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The phrase election integrity sounds noble on its face. But in recent years, election deniers have used it to lay the groundwork for challenging the results of the 2024 election.

A few months after Donald Trump took office in 2017, he signed an executive order establishing the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” The Brennan Center for Justice wrote at the time that “there is strong reason to suspect this Commission is not a legitimate attempt to study elections, but is rather a tool for justifying discredited claims of widespread voter fraud and promoting vote suppression legislation.” That proved prescient. Although there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2016 or 2020 elections—or in any other recent elections, for that matter—Trump and his allies have fomented the narrative that such interference is a real problem in America, employing it in the illegal attempt to overturn the 2020 election and their reported plans to claim that the 2024 race is rigged.

As part of this strategy, right-wing activists and lawyers have organized initiatives under the auspices of election integrity, warping the meaning of those words to sow distrust. Through her Election Integrity Network, the right-wing activist Cleta Mitchell has been recruiting people—including election deniers who will likely continue to promote disinformation and conspiracy theories—to become poll workers and monitors, in an effort that was reportedly coordinated with members of the Republican National Committee. Poll watching in itself is a timeworn American practice, although it has been misused in the past; now, however, election-denial groups are sending participants to polling places under the presumption that fraud is taking place.

More recently, Elon Musk—in addition to his own brazen efforts to get Trump reelected—has invited X users to report activity they see as suspicious through an “Election Integrity Community” feed, an effort almost certain to trigger a flood of misinformation on the platform. In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Election Integrity Unit has gone to great lengths to seek evidence of fraud; in one case, nine armed officers reportedly appeared with a search warrant at the door of a woman who had been working with a Latino civil-rights organization to help veterans and seniors register to vote.

The RNC, especially under the influence of its co-chair Lara Trump, has taken up “election integrity” as an explicit priority: As she said at a GOP event over the summer, “we are pulling out all the stops, and we are so laser-focused on election integrity.” Her team created an election-integrity program earlier this year and hired Christina Bobb, who was later indicted for efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Arizona (she has denied wrongdoing), as its lead election-integrity lawyer. As The New Yorker reported earlier this month, the RNC plans to staff a “war room” with attorneys operating an “election-integrity hotline” on Election Day. Such initiatives have helped inject doubt into a legitimate process. Despite the clear lack of evidence to suggest fraud is likely in this election, nearly 60 percent of Americans already say they’re concerned or very concerned about it, according to a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll; 88 percent of Trump supporters said they were concerned about fraud (compared with about 30 percent of Kamala Harris supporters).

The “consistent, disciplined, repetitive use” of the term election integrity in this new context is “designed to confuse the public,” Alice Clapman, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Voting Rights Program, told me. A sad irony, she added, is that those who use this framing have done so to push for restrictions that actually suppress voting, including strict voter-ID laws and limitations on early ballots, or to threaten the existence of initiatives to ensure fair voting. Many of the same activists promoting “election integrity,” including Cleta Mitchell, organized a misinformation campaign to undermine a bipartisan state-led initiative called the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was created in 2012 to ensure that voter rolls were accurate. Multiple states eventually left the compact.

The term election integrity isn’t entirely new—Google Trends data suggest that its usage has bubbled up around election years in recent decades. But its prominence has exploded since 2020, and the strong associations with election denial in recent years means that other groups have backed away from it. “Like so much charged language in American politics, when one side really seizes on a term and uses it in a loaded way,” it becomes “a partisan term,” Clapman told me. Now groups unaffiliated with the right are turning to more neutral language such as voter protection and voter security to refer to their efforts to ensure free elections.

Election deniers are chipping away at Americans’ shared understanding of reality. And as my colleague Ali Breland wrote yesterday, violent rhetoric and even political violence in connection with the election have already begun. This month so far, a man has punched a poll worker after being asked to remove his MAGA hat, and hundreds of ballots have been destroyed in fires on the West Coast. Election officials are bracing for targeted attacks in the coming days—and some have already received threats. If Trump loses, the right will be poised—under the guise of “election integrity”—to interfere further with the norms of American democracy.

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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.