White voters are more likely to feel anxious and frustrated than Black and Hispanic voters, the US poll found.

For years, the dominant belief in both parties has been that Democrats need to run up a big lead in the national presidential popular vote to win an Electoral College majority. But in the dead-heat election of 2024, that may no longer be true. The distinctive dynamics of the 2024 campaign could allow Kamala Harris to eke out an Electoral College win even if Donald Trump runs better in the national popular vote this time than during his previous two campaigns.

The belief that Democrats need a big popular-vote win to prevail in the electoral vote hardened in the course of those two previous Trump campaigns. In 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump by a resounding 4.5 percentage points in the popular vote but still only squeezed past him by relatively small margins in the three Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that decided the race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by two points in the national popular vote but narrowly lost those same three states, and with them the presidency.

That history has weighed heavily on Democrats as a procession of recent polls has shown Trump shrinking or even erasing Harris’s national lead. But the pattern of differences among white, Black, and Latino voters found in most of those national surveys show how Harris could still potentially capture the 270 Electoral College votes needed for victory—even if she wins the nationwide popular vote by much less than Biden did in 2020, and possibly by only about the same margin that Clinton got in 2016.

The principal reason is that these recent polls show Trump making most of his gains in national support by performing better among Black and, especially, Latino voters than he did in either of those previous elections. Even the most favorable surveys for Trump consistently find Harris polling very close to Biden’s level of support in 2020 among white voters, which had improved over Clinton’s performance with that group by several points. In other words, Harris will likely rely a bit more on white voters than her party’s past two nominees did.

That subtle shift is the crucial distinction from the earlier contests. It could allow Harris to scrape a win by sweeping the predominantly white, former “Blue Wall” battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, even if Trump improves over his prior popular-vote results by gaining among Black and Latino voters (and Black and Latino men in particular).

[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]

In each of his previous two races, Trump benefited because the decisive states leaned more Republican than the nation overall. In both 2016 and 2020, Wisconsin was the tipping-point state that provided the 270th Electoral College vote for the winner—first for Trump, then for Biden. In 2016, Trump ran about three percentage points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally; in 2020, he ran nearly four points better in Wisconsin than he did nationally, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

The fact that Trump each time performed much better in the tipping-point state than he did in the national popular vote is central to the assumption that Democrats can’t win the Electoral College without a popular-vote majority. But as the Center for Politics research demonstrates, that hasn’t always been true.

The tipping-point states in the three presidential elections preceding 2016—Ohio in 2004 and Colorado in 2008 and 2012—each voted slightly more Democratic than the national popular vote. And in none of those elections was the disjunction between the tipping-point-state result and the national popular vote nearly as big as it was in 2016 or 2020. In fact, the gap between the national popular vote and the tipping-point state in Trump’s two races was considerably wider than in any election since 1948, the Center found.

Polling in the past few weeks, however, has indicated that this gap has shrunk to virtually nothing. Trump and Harris remain locked in a virtual tie both nationally and in the swing states. With polls that closely matched, none of the swing states appears entirely out of reach for either candidate.

Still, professionals on both sides with whom I’ve spoken in recent days see a clear hierarchy to the states. Both camps give Harris her best chance for overall victory by winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Trump is considered stronger across the Sun Belt in North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada (ranked from most to least promising for him).

That separation reflects the race’s unexpected racial dynamics. If Trump’s polling gains among voters of color bear out in practice, that would benefit him the most in the Sun Belt battlegrounds. There, minority voters are such a large share of the electorate that even a small shift in their preferences—toward Trump—would greatly diminish Democrats’ chances.

Whatever happens in the Sun Belt, though, if Harris sweeps the Rust Belt big three, she would reach exactly the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win (so long as she held all of the other states that Biden carried by about three percentage points or more, which is very likely). All three of those major industrial states are much less diverse than the nation as a whole: In 2020, white people cast about four-fifths of the vote in Michigan and Pennsylvania, and roughly nine-tenths of it in Wisconsin, according to census figures.

“One of the potential outcomes here is that at the end of the day, Trump will have gained with Blacks and Latinos and it may not have decided the Electoral College, if we don’t need [the Sun Belt states] to win,” Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster with long experience in Wisconsin, told me.

Obviously, Harris has no guarantee that she could survive a smaller national popular-vote margin than Biden: The polls showing national gains for Trump could be capturing a uniform uptick in his support that would deliver slim victories across most—and possibly all—of the seven decisive states. Even the most optimistic Democrats see marginal wins in the battlegrounds as probably Harris’s best-case scenario. But the prospect that she could hold the former Blue Wall states even while slipping nationally challenges the conventional wisdom that Democrats must amass a significant lead in the national popular vote to secure enough states to win the electoral vote.

“The Blue Wall states are the likeliest tipping point for either candidate,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball newsletter published by the Center on Politics, told me. “If the country moves two to three points to the right but those states only move a point or less, that’s where you start to get the tipping point looking pretty close to the popular vote.”

The Democratic strategist Mike Podhorzer, a former political director at the AFL-CIO, also believes that Harris could win the Electoral College with a smaller popular-vote advantage than most analysts have previously assumed. But he says the demographic characteristics of the swing states aren’t the primary cause of this possibility. Rather, the key factor is that those states are experiencing the campaign in an immersive way that other states are not thanks to huge advertising spends, organizing efforts, and candidate appearances.

That disparity, he says, increases the odds that the battleground states can move in a different direction from the many states less exposed to such campaigning. Both Podhorzer and Kondik note that the 2022 midterm elections supported the general thesis: Although broad dissatisfaction with Biden allowed Republicans to win the national popular vote in House elections, Democrats ran much better in statewide contests across the most heavily contested battlegrounds, especially in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

“It is really the difference between how well you are doing outside the battlegrounds and inside the battlegrounds,” Podhorzer told me. Inside the battlegrounds, he pointed out, voters have for years now been exposed at blast-force volume to each party’s arguments on all the major issues. “The cumulative effect of it is that they have an awareness of what is at stake, a different worldview, than people living outside those states,” he said.

The analogue to 2022 this year would be whether general disappointment in Biden’s economic record increases Trump’s popular-vote total in less-contested blue and red states alike, but Harris holds on to enough of the battlegrounds where voters are hearing the full dimensions of each side’s case against the other.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

The same national polls that show Trump gaining among voters of color this year do not show much, if any, improvement for him compared with his 2020 performance among white voters. The latest aggregation of high-quality national public polls published by Adam Carlson, a former Democratic pollster, found that Harris is almost entirely preserving Biden’s gains among white voters; that means Harris is also exceeding Clinton’s showing with them from 2016.

The comparison with Clinton is instructive. Among voters of color, Clinton ran better in 2016 than either Biden in 2020 or how Harris is polling now. But Clinton lagged about three to four points below both of them among white voters. If Harris wins the popular vote by only about the same margin as Clinton, but more of Harris’s lead relies on support from white voters, the vice president’s coalition would be better suited to win the Rust Belt battlegrounds. In that scenario, Harris would assemble what political scientists call a more electorally “efficient” coalition than Clinton’s.

Biden’s margins of victory in the former Blue Wall states were so slim that Harris can’t afford much erosion with voters of color even there. But two factors may mitigate that danger for her. One is that in the Rust Belt states, most voters of color are not Latino but Black, and Democrats feel more confident that they can minimize losses among the latter than among the former.

The other key factor is a subtle change in those states’ white populations. Calculations from the latest census data provided to me by William Frey, a demographer at the nonpartisan Brookings Metro think tank, found that since 2020, white voters without a college degree—the demographic group in which Trump performs best—have declined as a share of eligible voters by about three percentage points in both Michigan and Wisconsin, and by about 1.5 points in Pennsylvania. In Michigan and Wisconsin, college-educated white voters, who now tilt mostly toward Harris, largely made up the difference; in Pennsylvania, the share of minority voters grew. In a typical election, these slight shifts in the electorate’s composition probably would not matter, but they could in a contest as close as this one.

“There is still room to grow in the suburbs [across the region], and two things are going to contribute to that growth: January 6 and the Dobbs decision,” Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic consultant, told me, referring to the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 and the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned the constitutional right to abortion. The racist slurs against Puerto Rico at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally last weekend could also cost him with Pennsylvania’s substantial Puerto Rican population.

Sweeping Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin with a smaller national-popular-vote lead than Biden’s is nonetheless a high-wire assignment for Harris. A significant concern for Democratic strategists is whether the party has plausibly declined since 2020 only among voters of color, without suffering material losses among white voters as well.

One strategist with access to a wide array of party polls, who asked for anonymity to discuss that private research, told me that although many Democrats are optimistic that surveys overestimate Trump’s strength among Black voters, a risk also exists that polls underestimate Trump’s strength with white voters (something that has happened before). That risk will rise if Trump turns out unexpectedly large numbers of the blue-collar white voters who compose the largest share of infrequent voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.

However, the Republican pollster Whit Ayres told me that he is seeing the same divergence between slipping non-white support and steady white backing for Harris in his surveys—and he sees good reasons for that pattern potentially persisting through Election Day. “The Hispanic and African American weakness [for Harris] is a function of a memory of the Trump economy being better for people who live paycheck to paycheck than the Biden-Harris economy,” Ayres said. “On the other hand, there are far more white voters who will be voting based on abortion and the future of democracy. There’s a certain rationale behind those numbers, because they are making decisions based on different issues.”

Democrats generally believe that they maintain a fragile edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, partly because many public polls show Harris slightly ahead, but even more because their party has built a better turnout operation than the GOP in those states. Pennsylvania looks like the toughest of the three for Harris and, in the eyes of many strategists in both parties, the state most likely to decide this breathtakingly close race.

“Looking statewide, I’ve always thought from the time she got in that Harris would do better in the suburbs and the cities than Biden, and Trump would do better in a lot of these redder counties, and the million-dollar question is what number is bigger and how much bigger,” Mikus, the Pittsburgh-based consultant, told me.

Biden carried the Keystone state by only 1.2 percentage points while winning the national popular vote by nearly 4.5 points. Whether Trump wins a second term to execute his dark vision of “retribution” against “the enemy from within” may be determined by whether Harris can hold Pennsylvania while winning the national popular vote by much less, if at all. It would be a fitting conclusion to this bitter campaign if the state that decides the future shape of American democracy is the same one where the nation’s Constitution was written 237 years ago.

A decade ago, the inaugural season of Serial debuted. The podcast, about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee and questions surrounding the arrest and conviction of her former boyfriend, Adnan Syed, drew upon the alchemy of suspenseful storytelling and a taste for the lurid that has enticed Americans for centuries. Serial’s massive popularity, and its week-by-week format, overhauled how the genre was received: Audiences were no longer content with merely consuming the story. They wanted to be active participants, to post theories, drive by suspects’ houses, and call attention to errors.

As a result, the true-crime landscape was transformed. Its popularity has soared, making room for work that not only shocks but also asks deeper questions. There has been a welcome uptick in stories that focus on the victims of violence and the social structures that perpetuate it. But a perennial desire for the macabre doesn’t just dissipate under the umbrella of good intentions. The level of dreck in the genre—particularly cheap, poorly researched media that substitutes flippancy for compassion—continues to rise.

This glut makes it hard to identify the best true crime, which harnesses the instinct for titillation in the service of empathy, justice, and maybe even systemic change. These eight books are some of the most accomplished the genre has to offer. They broaden the definition of true crime itself—and most important, they interrogate their own telling of the story, reflecting an essential self-awareness about mining real people’s grief.

The Phantom Prince, by Elizabeth Kendall

So much has been written about Ted Bundy, who murdered dozens of women and girls in the 1970s, most of it wondering, from the outside, how Bundy got away with so much for so long. Kendall, however, had a more intimate perspective: She was his long-term girlfriend (though she uses a pseudonym here). She thought she knew Bundy well, but as the murders of women in the Pacific Northwest began to spread, and police sketches of a man named Ted circulated, she had to confront her level of denial—and then catalog the collateral damage of being a serial killer’s partner. This book is dedicated to figuring out what she actually knew and was kept from knowing, and Kendall does so in plain (if occasionally awkward) prose that doesn’t shy away from her own blind spots. True-crime memoirs were fairly rare in the early ’80s, when hers was released—and it remains an important one.

[Read: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]

Under the Bridge, by Rebecca Godfrey

The horrific 1997 murder of 14-year-old Reena Virk by several other teenagers prompted a reckoning in Victoria, British Columbia. Godfrey, the author of The Torn Skirt, a novel about the effects of a self-destructive girlhood, felt compelled to report on what happened, and why. The fine Hulu series of the same name, released in April and starring Riley Keough and Archie Panjabi, was more about Godfrey’s investigative quest than Virk’s murder. But the original work, which I’ve read multiple times, better depicts the toxic dynamic of teenage girls egging one another on from bullying to more violent acts, while also humanizing the victim and perpetrators.

The Red Parts, by Maggie Nelson

In 2005, Nelson published the poetry collection Jane: A Murder, which focuses on the then-unsolved murder of her aunt Jane Mixer 36 years before, and the pain of a case in limbo. This nonfiction companion, published two years later, deals with the fallout of the unexpected discovery and arrest of a suspect thanks to a new DNA match. Nelson’s exemplary prose style mixes pathos with absurdity (“Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’” she writes of Mixer’s killer, “I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd”), and conveys how this break upends everything she believed about Mixer, the case, and the legal system. Nelson probes still-open questions instead of arriving at anything remotely like “closure,” and the way she continues to ask them makes The Red Parts stand out.

[Read: The con man who became a true-crime writer]

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso, by Kali Nicole Gross

Four years ago, my friend and fellow crime writer Elon Green investigated the alarming lack of true crime written by Black authors; today, white authors still tell most of these stories, most of which are about white victims. This is in part, I’ve come to believe, because so many crime narratives—particularly historical ones—depend on a written record of some kind, which tends to exclude people of color. This book by Gross, a historian based at Emory University, was a revelation to me for uncovering the fascinating, messy story of Tabbs, a formerly enslaved woman, probable fraudster, and murderer in 1880s Philadelphia. Tabbs does not fit into any easy box, and Gross’s careful research places the desperate acts of this particular woman against the backdrop of post-Reconstruction America, a time when the gap between what was promised at the end of slavery and what was actually possible widened sharply.

We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper

Cooper, a onetime New Yorker staffer, had for years been haunted by a story she’d heard while attending Harvard in the late 2000s: A girl had been murdered, and she had been having an affair with her professor, which the school covered up. The story turned out to be more myth than truth, but Cooper felt compelled to investigate, and she discovered that there had, in fact, been a long-unsolved murder. Some of the details eerily parallel those of The Red Parts—both victims are college students named Jane, both murdered in 1969—but Cooper’s book veers away from Nelson’s. The book, which conjures the vivid, all-too-brief life of the anthropology student Jane Britton, is a furious examination of a culture of complicity at Harvard, where, Cooper points out, sexual-misconduct allegations were (and still are) dismissed or ignored. And like Nelson, Cooper demolishes the concept of closure.

[Read: When Truman Capote’s lies caught up with him]

The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg

Before Eisenberg put out her wonderful novel, Housemates, she worked primarily in the nonfiction space, publishing a 2017 feature story for Splinter about the missing Black trans teen Sage Smith, which was reprinted in my true-crime anthology Unspeakable Acts. She also published this book, a standout hybrid of reportage, memoir, and cultural criticism. Her subject was the 1980 murders of Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero in Pocahontas County, West Virginia (and the subsequent wrongful conviction of a suspect)—but also the author’s own queer coming of age in the same area of Appalachia. Eisenberg is a warm, compassionate guide through a thicket of violence, abrupt endings, and youthful longings, and her book is an intelligent corrective to common true-crime tropes. “Telling a story is often about obligation and sympathy, identification, and empathy,” she writes. “With whom is your lot cast? To whom are you bound?”

Seventy Times Seven, by Alex Mar

I had been waiting many years for a book about Paula Cooper, the Black teenage girl who was sentenced to death for the robbery and murder of Ruth Pelke, an elderly white woman, in the mid-’80s. Though she committed the crime with three other girls, only 15-year-old Cooper was given the death penalty. She became the youngest person on death row in the country at the time, leading to international outrage, a clemency campaign, and an unlikely friendship with the victim’s grandson, Bill. The points this story makes about the human capacity for empathy, who merits collective forgiveness, and the stubborn persistence of the death penalty are discomfiting. Mar (another Unspeakable Acts contributor) has made a long career of probing deeper questions, and in this book she eschews tidy narratives. Forgiveness does not, in fact, overcome the ramifications of violence, as will become clear in Bill’s home and work life—and in Paula’s, after she is eventually released from prison. Mar masterfully explores who is entitled to mercy, and how we continue to fail prisoners during and after their incarceration.

By the Fire We Carry, by Rebecca Nagle

Finally, this terrific new book, published just last month, looks at the larger picture of Indigenous autonomy and forced removal through the lens of one case—the murder of the Muscogee Nation member George Jacobs by another tribal member, Patrick Murphy—asking whether the state of Oklahoma actually had the jurisdiction to prosecute and execute Murphy. In 2020, the Supreme Court would eventually rule that much of eastern Oklahoma did remain an American Indian reservation; its decision set a far-reaching precedent that, in practice, would prove more complicated to enforce. Nagle, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a resident of Oklahoma, writes with sensitivity and empathy for the Native American communities she grew up in and around. Her work is similar in scope and feel to (and clearly in conversation with) Missing and Murdered and Stolen, the excellent podcasts by the Indigenous Canadian journalist Connie Walker.

Alexza, a Midwest native, struggled with credit-card debt for 10 years, working multiple jobs—as a nanny, bartender, and distillery tour guide—just to meet the minimum payments. Collection agencies called her constantly. She stopped answering, but that wasn’t enough to escape her financial anxiety. She entered an inpatient therapy program in large part because of the stress, which compounded her debts further. (Alexza requested to be referred to by only her first name in order to speak candidly about her finances.)

She had considered bankruptcy, but she was afraid of what it would say about her. “You kind of feel like a failure,” she told me. The cost of filing—in her case, about $1,800 to cover legal fees—was also prohibitive for someone without any savings. But in September 2021, while working at a coffee shop, she decided, “I can’t afford to continue to just barely tread water.” She borrowed the money from a friend and met with a lawyer. Less than two weeks after she filed, the calls from collection agencies stopped. By January, she had erased nearly $20,000 of medical and credit-card debt.

[Read: ‘Nobody knows what these bills are for’]

Debt has long plagued many Americans like Alexza. Today, people in the U.S. carry more debt than they did a few decades ago. Household debt tripled between 1950 and 2022; as of 2020, 14 percent of Americans had so much debt that it outweighed the value of their assets. In this context, you might expect more people to reach for the kind of financial fresh start that bankruptcy can offer. Yet last year, fewer than 0.2 percent of American adults filed. Of course, not everyone in debt would benefit from bankruptcy—but a lot of people might. At a time when so many Americans are struggling, why aren’t more people taking that path to a second chance?

Until the early 19th century, Americans in debt had few mechanisms by which to dig themselves out. But beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, the political scientists Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston write in The Political Development of American Debt Relief, white farmers in the southern and Plains states, who sometimes had to take out loans if their crops failed, began demanding that their political representatives do something to help. Thanks in part to those efforts, legislators began working to create a process by which people could take their creditors to court, with the goal of erasing what they owed; the debtors would be free to start over. (The process was mostly concerned with helping farmers in debt keep their property; it did little for Black sharecroppers, who didn’t own any land to begin with.)

The first federal voluntary bankruptcy law was passed in 1841. It was repealed two years later but reintroduced and expanded in 1867. As one senator who supported the 1867 expansion put it, all the law proposed was that anyone should be able to “escape from [their debts] and be again a man.” That idea was radical: It turned the U.S. into one of the most debtor-friendly countries on earth. Within three years of the American law’s reintroduction, nearly 43,000 debtors had cleared what they owed.

Today, U.S. bankruptcy law looks a lot different. American laws remain more forgiving than those in many other wealthy countries, such as Australia and Austria. But over the past several decades, financial-industry groups in the U.S. have pushed legislators to amend the bankruptcy system in a way that prioritizes creditors over debtors. And with each legal update, “it just gets harder and harder on consumers,” Robert H. Scott III, an economics professor at Monmouth University, told me.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bankruptcy was more common than it is now, and Americans were successfully canceling $4 billion per year in credit-card debt. But then credit-card lobbyists, worried about all of that lost revenue, began promoting the notion that certain debtors were abusing the system and driving up the cost of credit for everyone. (“What Do Bankruptcies Cost American Families?” one of their newspaper ads asked.) They argued that mass bankruptcies hurt the economy. So, however, does failing to help debtors: Debt is one of the greatest drivers of wealth inequality. Plus, many scholars contend that debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws foster entrepreneurship. But the creditor argument won out, and after much pushing, legislators passed the inelegantly named 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Since then, filing has become riskier, more onerous, and more expensive.

To file, debtors owe an up-front fee that can exceed $1,000—a bizarre catch-22 for someone who can’t afford to pay their bills. The bankruptcy process can also affect your credit score. Although research on exactly what filing does to a score over time is limited, a bankruptcy can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years, potentially limiting your access to rental housing and bank loans. Depending on where you live and what type of bankruptcy you file for, you might also be more likely to have to give up your home or your car to repay your debts. People filing in some states are more fortunate. In states like Rhode Island, which has a generous $12,000 motor-vehicle exemption, the risk of losing what might be your only way to commute to work is low. Alexza, for instance, was able to keep her old car. Texas and Florida homeowners are also lucky, as their houses are essentially protected from creditors. But people living in places with less generous protections may have to accept bigger losses.  

The choice of whether to file gets more complicated when you factor in the different kinds of bankruptcy. While bankruptcy has many permutations, the two most common types for individuals are Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7, which Alexza filed for, erases most eligible debts but also demands that you give up any possessions over a certain value, with a few exceptions. For the poorest Americans, it’s a natural choice; 95 percent of people who file for Chapter 7 keep everything they own, and 96 percent have their debts discharged.

Chapter 13, by contrast, is essentially a long-term repayment plan. It comes with one major benefit—you can keep your assets—but it’s overall much less forgiving. If you miss payments, your whole case could be dismissed, leaving you solely responsible for paying off all of your debts once again. As Zackin and Thurston write in their history of debt relief, Chapter 13 was created in the 1930s not to protect debtors, but as a way to funnel money back to American business owners who worried that bankruptcies were costing them. One contemporaneous study found that few debtors could keep up with payments; today, only about half of people who file for Chapter 13 ultimately become debt free, and some filers wind up in worse financial shape than when they started the process.

However, the legal system pushes a lot of poor people who don’t own much toward Chapter 13. Some of the pressure is structural, as traffic tickets and other court fees, which are disproportionately levied on the poor, can be forgiven only through Chapter 13. But bias in legal representation also plays a role: A study published by the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review found that when advising debtors with identical financial situations, lawyers were more likely to recommend Chapter 7 to white clients and Chapter 13 to Black ones.

In various other ways, bankruptcy does not serve Americans equally. The typical filer is more likely to be middle income, even though low-income Americans have the most debt relative to their earnings—suggesting that the system may not be reaching them. This may be in part because many of the broadest exemptions are targeted at those who already own significant assets. Many states allow homeowners who file Chapter 7 to keep their house if it’s below a certain value, but renters don’t necessarily get to save possessions that most likely cost a lot less than a home. Meanwhile, many debts faced by formerly incarcerated people, such as restitution debts and parole fees, cannot be removed during Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. And student loans didn’t become easier to discharge in bankruptcy court until 2022.

[Read: Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem]

The inequities don’t end there. Even as bankruptcy has failed to reach many of the Americans who need it most, it has morphed into an escape hatch for the wealthy. Chapter 11 was designed specifically for wealthy people and corporations. It lets them pay back creditors over the long term, sometimes in part at a lower interest rate, while their companies operate as usual, in the name of protecting their employees’ jobs. Rudy Giuliani, Francis Ford Coppola, and Donald Trump have filed for Chapter 11—in Trump’s case, six times. Though the process is expensive and complicated, according to the scholar Melissa Jacoby, it is actually much friendlier than the bankruptcies the rest of us use.  

Leaving aside the difficulty of filing, the perhaps more significant barrier to choosing bankruptcy, for many Americans, is the stigma. Some scholars have likened the process to a kind of public penance. During it, a court scrutinizes your finances and choices. And because many people consider debt to be an individual failing, those going through bankruptcy can feel humiliated—even though, in many cases, debt is more properly seen “as a collective misfortune,” Daniel Platt, a legal-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told me. In the 19th century, members of the debtors’ movement understood that their struggles were shared. Glimmers of that mindset emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, when many people drew a direct line between corporate exploitation and individuals’ money troubles. But even in the absence of widespread economic catastrophe, when someone declares bankruptcy “there has been a failure,” Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, explained. “A lot of that failure is not on the person but on the system that has no other safety net for you.”

Of course, bankruptcy cannot save individuals from that systemic failure. Expunging your debts cannot, for instance, solve the problem of stagnating wages or rising housing costs. But for people like Alexza, it can offer some breathing room. One moment she couldn’t see a way out of her debts. Then, before she knew it, they were gone.

Will tradition hold, or is change in the air?

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times, saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

Georgia's traditionally Democrat-supporting 2.6 million Black voters are a growing segment. Can Trump make inroads?

On Sunday afternoon, I stood for three hours in a block of Midtown Manhattan—33rd Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues—surrounded by thousands of Donald Trump supporters. Every half hour or so, the herd shuffled forward 15 or 20 feet before the police barriers up ahead closed again. Whenever we moved, a chant of “USA! USA!” broke out, only to die as soon as progress stopped. Madison Square Garden, where Trump and an all-star MAGA lineup were on the bill, stood in view the whole time, a few hundred feet away. Snipers perched on high-rise rooftops, and a pair of drones hovered overhead. A friend had bought two tickets, but word reached us from the front that tickets weren’t being checked—they were a ruse for the campaign to snag fundraising emails. As the sun drifted toward the Hudson River and the sparkling fall day cooled off, the clock was outrunning us.

I’ve been in Trump crowds before, but never in New York City. The familiarly scuzzy and desolate neighborhood around Penn Station was filled with a political throng wearing an unusual amount of red for a city that dresses dark. Because it was New York, there were a lot more Black and brown people, and a lot more Orthodox Jews, than you’d see at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. An occupying force of unmistakable locals had taken over the street. My disorientation deepened all afternoon.

No one had more than six inches of personal space. To exit through the crush sideways and climb over metal barriers for a bathroom break or cup of coffee would take a major effort of will. We were stuck. There was nothing to do but chat.

Next to me stood a solemn-looking man in his 20s who held a tiny American flag in one hand. He said that he worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a world-famous, progressively orthodox cultural institution where his politics made him a lonely dissident. One of about three? No, he said—there were secret comrades in warehousing. I asked if he thought the country could come together after the election, whatever the result. His answer—that Trump had the support of an overwhelming majority of Americans, more than enough to clean up the mess, and that Democrats alone were guilty of demonizing their opponents, because Republicans were just saying what was true—sounded like a no.

An hour later and 100 feet farther along, I was standing beside Richard and Jason, Trinidad-born men in MAGA caps, who live near me in Brooklyn. They supported Trump because of high prices—a dozen eggs for $6—and lack of international respect; also, The Apprentice. Richard was certain that Trump would win in a landslide—would even take deep-blue New York City. (There’s a lot of secret Trump support in Flatbush, he confided.) When I asked if he would accept a result that went against his candidate, Richard simply repeated: Trump in a landslide. I almost believed him, because the street had become an echo chamber—not the virtual kind, but a physical one—and I began to understand the power of crowds over the mind. As the afternoon wore on, it became harder to hold on to the thought that all these thousands of people were wrong.

Around 3 o’clock—after two hours of standing, and no progress for at least 45 minutes—my lower back throbbed. It was becoming clear that we would never cross 7th Avenue and reach the promised land of Madison Square Garden, and I began to imagine a stampede. If this had been an ordinary Manhattan traffic jam, the blare of car horns would have been deafening. But the crowd remained shockingly patient and pleasant, making instant friends in the American way. Promoters for a local betting market tossed out red T-shirts that gave Trump a 57 percent chance to win, and Richard, Jason, and my other neighbors took up a cry of “Bet on Trump! Bet on Trump!” On the sidewalk, a near-perfect Kim Jong Un impersonator was barking, “No to democracy! Yes to autocracy! That’s why I support Donald J. Trump!” and everyone was laughing. Being fellow Americans together, or New Yorkers, or even Yankee fans, wouldn’t have been enough to prevent things from getting ugly. Today, the week before Election Day, only a political tribe—the Fellowship of Trump on 33rd Street—creates such solidarity.

Close to 4 o’clock, we hadn’t moved in well over an hour. With this motionlessness in the heart of New York City, the crowd congealed into a single thought, and the thought became reality—it was as if Trump had somehow already won. Wedged between the men from Flatbush and a metal barricade, I was living in Trump’s America. The smiles and laughter, the cheerful outbreaks of chanting, the helpful calls of “Chair coming through, wheelchair coming”—all these tokens of happiness depended on a mass delusion that had everyone in its grip. It was absolutely possible for the unanimous belief of all these thousands of people to be wrong. And if I stayed here any longer, I might go under the spell too, like a lost climber who sits down to rest in the snow for a few minutes and never gets up. I squeezed my way along the sidewalk until I found an opening in the barricades and slipped out.

So I, along with 10,000 or 20,000 others, missed the big show inside Madison Square Garden. I missed the racist jokes and vulgar insults and profanity directed at Puerto Ricans and other Latinos; at Jews, Palestinians, women, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the half of Americans who support Democrats. I missed the crude nativism, the conspiracy-theory mongering, the warnings of violence and revenge. I missed the grifters and the nepos, the opportunists and the fanatics, the heirs of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, the fascist wannabes who don’t quite have the chops—the dark mirror of the good will outside. I missed seeing what the hateful extravaganza would have done to my neighbors in the crowd on 33rd Street. And I went home wondering how a spell ever breaks.

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.

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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.”

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