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Samuel L. Jackson strutted out onstage at James R. Hallford Stadium outside Atlanta last night and attempted to lend Kamala Harris some of his lifelong cool: “We’ve heard her favorite curse word is a favorite of mine too!” (Sadly, he restrained himself from saying it—of course you know what it is.)

Harris’s team had curated a star-heavy bill, including Spike Lee, Tyler Perry, Bruce Springsteen, and Barack Obama. Thousands of potential voters had come out in support of Harris, but in the end, the evening felt more like an anti-Trump rally. And although Harris was the headliner, she seemed more like a role-player in an ensemble.

A New York Times/Siena College poll released this morning has Donald Trump and Harris dead-even for the popular vote, at 48 to 48. Up close, when you experience them in a live setting, the two campaigns couldn’t be more different. Trump rallies remain dark, campy spectacles: a little Lee Greenwood, some Village People, then a bunch of dystopian hyperbole and chaotic tangents from an aspiring authoritarian. It’s the same show in a different city, night after night, always with cultlike devotion from the MAGA faithful. Democrats, by contrast, keep trying to rekindle that singular Obama essence from 16 years ago, with intermittent success. Harris has found her rallying cry with “We’re not going back!” and she often talks about the future. But the core product being offered by her team might best be described as nostalgia for the pre-Trump era.

You could hear it in the soundtrack last night: Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September,” Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” plus some Outkast for the local Georgia crowd. It all amounted to a balmy, tranquil evening that unfolded as the sun went down—but it wasn’t fiery. In place of apparel with aggressive slogans, I passed a guy in a shirt that said #PledgeEquality, and another guy in a hat that said, simply, Vibes. I saw people making hearts with their hands and snapping in approval during certain speeches (as opposed to the cadre of Trump supporters hurling middle fingers during his rallies). Springsteen played three songs on acoustic guitar, including a Bob Dylan–esque version of his synth-pop hit “Dancing in the Dark.” All of this was inoffensive—like Jackson refusing to say “motherfucker.” On the one hand, you could say this pivot to “normalcy” is a calculated rejection of Trumpian bombast and bluster, and that’s why, in theory, it should work. On the other hand, it was a little boring.

I was shocked to see some attendees begin to filter out several minutes into Harris’s speech. She touched on the big themes of her campaign—protecting Americans’ rights and individual freedom—but she also perhaps spent a bit too much time discussing plans and policies. To be sure, this may have come in response to critics who have said her campaign is short on substance and specifics. Or maybe it was an act of caution. But the reality is that people pack into a football stadium because they want to roar, not necessarily to hear proposals.

Harris had the unenviable task of following Obama, one of the most gifted political orators alive. With his sleeves rolled up—no tie, no jacket—he was as comfortable and engaging as ever. But he also seemed pissed. As I observed in Pennsylvania recently, he has zeroed in on attacking Trump, whose potential reelection would be a rebuke of all that Obamaism stands for: optimism, and a steadfast belief in the American dream. (It was also striking to witness how much Obama has influenced the generation of Democratic leaders below him; in his remarks, Jon Ossoff, the 37-year-old Georgia senator, mimicked Obama’s inflection, his faraway stare, his knowing half-smile, and his call-and-response method.)

But the most effective speaker of the night, and possibly of the entire Harris campaign so far, was the entertainment mogul Tyler Perry. He connected with the crowd by telling his life story with raw, concrete anecdotes: hiding from his landlord, sleeping in his car or in an extended-stay hotel, dealing with repo men. He spoke of his personal journey of learning the truth about Trump the charlatan, Trump the racist. He carved a clear arc that ended with what a Harris presidency would mean to others like him. He also delivered the line of the year: “It was so important for me to stand with a candidate who understands that we, as America—we are a quilt. And I could never stand with a candidate who wants America to be a sheet.” Perry’s speech sounded like none other I’ve heard over the past two years of campaign-trail events, and that’s why it hit.

Tonight, Harris will host another large-scale rally, this time in Houston, where she’ll be joined by a native Houstonian and one of the biggest stars on the planet: Beyoncé. Tomorrow, Harris will head to Michigan and campaign with one of her party’s most popular figures, former First Lady Michelle Obama. Harris may be leaving some of the most memorable and compelling closing arguments to her surrogates, and that may not matter to many voters. In the end, though, overly cautious campaigning doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence among those who are undecided. Harris’s messaging against Donald Trump has merit, but the ideas that penetrate deepest are those that strike at one’s personal core—such as the stories that Perry told last night. With 11 days left, it’s unclear whether Harris feels comfortable enough to go down that path.

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Hackers associated with the Chinese government targeted the phone data of Donald Trump, Senator J. D. Vance, and senior Biden-administration officials, according to CNN. For the first time since the 1980s, the Washington Post editorial board will not endorse a presidential candidate and will stop endorsing candidates in future elections, per a decision made by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. President Joe Biden formally apologized for the “sin” of government-run boarding schools that forcibly removed many Native American children from their homes.

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Election Anxiety Is Telling You Something

By Shayla Love

Type election anxiety into Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles instructing you to focus on aspects of life outside of politics, to spend less time watching the news, or to use relaxation techniques such as breathing exercises to subdue the negative feelings.

But there’s another way to think about election stress: A big event should prompt big feelings.

Read the full article.

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To understand modern politics, including the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns, distinguishing between two qualities—charisma and charm—is vital. They are different kinds of political magnetism. And thanks to the sociologist Julia Sonnevend, I’ll never conflate them again.

In her book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, she defines charisma as the German sociologist Max Weber did––a quality by which an individual “is set apart from ordinary men.” Possessing it does not make a leader morally better or worse. Think of Charles de Gaulle, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill—larger-than-life figures who communicated through exceptional rhetorical performances. Their charisma required distance from the audience.

Charm requires proximity. It is the “everyday magic spell politicians cast,” Sonnevend writes. To succeed in today’s media environment, “political leaders must appear as accessible, authentic, and relatable,” she argues, catering to a desire for familiarity—not a faraway figure embodying the nation but a person with whom we’d like to grab a beer.

That doesn’t mean charisma is a relic of the past. When Barack Obama gave formal orations in large stadiums where he stood in front of staged classical pillars, he was aiming for charismatic performances. But Obama was trying to charm us when he filled out NCAA brackets and shot hoops. Trump renting out Madison Square Garden this weekend appears to be an attempt at a charismatic event. But his preparation of fries at McDonald’s was intended to charm.   

[Read: The power of oddball charm]

“Charm is a defining feature of contemporary politics, not just in the United States but internationally,” Sonnevend told me recently at an event in New York City hosted by the intellectual community Interintellect. “If you analyze politics without considering it, you are missing a core component,” she insisted. “There’s a stronger focus on personality than before. We have to understand how it operates.”

To clarify how her ideas can help us understand the United States—and the distinct relationships that Trump, Harris, J. D. Vance, and Tim Walz have with charisma and charm—I visited Sonnevend at the New School, where she is an associate professor. What follows is a condensed, edited version of our conversation, where I learned that charm works partly because almost all of us want to be seduced.

Conor Friedersdorf: Trump always wears a suit and tie. He rose to fame as a billionaire CEO behind a boardroom table. He loves hosting huge rallies. Kamala Harris isn’t as good at big arena speeches. She has tried to avoid traditional interviews. But people in small groups and more informal settings seem to find her likable and relatable.

Is Election 2024 charisma versus charm?

Julia Sonnevend: Harris in many ways is a great example for the charm category if you think of the dancing videos, the cooking videos. There was a viral tweet where someone suggested that instead of formal interviews, she should go on the Food [Network] and cook—all the people urging her: “Maybe you actually shouldn’t do that traditional appearance.” “Maybe these intimate settings offer a better chance for success.” “Show the power of charm and the value of everyday interactions.” Still, in debates, wearing formal dress and a flag pin, she is attempting charisma.

Trump is a more complex case. He has a strong charismatic component. If I think of the assassination attempt––how he realized, This is the moment in which I’m going to generate that iconic photograph with the raised fist. He had the composure to create that kind of moment, which is a more charismatic situation. You don’t feel like you would do it. It is not ordinary.

Some of my students argue that Trump has no charming component. But when he is telling personal stories or saying “You guys are the same as me” in a Bronx barber shop or wearing the red baseball cap––you know, that’s not a regular kind of accessory with the super-formal business suits––then there are elements that are forms of charm. Most politicians try a mix of charisma and charm, even if they lean closer to one or the other.

Friedersdorf: Why do voters care about charm more than they once did?

Sonnevend: One reason is the changing media environment. It has become increasingly possible to give almost continuous access to politicians—or that’s the illusion. Think of our phones, these totemic objects we all carry—the intimacy of sitting in bed with the screen close to your face, watching a politician record a video or a livestream of themselves with their own phone. That’s different from sitting in the living room, watching a TV set where a leader is on a stage.

In everyday life, there are so many moments when we are not fully ourselves, when we feel awkward during a meeting or an interview or a date. Yet in our politics, we want a steady performance of authenticity from leaders, without it being too polished or fine-tuned a performance. We know that attempts at charm are highly constructed. But if it works, you don’t feel like it’s a performance. Everyday settings become normal sites of politics, like Jacinda Ardern, then–prime minister of New Zealand, at home in a gray hoodie, recording a video announcing, I just had a conversation with President-elect Joe Biden.
Friedersdorf: What about when attempts at charm fail?

Sonnevend: The chance of failure rises with every attempt. And the feeling the audience has when it fails is often cringe. The fine line between successful performances of charm and cringe is interesting. These attempts at proximity aim to make you feel, Okay, that’s actually him; he’s authentic; I’ve gotten to know him. But in some cases you feel that there’s an attempt to deceive or manipulate, or that the person shares too much. Charming people excel at making you feel you’ve gotten to know them while maintaining boundaries and avoiding cringe.

[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini ]

Friedersdorf: So an example of cringe would be that J. D. Vance trip to the doughnut shop, where his interactions with staff seemed awkward and stilted rather than natural?

Sonnevend: Yes. Vance is not charming. He is better in the charismatic setting of the formal debate. Tim Walz is the opposite. He is better at charm.

Friedersdorf: As a young woman, my grandmother would go to movie premieres in Hollywood to see 1950s movie stars on the red carpet. In her older years, she would scoff dismissively at shows like Access Hollywood and tell me, “I feel sorry for your generation. The stars don’t shine anymore.” She felt, to borrow Us Weekly’s tagline, that the stars were “just like us,” and that was a bad thing. In catering to our desire for exposure, do politicians lose something, and that fuels our contempt for them?

Sonnevend: There is a sort of magic that we are losing. If you introduce viewers to your private life, you lose the magic of distance that is core to charisma, this stardust you can never touch. There is a difference between being a godlike character and the illusion of a guy you can have a beer with. The sheer amount of access makes it less exciting. Think about the Royal Family and how difficult it becomes to have all these fans who start to know too much, then the inevitable controversy about what people think of those particular details.

Still, you get another form of magic with charm.

Friedersdorf: What’s an example of someone who lost a bit of the magic that comes from distance while gaining a bit of the personal magnetism that comes from familiarity?

Sonnevend: I saw Princess Diana as a kind of icon when I was growing up in Communist Hungary, with barely any commercial products available. She was, to me, the first example … of this distant character who was magical, a princess.

But what I remember discussing with my mother for hours and hours were Princess Diana’s marital troubles and how to solve them. I had access to this very mundane form of unhappiness that she displayed in maybe a performative way. We felt we knew her deep-rooted unhappiness and her marriage despite living in circumstances so different from hers.

Friedersdorf: Perhaps there is no stable sweet spot. As humans, do we always crave more intimacy when confronted with mystery, and more mystery when confronted with intimacy?

Sonnevend: We may see cyclical processes in politics where a country has a charming, charismatic leader for a while until they get fed up, want change, and choose a more bureaucratic process for a while.

Sometimes we are deceived by charming people––abusers, fraudsters, charming psychopaths, sociopaths. A long list of people have this quality, and authoritarian leaders can have it. So I’m not saying celebrate every aspect of it. There is a dark side to charm.

At the same time, I think we all want to be seduced. Charm is enormously important in everyday life, whether we accept it or not. It matters very much whether your kid has a charming teacher. It matters to the New School that we have a charming president. It matters in fundraising but also in the everyday mood and feel of the university, because charming people shape organizations. Charm is not in itself good or bad. And I really try to go against what I see as the hypocrisy of saying I don’t want to have anything to do with seduction.

[Read: Trump has turned over a new leaf]

Friedersdorf: So you would say that, even in politics, charm’s importance is less a choice than a fact to deal with?

Sonnevend: I think we are trained, particularly on the left, to be critical of performance. And I feel we should be more honest in acknowledging that performance is crucial to politics. It doesn’t mean it’s the only factor––that policy or other factors don’t matter. But it is a defining feature.

You have fragmented, disillusioned audiences that are bored by politics and often don’t even follow it, because we think it’s too much. If you have a charming character who can bring a bit of seduction and magic to our lives, that can reinvigorate and energize politics. And there is a risk and that dark side to charm. I don’t think we should adopt an easy answer, that charm is a magical process we all need or a disaster to fear. We should recognize its presence in social life and reflect on it as it arises, trying our best to understand it.

Barack Obama was barely three minutes into his speech inside a Madison, Wisconsin, arena on Tuesday when he delivered his call to action—“I am asking you to vote”—a plea so eagerly anticipated by the thousands in attendance that they erupted in cheers before he could finish the line.

Kamala Harris’s campaign had dispatched its most valuable surrogate to Wisconsin’s heavily Democratic capital on the swing state’s first day of early voting, with just two weeks to go until the election. Before this crowd in Dane County, though, Obama’s exhortation—maybe even his entire appearance—seemed superfluous.

As Michael Wagner, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin’s flagship Madison campus, put it: “A lot of people live here, and everybody votes.” He was exaggerating, but only slightly.

Within the battleground states that will determine the presidency, no city turns out its voters more reliably than Madison, and no county turns out more reliably than Dane. Four years ago, a whopping 89 percent of Dane’s registered voters cast ballots in the presidential election—well above the national average—and more than three-quarters of them went for Joe Biden. He received 42,000 more votes in the county than Hillary Clinton had in 2016—and twice his statewide margin of victory. Harris might need even more. In the scramble for every last vote in a deadlocked campaign, the vice president is betting that she can beat Biden’s margins among the white, college-educated suburbanites who have swung hardest toward the Democrats in recent years.

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

Along with Pennsylvania and Michigan, Wisconsin is one of three “Blue Wall” states that offer Harris’s simplest path to 270 electoral votes, and recent polls have it essentially tied. That is not unusual: Only twice this century has a presidential candidate of either party carried Wisconsin by more than a single percentage point.

To win Wisconsin, Harris likely has to turn out new voters from Madison and Dane to offset possibly steeper Democratic losses in the state’s rural areas, as well as a potential dropoff among Black and Latino voters in Milwaukee. Republicans are gunning for the area, too; Donald Trump held a rally near Madison earlier this month, and despite the Democrats’ dominance in Dane, the state’s second-most-populous county is also home to one of Wisconsin’s largest groups of GOP voters.

But Democrats still have a much higher ceiling in Dane. The county is the fastest-growing in the state, thanks to expanding local health and tech sectors. Dane’s population has grown by 50,000 since the 2020 census, the county’s Democratic Party chair, Alexia Sabor, told me. “The new growth is more likely to be younger, more likely to be college-educated, and more likely to be at least middle-class,” she said. “That all correlates with Democratic votership.”

Strong turnout in Madison and Dane helped progressives flip a pivotal state Supreme Court seat in a special election last year. In August, Madison set a 40-year voting record for a summer primary, and Dane County cast more ballots than Milwaukee County, which has nearly double Dane’s population. Enthusiasm has only increased in the months since. The state party asked the Dane Democrats to knock on 100,000 doors by November—a goal they achieved before the end of September. Sabor’s office received so many emailed requests for lawn signs that she had to set up an auto-reply message.

A couple of hours before the Obama rally, which also featured Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, I met Sabor at a coffee shop across the street from an early-voting site in Madison. Neither of us could find parking, because so many people had showed up even before the polls opened. Sabor said she wouldn’t be going to the rally. Her time was better spent elsewhere, she told me: “There are more doors to knock.”

Chris Sinicki has a tougher job than Sabor. She’s the Democratic chair in Milwaukee County, whose eponymous city has been losing population and where enthusiasm for Harris is a much larger concern than in Dane. In 2008, turnout among Black voters in Milwaukee helped propel Obama to the biggest presidential landslide in half a century in Wisconsin—he won the state by 14 points. Black turnout stayed high for his reelection in 2012 but has fallen off since.

Still, Sinicki was upbeat when we spoke—at least at first. The excitement among Democrats was “off the charts,” she told me. “I am feeling really positive.” But when I asked her why the Harris campaign had sent Obama and Walz to Madison rather than Milwaukee, her tone changed. “Madison doesn’t need the GOTV stuff. They vote in high numbers,” Sinicki said. “We need that type of muscle here in Milwaukee. We need big rallies.”

She wasn’t alone in questioning the decision. A few Democrats I met at the rally, although they were excited to see Obama, wondered why he was there. “It was an interesting political move,” Dakota Hall, the Milwaukee-based executive director of the Alliance for Youth Action, a progressive political group, told me when we met in the city the next day. “I don’t think we need Obama to go rally Madison as much as we needed him to rally Milwaukee voters.”

The Harris campaign says it hasn’t ruled out sending Obama to Milwaukee in the closing days of the race. It pointed to less notable surrogates who have campaigned for Harris in the city, including the actors Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, as well as Doc Rivers, the head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. On Friday, however, the campaign announced that Harris would return to Wisconsin next week—for a rally in Madison.

Wisconsin Democrats remain bitter about 2016. Hillary Clinton spent crucial time in the final weeks campaigning in states she would go on to lose by several points—including Arizona, Ohio, and Iowa—and did not step foot in Wisconsin, which she lost to Trump by 22,000 votes. But they have no such complaints about Harris. The vice president has campaigned heavily across Wisconsin; earlier this month she visited the small cities of La Crosse and Green Bay. The night before Obama’s Madison rally, she held a town hall with former Representative Liz Cheney in Waukesha, a GOP stronghold where Harris is hoping to win over Republicans who have turned away from Trump. Waukesha’s Republican mayor endorsed the vice president a few days later.

“In Wisconsin, you only win with an all-of-the-above strategy,” Ben Wikler, the state Democratic chair, told me in Madison. “We need every Democrat to turn out. We need nonvoters to vote for Harris-Walz, and we need to bring some Republicans.”

Top left: Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson encourages residents to vote. Top right: Wisconsin’s capitol building, in Madison. Bottom left: Signs at UW Madison direct students to an early-voting site. Bottom right: Barack Obama speaks in Madison on Tuesday. (Jim Vondruska for The Atlantic)

[Read: Is Ben Wikler the most important Democrat in America?]

Although Madison scored Obama, the Harris campaign is giving plenty of love to Milwaukee as well. The vice president held an 18,000-person rally in the city in August—at the same arena where Republicans had convened to nominate Trump a few weeks earlier—which until last week had been the largest of her campaign. She returned for a smaller event this month, and sent her husband, Doug Emhoff, to campaign in the city on Thursday.

“This is very different from 2016,” Gwen Moore, Milwaukee’s representative in Congress, told a small group of reporters near an early-voting site on Wednesday. “We’re very happy.”

Moore appeared alongside two other prominent Black Democrats—Milwaukee’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, and its county executive, David Crowley—who tailored their messages to citizens who might be disinclined to vote. “While you might not be into politics, politics is into you,” Johnson said. “There are so many people who are counting Milwaukee out.”

Hall, the progressive activist, credited the Harris campaign for paying attention to Milwaukee. But he worried that the vice president’s truncated candidacy and the lack of a full Democratic primary campaign had left less engaged residents—especially younger Black and Latino men—unsure what she would do as president. “People need to hear more concrete details,” he told me. “You have a candidate who, for the most part, is unknown to younger voters.”

In Milwaukee, Harris’s challenge is not only mobilizing Black people to turn out, but persuading them to vote for her. Polls across the country have shown Trump winning a higher share of Black voters than in the past, a trend that’s concentrated among young men. With an eye on that constituency, Trump is planning a large rally in Milwaukee later this week. “I don’t know that we realistically expect her to get more of the male vote” than Biden did, Moore told me. “There are Black people who are Republican, and we accept that, period.” She said that the many negative ads Republicans are running against Harris have likely turned off a portion of Black men. “What’s more likely is that they won’t come out to vote at all,” Moore said.

Behind Moore, dozens of voters—most of them Black—stood in a line that snaked outside the polling place for the second day in a row. The turnout delighted Democratic officials, and the bulk of the voters I interviewed said they were voting for Harris. But not all. Michael and Mark Ferguson, 44-year-old twin brothers, told me they had backed Biden four years ago but were firmly behind Trump this time.

Michael, a correctional officer, said his top issues were immigration and the economy. “I don’t believe Kamala Harris is a strong leader,” he told me. “She got every appointment handed to her. She didn’t earn it.” A president who’s afraid to go on Fox News, Ferguson said, couldn’t be trusted to deal with tough foreign leaders. I pointed out that Harris had recently sat for a Fox interview. “Yeah,” he replied, “and she stunk it up.”

To try to compensate for the defections of onetime Democrats like the Fergusons, the Harris campaign is looking to Dane County. In addition to the thousands of largely Democratic voters who have recently moved in, there are the nearly 40,000 undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who lean left and vote at much higher rates than the national average for college-age citizens, and at higher rates than their Big Ten (and swing-state) rivals in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

[Read: ‘Stop counting votes, or we’re going to murder your children’]

Thanks to Wisconsin’s same-day voter registration, out-of-state students can easily cast ballots soon after they move to Madison. In a few small wards near campus in 2020, voter turnout exceeded 100 percent because more people voted than had previously been listed as registered. Many other precincts reported turnout exceeding 90 percent that year. (Officials in Madison and Dane report turnout as a percentage of registered voters, a smaller pool than the voting-age population used by political scientists; by either yardstick, turnout in the area greatly surpasses the national and state averages.)

A large contingent of UW Madison students attended the Obama rally. I met a group of three 20-year-olds who grew up in blue states but planned to cast their first votes—for Harris—in Wisconsin. Not all of their friends were doing the same. “Trump has a hold over our age group and demographic more than I expected,” Owen Kolbrenner of California told me. Trump’s unseriousness appealed to some guys they knew. “Some of our friends think the whole thing is a joke,” Kolbrenner said. “It’s kind of impossible to rationalize with them.”

During his speech, Obama told the crowd, “I won’t be offended if you just walk out right now. Go vote!” Nobody took him up on the offer, but after he left the stage, some attendees headed straight for an early-voting site on campus, where the line stretched through multiple rooms. Across Wisconsin that day, officials said high turnout strained the state’s election system and caused slowdowns in printing ballot envelopes. In Madison, even more people voted the next day, and by midweek, the city had nearly matched the totals in Milwaukee, its much larger neighbor. At the university’s student union, Khadija Sene, a lifelong Madison resident, was standing in line with her family, waiting to cast her first-ever ballot for Harris. She told me, “Everybody that I know is voting.”

Well, it’s that time again: Millions of Americans are stress-eating while clicking “Refresh” on 538’s presidential forecast, hoping beyond hope that the little red or blue line will have made a tiny tick upward. Some may be clutching themselves in the fetal position, chanting under their breath: “There’s a good new poll out of Pennsylvania.”

The stakes of this election are sky-high, and its outcome is not knowable in advance—a combination that most of us find deeply discomfiting. People crave certainty, and there’s just one place to look for it: in the data. Earlier humans might have turned to oracles or soothsayers; we have Nate Silver. But the truth is that polling—and the models that rely primarily on polling to forecast the election result—cannot confidently predict what will happen on November 5.

The widespread perception that polls and models are raw snapshots of public opinion is simply false. In fact, the data are significantly massaged based on possibly reasonable, but unavoidably idiosyncratic, judgments made by pollsters and forecasting sages, who interpret and adjust the numbers before presenting them to the public. They do this because random sampling has become very difficult in the digital age, for reasons I’ll get into; the numbers would not be representative without these corrections, but every one of them also introduces a margin for human error.

Most citizens see only the end product: a preposterously precise statistic, such as the notion that Donald Trump has a 50.2 percent—not 50.3 percent, mind you—chance of winning the presidency. (Why stop there? Why not go to three decimal points?) Such numerical precision gives the false impression of certainty where there is none.

[Read: The world is falling apart. Blame the flukes.]

Early American political polls were unscientific but seemingly effective. In the early 20th century, The Literary Digest, a popular magazine in its day, sent sample ballots to millions of its readers. By this method, the magazine correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election from 1916 until 1936. In that year, for the contest between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Alf Landon, the Digest sent out roughly 10 million sample ballots and received an astonishing 2.4 million back (a response rate of 24 percent would be off the charts by modern standards). Based on those responses, the Digest predicted that FDR would receive a drubbing, winning just 41 percent of the vote. Instead, he won 61 percent, carrying all but two states. Readers lost faith in the Digest (it went out of business two years later).

The conventional wisdom was that the poll failed because in addition to its readers, the Digest selected people from directories of automobile and telephone ownership, which skewed the sample toward the wealthy—particularly during the Great Depression, when cars and phones were luxuries. That is likely part of the explanation, but more recent analysis has pointed to a different problem: who responded to the poll and who didn’t. For whatever reason, Landon supporters were far more likely than FDR supporters to send back their sample ballots, making the poll not just useless, but wildly misleading. This high-profile error cleared the way for more “scientific” methods, such as those pioneered by George Gallup, among others.

The basic logic of the new, more scientific method was straightforward: If you can generate a truly random sample from the broader population you are studying—in which every person has an equally likely chance of being included in the poll—then you can derive astonishingly accurate results from a reasonably small number of people. When those assumptions are correct and the poll is based on a truly random sample, pollsters need only about 1,000 people to produce a result with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

To produce reasonably unbiased samples, pollsters would randomly select people from the telephone book and call them. But this method became problematic when some people began making their phone numbers unlisted; these people shared certain demographic characteristics, so their absence skewed the samples. Then cellphones began to replace landlines, and pollsters started using “random-digit dialing,” which ensured that every active line had an equal chance of being called. For a while, that helped.

But the matter of whom pollsters contacted was not the only difficulty. Another was how those people responded, and why. A distortion known as social-desirability bias is the tendency of respondents to lie to pollsters about their likely voting behavior. In America, that problem was particularly acute around race: If a campaign pitted a minority candidate against a white candidate, some white respondents might lie and say that they’d vote for the minority candidate to avoid being perceived as racist. This phenomenon, contested by some scholars, is known as the Bradley Effect, named after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley—a Black politician who was widely tipped to become governor of California based on pre-election polling, but narrowly lost instead. To deal with the Bradley Effect, many pollsters switched from live callers to robocalls, hoping that voters would be more honest with a computer than another person.

But representative sampling has continued to become more difficult. In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Most Americans spend much of their time online, but there are no reliable methods to get a truly random sample from the internet. (Consider, for example, how subscribers of The Atlantic differ from the overall American population, and it’s obvious why a digital poll on this site would be worthless at making predictions about the overall electorate.)

These shifts in technology and social behavior have created an enormous problem known as nonresponse bias. Some pollsters release not just findings but total numbers of attempted contacts. Take, for example, this 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan’s Eighth Congressional District. The Times reports that it called 53,590 people in order to get 501 responses. That’s a response rate lower than 1 percent, meaning that the Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. As I often ask my undergraduate students: How often do you answer when you see an unknown number? Now, how often do you think a lonely elderly person in rural America answers their landline? If there’s any systematic difference in behavior, that creates a potential polling bias.

To cope, pollsters have adopted new methodologies. As the Pew Research Center notes, 61 percent of major national pollsters used different approaches in 2022 than they did in 2016. This means that when Americans talk about “the polls” being off in past years, we’re not comparing apples with apples. One new polling method is to send text messages with links to digital surveys. (Consider how often you’d click a link from an unknown number to understand just how problematic that method is.) Many pollsters rely on a mix of approaches. Some have started using online “opt-in” methods, in which respondents choose to take a survey and are typically paid a small amount for participating. This technique, too, has raised reasonable questions about accuracy: One of my colleagues at University College London, Thomas Gift, tested opt-in methods and found that nearly 82 percent of participants in his survey likely lied about themselves in order to qualify for the poll and get paid. Pew further found that online opt-in polls do a poor job of capturing the attitudes of young people and Hispanic Americans.

No matter the method, a pure, random sample is now an unattainable ideal—even the aspiration is a relic of the past. To compensate, some pollsters try to design samples representative of known demographics. One common approach, stratification, is to divide the electorate into subgroups by gender, race, age, etc., and ensure that the sample includes enough of each “type” of voter. Another involves weighting some categories of respondents differently from others, to match presumptions about the broader electorate. For example, if a polling sample had 56 percent women, but the pollster believed that the eventual electorate would be 52 percent women, they might weigh male respondents slightly more heavily in the adjusted results.

[Read: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

The problem, of course, is that nobody knows who will actually show up to vote on November 5. So these adjustments may be justified, but they are inherently subjective, introducing another possible source of human bias. If women come out to vote in historically high numbers in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, for example, the weighting could be badly off, causing a major polling error.

The bottom line is that modern pollsters are trying to correct for known forms of possible bias in their samples by making subjective adjustments to the data. If their judgments are correct, then their polls might be accurate. But there’s no way to know beforehand whether their assumptions about, say, turnout by demographic group are wise or not.

Forecasters then take that massaged polling data and feed it into a model that’s curated by a person—or team of people—who makes further subjective assessments. For example, the 538 model adjusts its forecasts based on polls plus what some in the field call “the fundamentals,” such as historical trends around convention polling bounces, or underlying economic data. Most forecasters also weight data based on how particular pollsters performed in earlier elections. Each adjustment is an educated guess based on past patterns. But nobody knows for sure whether past patterns are predictive of future results. Enough is extraordinary about this race to suspect that they may not be.

More bad news: Modern polling often misses the mark even when trying to convey uncertainty, because pollsters grossly underestimate their margins of error. Most polls report a plus or minus margin of, say, 3 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval. This means that if a poll reports that Trump has the support of 47 percent of the electorate, then the reported margin of error suggests that the “real” number likely lies between 44 percent (minus three) and 50 percent (plus three). If the confidence interval is correct, that spread of 44 to 50 should capture the actual result of the election about 95 percent of the time. But the reality is less reassuring.

In a 2022 research paper titled “Election Polls Are 95 Percent Confident but Only 60 Percent Accurate,” Aditya Kotak and Don Moore of UC Berkeley analyzed 6,000 polls from 2008 through 2020. They found that even with just one week to go before Election Day, only about six in 10 polls captured the end result within their stated margin of error. Four in 10 times, the polling data fell outside that window. The authors conclude that to justify a 95 percent confidence interval, pollsters should “at least double” their reported margins of error—a move that would be statistically wise but render polling virtually meaningless in close elections. After all, if a margin of error doubled to six percentage points, then a poll finding that Harris had 50 percent support would indicate that the “true” number was somewhere between 44 percent (a Trump landslide) and 56 percent (a Harris landslide).

Alas, the uncertainty doesn’t end there. Unlike many other forms of measurement, polls can change what they’re measuring. Sticking a thermometer outside doesn’t make the weather hotter or colder. But poll numbers can and do shift voting behavior. For example, studies have shown that perceived poll momentum can make people more likely to vote for the surging party or candidate in a “bandwagon” effect. Take the 2012 Republican primaries, when social conservatives sought an alternative to Mitt Romney and were split among candidates. A CNN poll conducted the night before the Iowa caucus showed Rick Santorum in third place. Santorum went on to win the caucus, likely because voters concluded from the poll that he was the most electable challenger.

The truth is that even after election results are announced, we may not really know which forecasters were “correct.” Just as The Literary Digest accurately predicted the winner of presidential races with a deeply flawed methodology, sometimes a bad approach is just lucky, creating the illusion of accuracy. And neither polling nor electoral dynamics are stable over time. Polling methodology has shifted radically since 2008; voting patterns and demographics are ever-changing too. Heck, Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008; recent polls suggest that Harris is losing there by as much as 17 points. National turnout was 55 percent in 2016 and 63 percent in 2020. Polls are trying to hit a moving target with instruments that are themselves constantly changing. For all of these reasons, a pollster who was perfectly accurate in 2008 could be wildly off in 2024.

In other words, presidential elections are rare, contingent, one-off events. Predicting their outcome does not yield enough comparable data points to support any pollster’s claim to exceptional foresight, rather than luck. Trying to evaluate whether a forecasting model is “good” just from judging its performance on the past four presidential elections is a bit like trying to figure out whether a coin is “fair” or “rigged” from just four coin flips. It’s impossible.

[Read: The man who’s sure that Harris will win]

The social scientists Justin Grimmer, Dean Knox, and Sean Westwood recently published research supporting this conclusion. They write: “We demonstrate that scientists and voters are decades to millennia away from assessing whether probabilistic forecasting provides reliable insights into election outcomes.” (Their research has sparked fierce debate among scholars about the wisdom of using probabilistic forecasting to measure rare and idiosyncratic events such as presidential elections.)

Probabilistic presidential forecasts are effectively unfalsifiable in close elections, meaning that they can’t be proved wrong. Nate Silver’s model in 2016 suggested that Hillary Clinton had a 71.4 percent chance of victory. That wasn’t necessarily “wrong” when she lost: After all, as Silver pointed out to the Harvard Gazette, events with a 28.6 percent probability routinely happen—more frequently than one in four times. So was his 2016 presidential model “wrong”? Or was it bang-on accurate, but an unusual, lower-probability event took place? There’s no way of knowing for sure.

The pollsters and forecasters who are studying the 2024 election are not fools. They are skilled analysts attempting some nearly impossible wizardry by making subjective adjustments to control for possible bias while forecasting an uncertain future. Their data suggest that the race is a nail-biter—and that may well be the truth. But nobody—not you, not me, not the betting markets, not Nate Silver—knows what’s going to happen on November 5.