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Americans are anxious about the election. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that, as of August, politics was the leading cause of stress for seven out of 10 adults across party lines. In a poll from a mental-health-care company the same month, 79 percent of respondents reported that the presidential election made them feel anxious this year, and more than half thought about the election every day. Now that the election is imminent, one can only assume that Americans’ anxiety is even higher.

Many U.S. media outlets have responded by offering their readers advice on how to calm down. 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. The stakes of this election go far beyond anyone’s preferred party winning or losing. “Voters on both sides of the aisle are being given a message that if the other side wins, this will be the end of American democracy as they know it,” Andrew Civettini, a political scientist at Knox College, told me. Why wouldn’t you feel anxious?

In Western philosophy and psychology, emotions have long been cast as the opposite of reason. In Stoicism, emotions are considered “non-reasoning movements,” wild inner beasts that a person has to keep in check in order to live well. During the Enlightenment, reason was widely considered a better guiding force than the senses or the emotions. This notion occasionally rears its head in cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches patients that feelings aren’t facts, so that they can act despite their anxiety or insecurity. This week, Arianna Huffington argued in Time magazine that Americans shouldn’t be stressed out by polls. “The way to best affect outcomes is to find the eye of the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength and wisdom,” she wrote.

But political emotions motivate action all the time. “When we experience anxiety about politics, it causes us to pay more attention, and that could have positive learning effects,” Civettini said. Steven Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, has found that political anger can push people to vote and donate to campaigns. People can, Webster told me, get too emotional about politics: Too much anger, anxiety, or fear might motivate people to support political violence, or isolate themselves from any person or news source that doesn’t confirm their beliefs. But overall, he said, “it’s not obvious to me that we should want to reduce political emotions.”

Although emotions, with their heat and urgency, can overtake and weaken people, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that they reflect inner judgments and evaluations—in other words, that they are reasonable and intelligent responses to real-world events. For example, to have fear, as Nussbaum wrote in her book Upheavals of Thought, “I must believe that bad events are impending; that they are not trivially, but seriously bad; and that I am not entirely in control of warding them off.” In this way, Nussbaum noted, emotions—not some mythic, unemotional source of rationality—reveal what we require to live well and flourish.

Throughout history, major political shifts have been met with equally big feelings, says Kerstin Maria Pahl, a historian of political emotion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a co-editor of the 2022 book Feeling Political. Apathy, a longstanding Christian concept, became part of Western political language at the end of the 18th century. “Not being affected by something made you a bad person, because you didn’t take any interest in the common good of mankind, or welfare of humanity,” Pahl told me.

Allowing so much emotional interest to go unchecked might sound counterintuitive in 21st-century America, where cultural forces and psychological experts teach that emotions must be regulated for optimal well-being. But election anxiety highlights what emotions are for: to reveal what we care about, and what our moral values are. Thomas Szanto, a political philosopher at the University of Flensburg, in Germany, told me that many Americans’ political emotions are fitting responses to the election cycle. “There is something at stake for people,” Szanto said. Earlier this year, Szanto and his colleague Ruth Rebecca Tietjen argued in a paper that a political emotion is appropriate if it is functional—for example, if it pushes people to vote or seek out information about candidates—and if it has a moral component that mirrors a person’s concerns about their world, and their sense of right and wrong. Anxiety is an appropriate response from a voter who believes that Donald Trump is a threat to reproductive rights, which would violate their moral belief in bodily autonomy. Similarly, a voter who believes that abortion is murder would have a fitting emotional reaction to the idea that a Kamala Harris presidency would lead to more access to abortions.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, people can conjure any emotion they want through the use of a machine called the “mood organ.” When Iran Deckard, the wife of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, programs for herself a six-hour “self-accusatory depression,” Rick asks why she would subject herself to that when she could feel anything else. She replies that it feels wrong to not respond emotionally to the ongoing calamities in their world. “That used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect,’” she tells Rick.

Americans in 2024 don’t need a mood organ to feel any variety of negative emotion in response to this election. They are feeling anxiety, sadness, and dread, all on their own. Surviving the remaining days until November 5 requires not simply turning off those emotions, but paying attention to what they are telling us.

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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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Today’s News

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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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic

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.

More From The Atlantic

The death of American exceptionalism “Okay, I will join the Marines.” Taiwan has a Trump problem.

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Hickey

Learn to share. Americans are hoarding their friends—and the practice may be making people feel more lonely, Faith Hill writes.

Explore. These farmers are subletting their fields to become much-needed wetlands for birds, Natalia Mesa writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

When someone attacks the messenger rather than the message, they’re usually revealing something.

Friday night in Austin, Texas, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, fiercely criticized The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, over a recent report about Trump’s troubling attitude toward the military, which he believes should be loyal to him personally. As Goldberg reports, Trump said, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” which is both chilling and historically illiterate.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals Hitler had’]

Trump called The Atlantic “a failing magazine run by a guy named Goldberg.” He added that “they were the ones that made up the story about me saying bad things about this, about the soldiers.” That’s a reference to another article that Goldberg published, in September 2020, reporting that then-President Trump had called Americans who died in wars “suckers” and “losers.” Trump’s attack is factually wrong on nearly every count, but it’s still a useful demonstration of Trump’s political methods and aims.

First, some housekeeping: Trump’s own former staffers have confirmed the “suckers” and “losers” reporting on the record. The Atlantic is thriving both journalistically—it has won the magazine industry’s top award three years running—and as a business, attaining profitability this year with more than 1 million subscribers. Nearly the only thing that Trump got right was Goldberg’s name. As in past instances, he emphasized the name in a way that reeked of anti-Semitism. Trump likes to deny allegations of anti-Semitism by pointing to his Jewish family members, but he has a long history of crude, stereotypical remarks about Jews, and in this election he has repeatedly attacked American Jews for not supporting him, saying they will be to blame if he loses.

[Read: Trump: Americans who died in war are ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’]

Trump is attacking the messenger here because he can’t really attack the message. He denies making the remarks, but a pile of other evidence backs up the report. Goldberg’s recent story was closely followed by a New York Times story in which John Kelly, a retired general who served as Trump’s chief of staff, described Trump’s obsession with personal loyalty and desire to use the military against domestic critics. Thirteen other former Trump-administration officials signed a letter backing these accounts up. “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country,” Kelly recently told Goldberg. “There are many, many people who have heard him say these things.” Besides, Trump has said himself that he wants to use the military domestically, and he’s disrespected fallen soldiers by trying to use Arlington National Cemetery as a cheap campaign prop.

He’s also employed this kind of attempted bullying before. Four years ago, Trump denied Goldberg’s story about “suckers” and “losers,” but other reporters quickly duplicated the reporting, including Jennifer Griffin of Fox News. Trump quickly (though unsuccessfully) demanded that Fox fire her. The former president has also sporadically railed at Goldberg and The Atlantic since 2020.

[Read: Why Trump’s Arlington debacle is so serious]

Although Trump’s attacks on the press are not new, they have escalated in recent weeks. Trump has said that CBS should lose its broadcast license over a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent. He has pressured Fox News to stop airing ads that are critical of him. He has threatened Google for showing negative stories about him. He has previously vowed to jail reporters.

The point here is not to plead for pity for the poor press. Courageous reporting is courageous because it puts journalists in conflict with powerful people. Anyone who expects adulation all the time should go into a different business. (This also goes for any media owner who might feel tempted to tone down criticism of Trump.)

[Read: The Trump believability gap]

But voters need to understand why Trump is attacking the press, and where it will lead if he is reelected. The future of American democracy is the key question of this election. Trump has left an ample record showing that he is committed neither to the rule of law nor to rule by the people—after all, he tried to steal the last presidential election after he lost it. But many Americans seem to have forgotten what Trump’s presidency was like, or they simply don’t believe that he’ll do the things that he keeps saying, loudly and publicly, that he’ll do.

Stories like Goldberg’s are an impediment to Trump’s return to power because they are vivid depictions of what Trump believes and how he acts. In a country with a free press, voters can hear these things. American voters should carefully listen to what Trump says and know what he has done—and they should have no illusions about the fact that if he wins, Trump will try to make the press less free.