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Almost everyone knows the first line of Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece Moby-Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” Fewer people may remember what comes next—which might just be some of the best advice ever given to chase away a bit of depression:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Melville’s narrator was ostensibly a 19th-century whaler, whose cure for what he called the “hypos” was to hit the high seas and forget his troubles. Whaling was not exactly curling up with a cup of hot chocolate and a comfort dog; it was a brutal, exhausting, dangerous job (just read the rest of the novel for an ample account of that).

So Ishmael’s prescription might seem counterintuitive advice in today’s era of self-care. But Melville perhaps knew something that we have forgotten: When life is getting you down, the answer is not more comfort but less. If you’re troubled by your own case of the hypos, the remedy may be a tough challenge.

[From the June 1948 issue: W. Somerset Maugham on Moby-Dick]

In 2017, a scholar at the Murdoch University in Australia proposed a provocative hypothesis about why materially comfortable humans would nonetheless be drawn to difficult, even dangerous tasks. The researcher started from the observation that the universe is at once life-giving and deadly, and that therefore, from the outset, humans needed to embrace risk to flourish. This characteristic, arguably encoded in the genome ever since, may manifest in human beings as a tendency to adopt risky heroic behaviors and admire them in fellow humans.

That genetic inheritance gets reinforced by culture—which is why heroic adventure forms the basis of nearly all mythologies. This was Joseph Campbell’s famous conclusion in his 1949 study of archetypes, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In it, Campbell, who was a professor of literature, laid out the structure of the “monomyth,” which provides the underlying architecture of a narrative tradition that spans millennia commonly known as the “hero’s journey,” such as the Old Testament’s King David story and George Lucas’s Star Wars series.

This ur-myth opens with a call to adventure, proceeds through a series of difficult trials and dangerous obstacles, and finally ends in triumph. The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who, among other things, popularized the concept of archetypes, saw that for anyone, pursuing some metaphorical form of the hero’s journey might be indispensable to finding satisfaction in life. “Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard,” he wrote.

Evidence from modern researchers does indeed suggest that framing one’s life as this type of quest, even when it is difficult or unwelcome, can lead to positive transformation. In one 2023 experiment, scholars asked participants to reframe their life as one that followed the steps in the hero’s journey. The researchers found that doing so raised their subjects’ sense of purpose; it also made a difficult task more meaningful to them and improved their resiliency to trouble.

But beyond simply rewriting your life story to be more of a hero’s journey, starting an actual one in the form of a voluntary challenge or adventure can bring immediate and big happiness benefits. Consider a 2013 study finding that experienced climbers tend to derive unusual spiritual inspiration, experience a greater sense of flow, and generally feel happier when they climb mountains. A 2023 meta-analysis of research on outdoor adventures showed that participants in these experiences profited in at least one of four ways: physical and mental balance, personal development, community, and immersion and transformation.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

A challenging adventure doesn’t have to be physical in nature to bestow benefits; it can equally be mental. Indeed, learning new things with a spirit of curiosity and exploration has been shown to induce positive moods. This raises an interesting paradox that appears in this field of happiness research: People derive a lot more happiness from high-skill activities that require learning than they do from low-skill ones that don’t, yet we typically settle for the latter. In other words, you will probably be much happier reading about philosophy or science than you will if you just scroll social media—so why are you still scrolling? The obvious answer is that it takes a lot less learning effort and mental focus—and although the happiness benefits of reading Cicero will probably be greater, they are deferred and seem abstract compared with the instant, if largely illusory, gratification of sitting on the couch watching videos on your phone.

Just as more demanding physical and mental adventures raise happiness, their absence can harm well-being. This is a common theme that has emerged from analysis of declining mental health during the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, when people suffered from a lack of external stimuli and new experiences. Those who did best during this period tended to be people with an “adventure-based mindset”—who purposely went in search of new, interesting, and challenging things to see and do.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why so many people are unhappy in retirement]

If you find yourself a bit “grim about the mouth” like Ishmael, you don’t necessarily need to risk your life chasing an enraged sperm whale around the world. But you don’t have to accommodate your melancholy, either. I can suggest two approaches that you can employ right away to take on your hypos.

The first strategy is to use that narrative device of the hero’s journey to reframe your difficulties. This can be especially powerful if you have recently endured an event or hardship from which you’re still struggling to recover. Say, for example, that you went through a bad breakup that you did not initiate. This experience is all too easy to frame as a humiliating defeat or evidence of failure. It is nothing of the sort if you can think of it this way instead: that your breakup jerked you out of a complacent reverie with unwelcome evidence that you were not actually in the right relationship.

That realization is in fact your call to adventure, per Campbell. Now, confronted with this truth, you can embark on the second stage of your journey: learning to overcome emotional obstacles and getting stronger through your pain. The greatest stage lies ahead, when you will emerge triumphant—more secure, more emotionally intelligent, more self-knowing—ready to love again and be happier, on your own terms.

The second strategy, if your life simply feels dull and gray, is to go find a challenge that is worthwhile, hard, maybe even scary. If you have gotten a little too comfortable marking time in work that doesn’t inspire you, perhaps you should announce (to yourself at least) your intention to quit and start a job search. If the information you carry in your head has become stale to you, maybe it is time to go back to school in a new field. For a physical challenge, sign up for a half-marathon in six months’ time or (my personal favorite) set out to walk a few hundred miles. If your terrestrial existence is getting tedious, go in search of metaphysical truths. And if it shocks people around you who always took you for someone without a spiritual bone in your body, all the better.

There is no guarantee that whatever adventure you choose will turn out the way you hope, of course. And that is the point. If it were safe, it wouldn’t be heroic; if it were predictable, it wouldn’t be an adventure. Even if your heroic exploits prove to be more uncomfortable or painful than you expected, that, too, is part of your journey. The object is not to win in a conventional way; it is to wake up and be fully alive. If it’s for the first time in a long time, it should be bracing.

[From the November 1956 issue: Ishmael and Ahab]

One last point about the adventure you might seek: A common mistake is not to be Ishmael but Captain Ahab. Ahab—the doomed skipper of the Pequod, the whaling ship whose crew Ishmael joined—was singularly consumed with finding and killing Moby Dick, the great white whale. The days leading up to Ahab’s fateful encounter with the great whale were a fever dream singularly focused on the object of his obsession. This makes Melville’s story an inverted myth: an antihero’s journey that began with a plan born of hate and vengefulness, that brought travails from which Ahab learned nothing, and that ended tragically in a way that permitted no return.

Your adventure should have a goal, it is true, but it is called a hero’s journey for a reason. Happiness comes not from the blip that is a moment of victory but from the long arc of living, learning, and loving. That is the best cure for a damp, drizzly November in your soul.

Over the weekend, a group of Arab American and Muslim American leaders in Michigan appeared onstage at a Donald Trump rally and urged their communities to vote for him. The outreach might be working: A recent poll showed Trump with a narrow lead among Arab American voters.

This is shocking, but hardly surprising. It’s shocking because Trump’s stated policies—on Palestine, on political freedom, and on the very presence of Muslims in America—are antithetical to so much of what most of these voters believe in. It’s unsurprising because we Arab and Muslim Americans have a long tradition of merciless political self-sabotage.

In 2000, angered by the sanctions against and bombing of Iraq, the use of “secret evidence” in deportation proceedings against Arab and Muslim immigrants, and especially the carnage of the Second Intifada, many liberal Arab Americans—myself included—decided not to vote for Al Gore and turned instead to Ralph Nader, himself a prominent Arab American. If the point was to advance Arab political interests, our protest was a pathetic failure. The election of George W. Bush led directly to the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategic disaster that continues to resonate in the Middle East, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Arab civilians.

This time around, the primary grievance is the Biden administration’s support of—or, at least, inability to end—Israel’s invasion of Gaza and, now, its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran. Once again, the impulse is to express our anger and “punish” the politicians responsible by withholding a vote for them. In an election with only two viable candidates, however, there is no difference between not supporting Kamala Harris and actively supporting Trump. And a quick review of the most important issues on which there’s a consensus among Arab and Muslim Americans demonstrates that a second Trump term would be dramatically worse than a Harris presidency.

[Read: What would a second Trump administration mean for the Middle East?]

Start with Trump’s signature issue, immigration. Nothing in Harris’s agenda would restrict immigration from Arab or Muslim countries. Trump offers the precise opposite. One of his first acts as president was to institute a “Muslim ban,” flatly prohibiting the entry of nationals from a list of seven majority-Muslim countries. President Joe Biden rescinded that executive order; Trump has vowed to reinstate and possibly expand it.

Moreover, Trump’s likely attack on Temporary Protected Status, especially for Haitian immigrants, is ominous for a number of Arab and Muslim communities whose members currently qualify, including Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis, Syrians, and Sudanese. With a stroke of Trump’s Sharpie, all of them could find themselves stripped of this protection—and included in his promised “bloody” mass deportations. Efforts to extend Temporary Protected Status to Lebanese nationals, entirely plausible under a Harris administration, would be dead in the water under Trump. Defending his decision to endorse Trump, an imam in Michigan declared that the former president “promises peace.” He plainly does not. The Washington Post has reported that, according to six sources, Trump recently told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do what you have to do” militarily in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. The notion that Trump would prioritize the interests of Arab civilians is simply absurd. This is a man who has repeatedly used the word Palestinian as an epithet against his (in many cases Jewish) Democratic political opponents.

Trump already has a long, instructive, and highly discouraging record on these issues. As president, he moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and issued a statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in the contested holy city. He recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, in direct contravention of the United Nations charter’s rule against the acquisition of territory by war. And he slammed shut the Overton window on Palestinian independence and a two-state solution, which had been a matter of bipartisan consensus since the end of the Cold War. His “Peace to Prosperity” plan, released in January 2020, invited Israel to annex 30 percent more of the West Bank. Such a move would leave the remaining Palestinian territory surrounded entirely by Israel, and therefore incapable of meaningful sovereignty. The primary effect of this crude document was to create a permission structure for Republicans to support wide-scale Israeli annexation of the West Bank and dispense with supporting Palestinian independence.

Harris, by contrast, has been categorical in her support of a real two-state solution that would mean the end of the occupation that began in 1967. The vice president has clearly stated that Palestinians and Israelis need to reach a peace agreement that affords them “equal measures of prosperity and freedom.” Trump has never spoken of Palestinians and Israelis enjoying equal measures of anything.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s new racist insult]

Trump’s anti-Palestinian bias extends to the home front. Arab and Muslim Americans have been emigrating to the United States in large numbers since the late 19th century in search of a better life characterized by liberty and democracy. And yet Trump’s whole campaign, and his entire agenda, amounts to an assault on those ideals. He has consistently singled out pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses as part of a “radical revolution” that he has pledged to eliminate. According to The Washington Post, he told a group of Jewish donors in May that he is determined to deport pro-Palestinian students and “set that movement back 25 or 30 years.”

Our communities are overwhelmingly aghast at the U.S. government’s ongoing support for Israel’s military campaigns. I share the sentiment. But channeling that anger into support for Trump would be an exercise in the most rarefied gullibility and naivete. Far from promising peace, Trump threatens war on “the enemy from within.” Arab Americans and Muslim Americans, particularly those with pro-Palestinian sentiments, are likely to be high on the list of targets. We need to learn from the lessons of our own history. When we try to punish the politicians who have disappointed us without taking a serious inventory of the likely consequences, we usually just end up hurting ourselves.

We might as well start with the lowlight of last night’s Trump campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. That would be Tony Hinchcliffe, a podcaster who’s part of Joe Rogan’s circle, and who was the evening’s first speaker.

“These Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside,” he joked. “Just like they did to our country.” A minute later: “I don’t know if you guys know this, but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” It took a few more minutes before he got to the joke about Black people loving watermelons. Novel, edgy stuff—for a minstrel show in 1874.

Other speakers were only somewhat better. A childhood pal of Donald Trump’s called Vice President Kamala Harris “the anti-Christ” and “the devil.” The radio host Sid Rosenberg called her husband, Doug Emhoff, “a crappy Jew.” Tucker Carlson had a riff about Harris vying to be “the first Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” Stephen Miller went full blood-and-soil, declaring, “America is for Americans and Americans only.” (In 1939, a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden promised “to restore America to the true Americans.”) Melania Trump delivered a rare public speech that served mostly as a reminder of why her speeches are rare.

[Read: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Only after this did Trump take the stage and call Harris a “very low-IQ individual.” He vowed, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” He proposed a tax break for family caregivers, but the idea was quickly lost in the sea of offensive remarks.

Republicans who are not MAGA diehards reacted with dismay and horror—presumably at the political ramifications, because they can’t possibly be surprised by the content at this point. Politico Playbook, a useful manual of conventional wisdom, this morning cites Republicans fretting over alienating Puerto Ricans and Latinos generally. (Yesterday, Harris visited a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia and received the endorsement of the Puerto Rican pop superstar Bad Bunny.)

“Stay on message,” pleaded Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a New York Republican in a tight reelection race. That’s ridiculous. This—all of this—is the message of Trump’s campaign. Other Republicans may cringe at the coarseness of these comments, or worry that they will cost votes, but they made their choice long ago, and have stuck with them despite years of bigotry and other ugliness

[Adam Serwer: J. D. Vance’s empty nationalism]

Trump is running on nativism, crude stereotypes, and lies about immigrants. He has demeaned Harris in offensive and personal terms. He’s attacked American Jews for not supporting him. His disdain for Puerto Rico is long-standing, and his callousness after Hurricane Maria in 2017 was one of the most appalling moments of an appalling presidency. He feuded with the island’s elected officials, his administration tried to block aid, and he tried to swap the American territory for Greenland. (The Trump campaign said that Hinchcliffe’s routine “does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” which is also absurd. He was invited by Trump to appear at a rally for Trump’s campaign, and made the joke standing at a lectern emblazoned with Trump’s name.)

The Trump campaign itself may be perfectly happy with how it all went down. Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in Manhattan, a place that still enthralls him, was packed to the rafters for him. Counterprotests were muted, even as speakers at the rally boasted about entering the beating heart of liberalism. (As The New York Times’ Nate Cohn writes, New York City has moved somewhat toward him, though any hopes of his winning the city or the state remain far-fetched.)

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump’s dog whistles are unmistakable]

The whole point of the rally was provocation. Trump has long demonstrated a view that it’s better when people are talking about him—even if they’re outraged—than talking about anyone else. The record is murky: Trump won in 2016 but lost the popular vote, lost in 2020, and led his party to poor performances in 2018 and 2022. But he appears to believe that this year could be different. Trump calculates that if people are thinking about immigration and race, they will move toward him, even if they disapprove of the policy solutions he’s offering (or just don’t believe he’ll implement them).

Some Democrats agree, and fret that the Harris campaign’s recent turn toward attacking Trump is a missed opportunity for the Democrat to make a positive case for herself or refocus on economic issues. The pro-Harris super PAC Future Forward warns in an email that “attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” while Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, a Harris surrogate, warned that the rally was “bait.”

As a matter of electoral calculation, focusing on the offensive remarks last night may be unhelpful for Harris. But as an encapsulation of what Trump stands for as a candidate, and what he would bring to office, the rally was an effective medium for his closing message.

In the early 17th century, the English jurist Edward Coke laid out a fundamental principle of any constitutional order: No man can be the judge in his own case. Donald Trump thinks he has found a work-around.

The Republican presidential candidate yesterday confirmed what many observers have long expected: If he is elected president in two weeks, he will fire Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel investigating him, right away. No man can be his own judge—but if he can dismiss the prosecutors, he doesn’t need to be.

“So you’re going to have a very tough choice the day after you take the oath of office, or maybe even the day that you take the oath of office,” the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a Trump critic turned toady, asked him. “You’re either going to have to pardon yourself, or you’re going to have to fire Jack Smith. Which one will you do?”

“It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds,” Trump said. “He’ll be one of the first things addressed.”

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: a guide]

Smith has charged Trump with felonies in two cases: one related to attempts to subvert the 2020 election, and the other related to his hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Although Trump claims to have many substantive policy goals for his second term, his comments about firing Smith reveal where his true priorities lie. Trump frequently dissembles, but this is a case of him speaking quite plainly about what he will do if he is elected. One major theme of his campaign has been the need to rescue himself from criminal accountability (or, in his view, persecution). Another has been the promise to exact retribution against his adversaries. Sacking Smith would serve both objectives. In another interview yesterday, Trump said that Smith “should be thrown out of the country.”

The scholarly consensus is that Trump has the legal right to fire Smith, and also that such a firing would be a deeply disturbing violation of the traditional semi-independence of the Justice Department. It would also be a scandalous affront to the idea that no citizen, including the president, is above the law. Even if it could be proved that Trump fired Smith with the express purpose of covering up his own crimes, Trump would almost certainly face no immediate repercussions. The Supreme Court this summer ruled that a president has criminal immunity for any official act, and firing Smith would surely qualify.

[Quinta Jurecic: The Supreme Court’s effort to save Trump is already working]

During the radio interview, Hewitt warned that removing Smith could get Trump impeached. It’s possible. Control of the House is up for grabs in November, and the Democrats might be slight favorites to prevail. But Trump’s first two impeachments made perfectly clear that Senate Republicans, whose votes would be required to convict, have no interest in constraining him. Some of them have already taken the public stance that the prosecutions against Trump are improper—even though no one questions that Trump took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after he left office, no one has made a coherent defense that he had a right to possess them, and the details of Trump’s election subversion are well known and unchallenged.

These facts will be irrelevant if Trump can simply fire Smith. That’s the power he’s asking voters to grant him.

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

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

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

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

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Capitol riot was finally contained on January 6, 2021, Mitch McConnell spoke from the Senate floor in unambiguous terms. The Senate, said the then–majority leader, would do its duty “by the book,” and not be deterred by the violent mob’s attempt at intimidation. McConnell said that the rioters had failed in their attempt to disrupt American democracy. The Senate affirmed Joe Biden’s election, but the American catechism of a peaceful transfer of power had been sullied.

This was a moment of moral clarity for McConnell about the threat of Donald Trump, but not a lasting one. Rather, it was merely a prelude to the kind of contradiction that has marked his time as one of the nation’s most powerful leaders.

McConnell made up his mind on Trump well before January 6. He and Trump had not spoken since a month after Election Day, when Trump yelled at McConnell for acknowledging the obvious, that Joe Biden had been fairly elected after the Electoral College vote. Trump’s “postelection behavior was increasingly detached from reality,” McConnell told me, “and it seems to me he made up this alternate universe of how things happened.” Trump, he said, had engaged in a “fantasy” that he had somehow won, and had been listening to “clowns” who served as his private lawyers.

In an interview with an oral historian in late December 2020, he called Trump a “despicable human being” and said he was “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.” Trump’s behavior after the election, McConnell said, “only underscores the good judgment of the American people. They’ve just had enough of the misrepresentations, the outright lies almost on a daily basis, and they fired him. And for a narcissist like him, that’s been really hard to take.”

[Jeffrey Goldberg: A study in Senate cowardice]

January 6, McConnell told the historian the following week, was a “shocking occurrence and further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.” Reflecting on the trauma of that day, McConnell said, “It’s hard to imagine this happening in this country, such a stable democracy we’ve had for so long, to have not only the system attacked but the building itself attacked.” He added later, “It was very disturbing.” He was sickened by the damage done to the Capitol itself. “They broke windows,” McConnell said. “They were narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice president’s chair taking pictures of themselves.”

This article was adapted from Michael Tackett’s new book, The Price of Power.

Calls quickly came to investigate the cause of the riot. Polls showed that a majority of Americans supported an inquiry. The House passed bipartisan legislation to create a commission modeled after the one that had examined the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a body that would include an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. Thirty-five Republicans in the House joined Democrats to support the measure.

Then the legislation went to the Senate, and McConnell pivoted. Congressional committees, he said, were capable of conducting the investigation, and the commission was largely a Democratic ploy to “relitigate” that day and Trump’s role in it. So on May 28, less than six months after his own life had been jeopardized during the riot, he blocked perhaps the nation’s best chance at getting a full accounting of what had happened.

McConnell was well aware that he would be criticized, and, as at so many other times during his tenure in the Senate, he did not let that deter him from his larger goal. He had said a few weeks earlier that his focus was to thwart Biden’s agenda “100 percent.” McConnell’s best shot at making good on that threat would be to regain just one seat in the Senate in the 2022 midterms, retaking the majority for Republicans and restoring him to the position he coveted.

Abandoning the commission could readily be seen as a craven concession to his party’s right flank, but McConnell has an unsentimental view of tactics and strategies that do not lead to victories and majorities. McConnell blocked the inquiry by deploying the filibuster and requesting the support of some Republicans, such as Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, as a rare “personal favor” to him. McConnell was worried Trump would encourage more fringe candidates, the kind who had doomed Republican hopes in previous elections. If Trump were not a unifying force in the midterm elections, when the president’s party typically suffers heavy losses, then Democrats would be in a position to defy history and keep power in Congress. So McConnell ignored the insults and chose what he saw as the surest path back to the majority.

More striking was how McConnell approached another potential remedy to deal with Trump: a second impeachment.

A week after the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell noted in an oral-history interview that the House was likely to impeach Trump very soon. “Someone listening to this years from now might wonder what’s the point; he’s leaving office anyway on January 20,” he said. “But apparently you can impeach somebody after they leave office, and if that happens, there’s a second vote in the Senate, which only has to pass by a simple majority, that prevents that person from seeking office again. So he could not only be impeached, but also eliminated from the possibility of a comeback for this office. So it is significant.” While not showing his hand, he was signaling an inclination.

McConnell said that voting in the Senate before Trump left office would be difficult. He talked with Biden about the challenge of getting his Cabinet in place if the Senate was caught up in an impeachment trial. The Senate also had time off scheduled. Still, it was at least theoretically possible to have it back in session to deal with impeachment.

“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is,” McConnell said in the oral history. “Urging an insurrection, and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result … is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine, with the possible exception of maybe being an agent for another country.” Even so, he was also convinced by legal opinions that the Senate could not impeach someone after they had left office. He was not yet certain how he would vote.

Democrats pushed to impeach Trump, and the House moved quickly to do so. Up until the day of the Senate vote, it was unclear which way McConnell would go. “I wish he would have voted to convict Donald Trump, and I think he was convinced that he was entirely guilty,” Senator Mitt Romney told me, while adding that McConnell thought convicting someone no longer in office was a bad precedent. Romney said he viewed McConnell’s political calculation as being “that Donald Trump was no longer going to be on the political stage … that Donald Trump was finished politically.”

George F. Will, the owlish, intellectual columnist who has been artfully arguing the conservative cause for half a century, has long been a friend and admirer of McConnell. They share a love of history, baseball, and the refracted glories of the eras of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. On February 21, 2021, Will sent an advance version of his column for The Washington Post to a select group of conservatives, a little-known practice of his. One avid reader and recipient was Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, who read this column with particular interest. Will made the case that Republicans such as Cassidy, McConnell, and others should override the will of the “Lout Caucus,” naming Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, and Ron Johnson among them.

“As this is written on Friday [Saturday], only the size of the see-no-evil Republican majority is in doubt.” Will harbored no doubt. He abhorred Trump. He had hoped others would vote to convict, including his friend. The last sentence of his early release was bracketed by parentheses: “(Perhaps, however, a revival began on Saturday when the uncommon Mitch McConnell voted ‘Aye.’)” Will had either been given an indication of McConnell’s vote or made a surmise based on their long association.

Cassidy told me he thought that meant McConnell had clued Will in on his vote, so he called Will on Saturday. Will told him that the column was premature, and he was filing a substitute.

His new column highlighted McConnell’s decision to vote not guilty, saying that the time was “not quite ripe” for the party to try to rid itself of Trump. “No one’s detestation of Trump matches the breadth and depth of McConnell,” Will wrote in the published version. Nevertheless, “McConnell knows … that the heavy lifting involved in shrinking Trump’s influence must be done by politics.” McConnell’s eyes were on the 2022 midterm elections.

Will told me he did not recall writing the earlier version.

On the morning of the Senate vote on impeachment, there was still some thought among both Republicans and Democrats that McConnell might vote to convict Trump. The opening of his remarks certainly suggested as much.

“January 6 was a disgrace,” McConnell began. “American citizens attacked their own government. They use terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chatted about murdering the vice president.

“They did this because they’d been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth because he was angry. He lost an election. Former President Trump’s actions preceded the riot in a disgraceful dereliction of duty … There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day. No question about it.”

Then-Representative Liz Cheney, who would lose her Republican primary the following year because of her criticisms of Trump, wrote in her memoir that she knew McConnell had, at one point, been firm in his view that Trump should be impeached, but she had grown concerned about his “resolve.” When Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky made a motion that the trial was unconstitutional because Trump was no longer president, McConnell voted for it, a sign to Cheney that his position was shifting.

[David A. Graham: Mitch McConnell surrenders to Trump]

Her concerns were borne out: McConnell held a strong belief that Trump had committed an impeachable offense but made a political decision that overrode it.

McConnell thought that Cheney had made a mistake. “Where I differed with Liz is I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be,” McConnell told me. He later added, “I think her sort of self-sacrificial act maybe sells books, but it isn’t going to have an impact changing the party. That’s where we differed.”

Cheney thought that it was McConnell who had abdicated his duty and responsibility to do more to rid the GOP of Trump. In a post on X, she said, “Mitch McConnell knows Trump provoked the violent attack on our Capitol … He knows Trump refused for hours to tell his mob to leave … He knows Trump committed a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ … Trump and his collaborators will be defeated, and history will remember the shame of people like @LeaderMcConnell who enabled them.”

McConnell, in part to preserve his position with the Republican members and mindful of what had happened to senators such as Mitt Romney, who had become an outcast to many in his party for simply standing firm on principle, decided against voting to convict. He argued that the Constitution did not provide for such a penalty once a president had left office. There is ample debate about that point, but for McConnell, as usual, the political rationale was sufficient. Biden was among those who understood the politics. In an Oval Office interview, he told me, “I can understand the rationale—not agree with it—understand the rationale to say, ‘If I don’t do this, I may be gone.’”

McConnell’s goal was to preserve a Senate majority. He wanted the energy of Trump’s voters in Senate races, without the baggage of Trump. He gambled on his belief that Trump would fade from the political stage in the aftermath of the insurrection. Instead, Trump reemerged every bit as strong among core supporters. It was likely the worst political miscalculation of McConnell’s career.

This article was adapted from Michael Tackett’s new book, The Price of Power.

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