When Shannon Coulter first started listening to Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, she thought it seemed fairly standard. “All women,” he said, “should have the freedom to make their own decisions, freedom over their own bodies, freedom about whether to pursue IVF.” But then he said something that she rarely hears from political leaders: Women should also have “freedom about whether to have children at all.” Beshear was recognizing that some Americans simply don’t want to be parents, Coulter, the president of the political-advocacy nonprofit Grab Your Wallet, told me. And that handful of words meant a great deal to her as a child-free person, someone who’s chosen not to have kids. “People are just looking,” she said, “for even the thinnest scraps of acknowledgment.”

By some estimates, nearly a quarter of U.S. adults are child-free—which is about three times the number of people who are childless, who want kids but cannot have them. Yet politicians have long ignored child-free adults, perhaps out of strategic necessity: The majority of the voters they’re trying to reach either have kids or want to someday, and the nuclear family is exalted in American culture. In a Pew Research Center poll from earlier this year, roughly half of respondents said that if fewer people chose to have children, it would negatively affect the country. As a result, the child-free rarely come up, Zachary Neal, a Michigan State University researcher who studies that population, told me: “Politicians don’t even want to touch it.”

The run-up to the general election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump has underscored that point. Harris has no biological children, but her campaign has highlighted her role as a doting stepmom. Abortion has been a major issue, but pro-choice politicians tend to emphasize the stories of women who need one for, say, life-saving medical reasons, rather than those who simply don’t want a child. When a 2021 Fox News interview with J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, was re-aired—the one in which he calls Democrats “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”—much of the resulting conversation focused on childless adults, not child-free ones.

[Read: The post-liberal Catholics find their man]

So far, politicians haven’t had much reason to pander to the child-free; the group has been too fractured to be called a voting bloc. But when I spoke with child-free people for this article, they told me that Vance’s “cat ladies” comments were upsetting enough to inspire political action. Coulter believes that his remarks amounted to hate speech. Yet the response among many Democrats, she said, just seems to be We like babies too!—not exactly the defense she wanted. She founded a nonpartisan group called the Alliance of Childfree Voters and posted about a webinar with a panel of speakers; not long afterward, 500 people had registered—the limit for the Zoom call.

The alliance is still new. But the portion of American adults who say they don’t want children could amount to as many as 60 million voters, and that population has been growing. Eventually, Neal predicted, there will come a time when ignoring child-free voters will be riskier than acknowledging them—and “we may be approaching that sort of tipping point fairly soon.”

Child-free people are a pretty varied bunch. Politically, they’re quite diverse, skewing slightly liberal overall but encompassing plenty of conservatives; in surveys, many of them say they’re “moderate,” Neal told me. Data he collected with his colleague Jennifer Watling Neal show that not wanting children is more common among those who are men, white, or identify as LGBTQIA—but not by any overwhelming margins. And child-free people care about a wide variety of policy issues, not all having to do with being child-free. “There’s not really an effective way to speak to them as a single bloc in a way that would matter at the ballot box,” Neal said.

A scattered array of voters can consolidate, though; it’s happened before. Take evangelical conservatives. In the 1960s, evangelicals were seen more as a ragtag assemblage of hippies than as a Republican bulwark; abortion was not a political rallying point for them. But the group started shifting rightward in the ’70s, and some white evangelical leaders began to dream up how they might gain a political foothold. By the ’80s, they were organizing around a “pro-family” platform that included an anti-abortion agenda. Today, white evangelicals are one of the most powerful voting blocs in America; in 2016, 81 percent of them voted for Trump.

Of course, evangelicals already had something crucial in common: religious belief. If child-free adults are largely just connected by a lack of interest in something—well, that’s not necessarily a strong bond. When I interviewed Alan Cooperman, the director of religion research at Pew, for a story on why secular congregations have struggled to take off, he told me: “Being uninterested in something is about the least effective social glue, the dullest possible mobilizing cry, the weakest affinity principle, that one can imagine.” I was reminded of that insight when Neal told me he’s found that child-free adults report feeling pretty neutral about other child-free adults, whereas parents say in surveys that they feel very warmly toward other parents. Amy Blackstone, a University of Maine sociologist and the author of Childfree by Choice, told me that when she and her husband started a local group for child-free adults, they pretty quickly ran out of things to talk about. “After a few meetings,” she said, “we realized we didn’t really have much in common with each other other than we opted out of having kids.”

But recent events may be giving the child-free a stronger emotional tie. Vance’s suggestion that parents should get more votes than nonparents, the many Republicans claiming that only people with kids care about the country’s fate: This is the kind of rhetoric that could make child-free adults feel excluded from the cultural norm—and that they’re together on the margins. Studies suggest that when members of a group sense discrimination from the rest of society, it can increase the degree to which they identify with one another and feel proud of their collective identity, which can be politically mobilizing. One reason, researchers believe, is that members might feel they have a “linked fate”—regardless of other differences, they have certain shared interests or vulnerabilities that need protecting. (That’s one theory for why Black Americans, a historically marginalized group, tend to vote fairly cohesively despite being more and more economically diverse.)

[Read: One legacy of the pandemic may be less judgment of the child-free]

Child-free people have long been societal misfits to some degree. Studies have shown that nonparents tend to be perceived as less warm than parents, and couples understood as unlikely to have kids are viewed less positively than those seen as likely to have them. The child-free people I spoke with told me that they’d overcome a lot of shame in their own disinterest in having kids. Therese Shechter, a documentary filmmaker who directed My So-Called Selfish Life, about women who choose “not to become a mother,” told me that for a long time, she believed that she would have children, despite having no desire to do so. She spent her 30s filled with dread, imagining that parenthood lurked in the near future. Blackstone told me that when she finally decided not to have kids, she dealt with intrusive questions and inappropriate comments about her choice, something she finds many child-free people relate to.

And yet, Blackstone said that until this election, she had trouble convincing people that any stigma about the child-free exists. Now, with political rhetoric making animosity toward child-free adults plainly visible, such skepticism may finally have been squashed. “I think J. D. Vance did us a favor, because he made very public what most of us who are child-free have known our whole lives,” she said: “that there are people who are extraordinarily hostile toward us.”

With that prejudice confirmed, ironically, some child-free people may finally feel empowered to embrace their own choice—because if they don’t, who will? After Vance’s screed blew up, women started posting pictures or videos of themselves, sometimes with their actual cats, declaring themselves child-free and ready to vote. Shechter told me that it “was a great moment of solidarity”; Coulter said her feed was “lit up like a Christmas tree.” Around that time, she deleted the phrase cool aunt from her X bio. “I realized I had it there as kind of an apology,” she told me, a “way of softening myself for people who don’t know me.”

For a population to become a voting bloc, it needs shared policy goals—and the child-free have plenty. The people I spoke with said they care deeply about reproductive freedom, and specifically the freedom to not reproduce at all. Their concerns include not only abortion rights but also access to birth control, which many fear could be threatened by the 2022 Dobbs decision striking down federal abortion protections. Democrats introduced the Right to Contraception Act in Congress shortly after the decision, which fell short of the votes it needed to advance in the Senate; all but two Republicans voted against it. Meanwhile, many doctors refuse to perform permanent birth-control procedures, such as tubal ligations, for fear that a patient will regret it—a concern that often seems grounded not in actual legal barriers but in paternalism.

Birth control should fit squarely within the reproductive-rights conversations Democrats are already having. Yet politicians tend to focus on emotionally potent but less common stories—of emergency abortions, or IVF granting long-yearned-for families. Blackstone remembers hearing Tim Walz talk about how his family wouldn’t exist without fertility treatments, and thinking that she could say something similar about birth control. “My family of two”—herself and her husband—“would not have been possible had I not had access to the reproductive health care that I did,” she said. But “I don’t know that Tim Walz had families like mine in mind.”

[Read: More people should be talking about IVF the way Tim Walz is]

Another policy priority could be workplace equity. Many child-free people believe that they’re expected to work extra hours, or that they’re paid less than their colleagues with kids; in one 2022 survey, 74 percent of respondents—parents and nonparents alike—reported that people with children are treated better in their workplace than those without. That doesn’t mean child-free adults want flexibility taken away from parents: They’d like everyone to have fair working conditions, for pay to be transparent, and for people to understand that child-free adults have obligations outside work too—say, taking care of their own parents or babysitting godchildren. “We do all actually have families,” Shechter said. “They just might not look like someone else’s family.”

It’s unclear how Coulter’s group, the Alliance of Childfree Voters, will push for these policies. She’s polling members to figure out where their priorities lie; whatever comes next, this nascent voting bloc probably won’t swing the November election. But if one thing can pull the child-free population together in the future, Coulter told me, it might be “finally feeling pride.” Child-free adults don’t just want to be seen. They want to be seen as valuable—as mentors to the kids around them, agents of social change, volunteers in their communities and emotional rocks for the people in their life. “I would love to hear a leader one day refer to my family as a family, which I don’t think I will in my lifetime,” Blackstone told me. “If that happened before I die, I would just be overjoyed.”

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Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat in a tight race for a Senate seat, has been on the defensive about a manufacturing renaissance happening in her own backyard.

Thanks to incentives that President Joe Biden's administration has championed in the Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation, Michigan alone could see 50,000 or more new jobs by 2030 brought on by the boom in electric vehicles. And yet, in a new ad, Slotkin all but disavows EVs, telling voters, “I live on a dirt road, nowhere near a charging station, so I don’t own an electric car.”

“No one should tell us what to buy, and no one is going to mandate anything,” she says in the ad. “What you drive is your call—no one else’s.” Only in between such assurances does Slotkin allow that if an EV boom is happening, she’d rather those cars be built in Michigan than in China.

Normally, an economic explosion of this magnitude would be the kind of win that any politician would fight for and hinge reelections on. But Slotkin’s party is clearly not winning the information war over electric vehicles. The IRA is spurring General Motors, Ford, Volvo, BMW, and many others to retrofit old car plants and build new battery factories across the U.S., challenging China for control over the technology of the future. Economic stories like Michigan’s are playing out in Georgia, Nevada, North and South Carolina, and Tennessee, too. Yet, according to recent data from the nonprofit advocacy group American EV Jobs Alliance, more than 75 percent of the political messaging about EVs this election cycle has been negative. Donald Trump has been railing against what he and critics falsely call electric-vehicle “mandates” for drivers; Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t exactly been on camera ripping hard launches in an electric Hummer the way Biden did in 2021. Instead, she too has been reassuring crowds that “I will never tell you what car you have to drive.” Democrats have decided to treat what should have been one of the biggest manufacturing and job wins of the past century as a political liability.

“I think the great, irritating tragedy to all this is the actual story of EVs and auto jobs is a very good one,” says Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican political consultant who co-founded the American EV Jobs Alliance and also runs the EV Politics Project, which is dedicated to pushing Republicans towards EV adoption. His group found that most political messaging about EVs references people being forced to drive electric someday under some kind of “gas car ban” that starts with layoffs now and will ultimately kill the American auto industry. None of that is true; nowhere in the U.S. has “mandates” that every person must drive an electric car. Trump has also repeatedly and misleadingly said that EVs “don’t go far” (their ranges can rival gas vehicles) and are “all going to be made in China” while comically overstating the cost of building electric-vehicle chargers. Somehow, it seems to be working. During this election, the narrative has spun out of control, particularly in Michigan, Murphy told me. Tens of thousands of new manufacturing jobs are coming to Michigan because of EVs, Murphy said. “The problem is that it’s the biggest secret of the campaign.”

The Biden administration did set a goal of increased EV sales—that 50 percent of all new cars sold in 2030 would have zero tailpipe emissions. Functionally, that means developing a robust local battery-manufacturing ecosystem after America and the rest of the world spent decades outsourcing it to China. And the IRA was meant to give carmakers and parts suppliers the teeth to actually do that work. Ample evidence suggests that the act’s plans are working as intended—especially in red and swing states. The Hyundai Motor Group has sped up the opening of Georgia’s biggest-ever economic-development project, its new $7.6 billion EV-making “Metaplant.” Last week, Scout Motors—a classic American brand revived by the Volkswagen Group—unveiled an electric truck and SUV that it aims to manufacture in South Carolina at a new $2 billion factory by 2027. Tennessee is becoming an epicenter for battery-making, thanks to some $15 billion invested for various EV projects. And Kentucky is also seeing billions in job-creating investments from Toyota, Rivian, and other companies as it seeks to become what Governor Andy Beshear has called “the EV capital of the United States.” Cleaner cars, manufactured at home, with battery technology no longer firmly in the hands of a geopolitical adversary—from an electoral perspective, what’s not to like?

Yet Democrats on the campaign trail are reluctant to talk about any of this. And so far, American car buyers simply aren’t as willing to buy EVs as policy makers and automakers hoped. EV sales have risen significantly since the early days of the Biden administration, but they haven’t taken off the way automakers believed they would. GM, for example, once projected 1 million EVs produced by 2025 but will have scored a major victory if it can sell 100,000 by the end of this year. Those slower-than-expected sales, plus the fact that automakers are getting crushed on still-high battery costs, have led several companies to cancel or delay new EV projects. Plenty of Americans have little to no personal exposure to cars outside the gas-powered ones they’ve been driving for a century, and still regard EVs as expensive toys for wealthy people on the coasts.

Democrats have not yet figured out how to square these two realities: American voters might support the jobs that EV manufacturing creates, but they can be fearful of or even hostile toward the product. Instead, the party has ceded rhetorical ground to Trump’s line of attack: that Biden’s (and presumably Harris’s) policies are meant to force Americans to someday buy a car they don’t want, or even “take away your car,” as the Heritage Foundation has put it. “The Republican Party in the Senate race has been pounding, pounding, pounding on the [internal-combustion engine] ban, which is a scary thing that tests pretty well if you want to scare voters, particularly in Michigan,” Murphy said. The GOP’s anti-EV sentiment has been helped along, too, by the fossil-fuel industry’s ad campaigns.

Meanwhile, the CEOs of Ford, General Motors, and the EV start-up Rivian have all expressed dismay about how politicized vehicle propulsion has become. The Tesla CEO Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be much help: Trump has repeatedly said that Musk has never asked him to go easier on EVs, something Musk cheerfully reaffirmed on X. Trump has vowed to repeal Biden’s EV “mandate” on day one of his presidency; whether he can without an act of Congress is the subject of intense speculation in the auto industry. Then again, a Trump sweep could mean he’d get the firepower to do exactly that, by targeting the tax breaks to buy EVs, the incentives to manufacture them, or both. Trump is unlikely to be able to halt a transition happening at car companies all over the world, but he could delay it or put the U.S. further behind the curve.

In theory, no red-state governor or member of Congress should want to give up the jobs that the EV boom is creating. (Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, has contended that EV manufacturing will mean job losses for the auto industry overall, even though Honda and LG Energy Solution are committing some $4 billion to its future electric “hub” in Vance’s home state of Ohio.) But the success of this manufacturing boom in Georgia or Michigan does hinge on people actually buying those products. One recent survey by an automotive research group found that a person’s political identity has become less associated with EV acceptance. But Republican rhetoric could reverse that. Murphy pointed to one recent poll his group conducted showing that 62 percent of Michigan respondents said the government’s push to adopt more electric vehicles is a bad thing for the state. Until recently, he told me, he felt that the auto industry’s leaders weren’t spooked by the political push against EVs. Now, he said, “they ought to be.”

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A simple and intuitive view of democratic politics holds that political parties exist to advance the material self-interest of the coalitions that support them. If this were true, then as the Democrats became the party of high-earning college graduates, they would have abandoned economic policies that would threaten those voters’ pocketbooks. A version of this essentially Marxist analysis has become standard fare on the right, where the phrase woke capital has become a slur to describe the Democrats’ supposed fealty to corporate America; the Republican vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, has argued that the Democratic Party is now the party of Wall Street.

But as wealthier and better-educated voters have shifted toward the Democrats, the party and its constituents have become more economically progressive, not less. They have largely united around an economic agenda that emphasizes aiding the poor and middle class, and around messaging that places that agenda front and center. The very richest Democrats have become just as left-wing on economics as their less affluent party members, and far more economically progressive than low- and middle-income Republicans. U.S. politics seems to have decisively entered what you might call a post-Marxist or post-materialist phase.

From the New Deal through the George W. Bush era, the Marxist view of politics largely held up. The rich and educated overwhelmingly voted for Republicans, who pursued tax cuts and deregulation, while the working class mostly voted for Democrats, who expanded the social safety net.

[Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history]

Over the past decade and a half, however, the dynamic has dramatically shifted. In 2008, the top fifth of earners favored Democrats by just a few percentage points; by 2020, they were the group most likely to vote for Democrats and did so by a nearly 15-point margin. (Democrats won the poorest fifth of voters by a similarly large margin.) Democrats now represent 24 of the 25 highest-income congressional districts and 43 of the top 50 counties by economic output. A similarly stark shift has occurred if you look at college education rather than income. Perhaps most dramatic of all has been the change among wealthy white people. Among white voters, in every presidential election from 1948 until 2012, the richest 5 percent were the group most likely to vote Republican, according to analysis by the political scientist Thomas Wood. In 2016 and 2020, this dynamic reversed itself: The top 5 percent became the group most likely to vote Democratic.

This newly educated and affluent Democratic Party did not swing to the right on economics. Quite the contrary. Following the 2020 election, the Biden administration pursued an expansive economic agenda that included a generous pandemic stimulus package, a massive expansion of the social safety net for the middle class and poor (including cash transfers to families and universal pre-K), and large investments to create well-paying jobs in left-behind places. These policies, if fully enacted, would have represented a significant redistribution of wealth. Most of the $4.5 trillion in proposed new spending would have been funded by a spate of new taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich. “The Biden agenda was more ambitious and redistributive than anything else pursued by Democrats since the 1960s or ’70s,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale and co-author of a recent paper on the Democrats’ changing coalition, told me. “This is not a party pursuing a ‘Brahmin left’ agenda. It’s pursuing an incredibly progressive economic agenda.”

Despite its ambition, this agenda did not provoke anything resembling a rebellion from the party’s rich, educated base or the politicians who represent them. (Indeed, one of the biggest obstacles to its enactment was West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who represents a much more working-class state than most of his Democratic colleagues and who switched his affiliation to independent this year.) Kamala Harris is now running on many of those same policies and, according to the polls, her support among college-educated voters is even higher than Joe Biden’s was in 2020.

A common complaint from the center and the right is that the influx of affluent, highly educated voters into the Democratic Party has caused it to focus primarily on culture-war issues instead of pocketbook economics. But when Hacker and his co-authors analyzed party platforms since 1980, they found that since the early 2000s the share dedicated to economic issues has steadily increased and that economic issues take up twice as much space as cultural issues. They reached a similar conclusion when looking at Twitter, where you’d most expect to see party elites pandering to the cultural tastes of their base. They looked at the tweets of high-ranking Democrats from 2015 to 2022 and found that nine of the 10 most frequently tweeted phrases were focused on economic issues, such as Build Back Better, Affordable Care Act, and American Rescue Plan; the only noneconomic issue in the top 10 was Roe v. Wade. (By contrast, just three of the top 10 Republican-used phrases referred to economic issues.) The authors also found that members representing wealthy districts were actually slightly more likely to discuss pocketbook issues such as economics and health care than members from poor districts.

The policies and rhetoric coming from party leaders reflect the fact that affluent liberal voters have moved well to the left on economic issues. A major survey conducted after the 2020 election found that overwhelming majorities of Democrats in the top fifth of income distribution favored raising the federal minimum wage, hiking taxes on individuals earning more than $600,000 a year, making college debt-free, and enacting Medicare for All. That’s similar or slightly higher than the support for those policies among poor and middle-income Democrats and anywhere from 20 to 40 points higher than support among low- and middle-income Republicans.

None of this means material self-interest doesn’t matter at all to affluent liberals. Some evidence suggests that although wealthy Democrats tend to support higher taxes in the abstract, they are less likely to support specific tax increases that affect them directly; they are also known to oppose new housing construction in their own neighborhoods that would make housing more affordable. But even those exceptions are less exceptional than they may appear. According to the survey cited above, a bare majority of the richest Democrats support raising taxes on individuals making more than $250,000. And during this campaign season, the leaders of the Democratic Party—including both Harris and former President Barack Obama—have trumpeted their support for building more housing.

The leftward drift of high-status voters is partly a story about a genuine ideological conversion. Since the 2008 financial crisis, politicians, academics, and the media have paid far more attention to how the existing economic system has produced inequality and hardship. Highly educated, affluent voters, who also tend to be the most plugged-in to national politics, seem to have responded to this shift by embracing more progressive economic views.

[David Deming: ]Break up big econ

The story is also about political strategy. After Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, many Democrats became convinced that the best way to win back disaffected working-class voters was to enact policies that would help them. Surveys consistently find that middle- and low-income Republicans strongly disagree with their own party leaders on most economic issues, creating a potential opening for Democrats.

The Biden agenda that was shaped by those views has largely produced its intended economic effects. Unemployment has fallen, wage inequality has shrunk, and hundreds of billions of investment dollars have poured into red states. Many of the country’s forgotten communities are making a strong comeback. Politically, however, the effort to win back working-class voters appears to have flopped: If polls are to be believed, the Democratic Party is bleeding working-class support more badly than it did in 2016 or 2020.

Part of that failure seems to be because, when it comes to the economy, many voters are concerned about high prices above all else and view Democrats as responsible for them. But there’s also compelling evidence that Republican voters aren’t particularly motivated by economic policy in the first place. That is, although they disagree with GOP politicians about health care, taxing the rich, and the minimum wage, they don’t much care about that disagreement. A recent paper by the political scientist William Marble analyzed nearly 200 survey questions going back decades and found that in the 1980s and ’90s, non-college-educated white voters were more likely to vote in accordance with their economic views, causing them to support Democrats. Since the early 2000s, however, that dynamic has inverted: Non-college-educated white voters now place a far greater emphasis on culture-war issues over economic ones, pushing them toward supporting Republicans.

That realignment leaves both parties in a strange place heading into November. Voters consistently say that the economy is the most important issue of the 2024 election. And yet the affluent overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris, whose administration favored bold redistribution and big government spending, while a critical mass of working-class voters favor Donald Trump, whose economic agenda consisted largely of cutting taxes for the rich and trying to kill the Affordable Care Act.

The irony is that the Biden administration’s economic-populist push implicitly assumed that the Marxist view of politics was correct all along. Democrats embraced an agenda that largely went against its voters’ immediate material interests in the hopes that they could win over less-wealthy voters by appealing to their material interests. But working-class Trump supporters, just like liberal elites, turn out to have other things on their mind.

In the final week of this election season, the Republican Party is running two different campaigns. One of them is an ugly and angry but conventional political enterprise. Donald Trump and other Republicans make speeches; party operatives seek to get out the vote; money is spent in swing states; television and radio advertisements proliferate. The people running that campaign are focused on winning the election.

Last night, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, we caught a glimpse of the other campaign. This is the campaign that is psychologically preparing Americans for an assault on the electoral system, a second January 6, if Trump doesn’t win—or else an assault on the political system and the rule of law if he does. Listen carefully to the words of Tucker Carlson, the pundit fired from Fox News partly for his role in lying about the 2020 election. Warming up the crowd for Trump, he mocked the very idea that Kamala Harris could win: “It’s going to be pretty hard to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s so impressive as the first Samoan Malaysian, low-I.Q., former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

“Samoan Malaysian” was Carlson’s way of mocking Harris’s mixed-race background, and “low-IQ” is self-explanatory—but “85 million” is a number of votes she could in fact win. And how, Carlson suggested, could there be such a “groundswell of popular support” for a person he demeaned as a mongrel, an incompetent, an idiot? The answer was clear: There can’t be, and if anyone says it happened, then we will contest it.

[Read: This is Trump’s message]

All of this is part of the game: the Trump campaign’s loud confidence, despite dead-even polls; its decision, in the final days, to take the candidate outside the swing states to New York, New Mexico, and Virginia, because we’ve got this in the bag (and not, say, because filling arenas in Pennsylvania is getting harder); the hyping of Republican-early-voter numbers, even though no evidence indicates that these are new voters, just people who are no longer being discouraged from voting early. Also the multiple attempts, across the country, to remove large numbers of people from the rolls; the many claims, with no justification, that “illegal immigrants” are voting or even, as Trump implied during the September debate, that illegal immigrants are being deliberately imported into the country in order to vote; Vance’s declaration that he will accept the election results as long as “only legal American citizens” vote.

At Madison Square Garden, Trump doubled down on that rhetoric. He repeated past claims about the “invasion” of immigrants; about “Venezuelan gangs” occupying American cities, even Times Square; and he offered an instant solution: “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get these criminals out. I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail.” But he left open the question of who exactly all these “criminals” might be, because he seemed to be talking about not just immigrants but also his political opponents, “the enemy within.” The United States, he said, “is now an occupied country, but it will soon be an occupied country no longer … November 5, 2024, nine days from now, will be Liberation Day in America.”

The insults we heard from many speakers at Madison Square Garden, including the description of Puerto Rico as “garbage” or of Harris as “the anti-Christ” or of Hillary Clinton as a “sick son of a bitch”—insults that can also be heard in a thousand podcast episodes featuring Carlson, Elon Musk, J. D. Vance, and their ilk—are part of the same effort. Trump’s electorate is being primed to equate his political opposition with infection, pollution, and demonic power, and to accept violence and chaos as a legitimate, necessary response to these primal, lethal threats.

As I wrote earlier this month, this kind of language, imported from the 1930s, has never before been part of mainstream American presidential politics, because no other political candidate in modern history has used an election to undermine the legal basis of the American political system. But if we are an occupied country, then Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president of the United States. If we are an occupied country, then the American government is not a set of institutions established over centuries by Congress, but rather a sinister cabal that must be dismantled at any price. If we are an occupied country, then of course the Trump administration can break the law, commit acts of violence, or even trash the Constitution in order to “liberate” Americans, either after Trump has lost the election or after he has won it.

[Read: Trump’s tariff talk might already be hurting the economy]

This kind of language is not being used accidentally or incidentally. It is not a joke, even when used by professional comedians. These insults are central to Trump’s message, which is why they were featured at a venue he reveres. They are also classic authoritarian tactics that have worked before, not only in the 1930s but also in places such as modern Venezuela and modern Russia, countries where the public was also prepared over many years to accept lawlessness and violence from the state. The same tactics are working in the United States right now. Election workers, whose job is to carry out the will of the voters, are already the subject of violent threats and harassment. At least two ballot boxes have been attacked.

The natural human instinct is to dismiss, ignore, or downplay these kinds of threats. But that’s the point: You are meant to accept this language and behavior, to consider this kind of rhetoric “baked in” to any Trump campaign. You are supposed to just get used to the idea that Trump wishes he had “Hitler’s generals” or that he uses the Stalinist phrase “enemies of the people” to describe his opponents. Because once you think that’s normal, then you’ll accept the next step. Even when that next step is an assault on democracy and the rule of law.

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

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

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

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

[Read: The power of oddball charm]

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

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

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

Is Election 2024 charisma versus charm?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, you get another form of magic with charm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Trump has turned over a new leaf]

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

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

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

In September, Secret Service agents apprehended a man carrying an AK-47-style gun near Donald Trump’s Palm Beach golf course—in an apparent attempt, the FBI concluded, to assassinate the former president. To some, the thwarted violence was a bleak testament to the times: one more reminder that politics, when approached as an endless war, will come with collateral damage. To Elon Musk, however, it was an opportunity. The billionaire, treating his control of X as a means of owning the libs, gave the Palm Beach news a MAGA-friendly twist. “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” Musk wrote on the platform, punctuating the line with a thinking-face emoji.

Musk was wrong—authorities have arrested several people for death threats made against the president and vice president—and he eventually deleted the post. But he did not apologize for the mistake. Instead, earlier this month, Musk used an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s X-based show as a chance to workshop the line. “Nobody’s even bothering to try to kill Kamala,” Musk told Carlson, “because it’s pointless. What do you achieve?”

At this, both men guffawed. Musk, having found an appreciative audience, kept going, finding new ways to suggest that the vice president was not worth the trouble of assassinating. Carlson’s reply: “That’s hilarious.”

First as tragedy, then as farce, the adage goes. If only the old order still applied. Not that long ago, public figures such as Carlson and Musk might have been embarrassed to be seen using political violence as a punch line. But embarrassment, these days, is a partisan affliction. It can ail only the soft, the sincere—the people willing to be caught caring in public. The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is dull. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol. Cynicism reigns.

[Read: Political violence feeds on itself]

Trump, that louche comedian, is partially to blame. His humor—some of it crude, some of it cruel, most of it treating politics and the people who engage in them as the butt of an endless joke—is more than a performance. It is also permission. Musk and Carlson laughed at the thought of Harris’s death both because they wanted to and because they knew they could. Trump and his crowbar will come for every Overton window. Now no claim is too much. No joke is too soon. Deportations, assassinations, the casual suggestion that America is due for its own version of Kristallnacht: Invoked as ideas and implications, they might be threats. They might be omens. For Trump and the many who humor him, though, they’re simply material—fodder for jokes in a set that never ends.

“Not The Onion,” people might warn one another on social media, as they share the video of Trump’s nearly 40-minute attempt to turn a town hall into a one-man dance party. “Beyond parody,” they might moan, as J. D. Vance spreads racist lies about immigrants snatching and eating their neighbors’ pets. The disclaimers are hardly necessary. Americans, whatever their political convictions, have become accustomed to politics that read as dark comedy—and to politicians who commit fully to the bit. These leaders don’t merely lie or misspeak or make light of life and death. To them, leadership itself is a joke. They’re trolling one another. They’re trolling us. They’ve made mischief a mandate.

Call it the trolligarchy—and have no doubt that its regime is inescapable. Trump says that if reelected he’ll be a dictator on “day one” and then insists that he’s only joking. Under Musk, X’s email for press inquiries auto-responds to reporters’ questions with a poop emoji. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a congressional seat in Georgia by turning trolling into a campaign strategy, has been using the House bill-amendment process as an opportunity for cheap acts of score-settling. In a proposed amendment to a bill meant to allocate funding to aid Ukraine as it defends itself against Russia’s invasion, she stipulated, among other things, that any colleague who voted for it would be conscripted into Ukraine’s military.

“Messaging bills” may be fairly common among politicians seeking new ways to rack up political points. And Greene’s amendment was roundly defeated. Her stunt, though, wrote tragedy and farce into the congressional record. Roll Call, reporting on it, quoted social-media posts from Matt Glassman, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute. There have “always been chucklehead Members of the House,” Glassman wrote of Greene’s antics. “But the prominence of many of the chuckleheads in the GOP and the ever-increasing general level of chucklehead behavior worries me.”

Life under the trolligarchy requires constant acts of micro-translation: Did she mean it? Was he joking? Were they lying? The lulz, as a result, can be exhausting. The scholar Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, analyzing fMRI studies that illustrate how the brain processes jokes, argues that humor can impose a cognitive tax. Jokes, for all their delights, ask more of their audiences than other forms of discourse do: They require more split-second parsing, more energy, more work. And a troll is a joke unhinged—which makes it extra taxing. Its terms are particularly murky. Its claims are especially suspect. Under its influence, the old categories fail. Nihilism takes over. Fatigue sets in. Sincerity and irony, like stars whose centers cannot hold, collapse into each other.

Humor is an age-old political tradition—Common Sense, the pamphlet that persuaded many Americans to become revolutionaries, was powerful in part because it was often quite funny—but trolling, as a mode of political engagement, is not comedy. It is its antithesis. Nazis of both the past and present have tried to hide in plain sight by characterizing their racism as merely ironic. As The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum wrote in a 2017 essay, jokes deployed as rhetoric played a crucial role in helping Trump win the presidency.

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

Since then, the trolling has only intensified. But it has also become—in a twist that can read as a cosmic kind of troll—ever more banal. In 2008, The New York Times published “The Trolls Among Us,” a lengthy introduction to a subculture that was then emerging from the dark recesses of the internet. The article is remarkably prescient. It treats trolling as a novelty but frames it as a new moral problem. It parses the cruelty that has become a standard feature of online engagement. But it was also written when trolls’ power was relatively contained. Trolling, today, having slipped the surly bonds of 4chan, is no longer subculture. It is culture.

Many trolls of the early internet hid behind pseudonyms and anonymity; they largely performed for one another rather than for a mass audience. But trolling, as a political style, demands credit for the chaos it sows. Trump, the “troll in chief,” channels that status as brand identity. He will happily lie, his followers know; maybe he’ll lie on their behalf. He will trick his opponents. He will set traps. He will reveal his rivals’ foolishness. He will humiliate them. That old Times article captured one of the abiding ironies of this brave new mode of digital engagement. Trolling may manifest as pranks. But many practitioners insist that their hijinks have ethical ends. Trolls claim to be puncturing pieties, saving the sanctimonious from themselves. They’re righting social wrongs as they subject “elites” to a barrage of corrective humiliations meant to reveal empathy and equality and other such values as nothing more than smug little lies.

Trolling, in that way, can be self-rationalizing, and therefore particularly powerful when its logic comes for our politics. Trump once gave a speech in the rain and then bragged about the sun shining down on his performance. His bravado was propaganda in its most basic and recognizable form—overt, insistent, blunt. It did what propaganda typically will, imposing its preferred reality onto the one that actually exists. But the lie was also so casual, so basic, so fundamentally absurd—even the heavens, Trump says, will do his bidding—that it barely registered as propaganda at all.

[Read: The slop candidate]

Trump came of age as a public figure in the 1980s, long before irony was alleged to have died—a time, on the contrary, when cynicism had become cultural currency. It was a period when earnestness, or at least the appearance of it, was curdling into a liability. Trump has taken the irony-infused assumptions of those years and used them as tools of power. His lies invade and destroy, trampling the truths that stand in their way with casual, cunning brutality. But Trump’s jokes can be similarly, if more subtly, ruinous. A troll reserves the right, always, to be kidding—even about matters of life and death.

That attitude, once it takes hold of the body politic, spreads rapidly. People talk about “irony poisoning” because irony, in the end, has so few antidotes. Greene’s attempt to troll her colleagues as they determined aid to Ukraine led to several more proposed amendments—this time from Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic representative from Florida. One proposed to appoint Greene as “Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.” Another suggested renaming Greene’s office for Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who is widely denigrated for his appeasement of Hitler.

Recommending that a congressional office be called the Neville Chamberlain Room may not be a great joke; it’s even worse, though, as a mode of government. Democracy is an earnest enterprise: It requires us—challenges us—to care. It assumes that people will disagree, about the small things and the big ones. It further assumes that they will settle differences through acts of debate. But cynicism makes argument impossible. “How do you fight an enemy who’s just kidding?” Nussbaum asked in her 2017 essay, and the question still has no good answer. The old insult comic remains onstage, serving up the same routine to a crowd that cackles and roars. He’ll roast anyone in his path. He’ll soak up the applause. He’ll trust that, in all the levity, people will miss the obvious: When the comedy keeps punching down, anyone can become the butt of the joke.

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Yesterday, The Atlantic published another astonishing story by editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg about Trump’s hatred of the military. The reporting included, among other things, the retired general and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly confirming on the record that “Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country,” a fact that Goldberg had first reported in September 2020. (Team Trump, unsurprisingly, continues to deny the story.) Not long after the publication of yesterday’s article, The New York Times published excerpts from interviews with Kelly in which Kelly said—on tape, no less—that Trump fits the definition of a fascist.

Like many of Trump’s critics, I’ve repeatedly asked one question over the years: What’s it going to take? When will Republican leaders and millions of Trump voters finally see the immorality of supporting such a man? Surely, with these latest revelations, we’ve reached the Moment, the Turning Point, the Line in the Sand, right?

Wrong. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu—one of the many former Trump critics now back on the Trump train—said today on CNN in response to a question about Kelly’s comments: “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.”

The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about—in this case fellow citizens—associate with someone you know to be awful. Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does: Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.

But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy. Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor—think a cross between Herb Tarlek and David Duke—who tells offensive stories and racist jokes. She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.

But what she really enjoys, all these years after high school, is how uncomfortable he’s making you.

And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)

Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.

Exactly why so many Americans feel this way is a complicated story—I wrote an entire book about it—but a toxic combination of social resentment, entitlement, and racial insecurity drives many Trump voters to believe not only that other Americans are looking down on them but that they are doing so while living an undeservedly good life. These others must be punished or at least brought down to a common level of misery to balance the scales, and Trump is the guy to do it.

This unfocused rage is an addiction fed by Trump and conservative media, and the MAGA base wants it stoked continuously. If Trump were suddenly to become a sensible person who started talking coherently about trade policy and defense budgets, they would feel betrayed, like hard drinkers in a tavern who suspect that the bartender is watering down the high-proof stuff. My friend Jonathan Last—the editor of The Bulwark—has been wondering about this same problem, and says that some Trump supporters “are not (yet) comfortable with admitting this truth to themselves.”

He believes that most of them are either caught in a comforting blanket of denial or the fog of detached nihilism. I’m not so sure. I am struck by how often Trump voters—and I am speaking here of rank-and-file voters, not crass opportunists such as Sununu or wealthy wingmen such as Elon Musk—are almost incapable of articulating support for Trump without reference to what Trump will do to other people or without descending into “whataboutism” about Harris. (Yes, Trump said bad things, but what about Harris’s position on gender-affirming medical care for federal prisoners, as if liberal policies are no different from, say, threats to use the military against American citizens.)

Where all of this leaves us is that Harris could lose the election, not because she didn’t offer the right policies, or give enough interviews, or inspire enough people. She could lose because just enough people in four or five states flatly don’t care about any of that.

Some voters, to be sure, have bought into the mindless tropes that Democrats are communists or Marxists or some other term they don’t understand. But the truly loyal Trump voters are people who are burning with humiliation. They can’t get over the trauma of losing in 2020, the shame of buying Trump’s lie about rigged elections, and the shock of seeing each of their champions—Tucker Carlson, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and others—turn out to be liars and charlatans who have been fired, financially imperiled, or even imprisoned.

Rather than reckoning with the greatest mistake they’ve ever made at the ballot box, they have decided that their only recourse is to put Trump back in the Oval Office. For them, restoring Trump would be both vindication and vengeance. It would prove that 2016 was not a fluke, and horrify people both they and Trump hate.

I am not hopeful that Democrats will rally in large enough numbers to prevent this outcome. Harris’s campaign has wisely avoided a slew of traps and pitfalls, but too many Democrats are reverting to form, complaining about wonky intraparty policy differences while Trump fulminates against democracy itself. (Some of the nation’s media outlets have contributed to this sense of complacency by “sanewashing” Trump’s most unhinged moments.) I am also not sure that swing voters will really swing against Trump, but one ray of hope is that revelations from people like Kelly do seem to matter: A new analysis indicates that voters trust criticism from Trump’s former colleagues and allies more than standard political zingers from the opposition.

I genuinely want to be wrong about all this. I hope that many of the people now supporting Trump will have an attack of conscience on their way to their polling station. But as Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, once wrote for The Atlantic, Trump is “cultural heroin,” and the hard choice of civic virtue will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.

Related:

Trump: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Donald Trump’s fascist romp

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The three factors that will decide the election The positions that the Democrats won’t defend Why people itch and how to stop it

Today’s News

In response to comments that the former Trump chief of staff John Kelly made to The New York Times, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that President Joe Biden believes that Donald Trump is a fascist. An estimated 3,000 North Korean soldiers arrived in Russia this month, according to the White House. Their role in the region remains unclear. At least five people died and 22 people were injured at the headquarters of a Turkish state-run military manufacturer, in what Turkish officials described as a “terrorist attack.”

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Tuition-free medical school might be making health-care inequality worse, Rose Horowitch writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jackie Carlise

ChatGPT Doesn’t Have to Ruin College

By Tyler Austin Harper

Two of them were sprawled out on a long concrete bench in front of the main Haverford College library, one scribbling in a battered spiral-ring notebook, the other making annotations in the white margins of a novel. Three more sat on the ground beneath them, crisscross-applesauce, chatting about classes …

I said I was sorry to interrupt them, and they were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t. I explained that I’m a writer, interested in how artificial intelligence is affecting higher education, particularly the humanities. When I asked whether they felt that ChatGPT-assisted cheating was common on campus, they looked at me like I had three heads.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Read. These are six political memoirs that are actually worth reading, Franklin Foer writes.

Debate. Are obscure meme costumes sucking the joy out of Halloween?

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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For all the upheaval that followed the overturn of Roe v. Wade, it did not dramatically change the most basic fact about abortions in America: the number. Since 2022, abortions in the United States have held steady—even increased slightly, based on the best of limited data. One major reason? The rise of abortion pills, which are now used in the majority of abortions in America. Every month, thousands of women in states where abortion is banned have been able to discreetly order the pills by mail and take them at home. Even with abortion bans in place, the availability of these pills makes these rules less absolute than the anti-abortion movement would like.

“Abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world,” according to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy playbook. They are “death by mail,” according to Students for Life; Kristan Hawkins, the organization’s president, told me that “it’s a travesty what has unfolded under the Biden-Harris FDA.” And the anti-abortion movement is formulating plans to target the pills through a number of legal and political avenues—some of which could apply regardless of who is elected president next month.

Abortion pills had accounted for a steadily growing share of abortions in the U.S. for years, but in 2021, the FDA made them significantly easier to obtain: The pills are actually two different drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol, and the agency nixed a long-standing requirement to prescribe mifepristone only in person. With that, abortion pills became available by mail. The FDA cited COVID-related risks in its 2021 decision, but anti-abortion advocates immediately decried the move—and the policy has remained in place beyond the pandemic. After the overturning of Roe in 2022, 21 states passed new abortion bans or restrictions, but more than a dozen states, including New York and California, took steps to keep abortion pills available by mail, even in restricted states, by passing “shield laws.” These laws explicitly protect doctors, midwives, and nurse practitioners who use telehealth to prescribe the pills by mail across state lines.

Since then, an average of 6,000 to 7,000 people a month living in states with complete or six-week bans have been able to get abortion pills via telehealth, according to data from the Society for Family Planning, which surveys abortion providers in the United States. This number does not include people who had an abortion outside the formal health-care system, for instance by using pills ordered from overseas. And in states where abortion remains legal, the number of abortions—and the proportion involving abortion pills—also rose from 2020 to 2023, according to Guttmacher Institute data. (The number of women traveling to other states for abortions also doubled in this time, which is another reason abortions have not significantly fallen post-Roe.)

“The anti-abortion movement hasn’t quite figured out what to do with this,” says Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who helped draft the nation’s first shield law. The shield laws have not yet been directly challenged in court. And when anti-abortion groups tried to go after the FDA’s original approval of mifepristone via a lawsuit, the Supreme Court dismissed the case this year for lack of standing.

Still, last week, three states—Missouri, Kansas, and Idaho—sought to revive that case, asking courts to reinstate certain restrictions on mifepristone. And although a President Kamala Harris would be likely to stick to the current FDA policy for abortion pills, a Trump administration could change those policies directly. It could, as my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, curtail access to mifepristone simply by reinstating the in-person requirement for dispensing the drug—or just pull the FDA’s approval of mifepristone altogether. (In August, Donald Trump expressed openness to cracking down on abortion pills; his running mate, J. D. Vance, walked that position back a few days later.) Anti-abortion activists are hoping that Trump will enforce the long-dormant Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of material “intended for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral use.” This could criminalize the mailing of abortion pills, even without the passage of a federal abortion ban, though anti-abortion activists have also suggested that Trump keep quiet about Comstock until he wins. (Trump, for his part, refused to share his views on the Comstock Act for months, before finally saying that he would not enforce it.)

Regardless of who becomes president, the anti-abortion movement is devising ways to restrict abortion pills through state governments too. Shield laws, for example, could be directly challenged if a red-state prosecutor goes after a doctor prescribing the pills from a shield-law state. Linda Prine, a doctor with the nonprofit Aid Access, which sends pills to states with abortion bans, told me she no longer leaves her home state of New York. Providers working under shield laws, she said, are all being “super careful.”

Anti-abortion groups could also test the limits of shield laws in more indirect ways. In Texas, says John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, pro-abortion groups have put up billboards advertising abortion pills: “You can go to people putting up the billboard. That’s aiding and abetting.” His group has also encouraged Texas lawmakers to introduce new laws that create liability for internet-service providers or credit-card-processing companies involved in abortion-pill transactions.

In Louisiana, where abortion is already banned, a law went into effect this month further restricting both mifepristone and misoprostol as “controlled dangerous substances.” The law is named after a Louisiana woman whose husband secretly slipped misoprostol into her drinks, and anti-abortion activists have used cases like hers to argue that the pills need more regulation. “A faceless, doctorless process to obtain abortion drugs enables abusers to poison or coerce women and girls,” Emily Davis, the vice president of communications for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement. But the law is also affecting routine medical care unrelated to abortion: The two drugs are commonly used in miscarriage and postpartum management, and hospitals in Louisiana have been doing timed drills to make sure staff can quickly access the locked closets where the medications now need to be kept.

Anti-abortion groups are also trying creative approaches to regulating abortion pills—such as through environmental regulations. Hawkins told me that Students for Life will be working with state legislatures next year on laws such as those requiring the disposal of fetal tissue from abortions as medical waste. These laws are designed to put the onus on the provider of abortion pills—presumably a doctor operating under a shield law—and states could then go after the provider for environmental-cleanup fees or fines, Kristi Hamrick, the organization’s vice president of media and policy, told me.

The new prevalence of abortion pills has opened up a new frontier, and the political and legal fights ahead may look quite different from those in the past. “We innovate, and we keep coming back. Our work is definitely just beginning,” Hawkins said. Seago, in Texas, told me he does not expect every attempt to restrict abortion pills to work. In the decades before Roe was overturned, he said, states introduced a number of different restrictions to limit access to abortion. Some worked. Some didn’t. With abortion pills, he told me, “we’re not expecting a silver bullet.” But activists like him are demanding that lawmakers try to stop their use nonetheless.

Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience. “FEMA was so good with me,” he said at one point. “I defeated ISIS,” he added later. “I’m the father of IVF,” he claimed, with no further explanation.

The former president set a boastful tone early. The Fox News moderator, Harris Faulkner, told Trump that the Democrats were so worried about the town hall that the party had staged a “prebuttal” to the event, featuring Georgia’s two Democratic senators and the family of Amber Thurman, who died after having to leave the state to access abortion care. “We’ll get better ratings, I promise,” Trump replied, smirking. (Finally, someone willing to tell grief-stricken relatives to jazz it up a little.)

This event was supposed to involve Trump reaching beyond his comfort zone, after he had spent the past few weeks shoring up his advantage with men by embarking on a tour of bro podcasts. But these women were extremely friendly—suspiciously so. CNN later reported that Republican women’s groups had packed it with Trump supporters. Still, even in this gentle setting, the former president blustered, evaded questions, and contradicted himself.  

[Read: The women Trump is winning]

This election cycle has been dominated by podcast interviews with softball questions, but the Fox town hall reveals that the Trump campaign still believes that the legacy media can impart a useful sheen of gravitas, objectivity, and trustworthiness. If a candidate can get that without actually facing tough questions or a hostile audience, then so much the better. Why complain about “fake news” when you can make it? Thanks to Fox, Trump could court female voters without the risk of encountering any “nasty women”—or revealing his alienating, chauvinist side. (Fox did not respond to CNN’s questions about the event.)

This has been called the “boys vs. girls election”: Kamala Harris leads significantly among women, and Trump among men; in the final stretch of the campaign, though, each is conspicuously trying to reach the other half of the electorate. Hence Harris’s decision to release an “opportunity agenda for Black men”—including business loans, crypto protections, and the legalization of marijuana—and talk to male-focused outlets such as All the Smoke, Roland Martin Unfiltered, The Shade Room, and Charlamagne Tha God’s radio program.

For Trump, the main strategic aim of the Georgia town hall was surely to reverse out of his party’s unpopular positions on abortion and IVF. The former drew the most pointed question. “Women are entitled to do what they want to and need to do with their bodies, including their unborn—that’s on them,” a woman who identified herself as Pamela from Cumming asked. “Why is the government involved in women’s basic rights?”

This was the only time the former president made an attempt at being statesmanlike, focusing on the topic at hand rather than his personal grievances or dire warnings about immigration. The subject had been rightfully returned to the states, Trump maintained, and many had liberalized their regimes thanks to specific legislation and ballot measures. Some of the anti-abortion laws enacted elsewhere, he allowed, were “too tough, too tough.” He personally believed in exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother. This unusual clarity suggests that his strategists have hammered into him that the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has repelled swing voters. He took credit, though in a peculiar way, for saving IVF in Alabama after that state’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos should be regarded as children. In his telling, he was alerted to the situation by Senator Katie Britt, whom he described as “a young—just a fantastically attractive person—from Alabama.” He put out a statement supporting IVF, and the legislature acted quickly to protect it. “We really are the party for IVF,” he added. “We want fertilization.”

[Read: The people waiting for the end of IVF]

Others dispute Trump’s account, and his claims to moderation on reproductive issues yesterday weren’t entirely convincing. (Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term that was compiled by many of his allies, calls for a raft of restrictions on abortion.) But at least it was something close to a direct answer. The first questioner, Lisa from Milton—whom CNN later identified as the president of Fulton County Republican Women—asked Trump about the economy. She got the briefest mention of the “liquid gold” underneath America, which will allegedly solve its economic problems. Then Trump segued into musing about his “favorite graph”—the one on illegal immigration that supposedly saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania.

To give Faulkner some credit, she did try to return the conversation to reality at several points, with vibe-killing questions such as “And we can pay for that?” (That was in response to Trump’s suggestion that he would cut tax on benefits for seniors. Trump sailed on without acknowledging it.) He told Linda, also from Milton, that transgender women competing in female sports was “crazy,” ruefully shaking his head. “We’re not going to let it happen,” he added.

“How do you stop it?” Faulkner asked. “Do you go to the sports leagues?”

Nothing so complicated! “You just ban it,” he said. “The president bans it. You just don’t let it happen.” Now, the U.S. commander in chief might oversee the world’s biggest military and its largest economy, but he or she is not currently charged with setting the rules of Olympic boxing.

Next up was a single mom, Rachel, struggling with the cost of daycare. She was visibly emotional as she stood at the mic. “You have a beautiful voice, by the way,” Trump said, to put her at ease. In response to Rachel’s question about how her child tax credit had decreased, he mentioned his daughter Ivanka, who, he said “drove me crazy” about the issue. “She said, Dad, we have to do tax credits for women. The child tax credits. She was driving me crazy.” (Typical woman, always banging on about economic freedom this and reproductive rights that.) “Then I did it, and I got it just about done, and she said: Dad, you’ve got to double it up.” He noted that fellow Republicans had told him he would get no gratitude for this, and then promised Rachel that he would “readjust things.”

[Read: Trump called Harris ‘beautiful.’ Now he has a problem.]

Audience members seemed not to mind that there was only the vaguest relationship between many of their questions and the former president’s eventual answers. (Contrast that with Bloomberg News’s interview the day before, in which the editor in chief, John Micklethwait, rebuked Trump for referring to “Gavin Newscum” and dragged him back from a riff about voter fraud with the interjection: “The question is about Google.”) Some solid objects did appear through the mist, however. Trump promised an end to “sanctuary cities” and a 50 percent reduction in everyone’s energy bills, and he defended his “enemies from within” comments as a “pretty good presentation.”

Much like a toddler, Trump occasionally said something insightful in a naive and entirely unselfconscious manner. Talking about Aurora, Colorado, where he and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have claimed that Venezuelan gangs are running rampant—a claim that the city’s mayor has called “grossly exaggerated”—a brief cloud of empathy passed across the former president’s face. “They’ve taken over apartment buildings,” he said. “They’re in the real-estate business, just like I am.” (So true: The industry does attract some unsavory characters.) Later, talking about the number of court cases filed against him, Trump observed, “They do phony investigations. I’ve been investigated more than Alphonse Capone.” Sorry? Had someone left a pot of glue open near the stage? Did the former president really just compare himself to a big-time criminal who was notoriously convicted only of his smaller offenses?

And then, all too soon, the allotted hour was up. Fox, according to CNN, edited out at least one questioner’s enthusiastic endorsement of Trump. Even so, it was obvious that the ex-president’s many partisans at the event enjoyed themselves. Before asking about foreign policy, the last questioner, Alicia from Fulton County, thanked Trump for coming into “a roomful of women that the current administration would consider domestic terrorists.” (“That’s true,” he replied.) But had undecided women watching at home learned anything more about Trump that might inform their vote? No. Did they at least have a good time? Probably not.

You can’t blame Mike Pence for wanting to keep his head down in this presidential election, given that he nearly had his head in a noose after the last one.

“I’m staying out of this race,” Pence said plaintively—more plaintively even than usual—in a rare interview with Lyndsay Keith on something called Merit Street Media (founded, apparently, by Dr. Phil). Pence sat stiffly, and his voice was hushed and dramatic, as it typically is. He was repeating what he has said before: that he could not support Donald Trump after everything the former president had done, and that he could never back Kamala Harris, either, because of what he holds sacred—namely “the sanctity of life,” which is the “calling of our time.”

“I’ve made it clear I won’t be endorsing,” he reiterated. “How I vote, I will keep to myself.”

But it’s not so simple for Pence. He can try to opt out, but his ordeal inevitably makes him an inescapable figure in this cliff-hanger for American democracy.

At so many turns, his absence has spoken louder than his presence ever could. He is a reminder of Trump’s abject indecency, the former president’s pitiless trampling of norms and the consequence-free zone afforded him by the Republican Party and the Supreme Court.

[Read: How Jack Smith outsmarted the Supreme Court]

“Well, it’s a shame,” Trump said in a recent interview, in an answer to a question about Pence. He conveyed not a speck of regret about Pence, only grievance, as he does. Trump started talking about January 6, 2021, that most fateful day of choosing for his most slavishly devoted of deputies. No one did complete submission to Trump like Pence did—right up until he chose fealty to the Constitution over the wishes of “my president,” as Pence used to refer to Trump (also: “this extraordinary man,” paragon of “broad-shouldered leadership”). “He couldn’t cross the line of doing what was right,” Trump lamented. He also allowed that Pence was a “good man.” They’d had a “very good relationship.” In the end, though, Pence lacked the “courage” and “stamina” to do Trump’s ultimate bidding—for which many thought he should pay the ultimate price.

“So what?” Trump was saying in the Oval Office while rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol. This latest detail was dropped into the delirium bowl by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s recent court filing in the January 6 case. In a rational world, this would be a bombshell—another example of Trump’s callous dereliction, his willingness to leave his deputy to a hanging mob of his own supporters.

But “so what?” pretty much summed up Americans’ response to this latest October non-surprise.

“So what” about Mike Pence? He can’t help but remain—the specter of him, if not the man himself. “When Mike Pence made that decision to certify that election, that’s why Mike Pence isn’t on this stage,” Tim Walz said, taunting his counterpart, J. D. Vance, in their debate.

Democrats like to point out that even Trump’s own vice president won’t support him. Remarkable, right? It should be, yes—it should speak volumes about Trump. Except: So what? Republican voters keep speaking their own volumes about Trump and keep nominating him. They keep proving, if more proof was needed, that Trump is a special case.

From the start, it was a bit of a mystery with Pence: how this most ostentatiously virtuous of Christians could affix himself to one of the most vulgar creatures ever to soil our public stage. Sure, ambition, opportunism, a mansion and a big plane—great. But how did Pence even get past, say, the Access Hollywood tape in 2016? His approach was essentially to swallow everything—all of the cruelty, crassness, and chaos from Trump—in the belief that this presidency would be a boon to the far-right policies that Pence had spent decades yearning for. He went along to get what he needed and to keep the peace with the boss, until he no longer could.

“Pence is always going to occupy this complex, almost unfathomable place,” the presidential historian Ted Widmer of the City University of New York told me. A speechwriter in the Clinton White House, Widmer has written several books on American democracy, leaders, and campaigns. He says that by standing firm against Trump on January 6, Pence ensured himself a kind of historical purgatory. “Nobody was as true blue of a Republican or loyal vice president as Pence was,” Widmer said. “Everything could have turned out so perfectly for him.” His refusal to help Trump thwart the will of American voters “might buy Pence whatever the historian’s version of a mulligan is,” Widmer told me. “But it is also the same thing that was unforgivable in Trump’s moral universe.”

Pence rarely talks about the day that will always define him. If it comes up, he prefers to frame January 6 as “a disagreement” that he had with Trump over what authority a vice president had (or clearly did not have) to challenge the certification of Electoral College votes. In the end, he declared his allegiance to an even higher authority than Trump. “I’ve always said that the safest place in the world is to be at the center of God’s will,” Pence said.

He likes to remind people that he and Trump spoke several times in the final, post-insurrection days of their administration. “We parted amicably,” he said in the Merit Street Media interview, adding that Trump “told me in the Oval Office with many present that he thought I’d done a great job.” Also, Pence said, Trump thanked him on the tarmac of Andrews Air Force Base. And they’d spoken often by phone in the days after he left office.

“But there was something in the early days of the spring of 2021 where he seemed to shift back,” Pence told Keith. Pence said he then concluded that, “like the Bible says, at some point, you’ve just got to wipe the dust off your feet and go your own separate ways.”

In so much as Pence is willing to discuss his breakup with Trump, he tends to focus on how the former president has abandoned the conservative positions that they championed in office. This particularly relates to abortion, but extends to a broader betrayal: “I’ve literally seen him walking away from strong American leadership on the world stage. I’ve seen him marginalize the right to life, and even parrot Democrats when it comes to the crisis facing our children and grandchildren in the National Debt,” Pence told Keith.

“When you now see Trump separating from Pence, it’s not just [Trump] going back to being pro-abortion,” Marc Short, Pence’s former vice-presidential chief of staff, who remains one of Pence’s closest advisers and confidants, told me. “It’s Trump moving away from the free-trader Mike Pence, who is also anti-tax and anti-tariff, and who would not abandon Ukraine.”

[Read: The Christian radicals are coming]

As for January 6, it has become something of a gateway drug. If Trump can be forgiven for that, what would his supporters not tolerate? Whether or not he ever gets convicted for it, Trump’s ability to overcome that day politically has come to represent its own get-out-of-jail-free card. What’s a little wobbliness on abortion?

“Once Republicans decide to condone Trump going the wrong way on the rule of law,” Short said, it becomes possible to rationalize all manner of ideological trespass. “I do think for a lot of people, once you’ve crossed that bridge, set aside your oath to the Constitution,” Short told me—“when you have violated what you know to be true—you figure that you might as well go all in.”

Friends of Pence say that many Republicans, including Trump supporters, will often express support for him. They tell him he is a good man, and they respect what he did, and that it’s unfair how he’s been treated. But these conversations almost always happen in private. They would never say as much in public—for fear, of course, of crossing Trump.

Where does that leave Pence, a Christian conservative in a GOP now governed by one man’s impulses? In powerful circles of the party, Pence remains a pariah. “Judas Pence is a dead man walking with MAGA,” Steve Bannon told The New York Times in June. If Trump wins, maybe he softens and absolves his former vice president, who did nearly everything he asked. If nothing else, Pence will endure as the cautionary scoundrel of the Trump age: one who was loyal to the bitter end, and barely lived to tell about it.