With his hat low over his eyes, and the sharpness in his voice sheathed, Eminem seemed slightly less than amped to be at the Kamala Harris campaign rally last Tuesday in Michigan. In a minute-and-15-second speech with nary a punch line or pun, the 52-year-old rapper saluted Detroit, voting, and freedom, and closed with all the passion of an HR professional giving a benefits update: “Here to tell you much more about that, President Barack Obama.”

Obama took it upon himself to play the part of the showman. Summoning his goofiest dad energy, he hooted the words of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” claiming he was so nervous that he had “vomit on my sweater already / mom’s spaghetti.” This line shook me to my Millennial core. It echoed the time at a North Carolina rally in 2008 when Obama cited Jay-Z lyrics by brushing some metaphorical dirt off his shoulder—a moment that christened an era in which Democratic politics and pop culture were brazenly intermingled. Partisanship and hipness seemed, ever so briefly, compatible. But as Eminem’s anti-performance had just indicated, we are now so far from then.

With veteran public idealists such as Bruce Springsteen and the West Wing cast on the trail for Harris lately—and with Donald Trump touting old allies such as Kid Rock alongside recent converts from hip-hop—it can be easy to overlook just how much celebrity culture’s relationship to political culture has shifted over the past few cycles. Mainstream entertainers have, as is typical, lined up for the Democrats—but they have, as is less typical, not tried to make much fuss about their participation. They seem to understand that the nature of celebrity itself has changed, and that praise from the glitzy class can be a liability.

Revisit, if you dare, the 2008 Will.I.Am music video “Yes We Can,” which featured a motley cast of stars—Scarlett Johansson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Herbie Hancock—speaking, singing, and piano-playing along to Obama’s soaring rhetoric. The video’s earnestness, so cringeworthy today, gives the lie to the summer hype about Harris recapturing Obama-mania. Moreover, it embraces an obsolete—and always shaky—cultural vision: “the arts” as represented by one unified team of dreamers whom voters tend to admire rather than despise.

The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, leaning on star-studded concerts and a sitcom cameo, learned the hard way that this vision had started to die out in the 2010s, because of both technological and political shifts. Chopping the prime-time-viewing masses into factions, social-media and streaming platforms turned out to be resentment-making machines; it is, simply, annoying to be told that an actor is important and popular when you, in your own media consumption, never encounter his or her work. Trump was a perfect champion for the resulting and widespread sense of cultural dislocation. He was an entertainer, sure, but an entertainer who humiliated other entertainers on his TV show. When Hollywood began pumping out resistance-themed entertainment early in his presidency, it produced little art of lasting significance, but it did bolster Trump’s claims to be aligned with the people rather than the elites.

Eight years later, after the pandemic spread yet more disunity and QAnon spread conspiracy theories about what goes on inside Hollywood’s private corridors, mistrust of celebrities seems to be at a high. On talk radio and TikTok, one of the hottest cultural topics of the moment is the sexual-abuse accusations against Sean “Diddy” Combs. The stories articulated in the federal indictment and dozens of civil suits against him are chilling (Combs denies them), but the chatter they’ve inspired on social media tends not to be focused on sympathy for the victims. Rather, many commenters seem gleeful with hope that the investigation into Combs will take down the many stars who attended his White Parties—events that, for years, symbolized the height of aspirational excess in pop culture. Trump used to brag about his closeness with Combs, but that hasn’t stopped him and his surrogates from continuing to tag Democrats as the party of celebrity decadence. Trump shared a fake image of Harris with the rapper; Elon Musk recently posted on X, in response to Eminem’s presence at Harris’s rally, “Yet another Diddy party participant.”

Mass antipathy toward celebrities does not mean, however, that stars don’t matter anymore. Quite the opposite. This is the age of stans—a word partially coined by Eminem, which now refers to internet-enabled superfandom. Stans are not just loyal to particular entertainers; in many cases, they’re monomaniacal and tribalist, rooting against rivals just as much as they root for their faves. At the same time, the rise of influencers—a term that can refer equally to a TikTok goofball and a philosophy podcaster—is helping further break down the border between entertainment and media. An influencer’s job isn’t merely to amuse; it’s to spread ideas and opinions. We’ve evolved into a polytheistic celebrity culture, worshipping countless mini-idols that command a different form of adulation in each household.

[Read: The truth about celebrities and politics]

The structure of this new fame ecosystem doesn’t fit neatly with national politics. Authenticity, the feeling that a celebrity is showing their real self, is what attracts fans, and nothing is less authentic than being a partisan hack—especially given the disillusionment spread by the pandemic, inflation, and the war in Gaza. Celebrities who want to talk about the election are probably smart to cultivate an air of reluctance. Take, for example, Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper, who gave a lengthy, apologetic explanation to listeners before interviewing Harris on her podcast: “As you know, I do not usually discuss politics, or have politicians on this show, because I want Call Her Daddy to be a place where everyone feels comfortable tuning in.”

One of the most haunting pieces of media from this election season is The Daily Show’s recent dispatch from the Gathering of the Juggalos, the music festival thrown by the face-painted rap-metal group Insane Clown Posse. The fans (called juggalos) who are interviewed profess all sorts of liberal leanings—about abortion, the economy, trans rights—but also say they’re nonvoters; seemingly as a matter of identity, of pride, they feel outside the system. Violent J, one of ICP’s two members, told The Daily Show that he supports Harris. But really, he didn’t seem to care very much about the election either way; he didn’t even know who Tim Walz is.

Even the most plugged-in stars seem a bit detached. Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of the year, has rejected calls for her to endorse a candidate. After backlash, she clarified in a TikTok video that she would be voting for Harris, but that because of various issues—primarily America’s support for Israel’s war—she couldn’t rightly call that vote an “endorsement.” In September, Taylor Swift gave Harris a much clearer boost, but her Instagram post on the matter was strikingly muted in tone, especially given Trump’s efforts to troll her. She hasn’t weighed in on the campaign since then. (Don’t bet against some crucial, last-minute activism—Swift is, among many other things, a master of timing.)

Then there’s Eminem. The rapper is a pretty prize for any political campaign; more than two decades after his first hit, he still commands a huge following among young men, a demographic that may well decide this election. The news that he’s voting blue isn’t much of a surprise, but he seems to be refining his methods with each election. During the 2016 campaign, he released an anti-Trump diss track; its opening line lives on as a meme-able example of how clunky protest art can be. During 2020, a campaign waged mostly online and in ads, he lent “Lose Yourself”—the ultimate inspirational anthem—to a Biden-Harris commercial. This time, he gave that short, halting speech, and it was, in its way, perfect for this cycle. The video is likely to pop up in the TikTok or Instagram Reel feeds of fans, many of whom might find Eminem’s palpable sense of burnout relatable and his words, therefore, more credible.

This past Friday brought to the campaign trail one of America’s highest-wattage figures: Beyoncé, who spoke at a Harris rally in Houston along with her mother, Tina, and her Destiny’s Child bandmate Kelly Rowland. Beyoncé’s potential involvement in this election has been speculated about for months. Her track “Freedom” became Harris’s rallying song, and fans theorized feverishly—and incorrectly—that she’d perform it at the Democratic National Convention. But when Beyoncé finally joined Harris onstage on Friday, it wasn’t to sing or dance. In a calmly uplifting speech, she focused on the historical nature of electing the first Black, female president. And she added this crucial stipulation: “I’m not here as a celebrity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Mark Leibovich: Mike Pence is haunting this election]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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