those are presumptively immune from prosecution, and if they’re within his core functions of office, then they’re absolutely immune.

Donald Trump was never acting in his official capacity as president when he tried to overturn an election, simply because that’s not part of the president’s job. It’s not part of the president’s job to have anything to do with the presidential election. When he’s trying to set up counterfeit elector slates, he’s not involved with the Electoral College. That’s done at the state level, and the state legislatures do it. And then the results are sent in to the House and the Senate and the archivist. They’re not sent to the president.

When he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia, and said, Just find me 11,780 votes, or called other election officials to harangue them—that’s not part of the president’s job. He was calling as a candidate, not as a president. And as a candidate, he was acting as an outlaw candidate and really as a tyrant, somebody trying to topple the whole constitutional order.

You know, a tyrant, in the Greek sense of the word, is someone who rises up from outside of the constitutional order to try to attack the constitutional order. And that’s a pretty accurate description and definition of what Donald Trump has done.

[Music]

Rosin: There’s a last thing I want to talk to Raskin about, and it pushed against everything he had just told me: When is it time to start moving on from January 6? That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: In the year I spent reporting my podcast about January 6, I came across a very interesting idea for how to approach the memory of that day differently. It was in an essay by journalist Linda Kinstler called “Jan. 6, America’s Rupture and the Strange, Forgotten Power of Oblivion.” Kinstler’s argument—or at least one part of it—is that we are a culture saturated in memories.

We have videos and body cams and security cameras. Almost every inch of January 6 is recorded, which is a good thing for, say, a trial. But also, it makes it harder for us to forgive and forget. Back in the day, American political leaders called it “oblivion.” It was used in certain moments in American history, like after the Civil War, when obsessively remembering might just bring on more and more cycles of recrimination and vengeance.

So I ran this question by Raskin. He’s a constitutional lawyer and also a philosophical thinker. Might there ever be a time when oblivion might be the appropriate strategy for January 6?

[Break]

Rosin: All right—last thing: Whether he wins or loses, we have a culture to deal with, a culture of Americans, 30 percent of whom still think that the election wasn’t fair, was stolen in some way. So that’s with us. That’s the state of our nation right now, whoever wins and loses.

I’ve been reading about a—it’s a philosophical, legal, political theory of oblivion. Like, is there a time when cycles of recrimination or justice have to yield to something else? Is there ever a moment when you’re remembering too much? Does that make any sense to you?

Raskin: Mm-hmm. Well, it will be important for us always to remember these events and the facts of what took place. But I suppose, you know, human beings are made up of a mixture of thoughts and passions and emotions. And just like the passions and emotions have diminished somewhat from the Civil War, perhaps the passions and emotions around January 6 will begin to subside.

But at this point, with the republic still so much under attack, and with so many lies and so much propaganda and disinformation and revisionism out there, I believe that the passions and the emotion surrounding January 6 are still very much there, and they should be there until we can actually dispel this threat of authoritarianism in our country.

Rosin: So a potentially useful idea for healing, but just not yet. Is that where we land? Because I’m very taken—I find this theory interesting, that there’s a history post-Civil War of oblivion. You know, that it’s talked about by politicians: It’s time for oblivion. And right now, you know, we have video memories. Everything’s taped, recorded. So it’s very hard, actually, to do something like that.

Raskin: Well, thank God it’s all taped, and thank God there are videos, because you can see the way they’re lying about it, even in the face of the videos and the absolute factual documentation.

Look—I would say that historical memory is essential to establishing our values and principles for the future. One hopes that in the case of a society or a nation, that we’re not disabled by a memory the way that individuals can be disabled by a memory through post-traumatic stress syndrome or something like that. I’m hoping we’re able to integrate this into the true American story.

But as long as people are out there lying about January 6 and claiming it was really antifa or it was really the FBI or something, it’s going to be important for us to insist upon the facts and bring passion to the project of making people see the truth and remember.

[Break]

Rosin: That was my interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin. My thanks to him for taking the time to chat with me. Now, before we end, I want to share a bit from the other podcast I made recently, We Live Here Now.

I can’t say that we managed to convince our neighbors of our version of the truth. I hope you’ll listen to the entire series to hear what happened. It starts with the ridiculous way we met them, and it moves through a lot of characters in their alternate universe, including some J6ers who’d been just released from prison.

But here, I’m going to share with you something from the final episode of the series because it’s kind of in the spirit of oblivion. Even though we didn’t change their minds, something softened.

The two people you are about to hear are Lauren Ober—she’s my partner, who co-hosted the series—and Micki Witthoeft—she’s the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot and killed on that day. Micki is our neighbor. This is from Lauren’s final interview with Micki.

Lauren Ober: Is there anything that I don’t get? Is there anything that you need to clarify? Is there any critique or anything that you need to say before, you know, we’re done with our interviews?

Micki Witthoeft: I think the only thing I can say that I haven’t said to death, because this has been an ongoing—it’s been quite something. I don’t know—you might know more about me than—

But no. I think that people like you and people like me that admittedly come from completely different places in our upbringing, geography, experience, and way of looking at things—I think that if we can sit down and have a civil conversation and just see that you can meet in the middle, at least somewhere, you know, people don’t have to stand on opposite sides of the fence and throw stones. I didn’t mean to cry when I said that. Let’s do—(Claps.) take two!

Ober: I mean, why are you trying to pretend like you’re a hard-ass? (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: No, but it’s just—people don’t want to hear that shit all the time. Eww. (Mock cries.) Nobody likes that.

Ober: Well, I beg to differ. (Laughs.)

Witthoeft: It is what it is.

Ober: I beg to differ. I know I agree with you.

Rosin: You can listen to We Live Here Now anywhere you get your podcasts.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Michelle Ciarrocca. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

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Big margins in the biggest places represent Kamala Harris’s best chance of overcoming Donald Trump’s persistent strength in the decisive swing states. Across those battlegrounds, Harris’s campaign is banking on strong showings both in major urban centers with large minority populations and in the white-collar inner suburbs growing around the cities. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with the economy under President Joe Biden, those are the places where she can find the highest concentrations of voters likely to reject Trump anyway, because they view him as a threat to their rights, their values, and the rule of law.

Posting significant advantages in these large metropolitan areas represents Harris’s best—if not only—opportunity to squeeze past Trump in the most closely contested swing states, particularly the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that remain her most likely path to an Electoral College majority.

When Harris visited Michigan last weekend, her itinerary underscored this priority. On Friday night, she appeared before a sizable, enthusiastic audience in Oakland County, a well-educated and prosperous Detroit suburb that has shifted dramatically from red to blue over the past three decades. Then, on Saturday morning, Harris held an event with the singer Lizzo in downtown Detroit on the first day that city residents were eligible to vote early. Yesterday, Harris returned to Oakland County to campaign with former Republican Representative Liz Cheney as part of a day-long sweep by the two women through white-collar suburbs outside Philadelphia and Milwaukee as well.

“That pairing and that geography tells you we think we have a lot of room to run up the score” in those places, Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, told me. Over the weekend, the campaign released strategy memos that cited expanded margins in well-educated suburban communities as the key to Harris’s ability to hold Michigan and Pennsylvania next month. The campaign hasn’t released similar blueprints for the other battleground states, but its formula for victory in all of them looks the same.

[Read: Harris’s best answer to Trump’s resilient appeal]

Trump is betting heavily on his ability to combine his historical advantage with working-class white voters with improved performance among working-class Black and Latino voters, especially men—and polls show him making progress toward that goal. Harris’s hopes, particularly in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds, depend on preserving enough of her party’s traditional advantage among striving minority voters clustered in the biggest cities, while expanding the Democrats’ edge among the affluent families who step out of their gleaming SUVs at the Whole Foods and Panera stores a few miles away. If Harris is to prevent Trump’s reelection under a more explicitly authoritarian banner, that incongruous electoral alliance among voters whose lives rarely intersect in other ways may represent the last line of defense for American democracy.

Running up the score in the most populous places has underwritten the Democratic advance in virtually all of the states where the party has prospered since the 1990s. Almost by definition, the few remaining swing states in U.S. politics are those whose populations are closely balanced between the Democratic-leaning big cities and inner suburbs and the Republican-leaning small towns and rural communities.

This year, with college-educated voters, especially women, continuing to recoil from Trump, Harris appears on track for strong performances in the large well-educated suburbs around major cities. That’s particularly true in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the three states that made Trump president in 2016 when he dislodged them from what I called “the blue wall.” To win those states, much less the Sun Belt battlegrounds where she faces longer odds, Harris will need every vote she can squeeze out of these suburban communities.

Across all the battlegrounds, Trump is pressuring Harris with a powerful pincer movement. From one side, the former president appears poised once again to record towering margins among largely rural, working-class white voters, who are frustrated with higher prices and drawn to his vitriolic attacks on immigrants, elites, and liberals. From the other direction, polls show Trump with an opportunity to make those small but potentially pivotal gains among urban voters of color, particularly men. Harris is unlikely to repel that multifront assault unless she can further improve on Biden’s already significant 2020 margins in the suburbs around major cities from Philadelphia to Phoenix.

These dynamics were at play in Harris’s appearances around the Detroit area last weekend; Trump also appeared in the region last week. When Harris rallied supporters Friday night in Oakland County’s Waterford Township, the fervor of resistance to Trump among the college-educated, professional middle-class voters was fully apparent—even more so than I’d seen in Trump’s earlier campaigns.

The people who were heading into the rally repeatedly reached, unprompted, for the same dire analogy. “Take him at his word,” Powell Miller, an attorney from nearby Rochester, told me. Citing Trump’s recent threat to use the military against “the enemy from within,” he said: “I wish the people of Germany in 1933 took Mr. Hitler at his word.” That sentiment was echoed by June McCallumore, a retired history teacher who wore a T-shirt that read Vote Like Your Granddaughters’ Rights Depend on It. “It’s like ’30s Germany,” she told me. “I know people don’t like you to compare anybody to Nazi Germany, but I’ve studied history.”

Miller and McCallumore were astonished at the backing Trump has sustained after everything that has happened since his defeat in the 2020 election: the January 6 insurrection, the Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, his manifold legal troubles, and his lurch toward more overtly racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, and plain vulgar language.

“It is shocking to me how many people support him and drank the Kool-Aid,” Miller told me—though he saw one encouraging sign among some lifelong Republican acquaintances who have told him Trump has grown so unstable and vindictive that they’re planning to support Harris.

Inside Harris’s crowded rally in a large exposition hall, the mingled ardor and anxiety was just as intense. “She has to win,” Susan Carey, a retired media director for an ad agency, told me, her voice almost quaking. “My husband and I are doing everything we can to make that happen. I think our democracy depends on it. The other option to me is just unthinkable.” She said that she has recently volunteered to join Democratic voter-mobilization efforts in the county. “Personally, I’m terrified,” she said. “Everyone who is not voting for Trump is incredulous: You can’t understand how this stuff is even happening.”

The next day in Detroit, the picture was more complicated. I spent much of the day at a community event called the Just F**kin Care Fest, sponsored by Detroit Action, a grassroots group that organizes in low-income minority neighborhoods, focusing on the people who are most alienated from the political process. Guiding Detroit Action’s work is a recent study of Black public opinion that calls these disaffected residents the “Rightfully Cynical,” a mostly younger group that it contrasts with the older “Legacy Civil Rights” residents, who retain faith in the political process and more reliably turn out for elections.

As rappers and DJs performed at the festival, I saw plenty of evidence that Harris’s replacement of President Joe Biden as the nominee has rekindled excitement among the legacy generation of Black voters. “A lot of people who are working and middle class can relate to her, that she knows what it is like to struggle,” Panella Page, a retired Air Force veteran, told me. Black women, she said, “are the most disrespected” members of American society, so to see a woman of color “running for commander in chief is substantial.” But Page observed more division among younger generations of Black voters. “What they like about Trump is he’s an entrepreneur,” she said, “he’s a businessman” who, they think, can create more economic opportunity for them.

[Mark Leibovich: Mike Pence is haunting this election]

A few minutes after I spoke with Page, Piper Carter, a cultural trainer for Detroit Action, took the microphone and, moving through the crowd, issued a passionate warning. “Who is kind of frightened in this moment, politically?” she asked the audience. “Who is very concerned right now that we might lose democracy?” She looked around the crowd, which had offered only a few muted murmurs of assent. “I don’t hear enough concern,” she told them, before adding ominously, “We are the lamb that’s on the altar.”

After Carter returned the mic to the emcee, I caught up with her. The problem was not, she told me, that minority communities did not see Trump as a danger; it was that the failure of any election to improve their neighborhoods had dulled their expectation that voting would produce material change. “Every single time that Detroiters said they wanted something through their vote, it didn’t happen,” she told me. “So it’s difficult to care, because there’s a lot of trauma and pain. It’s not because people don’t care; it’s [that it is] harmful to care.”

Also at the Detroit Action event was Prentiss Haney, a senior adviser for the Democracy Power and Innovation Fund, which works with the organizing group and helped fund the recent study. He told me that focusing solely on Trump is a luxury that most of the people they encounter can’t afford: Economically marginalized Black voters are too consumed by the daily struggle to stay afloat to view Trump as the existential danger that the more financially secure voters I met at Harris’s rally in Oakland County do. “There is a part of the Black electorate that already feels so threatened that the threat [from Trump] is not front and center to them,” Haney told me.

A few blocks away, the city had closed off several streets for a large party sponsored by the Detroit Pistons to promote early voting on its opening day. As local rappers performed, a steady flow of mostly young people filed into the city clerk’s office to cast a ballot. About 800 people ultimately voted at the event, among about 2,000 Detroiters who cast a ballot at similar centers that day.

Because the city’s population has declined so much over the years, Detroit is not the electoral powerhouse it once was: In 2020, Biden won about 240,000 votes from the city, way down from the roughly 325,000 it generated for Barack Obama in 2008. But Daniel Baxter, the longtime COO for the Detroit Department of Elections, told me at the Pistons block party that the stream of early voters on Saturday reinforced the signal from the large number of absentee ballots already returned: He expects turnout among eligible Detroit voters to rise slightly from the 51 percent who showed up in 2020—and significantly from its level in 2016, which was the only recent presidential election when turnout in the city fell below half of eligible voters. That year, Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by 10,700 votes.

In the Rust Belt battlegrounds, the electoral math for Democrats includes holding their own in the region’s unusually large number of midsize, mainly blue-collar cities such as Erie and Scranton in Pennsylvania, Saginaw and Flint in Michigan, and Eau Claire and Green Bay in Wisconsin. Both campaigns have devoted significant time and advertising spending to these places. But history suggests that Harris’s fate will turn on whether she can maximize the party’s advantage in the largest communities that drive these states’ growth of both population and economic activity.

Biden improved over Clinton’s 2016 margins in the counties centered on Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee—but only by relatively modest amounts, as Trump’s improvement among nonwhite voters that he already demonstrated in 2020 could be more pronounced this year. The bigger shift toward the Democrats in 2020 came in the inner suburbs around those cities. Biden won Michigan’s Oakland County by roughly twice as large a margin (108,000 votes) as Clinton did in 2016, or as Obama did in 2012; Biden also made significant gains in well-educated Kent County, around Grand Rapids, and Washtenaw County, which encompasses the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Similarly, Biden won the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia by a breathtaking combined margin of about 293,000 votes, roughly 115,000 more than Clinton’s four years earlier. In Wisconsin, Biden won booming Dane County, centered on Madison, by about 35,000 more votes than Clinton got in 2016, and he cut her deficit in Waukesha, a historically Republican-leaning suburb outside Milwaukee, by about 10,000 votes. (Harris appeared with Cheney in Waukesha yesterday.)

[Frederick Kempe: The U.S. is electing a wartime president]

In all of these suburban counties, the share of college graduates exceeds the national average. Although they remain predominantly white, they have added more middle-class Black, Asian, and Latino families in recent years. In most of these places, the Democratic share of the vote improved in the 2022 governors’ elections even over Biden’s 2020 performance. These were the first statewide votes after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion: The abortion issue, Democratic pollsters uniformly believe, remains very salient not only among college-educated suburban women, but also among men in that demographic. On Friday night in Oakland County, the loudest applause for Harris’s speech came when she pledged to sign legislation restoring a nationwide right to abortion.

Given the discontent over the economy, and the ferocity of Trump’s advertising campaign that portrays Harris as an extreme cultural liberal (particularly on crime, immigration, and transgender rights), she will find it difficult to avoid even deeper voter deficits than Biden saw among the smaller, outlying communities of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. At the Harris rally in Oakland County, Paul Witulski, a union shop steward who lives in Macomb County—a heavily blue-collar area fabled as the birthplace of the white, working-class “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s—told me that pro-Trump fervor is so unconditional in his neighborhood that he fears his house would be vandalized if he planted a Harris sign in his yard.

Given, also, the indications of incremental Trump gains among voters of color, particularly men, Harris’s campaign would consider it a win just to preserve Biden’s margins in the urban cores of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee (not to mention in the Sun Belt cities of Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). In any scenario, Harris won’t win as large a share of the vote in the white-collar suburbs as she does among the more diverse voters in the central cities. But the potential for the vice president to improve on Biden’s vote share among college-educated women of all races, and possibly among the men in their lives, makes these affluent suburbs the one type of community where she might consistently accumulate a larger advantage than Democrats did in 2020. That represents her best chance to hold back the tide of support that has carried Trump closer to the presidency than seemed possible when he left Washington in disgrace nearly four years ago.