Shifting demographics and a growing number of ‘unaffiliated’ voters have transformed North Carolina into a swing state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photographs by Mike Belleme

Gaston County, North Carolina, is not an obvious place to look for Democrats. Just a few miles east is Charlotte, one of the state’s Democratic strongholds, but suburban Gaston hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976, when the South threw its weight behind Jimmy Carter. In recent years, the high-water mark is Barack Obama’s 37 percent vote share in his first election. In 2020, it was one of President Donald Trump’s last campaign stops as he worked to juice turnout. Gastonia, the county seat, has a Republican mayor, a majority-GOP city council, and a statue of the Ten Commandments outside city hall.

And yet, on a Friday morning this month, a few dozen supporters and volunteers were gathered outside a Democratic field office in Gastonia, dancing to Aretha Franklin and revved up to hear from Harry Dunn and Aquilino Gonell, two former officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear. The setting wasn’t dazzling—like many campaign offices, it’s in a dingy old building available for a short-term lease—but it’s one of 29 field offices for Kamala Harris’s campaign across the state, and its existence is a sign of a new Democratic strategy: the idea that by pouring energy into red counties, they can turn out a previously untapped vein of Democratic voters, and win the Old North State for the first time in 16 years.

[Read: The surreal experience of being a Republican at the DNC]

This requires a certain amount of optimism. Being a Democrat in Gaston County is “tough,” county party chair David Wilson Brown told me. He’d know: He ran two quixotic campaigns for U.S. House in the area. “We were thrilled when we found out that they wanted to base here,” he said of the national and state parties. “I’m thrilled that they’re paying attention here.”

North Carolina is sometimes discussed as a state split along urban (Democratic) and rural (Republican) lines, but that’s too crude a division. Places like Gaston represent a crucial third category. Mac McCorkle, a professor at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy and a Democratic strategist unaffiliated with the Harris campaign, has identified 28 counties that he calls “countrypolitan,” borrowing a term from 1970s country music. (I teach journalism as an adjunct at Duke.) Sometimes called exurban, these places are technically defined as metropolitan, but their heritage is rural. “People have memories and nostalgia. They still want to think they’re in a small town,” McCorkle told me. “That’s why they don’t live in Charlotte. They want the values to be that way.”

Volunteers making calls at the Gaston County Democratic Party headquarters, in Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden won North Carolina’s 10 biggest counties decisively, while Trump won rural counties easily. But Trump’s victory in the state—by 1.34 percent, or fewer than 75,000 votes—was decided in the countrypolitan counties, where he captured 63 percent of the vote. Democrats have no hope of winning these counties, but they need to lose them by less to take the state overall. It’s here, not in rural areas, where North Carolina will be won and lost.

For years, Democrats in North Carolina and elsewhere have tried to win by running up the score in cities. That strategy helped deliver Georgia to Biden in 2020, but it has limits. Even when it works—and it has sputtered in Charlotte, as Politico’s Michael Kruse writes—it offers a single, narrow path to victory. It also all but relinquishes many more local races, helping Republicans win a supermajority in the state legislature, despite a Democratic governor. “The idea that we can keep squeezing more and more votes out of Raleigh and Charlotte—I wanted to squeeze the turnip as much as you can, but I’m just worried that that doesn’t get” enough votes, McCorkle told me.

So why now? Countrypolitan counties aren’t what they used to be. North Carolina’s population is becoming more racially diverse, and about half of the adult population was born out of state. Many of those newcomers have landed in places like Gaston, Cabarrus, and Union Counties, all countrypolitan counties outside Charlotte. Movement within the state is important too. As cities like Charlotte grow and sprawl outward, younger, more liberal people are moving with them.

(One telltale sign of young liberals’ arrival: luxury loft apartments in a refurbished Gastonia textile mill, the site of labor strife in 1929 that led to the deaths of a labor organizer and the local police chief. Perhaps the only thing the mill’s old and new denizens share is a likelihood of voting Democratic.)

Four years ago, I wrote about Union County and its county seat, Monroe, hometown of the late Senator Jesse Helms. The epicenter of change in Union County might be East Frank Superette, a hipster deli and bottle shop I visited at the time. More recently, the restaurant has been embroiled in a legal fight stemming from drag shows it hosted. Speaking on the way to an Obama rally for Harris last week, Carley Englander, one of East Frank’s owners, attributed that to cultural backlash.

“We created a place that people were able to come and just see that it’s not just white, cis humans living in this town,” Englander told me. “It was a party at the store when Harris stepped up to run. When Biden won, when Trump got indicted, when all these things happened, all of a sudden people gather at the store and they kind of party, because they’re in a safe place where they can celebrate something that they’re happy about.”

Back in 2020, the process of change was already apparent, and walking through downtown Monroe this month, I saw signs that it had accelerated. I passed a cat café, an upscale head shop, and a hip coffee shop—exposed brick, subway tile, Kendrick Lamar–themed artwork—that had all opened in the past year and a half. But nearly as soon as I passed the Monroe city limits, the landscape changed to small farms, many with Trump yard signs.

Not everyone who is moving to these counties is liberal, though. North Carolina has also attracted people from northern states drawn by economic opportunities, better weather, lower taxes, and, yes, a more conservative lifestyle. They don’t want to live in rural areas, but they’re also not interested in living in deep-blue cities, so they land in countrypolitan counties. They fit in with existing residents who are neither wealthy country-club Republicans nor, for the most part, evangelicals, but who are conservatives.

Even so, some of these more conservative voters—generally white, college-educated, and better off—could swing Democrat, or at least that’s what the Democrats hope. In every election since Trump’s victory in 2016, Democrats have made gains among traditionally Republican residents of suburbs—sometimes offsetting the GOP’s advances among working-class voters. Now the Harris campaign is making a push for them too or, failing that, hoping they stay home and don’t vote for Trump.

“There are a wide range of voters in North Carolina who maybe aren’t dyed-in-the-wool liberals but do not want—and in many cases reject—the kind of extreme politics Donald Trump represents,” Dan Kanninen, Harris’s battleground-state director, told me.

The Republican primary fueled Democratic hopes of winning these voters. Although Trump won the nomination, Nikki Haley won a substantial portion of the vote in presidential primaries, even after dropping out of the race. In North Carolina, she won nearly a quarter of the GOP primary vote, including 25.2 percent in Union County, 24.1 percent in Cabarrus County, and 21.1 percent in Gaston County. If only a small portion of North Carolina Haley voters defect to Harris, it could swing the race.

A polling place in downtown Gastonia (Mike Belleme for The Atlantic)

Michael Tucker, who lives in Gastonia, is at the top of that list. A former member of the county GOP board in Charlotte’s Mecklenburg County, he moved farther out seeking affordable housing. His politics have moved too. He’d supported Trump in the past but backed Haley in the 2024 primary. Now he’s a leader of Republicans for Harris.

[Read: Trump’s fate rests on countrypolitan counties]

“Seeing his treatment of Nikki Haley, the treatment of those of us who voted for Nikki Haley, it really just sends a resounding You are not welcome in the Republican Party,” he told me. “There’s a lot of Republican women who are appalled by the felonies, by the adultery, by the misogyny, by his lack of compassion towards women and women’s issues,” he said, adding that “soccer dads” were edging away from Trump for the same reasons.

Some polls suggest a wider pattern of what Tucker has seen up close. A national survey released earlier this month by the Democratic firm Blueprint found that only 45 percent of Haley voters were committed to backing Trump, while 36 percent backed Harris.

Potential voters are not the same as actual voters, though, which is why Andy Beshear was in town to encourage canvassers to knock on doors. Brown, the Gaston County Democratic Party chair, told me he hoped Democrats might be able to hit 41 or 42 percent of the vote there this year, which would be the highest level since Jimmy Carter in 1980. If Harris can do that, she’ll probably be inaugurated on January 20, but it won’t be easy. A few days after I visited, a Harris sign outside the field office was ripped down—for the second time. Gaston County is still a tough place to be a Democrat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: The truth about celebrities and politics]

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

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

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

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

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

A few years ago, all of this would have been extremely weird. Actually, as the Democrats around me in the theater stood to applaud Liz Cheney—the pro-life, ultraconservative daughter of Dick—it still kind of was. The former third-ranked GOP House leader was joined onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs by three young onetime Donald Trump staffers, together issuing a warning about his potentially catastrophic unfitness for office—the four horsewomen heralding the threat of the Trump-ocalypse. Attendees seemed in awe of their bravery, and every few moments clapped with vigor.

Such an alignment, everyone agreed, would have been unthinkable in some other, more normal political universe. “If you would have told me four years ago that I’d be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024, my head would have exploded,” Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in the Trump administration, told me after the event. There were uncomfortable titters from some in the audience, of course, including once when the former White House director of strategic communications Alyssa Farah Griffin spoke highly of her two former bosses, Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. But the broader feeling—the powerful force that is disdain for Trump—kept everyone nodding solemnly in their seat.

This shared sentiment lines up with the Democrats’ closing pitch in the final days before the election: that Trump is an exceptional threat to American democracy. Voters of all ideological persuasions should choose Harris now and disagree about policy later.

Cheney and her fellow anti-Trump surrogates have run with that message in recent weeks, sometimes even joining Harris herself on the trail. Their effort, the thinking goes, gives Republicans permission to hold their nose and vote for a Democrat, maybe for the first time ever.

It might work. In an election that will almost certainly be decided by a few thousand votes in a handful of states, Cheney could reach a significant-enough sliver of the electorate for Harris to scrape by in November. They’re hopeful, even, for the deus ex machina of a silent minority. “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody,” Cheney said Monday during an event with Harris in Royal Oak, Michigan. But centering a campaign on the nobler questions in politics—morality, democracy—is a risky bet when it comes to Trump, who has remained, throughout the past nine years, robustly immune to such high-minded attacks. The Cheney Strategy presumes that bipartisanship can win the day. It might be wishful thinking.

[Listen: Trump and the January 6 memory hole]

In the month since she formally endorsed Harris, Cheney has served as a traveling evangelist for the Democrats, hitting the road in America’s swing states to spread the good news about personal sacrifice and national redemption. There was that event onstage with the former Trump staffers in Philly, plus the stop with Harris in the Wisconsin town where the GOP was founded, and where Cheney declared that she “was a Republican even before Donald Trump started spray-tanning.” And this week, she wrapped up a three-state series of fireside-chats with Harris. In these appearances, Cheney has repeatedly referred to Trump as “cruel” and “depraved.” She warns that if he becomes president again, the mob attack of January 6, 2021, might look, in comparison, like the peaceful lovefest that Trump falsely maintains it was.

Nothing Cheney says is more telling than her example: A Republican born and bred, she effectively relinquished her seat in Congress and what was already an illustrious political career to stand up for what she thought was right. If a Cheney can vote blue, so can you. One problem, of course, is that most of the attendees at Cheney’s events are not Republicans. They are mostly Democrats—or Republicans who have been casting ballots for Democratic candidates in one election or another since 2016.

These gatherings sometimes carry the air of a religious revival, of people desperate to commune over their almighty revulsion for Trump. They weep and cheer to see Cheney confronting the bullies in this new, disfigured GOP. At other times, the events seem like a group-therapy session. At the theater outside Philly, several people told me, unprompted, about their own family divisions over politics: marriages and relationships torn apart during the Trump era. “I lost a 40-year friendship over Trump,” Sandy Lightkep, from nearby Horsham, told me. “My family’s split in half.” They come because they appreciate the sense of unity, real or imagined. “It’s wonderful that Republicans and Democrats are finally getting together,” Nancy Moskalski, visiting from Connecticut, told me. “This is what Joe Biden always wanted.”

Before a Harris-Cheney appearance in Chester County, Pennsylvania, earlier this week, I met two women who seemed to reflect the improbable alliance of the pair that would soon be onstage. “I just remember there was a time when I could have a discussion with a lot of my Republican and conservative friends,” Tanya Cain, who wore a navy-blue KAMALA HARRIS sweatshirt, told me. “We have to break this, whatever this is, and move forward.” Cain laughed. “If you would tell me Liz Cheney was gonna be in my politics—” The woman next to her, Susan Springman, broke in: “I never thought Harris would be in my politics either!” A lifelong Republican voter wearing a black turtleneck and pearls, Springman had voted for Trump in 2016 but now regretted it. “MAGA has to go, and whatever that means, I am willing to go with it to destroy that and to move forward with something else,” she said. She’d also persuaded her Republican husband to read Cheney’s book Oath and Honor, she said; he’d be voting for Harris too.

Democrats are banking on hopes that people like Springman aren’t such rare birds. That similar aisle-crossing comity is happening all around the country, under the radar. It’s totally fine, they say, if only a few Republicans are showing up to these events—they believe the important thing is the message it sends. Perhaps Cheney’s efforts will help remind voters of the violent attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election. “It’s about driving a news cycle that reinjects the memory of what happened and tries to put the stakes back at the center of the conversation,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the anti-Trump publication The Bulwark who has appeared on the trail in support of Harris, told me.

The Cheney Strategy reflects a Harris-campaign pivot. For the first weeks of her presidential bid, Harris’s line about Trump was, primarily, that he was responsible for taking away women’s reproductive rights. When Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joined the ticket, the pair focused on communicating to voters that Trump and the MAGA Republicans were “weird.”

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

Harris has worked hard to introduce herself, define her campaign, and deliver a message that sets her apart from Biden. For a while, she seemed successful, pulling ahead of Trump in several key swing states. But the polls have been tightening for weeks, compelling Harris to adopt something closer to Biden’s final pitch from 2020: that Trump is a reckless would-be dictator, whose reelection could bring about the end of American decency and democracy. “Brat summer is over,” as Vox’s Christian Paz put it. “‘Trump is a fascist’ fall is in.”

A closing argument about January 6 was the natural next move in this high-stakes election, Longwell told me. “They’ve decided that’s their closing pitch, to sort of go for those undecided voters,” she said. “Strategically, that’s correct.”

Most registered Republicans will vote for Trump, but it’s true that many conservative-identifying voters have concerns about his character. Whether enough of those exist to change the election result is debatable. Longwell and her Never Trump allies point to the GOP primary contest for evidence: Nikki Haley received 157,000 votes in Pennsylvania, even after she’d dropped out of the race, and she got 14 percent of the vote in pivotal Waukesha County, Wisconsin. “Trump has actively avoided courting any of those people,” Griffin, the former White House aide, told me. “So our belief is that there are people that you can reach—a sizable number of Republican voters—who will be willing to either cast their ballot this one time only for a Democrat, or at minimum, not vote for him.”

The gender gap in voting intention is wider than ever. College-educated women and suburbanites, in particular, are recoiling from Trump, and recent polling shows that women voters in general are 16 points more likely to support Harris. “Republican women can tip this election,” Brittany Prime, a self-identified moderate Republican and a co-founder of the anti-Trump organization Women4US, told me. Her group has identified nearly 400,000 “MAGA-exhausted” women in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, who, the group believes, can be persuaded to vote for Harris in November. Prime sees that effort as a twofold push. First, they assure voters that backing a Democrat “doesn’t mean you aren’t a Republican anymore,” she said. The second part of the message is that “no one’s going to find out, I promise.”

Some of the Republican women that Prime’s organization is talking to have requested that no mailers or ballots be sent to their home, she told me, because they don’t want their husband to find out. They plan to “go into the voting booth, vote their conscience, and never admit to it,” she said. When you talk to anti-Trump Republicans about this clandestine sisterhood, they will share stories about sticky notes in bathroom stalls reminding women that who they vote for is secret. Back in 2016, pollsters identified the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon, which referred to the poll respondents who were unwilling to admit that they were voting for Trump—and thus went unrepresented in surveys. Prime and other anti-Trump conservatives are hopeful that a similar phenomenon happens again, but in reverse: the shy anti-Trump voter. “We could be surprised on Election Day and the days after that there’s a silent majority, a quiet groundswell” in support of Harris, she said.

The problem with a quiet groundswell, though, is in its name. All of these hopeful anecdotes are impossible to translate into hard data about voter numbers and behavior. And some on the left are frustrated with Harris’s closing strategy, partly, because it’s an appeal to Republicans. “She’s trying to win without the base,” as Naomi Klein, the progressive author and columnist, put it this week.

A consistent drumbeat about practical, pocketbook policies would be better, other critics argue. After all, Democratic candidates in close House and Senate races are running campaign ads about abortion. A recent survey from the Center for Working-Class Politics found that voters responded better to “economically focused messages and messages that employed a populist narrative” than to warnings about Trump. “Ironically,” Dustin Guastella, a research associate with the group, wrote this week, “if Democrats are keen to defend democracy they would do well to stop talking about it.”

[Read: The everyday warfare of voting in America]

Most Americans already know what they think about Trump. As New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who was once a Trump critic and now supports him, put it rather cynically on CNN this week, “With a guy like [Trump], it’s kinda baked into the vote.” Sure, Trump referring to his critics as “the enemy from within” is despicable. So is Trump’s statement as president, reported by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that he wished he had generals like Hitler’s. But voters have been hearing stories about Trump’s authoritarian inclinations and norm violations for years, and the polls still show an impossibly tight race. Almost four years after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol—and amid his four indictments and felony conviction—Trump’s favorability rating is higher now than at any time during his presidency.

After Cheney and the former Trump staffers finished speaking onstage in the Philadelphia suburbs, the audience responded with sustained applause, and the attendees I interviewed for feedback shook their heads in wonder. “It’s just amazing. I was impressed by these young women,” Ann Marie Nasek, a lawyer from Glenside, Pennsylvania, told me. It’s so difficult to understand the other side, she explained—why her neighbors and family members, who are, by all accounts, good and decent people, still support Trump, despite everything. “I wish this whole room was filled with Republicans,” she said, looking around.

On Tuesday, seven days before Election Day, Harris will deliver a speech from the Ellipse, the park behind the South Lawn of the White House where four years ago Trump rallied his supporters before they descended on the Capitol. Harris’s intention is obvious: conjure the dark imagery of the day that a defeated American president attempted to cling to power, just as voters make their final deliberations. Less clear is whether enough of those voters care.

In thinking about the days and weeks after November 5, when unfounded attacks on the vote count and the integrity of America’s election are most likely to arise, one must begin with an uncomfortable acknowledgment: The threat to the fair evaluation of the results comes from only one party. There has never been any suggestion that Democratic officials are likely to systematically disrupt the lawful counting of ballots. The risk, such as it is, comes from possible spurious legal challenges raised by Donald Trump supporters, partisan election administration by Republican state officials, and unjustifiably receptive consideration of election lawsuits by Republican-nominated judges.  

The good news is that in the states most likely to be decisive, that group of people is not in control. The mechanisms of election administration are, generally speaking, in the hands of responsible public officials rather than partisan warriors—mostly Democrats, but a few clearheaded Republicans as well.

Consider Georgia, where the most senior officials are all elected Republicans who have, in one way or another, expressed their support for former President Trump. Yet both the governor, Brian Kemp, and the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, have a notable and honorable history of commitment to free, fair, and well-managed elections. For example, both recently opposed the transparently partisan efforts of the state election board to change election rules. If the past is prologue, we can reasonably expect that the contest in Georgia will be close, but we can also expect that the process by which the votes are counted will be fair and open.

[Read: Republicans’ new dangerous attempt to break the election]

The same is true of all the other battleground states. Those states—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada—are, of course, led by elected politicians who have partisan views, but none is a leader whose nature suggests a desire to manipulate election administration for partisan advantage. Most of the states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona) are led by Democratic governors who can be counted on to deliver the results fairly.  

That leaves Nevada, which, besides Georgia, is the only Republican-led swing state. Nevada’s governor, Joe Lombardo, has expressed moderate views on the election process: In an April 2022 interview with The Nevada Independent, Lombardo said he did not believe that any fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election and saw no reason to believe that President Joe Biden had not been “duly elected.” Of equal note, the secretary of state for Nevada, who has more direct responsibility for election administration, is an elected Democratic official who has committed to a fair election process.  

All told, none of the elected officials in any of the battleground states who have direct responsibility for election integrity is an election denier or someone who appears keen on having a partisan dispute over the results. One could not, for example, imagine any of these governors using their state’s National Guard for improper reasons.

Likewise, the court systems in the crucial battleground states are generally well structured to avoid partisanship. Republicans have already filed suits in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona, and doubtless many more will be filed. But as the former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb has said: “The one thing they need in court is evidence … They didn’t have any last time, and they’re unlikely to have any this time.”

Once again, Georgia provides an instructive example of how Trump’s efforts to legally game the system are likely to play out. Last week, a Fulton County Superior Court judge stopped a new election rule that would have required officials to count all Georgia ballots by hand. In a separate ruling, the court also said that certification of the election results was a mandatory duty—eliminating the possibility, which some Trump allies had been considering, of withholding certification and preventing Kamala Harris from receiving the state’s electoral votes should she win. Separately, a different judge barred even more of the election board’s efforts to change the rules at the last minute. At least one Republican appeal has already been unsuccessful.

[Read: The danger is greater than in 2020. Be prepared.]

The likeliest ultimate arbiter of election disputes will, in most instances, be the supreme courts of the battleground states. Partisan tenor is somewhat less salient in the courts, but even taking it into account here, structural protections are mostly quite strong. Democratic jurists hold majorities on the supreme courts in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Nonpartisan appointments are made in Nevada.  

And though the courts in Georgia and Arizona are controlled by Republican-appointed jurists, neither court has exhibited excessive partisan tendencies. Indeed, the all-Republican supreme court in Arizona recently unanimously upheld a ballot-access rule against an effort by the Republican Maricopa County recorder to limit the number of voters. Only the Republican supreme court in North Carolina has acted in a worryingly partisan manner, approving a Republican gerrymander that a Democratic court had previously rejected. This is thankfully an outlier; the overall correlation of factors suggests, again, that reasonable jurists will be in charge of adjudicating disputes about election outcomes.

Finally, at the national level, fair, good-faith efforts are being made to protect the processes by which the election will be certified. Unlike on January 6, 2021, when Trump put Congress at risk by delaying the deployment of the D.C. National Guard, this time the federal government is well prepared to forestall disruption in the nation’s capital. The Department of Homeland Security has already designated the electoral count as a National Special Security Event, for which ample protection is deployed. And, of course, the D.C. National Guard is now under the orders of Biden, who can be relied on to maintain election integrity.

Is all this cause for unbridled happiness? Of course not. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, remains an uncertain actor. And that we even need these reassurances is a distressing sign of how dysfunctional our current politics are. But a smooth—or, at least, mostly smooth—election is still possible, and the key ingredients are in place to make it happen. This itself matters. As the former federal judge Thomas Griffith recently wrote: “Tearing down faith in an election administration system when the facts show that it is reliable and trustworthy is not conservative.” It is also deeply dangerous. Let’s do our best to keep the faith.

No Democrat has won North Carolina since 2008, but polls show they have a chance - if they can beat Republicans on their home turf.

Illustrations by Ben Denzer

The splendor of the American big-box store lay before me, with its endless variety of shaving products in every imaginable size and color—a retail extravaganza, all of it locked behind Plexiglas. I needed a razor, and in order to obtain one at my neighborhood Target, I had to press a red button to summon a store clerk. Depending on where you live, you may know the drill. I waited in Aisle B45 with two women, one in front of the Dove deodorants, the other in the Old Spice section.

“I keep pushing, but no one comes,” said the Old Spice lady.

Six minutes passed. I pressed my button; my fellow shoppers pressed theirs. The Dove woman let out a dramatic sigh and left. Was a clean shave really worth all this? I looked at Old Spice; we shook our heads and departed. Result: three paying customers sacrificed to the War on Shoplifting.

By definition, most shoplifting is petty plunder—candy bars, baby formula, lipstick. But the small stuff adds up, as demonstrated by viral videos showing shelves of deodorant or cold medicine swiped into Hefty bags by thieves who can’t even be bothered to run away. Some people contend that all of the noise about shoplifting reflects mainly a race-tinged social panic, but the retail industry is not locking up its goods, annoying its customers, and closing stores because of a few viral videos. Companies are doing it because they’re seeing their goods walk out the door, costing them billions.

[From the March 2018 issue: The dark art of stealing from self-checkouts]

Big corporate retailers, mom-and-pop shops, cops, prosecutors, and lawmakers have tried everything to stop the thefts: get tough, be gentle, invest in new surveillance technology, turn pharmacies into fortresses. Nothing seems to work. At my Target in Washington, D.C., I counted 21 aisles of goods locked behind plastic, including toothpaste, body wash, underwear, earbuds, and air fresheners—all items that impulse thieves and organized criminals alike find desirable and easiest to resell, on the street or, more often these days, online.

Who is taking all of this stuff? And why has this age-old nuisance crime become so prevalent?

People steal because it’s easy and—with rare exceptions—free of consequences. David Kimmel, who resides at Northpoint Training Center, a former state mental hospital repurposed as a medium-security prison, in Boyle County, Kentucky, is one of those exceptions.

Kimmel is on his fourth tour in prison for shoplifting, for stealing a $12.88 doll from Walmart and $142.68 worth of ammunition from a Rural King store. This time, Kimmel faced a Kentucky prosecutor and jury who seemed determined to send a message. Each of Kimmel’s two charges was bumped up from a misdemeanor with a 90-day maximum sentence to a felony carrying up to a five-year penalty, mainly because he had already been banned from those stores for shoplifting (several previous instances of stealing from that Walmart, Kimmel told me, and one prior instance—stealing a lawnmower—from the Rural King). The jury didn’t think even that was enough, so they increased each sentence to 10 years. Finally, the jury recommended that Kimmel serve the two sentences not concurrently but consecutively, for a grand total of four decades.

Kimmel steals, he told me, because he’s a drug addict—pain pills, usually, or heroin and fentanyl. He is 39 now and has been shoplifting since he was 15. “I’ve done it hundreds of times,” he said. During all of those years, he was mostly employed—painting houses, doing construction. “I could make a living, pay rent and electric,” he said. “I couldn’t afford drugs.” He sold the stolen items at half their retail price to fences in a nearby parking lot, or on Facebook. He knows it’s not right, but “you ain’t hurtin’ nobody,” he told me. “It’s just from a big company.” If he were back on the street now, as an addict, he figures he’d still be shoplifting.

Kimmel appealed his conviction, and last year, the Supreme Court of Kentucky agreed that he should not have to serve his sentences consecutively. He told me his prison time was eventually cut back to 20 years. But the original sentence reflects how fed up many Americans are with shoplifting. At a rally last fall, Donald Trump announced that if he’s reelected, “we will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store. Shot!” At another rally last month, he said he could end shoplifting “immediately” with “one really violent day”— a “real rough, nasty day,” maybe even just “one rough hour”—during which police could take on criminals. Both times, the crowd cheered.

Whereas many on the right see the rise in shoplifting as proof of a nationwide moral collapse, many on the left deny that it’s even happening or that it is a meaningful problem. Shoplifting is one of the hardest crimes to measure, because only a tiny proportion of cases are ever reported to police. Thefts aren’t increasing in every city—in some, reported thefts have gone down—and viral videos of shoplifters-gone-wild don’t necessarily add up to a crime wave. But merchandise is disappearing off shelves at such high rates that stores have resorted to extreme measures to defend themselves—even at the risk of alienating paying customers. The surge, retailers and industry experts say, is real.

[From the November 2024 issue: How carjacking became a teenage pastime]

Shoplifting has soared over the past three years, according to a survey by Jack L. Hayes International, a loss-prevention consulting firm, of 26 big retail companies with, collectively, more than 22,000 stores. The study calculated the total retail losses due to theft to be $7.1 billion in 2022, up from $4.9 billion in 2019. Retailers say stores are closing because they can’t make up their losses, and because some employees are scared and don’t want to work there anymore.

When Mike Mershimer worked as a store detective in the 1980s and ’90s, the primary tools deployed against shoplifters were handcuffs, shame, and mockery. He’d see shoplifters swipe a belt or Air Jordans, and “I’d grab him, throw him on the ground, and cuff him,” he told me. Customers would ridicule the thief as Mershimer marched him out the door. “I never saw those shoplifters again,” he said. Today, Mershimer advises retailers and major brands on store security. Clients are looking for fixes, but though Mershimer can offer constructive advice, he’s well aware that there’s no simple solution. “I get a helpless pit in my stomach,” he told me. “I don’t know what to tell them.”

Guards aren’t the answer, he said. New engagement rules at many retail stores discourage police and security guards from using force to stop offenders—they can no longer grab and cuff shoplifters. Some chains, their lawyers eager to avoid injuries to employees, have made even chasing down shoplifters a fireable offense. In a recent video capturing a shoplifter rolling a cart of stolen items out of a D.C. supermarket, a customer berates the guard for not chasing the thief. The guard replies, “I’m just a visual deterrent,” a phrase now common in the retail-security industry. The criminals, Mershimer told me, “see them for what they are: nothing.”

Some businesses try to look tough by dressing the guards in black tactical gear or equipping them with a German shepherd or a handgun, but “you’re mainly intimidating your customers,” he said. “If I pull up in the parking lot and see that, I’m pulling out.”

Hardening the target—creating what the industry calls the “fortress store”—doesn’t work either. Adding physical barriers and locking away products “not only deters shoplifters; it deters legitimate customers,” Mershimer said. Ditto for limiting the amount of stock placed on display: A mostly empty shelf is more of a turnoff to real customers than to thieves.

Some stores have started locking their front doors, buzzing in only people who look like paying customers. But what does a paying customer look like? Door buzzers are invitations for a discrimination lawsuit.

Yet something has to be done, Mershimer told me. Twenty years ago, if someone swiped a pair of Levi’s, “you could stand the loss. You budgeted 2 percent for shrink. Now you can’t sustain these enormous losses. Now it’s a whole shelf of Levi’s.”

A senior executive at a national chain store was equally frustrated. He spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, because his bosses didn’t want the debate over shoplifting to tarnish the company’s brand. His stores lock up products even though they know it chases away paying customers and is an ineffective barrier against professionals. “They pop the locks; they melt the glass; they take the keys out of employees’ hands,” he said.

In the early 2000s, many cities and states began easing the consequences for shoplifting. Dallas police stopped responding to calls about thefts under $50 in value. In 2014, California voters approved a referendum reclassifying thefts of items worth $950 or less as misdemeanors.

Now the clamor for safer stores is pushing the pendulum back toward enforcement. In the past few years, states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Louisiana have ratcheted up penalties, especially for people caught stealing in a group. Next month, Californians will vote on a referendum that would toughen penalties for shoplifting, essentially undoing the reforms voters approved just a decade ago.

[Read: Why California is swinging right on crime]

Whether this will have an effect on thieves’ behavior is unclear. Shawn Hunter is 29 years old and has racked up more than 40 criminal charges in D.C., plus additional charges in Maryland and Virginia. Earlier this year, in a Target store in a wealthy section of D.C., two cops conducting a retail-theft surveillance operation watched Hunter stuff $54 worth of items into his bag and leave without paying. The officers stopped him just outside the door.

Hunter did not respond to requests for an interview, but I sat behind him in May in D.C. Superior Court as he waited his turn for a hearing. The judge called him to task for having missed a previous court date, but his lawyer explained that he had a good excuse: He’d failed to appear because he was in another courtroom on that same day, answering to yet another theft charge.

Hunter fidgeted throughout the hearing. The second he was dismissed, he jumped up, took the escalator two steps at a time, and burst out of the courthouse with a yelp of regained freedom.

Shoplifting is not a modern development; the term lifting dates back to a 1591 British pamphlet. In the years since, people have come up with plenty of theories about what drives shoplifters to steal. In Victorian Britain, shoplifting was seen predominantly as a female malady. The opening of department stores caused a moral panic—women with money and time to spare, London newspapers warned, were in danger of sullying their virtue and filling their days with petty crime.

When Rachel Shteir set out two decades ago to write a book on shoplifting, her idea was to plumb the roots of the early aughts’ apparent surge in retail thefts. She sold her book, The Steal, to her publisher on the back of a wave of attention devoted to the actor Winona Ryder, who’d been caught taking $5,500 of designer clothes and accessories from a Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills. According to a witness, Ryder claimed to have been conducting research for a role as a kleptomaniac. Ryder’s attorney denied this and suggested that the actor had assumed that the Saks clerk knew what she had taken and would charge her later for the goods. There was a sense then that women “were stealing not because they needed to eat but because they were shopping addicts,” Shteir, now a professor at DePaul University, told me. Talking about shoplifting in those years often meant discussing mental-health issues such as borderline personality disorder.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and especially after the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a different conception of shoplifters emerged, one that continues to dominate on the intellectual and political left. In this view, oppressed people steal to assert their power in the face of a society determined to keep them down. In the 2012 article “Stealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance,” the sociologist Victor Rios argued that shoplifting was a reasonable act of defiance against a system that preemptively labeled young men of color as criminals. Stealing, he wrote, was a way of “fighting for dignity.”

The idea that theft was both a reflection of social need and a form of political resistance became more entrenched on the left after protests—and, in some places, looting—erupted around the country over the murder of George Floyd, in 2020. Some commentators explicitly lumped shoplifting in with looting as a justified expression of frustration and rage. As Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting, told NPR, looting “freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it’s basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

This is not a popular perspective in the retail industry. Those who have studied shoplifting point out that retail theft has always been more common than people think, and not primarily among the poor or those who view themselves as politically oppressed.

[Read: Why people loot]

An estimated one in 11 Americans have shoplifted at least once. In one study, criminologists spent the spring of 2000 to the spring of 2001 monitoring surveillance video in a major national chain drugstore in Atlanta. They determined that about 20,000 incidents of shoplifting took place in that one store, compared with only about 25,000 larceny-theft cases reported to police in the entire city in 2001. The study used shoppers’ clothing, jewelry, and other markers to draw conclusions about their economic class, providing a rough profile of who steals. The result: The shoplifters were not disproportionately minority, male, and lower-class, as many experts had assumed. In fact, about a third were middle-class and nearly 40 percent were women, and white people were just as likely to steal as were Black or Hispanic people.

These days, industry analysts say they are seeing more middle-class shoplifters than they did pre-COVID, mainly because shoplifters think they won’t face significant consequences (which is likely correct). Men might treat themselves to home-improvement tools and video-game accessories. Women, many of whom are the primary shopper for their family, will pay for milk and eggs but then swipe luxury items that a tight budget can’t accommodate: high-end cosmetics, skin-care products, jewelry.

Retailers are also becoming more concerned about what is known as organized retail crime, which often involves ringleaders ordering up shopping lists of goods they’ve often already sold to customers online. The thefts are contracted out to professional boosters, who rip off home goods, hardware, clothing, and drugstore items from any point along the supply chain, including freight trains, delivery trucks, warehouses, and stores. No reliable statistics show what portion of overall thefts are initiated by organized rings, but estimates range from as little as 5 percent to half of all theft. Coordination online has made organized theft more efficient, but it’s a different kind of puzzle for law enforcement than the far more common, and more psychologically complicated, individual shoplifting.

Why is shoplifting surging now? The coronavirus pandemic and social media are the two factors most often cited by researchers and industry executives.

At the very beginning of COVID’s spread, many categories of crime decreased, because people mostly stayed home and access to stores was limited. Shoplifting apprehensions reported by 22 major retail chains declined by 44 percent from 2019 to 2020, according to the Jack L. Hayes consultants. But since then, the numbers have soared far beyond their pre-COVID levels, reflecting persistent inflation, “less staff on sales floors,” and “thieves viewing shoplifting as a high-reward, low-risk endeavor,” their survey concluded.

Read Hayes is a former store detective with the scars to prove it. Back in the ’90s, his hands were repeatedly cut by shoplifters’ fingernails and pocketknives. These days, he runs the University of Florida’s SaferPlaces Lab, which develops and tests innovations in shoplifting prevention. He’s busier than ever. He told me he’d “seen surges before, but this is different—more significant, more widespread.”

He said that “everything changed” with COVID, “including how you think about other people. Everybody around you is a threat to your health and safety.” Store employees grew less willing to confront thieves, and lifters felt free to ignore shopkeepers’ efforts to halt them. People seemed “quicker to go violent” against clerks who did intervene.

“People just seem bolder,” Hayes told me. “We used to use shame as a deterrent, an informal sanction.” At some point, it stopped working.

Hayes told me that shoplifting has become more common among both casual thieves and hardened professionals. On one end of the spectrum, videos on social media showing young people how easy it is to steal items they’re not allowed to buy—cigarettes, beer—have gone viral, encouraging the curious to try their hand at it. On the other end, some people who formerly sold drugs are now drawn to big-ticket theft—power tools, TVs, laptops—because of the lower risk of punishment.

Thieves advertise their loot on Facebook and eBay, and trade tactical tips on Reddit as well as on more obscure sites. Online communities of pros and amateurs are occasionally shut down, but new ones pop up all the time. Many shoplifters are now trained by helpful online advisers to know precisely what to target. “They come into the store with a list,” the senior retail executive told me. “They want Prevagen or Maybelline. They know when our delivery trucks arrive; they know when we stock the shelves. They know when we’re lightly staffed.”

The internet isn’t just a place to garner tips. It has also, Hayes said, become a place “to showcase what you’ve stolen.” Videos of shoplifters committing their crimes and showing off their loot have become internet mainstays, both a reflection of evolving attitudes toward retail theft and an encouragement for new practitioners. Videos tagged #haul—some set to the tune of Ayesha Erotica’s “Real Messy Bitch” (“Yeah, I sca-a-am and I ro-o-ob, I’mma take everything that you go-o-ot … I love robbery and fraud, I’m a shoplifting god”)—feature slo-mo pans: energy drinks, candies, cleaning products.

The subreddit r/ShopliftersGoneWild, which has been around for two years and has 5,200 members, is run by a 53-year-old man in Florida who works from home for a medical company.  He asked not to be named, “because the internet is a crazy place.” He’s not a shoplifter himself; in fact, he’s quite derisive of lifters. His wife works in retail and has long provided him with a steady supply of shoplifting stories at the dinner table. He told me that he launched the forum “to be funny”; he enjoys watching thieves and their critics go at each other in the comments.

GoneWild Man, as I’ll call him, started off posting videos of encounters between clerks and thieves. But the subreddit morphed into a place where compulsive lifters talk about why they do it, and right-thinking Americans confront them with the damage they’re doing to their own community.

“Some people love the risk,” GoneWild Man told me. “It’s the same adrenaline rush as skydiving, but a lot cheaper and safer.” The lifters “try to claim ‘we only do it from the big boxes, not the mom-and-pops,’” he said. “They make themselves out to be the good person.” Or not: Some advise newbies to avoid problems by threatening store security guards that if they “touch me, I’ll sue” or—an enduring legacy of COVID—“I’ll cough on you.”

GoneWild Man often struggles with a “moral dilemma”: Should he shut down the subreddit, especially when he sees people encouraging crime by, say, offering instructions on how to remove security tags from expensive garments?

He says he likes that law-abiding people jump in, trying to talk lifters out of stealing more stuff. But he’s under no illusions that his subreddit is converting thieves into upstanding citizens. It’s hard to detect much shame among brazen lifters. He does, however, see some fear. Perhaps the most frequently asked question on the forum is: “Am I going to get busted?”

If there’s one thing retailers agree on, it’s that the courts will never make shoplifting a high-enough priority. The industry, therefore, devotes enormous energy to figuring out its own defense.

Kay Patel, an engineer for a tech company in Philadelphia, thought that owning a convenience store would be a rewarding side gig. What he didn’t count on when he bought the store last October was about $200 to $300 in goods walking out the door every day. “This place is definitely harder than I thought it would be,” he told me. “People came in and took whatever they wanted.”

Temple University’s campus police have a station down the block, and officers are in and out of Patel’s shop all day. (Patel draws them in with free coffee.) Shoplifters paid the officers no mind. Kids would run in, grab snacks, and bolt. “You can’t do anything,” one of them taunted Patel. He had a point. Patel can’t file an insurance claim without his rates shooting up. He doesn’t want his seven employees chasing or grabbing lifters, because it’s not worth the risk of violence. Patel had 16 cameras inside and outside the store, but his cashiers couldn’t monitor the screens while they rang up purchases.

On a drizzly, gloomy day in May, I watched as a 15-year-old boy strolled toward the exit of Patel’s store, sipping from a Big Gulp cup. From behind the counter, the cashier called to him: “Hey, kid!”

The kid wheeled around and held out his cup: “It’s just water.”

The cashier waved him on. Confrontation diffused. False alarm. What the kid didn’t know was that seconds before the cashier had called out to him, the cashier’s phone had buzzed with an alert. A few months earlier, Patel had installed a security-software product called Veesion—one of a slew of new programs that promise to catch thieves before they steal anything. The software, constantly scanning every aisle of the store, had captured the boy’s image and used AI to analyze his movements. “Gesture close to body,” said the alert, displaying an image of the boy holding his cup up against his chest.

Minutes later, another alert flashed on the cashier’s phone: “Very suspicious,” it said, showing a woman in the back of the store rummaging through her purse. The cashier looked up and saw the woman at the ATM machine. She’d been digging out her bank card.

The software picks up on the kinds of “suspicious cues” that the Atlanta-drugstore study found were the most accurate predictors of shoplifting behavior: people turning their head as they scan the aisles, nervously playing with products, looking for cameras or security tags. Alerts fly when people reach into their pockets, open their handbag, stick a hand inside their jacket. Patel says that Veesion alerts him and his employees 50 to 60 times a day, and about half are false alarms. In the week before my visit to the store, one alert was triggered by a man nonchalantly loading some 30 cans of Red Bull into his backpack. When the cashier confronted the man, he dropped the bag and left, Patel told me. This, he added, happens in many cases when a shoplifter is called out. He told me that his losses have fallen to maybe $75 a day.

Video and AI solutions are all the rage at loss-prevention trade shows. FaceFirst, for example, promises to “instantly detect habitual shoplifters” by running customers’ faces through a database of proven thieves. There’s talk of creating a surveillance network across the retail industry that would allow stores to share images of alleged or convicted shoplifters.

AI doesn’t get bored monitoring video, so it can watch the parking lot and alert store clerks if someone walks toward the shop carrying a crowbar. “Hey, manager, do you want to lock the front door?” the bot might ask. But such technologies also raise the creepiness factor and its more serious corollary: the potential that someone will perceive racial discrimination and take action against your business.

[Read: Defund facial recognition before it’s too late]

Still, the products keep coming. An Irish program, Everseen, recognizes when customers at self-checkout stations mis-scan products (for example, waving a barcode filched from some cheap product over the scanner instead of the one on the steak they’re putting in their bag).

Big home-improvement chains have developed power tools that remain deactivated until they’re purchased. Grocery chains in the U.K. are storing expensive meats in a case that opens only after checkout. Some supermarkets have shopping carts that jam if they approach the store exit without clearing the checkout lane—an extra security layer that may slow down shoplifters but can also make consumers “feel corralled,” says Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist at City, University of London who studies retail theft. Last year, Walgreens opened a store in Chicago in which most products have been removed from the open shelves and customers must order at a kiosk up front, whereupon a clerk retrieves their items from storage.

Barbara Staib, an executive at the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, has been at this for a quarter of a century. She’s seen fancy fixes come and go. “You can keep going with your technology and your solutions and all the innovation in the world, but if you don’t address motivations, you’re not going to get anywhere,” she told me. That could mean getting shoplifters into counseling, rehab programs, food-assistance services, and job-training classes. Sometimes, especially with casual thieves, a few hours of education about the impact that shoplifting can have on their own friends and family—raising prices, closing stores—can make a difference. Staib’s organization offers a four-hour course focused on sending shoplifters the message that their behavior isn’t harmless. It seems to help: A four-year study in King County, Washington, found that fewer than 6 percent of young people who finished the course were nabbed again for shoplifting.

Such efforts won’t stop organized retail crime, Staib conceded, but they might help the many occasional shoplifters who think thievery is no big deal. “These people you can educate,” she told me. “We can’t stop them; we have to get them to stop themselves.”

But the surge in shoplifting is one piece of a larger collapse of the social forces that once restrained wayward behavior at least as much as the law did: trust, guilt, and shame. It took a lot to get us to this point—huge technological and psychological disruption; the atomization of American life by the anonymity of the internet; the isolation imposed by COVID lockdowns, which eroded many people’s sense of empathy; a lack of consequences for stealing, attributable to reductions in policing and store staffing. It’s hard to see how better surveillance cameras and longer prison terms, let alone programs like Staib’s, could roll back such powerful changes in how we live.

Maybe GoneWild Man was right when he said, “It’s just okay to be a bad person now.”

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Across the country, Donald Trump’s faithful fans sport MAGA merch—much of it emblazoned with antagonistic slogans—and line up to cheer for their candidate in arenas and event centers. His rallies are a cultural phenomenon, giving him a platform to boost violent rhetoric and deliver gibberish tirades. I spoke with my colleague John Hendrickson, who has been writing campaign-trail dispatches, about the differences he’s observed between Trump and Kamala Harris rallies and what draws people to such events.

A Never-Ending Tour

Lora Kelley: What makes attending a Trump rally feel different from other political events?

John Hendrickson: Trump long ago turned political rallies into a dark spectacle. Mitt Romney had rallies; John McCain had rallies; George W. Bush had rallies. But they didn’t have this carnival-type atmosphere.

I think a lot of people go because they want to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Maybe you can trace it to the decline of social organizations and even church attendance. Going to a Trump rally, being part of the MAGA movement, offers a sense of community—for better or for worse.

Trump remains a singular force. There’s such a cult of personality around him. His rallies are technically part of the campaign, but they’re almost unmoored from the traditional confines of a campaign. They’re his lifeblood. It reminds me of Bob Dylan’s never-ending tour, which has been going on since 1988. Trump has more or less been on his own never-ending tour for the past nine years.

Lora: How does that atmosphere contrast with what you see on the Democratic side?

John: Trump paints a dystopian portrait that revolves around this idea of a migrant “invasion” that’s destroying the fabric of the United States. His slogan—“Make America great again”—is predicated on an imagined past. Harris has zeroed in on a simple idea of championing freedom, which, ironically, used to be a Republican talking point. Her campaign rhetoric, as a whole, is far more positive and optimistic than Trump’s, especially when she’s talking about basic things such as the economy. But her tone often changes when she gets to the threats Trump poses to more personal issues, such as abortion rights, or when she called him “increasingly unstable and unhinged” at her recent rally in Pennsylvania.

Trump has internalized that negativity sells. The events held by Democrats don’t necessarily have the same electricity as the MAGA rallies, unless a high-energy surrogate, such as Barack Obama, comes out. For all of the obvious horrors of Donald Trump, he has an ability to create this vortex as a speaker that his fans find enthralling—although he inevitably drones on and people reliably trickle out. And at last night’s town hall in Pennsylvania, he stood onstage and swayed to music for a while—one of the stranger things he’s ever done.

Lora: What kind of merch do you see at these rallies, and what does that tell you about the broader mood of the campaign?

John: Most of the Trump apparel isn’t produced by the actual campaign. It comes from independent vendors, like the people who sell T-shirts outside a concert. At any given Trump rally, I’ll see hundreds of different pieces of merchandise, and the messaging tends to be aggressive. The slogans are often taunting and feature variations of a shared theme: owning the libs. I have endless pictures of these shirts and stickers on my phone—“I Clean My Guns With Liberal Tears” was one I saw recently.

At Harris’s events, you may see a T-shirt with a silhouette of Trump that says “Nope,” or an abortion-rights-themed shirt that says something like “Hands Off My Body.” But in general, the Democratic slogans are far less antagonistic toward Republicans.

Lora: Have you noticed a shift in rhetoric and attitude from Trump or his rally attendees since Harris became the nominee?

John: Right after Harris took Joe Biden’s place, seemingly everyone—Trump, his surrogates, rank-and-file rally-goers—appeared lost as to how to attack her.

In these final weeks before Election Day, Trump and his followers are trying to paint Harris as incompetent, a liar, and someone who can’t be trusted. At the most recent Trump rally I attended, in Pennsylvania, Trump repeated forms of incompetent and incompetence over and over again. But the attacks can also be vague. I’ve heard some of his supporters try to claim that she’s an illegitimate candidate because she didn’t “earn” the nomination. Harris voters, for their part, often say that Trump is a threat to democracy and to their rights.

Lora: What value do these rallies bring to the candidates?

John: The candidates have to fire up their base and hope that the people who show up will go home and convince their friends and neighbors to vote. It takes a special kind of voter enthusiasm to put on a T-shirt, get in the car, and drive to a rally. Those people are more engaged than the average person who won’t take off from work or ditch another obligation to go hear a politician speak.

Harris has held some major rallies in the nearly 100 days of her campaign, drawing big crowds to arenas. But her events aren’t over-the-top like some of Trump’s. Later this month, Trump is going to stage a rally at Madison Square Garden, in Manhattan. He’s by no means going to win New York, but holding the event feels like he’s planting a flag: Look at me—I’m headlining Madison Square Garden.

Related:

The Trump-Obama split screen in Pennsylvania On the National Mall with the RFK-to-MAGA pipeline

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump breaks down onstage. Peter Wehner: This election is different. Inside the carjacking crisis

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A Fulton County judge ruled that Georgia county election officials cannot decline or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance. In a letter to Israel signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the United States warned that it might restrict military aid if Israel does not take steps to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within the next month. A man from North Carolina was arrested on Saturday and accused of making threats against FEMA workers.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Here’s how to start your search for a new hobby—and how to deal with the likelihood that you’ll be bad at it initially, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Fine Art Images / Heritage Images / Getty

Dogs Are Entering a New Wave of Domestication

By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods

In just a generation, we humans have abruptly changed the rules on our dogs. With urbanization increasing and space at a premium, the wild, abandoned places where children and dogs used to roam have disappeared from many American communities. Dogs have gone from working all day and sleeping outside to relaxing on the couch and sleeping in our beds. They are more a part of our families than ever—which means they share our indoor, sedentary lifestyle.

Read the full article.

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After former President Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his administration imposed several rounds of tariffs on China on everything from washing machines to steel. The move was described by the nonpartisan conservative organization the Tax Foundation as one of the “largest tax increases in decades.” And yet, protectionist economic thinking has since gained traction in both parties. In a rare instance of agreement, President Joe Biden retained most of his predecessor’s tariffs—and imposed even more earlier this year.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described her own evolution on this topic succinctly: “People like me grew up with the view: If people send you cheap goods, you should send a thank-you note. That’s what standard economics basically says … I would never, ever again say, ‘Send a thank-you note.’” Essentially, Yellen used to think that if China wanted to flood the United States with cheap goods, why complain? Well, now she appears more concerned about the cost of all those cheap goods to the nation’s domestic manufacturing base.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by the Cato Institute’s vice president of general economics, Scott Lincicome, to examine this popular narrative—one that he doesn’t put much stock in, largely because the high cost of tariffs are disproportionately borne by poorer people, but also because of the political dysfunction they sow:

“The economics of trade are counterintuitive,” Lincicome explains. “And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: There was an interesting policy exchange about tariffs between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris during their debate last month.

Kamala Harris: My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20 percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result, for middle-class families, in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

Demsas: Then Trump hit back, pointing out that the Biden-Harris team had been all too happy to keep the tariffs going.

Donald Trump: First of all, I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off, because it was so much money, they can’t. It would totally destroy everything that they’ve set out to do. They’ve taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They’ve left the tariffs on.

Demsas: This exchange flew by many people. There was a lot going on in that debate, and this happened in the first few minutes. But Trump is pointing out something interesting here—that while Harris is calling his tariffs a sales tax, she and Biden kept the majority of his tariffs when they came into office.

Looking back on 2019, Biden had similarly criticized Trump’s trade policy, arguing at the time that “any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”

While I think it’s important to highlight this similarity, it’s also important not to overstate it. Trump is now promising a 60 percent tariff on goods from China and a 20 percent tariff on everything else the U.S. imports. And in a speech last week, Trump said he’d “impose whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.” This is far greater than anything Biden or Harris have publicly considered.

[Music]

Demsas: Welcome to Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today we’re talking tariffs, trade, protectionism, and more.

The standard economic narrative around tariffs is pretty negative. As my guest today has explained in a quip now famously memorialized on a novelty T-shirt: “Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.” It’s a busy shirt.

Scott Lincicome is the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute and has written broadly, including here at The Atlantic, about why the parties shouldn’t be so quick to embrace tariffs.

[Music]

Demsas: Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Lincicome: Well, thanks for having me.

Demsas: We’re going to talk about tariffs today, so I’m going to start with the simplest question: What is a tariff?

Lincicome: A tariff is a tax applied to an imported product, usually a good but, in theory, you could try to apply tariffs to services, as well.

Demsas: What kinds of things that people commonly buy have tariffs on them in the United States?

Lincicome: I think one of the most common examples we use is pickup trucks. In the 1960s, there was a dispute with the Europeans over chicken, of all things. That led to a tax on pickup trucks—

Demsas: Wait. Wait. Wait. Slow that down. How do we get from chickens to pickup trucks?

Lincicome: They were going after our chickens, so we put tariffs on their pickup trucks, and they stayed. Now we still have a 25 percent tax—tariff—on imported pickup trucks from everywhere except a few free-trade-agreement countries, like Mexico. So one of the reasons why we don’t have some of those cool little pickup trucks that you might see in Japan or whatever is because they’re subject to really ridiculous tariffs. And automakers abroad don’t want to have to deal with all the regulatory compliance and that kind of stuff and then pay another 25 percent tariff.

It’s actually a great example of the things that tariffs do beyond just raising prices. They limit availability and consumer choice, and they stick around forever. We have tariffs on the books on shoes and clothing and other things that go back to the Smoot-Hawley days. They’re really hard to remove once you get them into place.

Demsas: You just said something interesting. Who pays the tariff?

Lincicome: It’s a little complicated. Legally, the importer in the United States, in almost all cases, is paying the tariffs. If you are a U.S. company and you are importing stuff, you’re going to be paying the tariff, by law. There’s a little exception to that, but we don’t need to worry about that. The more complicated thing comes in who actually pays, because, in theory, a foreign exporter can lower his price to essentially absorb the tariff costs.

Let’s say you’re shipping widgets into the United States, and they’re $100. All of a sudden, a 25 percent tariff gets attached to it. You have, really, two basic choices: still sell at a hundred and have the importer pay $25 (25 percent of a hundred), or you lower your price to 80 and then have the importer pay $20 in tariffs. But to the importer, it’s all the same thing, right? It’s still $100. So the tariff hasn’t changed the calculus. In that sense, the foreign exporter is bearing the incidence of the tariff.

Then we have the empirical question. So the empirical question is: What actually happens? Well, what actually happens is, in the vast majority of cases, importers and consumers pay the tariffs. You only have a situation where foreign exporters pay tariffs when the market that the foreign exporter wants to sell into is just massive—really important—and the exporter says, You know what? I just want to maintain market share, so I’m going to lower my prices.

Typically, that’s not what happens. Typically, the consumer, the importer is going to pay the tariff. It might not be a hundred percent; the exporter might discount by a few bucks here and there. But, overall, as an empirical matter, typically consumers, importers pay. And that was certainly the case with the Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminum and Chinese imports. Studies show that about 95 percent of the tariff incidence fell onto American companies and consumers.

Demsas: And so as any listener listening to this can tell, you don’t really like tariffs. Economists, in general, don’t really like tariffs. Why is that? Can you walk us through the standard economic story for why tariffs are bad?

Lincicome: I’ll start out with saying that economists are okay with tariffs in certain contexts—national security, for example. There’s a legitimate case that the United States—I’d say, a strong case the United States—shouldn’t be buying its tanks and planes and laser-guided missiles from China, that tariffs can serve a role there.

But economists don’t like tariffs for a few reasons. First is that they’re costly. A tariff is a tax. It’s a tax typically borne by consumers and importers. Those consumers and importers typically are poorer, so it’s a regressive tax, meaning: More burden is paid by poorer people. They spend a larger share of their incomes on, say, tariffed bananas or whatever.

But the second reason is that they are very inefficient taxes, meaning—so good tax policy is: You want a very broad base, and you want it to be very transparent, and you want to minimize gaming and other things that can poke holes and make the tax less distortionary.

A tariff doesn’t qualify for anything I just said, right? It’s applied on a narrow set of products. It’s very opaque. Unlike a sales tax, you don’t get a receipt on that pickup truck that says, Oh, you just paid an extra 25 percent for this, right? It’s subject to all sorts of gaming because tariffs will vary, typically, based on the type of products. You get what’s called tariff engineering, where you’ll classify—I’ll go back to cars. There’s a famous example: Ford vans were imported without seats to get a lower tariff, and then, literally at the docks, they installed the seats and then drove them off to the warehouses. So it’s a really distortionary and inefficient way to raise revenue or do anything else you want to do with them.

The other big thing, though, is that they’re pretty ineffective at boosting the companies that are getting protected and the workers that are getting protected. For example, I mentioned we have tariffs on shoes. Some of them are ridiculously high, more than 34—almost 40 percent. We have not saved any shoe jobs in the United States. We have almost no jobs in shoe manufacturing. You basically are just having consumers pay a tax for little to no good reason. And in case after case after case, what you see is: Most companies that are protected by tariffs either end up going away after the tariffs are lifted, or they’re seeking perpetual protection, right?

The other big thing is that tariffs, by insulating companies from competition, discourage them from innovating. If you have a guaranteed market, you’re probably not going to be hyper-focused on staying lean and mean and really focused on delivering the best value to your customer. You will get fat, lazy, and happy. You’ll spend a lot of money on lobbying to maintain the tariffs, less money on being productive.

For example, U.S. steel. So there’s probably no industry in the history of the United States that has received more protection than U.S. steel. It’s definitely on the Mount Rushmore of protectionist industries. And U.S. Steel is notoriously inefficient, in part because of that protection. It’s now trying to be bought out by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company. And the goal to—supporters of that deal, including U.S. Steel, by the way, say that Nippon Steel will help it innovate, provide it with better management practices, an influx of capital to upgrade its services.

So put that all together, and economists say, You get high cost, you don’t achieve your objectives, and this is pretty bad. And then you throw in—the historians have looked back at tariff history, especially in the 19th century but even most recently. And tariffs are really historically associated with corruption and cronyism. And that goes back to them being kind of a hidden tax. Also, they target foreigners, and that makes it easier to sell. The economics of trade are counterintuitive. And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy, as well.

Demsas: You said a lot there. And I want to dig in on a few of these things, but I think as a broad overview, obviously, the idea is: You have to do a benefit-cost analysis of tariff policy. And you’ve obviously articulated a lot of reasons why there are high costs to tariffs, but, as you mentioned with national security, for instance, there are a lot of noneconomic things that policymakers are concerned with that they may want to use tariffs for. And so you think about the implications of what tariffs are trying to do, and often there’s this goal of, We want to spur some sort of industry in the United States. Often, it’s domestic manufacturing, right? You kind of asided to that with the shoe example.

But there’s a history of this, right? Actually, last week, we just had on the show Oliver Kim, who was talking to us about the East Asian development miracle. And one thing that a lot of East Asian countries are credited with doing is having protected native industries and ensuring that those industries were able to succeed on the world market. And there was a lot of protectionism that was involved in doing that, including tariffs.

And so what I guess I would ask you is, firstly, do you feel like that is a goal the U.S. government should have of trying to spur domestic manufacturing? Do you think that’s an important goal?

Lincicome: No. At least not via tariffs. I think there is a million things that the United States government could be doing to boost the manufacturing sector. I should note, of course, the United States is the world’s second-largest manufacturing nation in terms of output, in terms of productivity. So the stuff we make per worker—we’re absolutely crushing it. No. 1 in the world, basically, for large, industrialized nations, so it’s not like the United States is this weak, nothing-burger nation when it comes to manufacturing.

But that aside, there’s a couple caveats I think you need to include when you talk about Asian protectionism and industrial policy. First is: That came with a lot of free trade too. While, certainly, there was some protection for certain industries, there was also a lot of exposure to competition in export markets, in particular, but also in import markets. And, though, there was a lot of tariff liberalization for the things that manufacturers they were trying to support—that they needed. So it wasn’t this just blanket protectionist policy.

The second big thing, though, is that there is a bit of a correlation-versus-causation thing in a lot of East Asian industrial-policy narratives because they were doing a lot of other stuff at the exact same time. And there’s a great book by Arvind Panagariya, who actually looks at South Korea and Taiwan and others and says, Actually, these economies performed better when they weren’t being protectionist—when they weren’t engaging this heavy-handed industrial policy—than when they were. So we need to be a little bit cautious there.

But the third, and I think the most important one for the United States, is that the East Asian miracle applied to a radically different economy than the one in the United States in two big ways. One: Those were developing countries really trying to push infant industries, whereas most U.S. protection is—I mean, the U.S. is certainly not a developing economy. We’re a very developed economy. And most of our protection actually goes to lagging industries. It is not on the cutting edge, and one of the reasons—we have a lot of cutting-edge stuff. But typically, our protection goes to, again, shoes and steel and stuff like that—legacy industries.

But the other thing is that the United States has far-more-developed capital markets than Asian economies did—very open, very fluid. And that means we have much-more-efficient investment where there might be the potential for that success and that innovation. And so it’s less likely that government planners in the United States are going to be able to pick the right industries, pick the right companies, pick the right whatever, as opposed to capital markets and VCs and private equity and all that great stuff. And in general, though, it’s just a radically different environment than what existed in, say, South Korea in the 1970s.

Demsas: But then let’s take a look at the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, right? That’s the 2022 law Joe Biden signed to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the United States. So during the pandemic, there’s a real concern about semiconductor chips, that we’re not going to be able to have as many. There’s obviously this big shortage. We’re really reliant on Taiwan, which is, of course, concerning because of its proximity to China and the threat that China poses to Taiwan’s freedom.

It’s clear that there is a need to produce, at least in—if not domestically, we need to “friendshore.” We need to make sure can get those supplies from ally countries that we’re less worried about having some kind of future political risk with, but also just domestically because there might be supply-chain problems in the future that are unprecedented, like a global pandemic that we had not been expecting.

And so the CHIPS Act is an industrial policy where there is a real push to get chips made here in the United States. We have factories opening up. I believe they are already producing chips. There’s an Arizona factory.

Lincicome: Yeah. TSMC is not quite up yet.

Demsas: Okay. Not up yet. But basically, we brought Taiwanese expertise to the United States, and they’re building here. We have American jobs that are being created here. And you may care about parts of that or not, but that seems like a policy where that’s on the cutting edge. It’s not confusing to make these chips, but it is a cutting-edge technology. It’s not a legacy industry. So how do you view the use of protection there?

Lincicome: Yeah. Two things: One is that it’s really important to start by noting that this CHIPS Act is subsidies and not tariffs. Now, Biden just imposed some tariffs on semiconductors from China but, in general, the CHIPS Act is just about throwing money at companies.

In general, if you’re going to ask an economist, What would you prefer: a domestic subsidy or a tariff? they’re going to say, A subsidy, nine times out of 10, right? That’s important because you’re at least—granted you’re subsidizing the production, but you’re at least—once the company gets up and running, going to be subjecting it to market forces and competition and its production and output and the rest. You’re not going to be artificially raising prices for downstream consumers and that kind of stuff. So a subsidy is definitely preferable to a tariff.

And in fact, we actually applied tariffs to semiconductors in the 1980s. We had a big industrial policy push in the ’80s related to chips, Japanese memory chips. We applied a bunch of different tariffs, any dumping duties. There was a trade agreement restricting Japanese semiconductors. And what happened? Well, it raised the price of semiconductors and pushed computer manufacturers offshore from the U.S. computer manufacturers. So tariffs, again—historically not very good at achieving your objectives.

But the other thing with the CHIPS Act is: It is starting to reveal some of the problems with industrial policy that we saw back then too. For example, back then, we actually picked—we, the government—picked the wrong type of semiconductor. The Department of Defense in the ’80s thought memory chips were going to be the big innovative thing of the future. So we targeted memory chips. Well, it turns out that the entire industry was actually moving towards logic chips, which are what we use today. And the government totally missed that, while imposing all of those costs.

Right now, we might have a bit of a similar situation because you mentioned TSMC—and TSMC is a global leader. Okay. Cool. But also, the biggest subsidy recipient was Intel. Intel is our national champion. Intel is struggling like crazy.

Intel is slated to receive as much as $45 billion in total subsidies because the CHIPS Act had grants, loans, and tax credits. So Intel is really in trouble.

So did we, once again, pick a loser, along with TSMC? So that’s, I think, a concern we have to deal with. And that’s a traditional issue with industrial policy. Now, why did Intel get all that money? Well, Intel is an American company. Intel has an army of lobbyists in Washington, was instrumental in getting the CHIPS Act passed. Intel decided to locate its facilities in Ohio, a politically important place. And thus, there are questions about whether the government should, again, be giving $45 billion taxpayer dollars to a struggling company like Intel.

Demsas: You’re pointing out a glut of good reasons why it’s not the most optimally efficient policy. But it seems obvious to me, at least, that it’s important for us to make semiconductors here or at least friendshore them. Is there an alternative way to do this?

Lincicome: Yeah. Sure. Well, let me say one more thing about TSMC’s [fabrication facility], and then we’ll move onto your question. The other problem—and the thing I’m worried about—is that we’re actually not subsidizing bleeding-edge technology. TSMC’s fab that’ll be up and running next year is going to be very small, relative to its factories in Taiwan, and it’s not going to be producing the tippy-top-most innovative chip. It’s going to be producing four-nanometer chips instead of the industry two.

It’s also insanely costly. Apparently, it’s costing about 50 percent more to build. And then, of course, a lot of other chip companies that aren’t TSMC are getting money, too, and not just Intel. And they’re getting money to produce what we call legacy chips. So these are clunky commodity chips that really have no security or even, really, innovative nexus. So I think we should be concerned. I don’t know the answer yet. You know, it’s still early in the ballgame, but there are some warning signs.

Now, what could we do instead? A lot, because the big reason why companies weren’t producing a lot of chips here—although that’s a bit of a myth. About half of all chips consumed by American companies were still made in America before the CHIPS Act. But beyond that, we did lose some bleeding-edge capacity. Now, why did that happen? No. 1 reason is because of Intel. Intel was at the frontier and then totally botched it at 10 nanometers and has just become extremely behind the curve. So it’s just a corporate decision-making thing, nothing related to industrial policy.

But the other big reason is because it costs a darn fortune to build a semiconductor facility in the United States. Now, some of that is just because we’re the United States. Things are more expensive than in a developing country. But a lot of it is permitting issues and materials issues and immigration issues. The semiconductor industry is one of the most immigrant-dependent industries in the United States.

So tax issues, as well—we tax the construction of large structures at a much higher rate than we tax things like software and the rest. So you combine all these things, and there’s a free-market path to encouraging the onshoring of large manufacturing facilities, whether it’s semiconductors or anything else, and you could have tax reform and immigration reform and trade reform. Maybe we don’t put tariffs on construction materials and steel and everything else. So that’s a big part of it.

And to the extent even that didn’t do the job, then you could see a role for the government to provide a targeted subsidy for national-security-related chips, so things our Defense Department needs or the tippy-tippy-bleeding-edge stuff that we need for, like, government supercomputers and the rest. But we didn’t get that. You know, that’s maybe a $5 billion bill. And, instead, we got this $60 billion—and then plus another $200 billion in potential tax credit—slush fund that just goes to anything and everything. So I think that’s a problem. And that’s a problem with industrial policy. What starts out as maybe a decent idea on paper just morphs into kind of a political albatross.

Demsas: The only argument that I’ve seen that defends broad-based tariffs—because very few people will defend the, like, 60 percent tariff on goods from China, 20 percent on everything else the U.S. imports. I don’t think we even grow bananas. Even stuff we don’t actually make, no industries—coffee, stuff like that.

But the one argument I have heard is that, while you don’t see increases in domestic manufacturing from these smaller tariffs, if you were to do this really broad-based tariff, it would just force industries to invest in the American economy, because American demand is just both lucrative but also, it would just reshape how capital markets thought about where to invest in companies. It would reshape the kinds of entrepreneurship that would happen, because now we do have to figure out how to satiate this American demand that they’ve been priced out of buying these cheaper goods from abroad.

So setting aside the question about whether or not that would be good for the American consumer to have to now pay double or triple or whatever it is for these basic goods, why wouldn’t that work? Or what do you think would happen in a world where you actually saw these massive tariffs? You can go even higher. Like, you can say 60 percent tariffs on all goods outside the United States. What would actually happen here?

Lincicome: Yeah. So basically North Korea, right? And I joke, but the reality is that tariffs also come with a deadweight loss, an economic loss in terms of economic growth and the rest. Yes. The United States is a big, diverse country with a very productive workforce and a lot of smart people and wonderful capital markets. But if you started imposing giant tariff walls, you’d have a few problems—the biggest being slower economic growth.

By pushing workers into less productive industries, you would effectively be ensuring that the workforce, as a whole, is less productive. That means lower wages, less innovation outside of the sectors you’re targeting, right? You would push a lot of workers and resources into lower-value production. And let’s just leave aside the fact that you’d need giant greenhouses for bananas and stuff like that. We’ll leave that out.

Demsas: Or we just don’t have bananas. No bananas. Yeah.

Lincicome: Right. Heaven forbid. But I do think that’s the other thing that you would have to also consider. You would not just have lower economic growth and slower wages, but I think non-financially, it’d be a lower quality of life. And the grocery store is a wonderful example of that. I can remember back in the 1980s, the grocery store was not nearly as incredible as it is today. And a lot of that, today, is owed to open trade, globalization. And you would lose some of that. You would lose the variety and some of the things that make our lives richer. And I don’t just, by the way, mean bananas. And I don’t just mean food, although that’s a big one.

We have this big globalization series going on. And we talk about fashion and film, and you can go down and on and on down the list. And there’s a lot of aspects of trade and open markets that make our lives fuller and richer in ways that aren’t just about where we’re working or how much we’re making, right? And so that would mean a little less, if not a lot less, of that too. I mentioned at the beginning those cool European and Asian pickup trucks we don’t get. Well, we wouldn’t get those either. We would just have fewer varieties of those things, even if, let’s assume prices are a little bit higher. Sure. But we just also wouldn’t have the variety.

Demsas: I agree with you on this, but then it also gets to a point where sometimes I’m talking to people, and I realize there’s a difference in value. Some people don’t care about this, or they think it’s less important. They think that if we could get more manufacturing jobs in the United States, then it’s okay for us not to have bananas. It’s okay for us not to have a great variety of trucks. Is that stuff important? And I wonder, doesn’t this fall then down to political value judgment about what kind of world looks best?

Lincicome: Yeah—yes and no, because I think if you started saying things like, Well, would you accept less medical innovation? Would you accept less scientific innovation outside of that? because resources are finite—so I think that if you gave people the fuller picture of the price of autarky, I think they would recoil. Particularly if you added things like, And also, your 401(k) is going to be smaller. Your houses are going to be smaller, there’s going to be less resiliency, not more.

You might remember the baby-formula crisis, right? Well, we made all baby formula in the United States, except—because of protectionism. We had walls— tariff wall, non-tariff wall—around the country. Ninety-eight percent of baby formula consumed here was made here. We had a one factory closure, and the entire supply chain collapsed for a year. So you would have actually a more brittle economy than a more resilient one. We would not, at the end of the day, enjoy the much lower living standards, overall, just because we had a few more manufacturing jobs that people don’t even want.

[Music]

Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Scott when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: Something you mentioned earlier on I always think is interesting is: The connection between tariff loving and immigration hating I always find very bizarre. We’re at low unemployment right now, so if you’re trying to spur more people to work in domestic manufacturing, it means you’re moving people out of other industries to work towards manufacturing. And if you have the kind of broad-based tariffs that are being proposed by the Trump-Vance ticket—I mean, they’re proposing, like, 60 percent on goods from China and up to 20 percent on everything else from the U.S. imports. These are massive, massive tariffs.

That sort of thing means that you’re going to have the U.S. producing a ton more of the goods that Americans consume. And that would indicate that you would want more people coming here and working here. But at the same time, they’re opposed to immigration. So why do you think the anti-immigration and pro-tariff sentiments have gone hand in hand? They’re trying to deport millions of people too. I forgot about that.

Lincicome: Nationalist sentiment, right? Look—I don’t think there’s a lot of logic or coherence in most economic nationalist arguments. And I think this is just a great example of it, for the reason you said, right? This isn’t 2014 anymore. Native-born employment has flatlined. We are an economy that needs more workers if it wants to grow at the rates we have grown accustomed to in the past. And that means we’re going to need just warm bodies. Just in terms of warm bodies, we’re going to need more of them. And obviously, immigration is a great source. I mean, babies are great, too, but they take at least 18 years to become workers, right? So we can’t do that tomorrow—at least, not that I’m aware of. I don’t know what the science is doing—

Demsas: Latest technology? I think it’s still 18 years.

Lincicome: Right. So we’re going to have a while on that. So immigrants are the obvious source for, you know—if we’re going to be making toasters in America again, like J.D. Vance wants, we’re going to need workers to do that. And robots are great, but robots can’t fill the gap entirely, particularly, again, in the near term. So there’s a huge disconnect there.

And the other thing I’d note is that native-born Americans, in general, just don’t want to work in manufacturing. And this is something totally missed. We at Cato did a very expansive poll over the summer, asking people all sorts of questions. One of the questions we asked was a two-parter: One, Do you think the U.S. should have more manufacturing jobs? And it was, like, 80 percent yes. Yes. More people should work in manufacturing. Then we said, Do you want to work in manufacturing? And it was, like, 20 percent said yes. It’s almost the exact flip.

There was a great article in Bloomberg a couple of years ago about furniture manufacturing here in North Carolina, talking about how they can’t find workers. And this was pre-pandemic, so it’s certainly gotten worse since then. You look at—the textile-manufacturing jobs in South Carolina pay $11 an hour to start. These are not the glamorous jobs that a lot of our politicians think they are. So to the extent we want these jobs in the United States, I am ambivalent. I want the market to determine that. Big surprise. They’re just going to have to come to the reality that we’re going to need more workers to do that. And, again, immigration’s the source.

But there is another thing that I think the nationalists miss entirely, is that free trade actually can help reduce some of the immigration pressures in places like Central America, for example, because it’s going to boost the local economies and boost the stability of these places. Because a lot of immigration is that push-pull, right? People are living in terrible places. They’re like, I got to get the heck out of here. But also, the U.S. economy’s pulling them in. So to the extent that a trade agreement—and allowing companies to access the U.S. market to sell us shirts and stuff like that—can actually boost the local economies in places like, say, Guatemala, that’s going to actually reduce some of that push pressure on immigration, legal or otherwise.

And there’s a fantastic study that actually showed everything I just said, most recently, and it said that you could reduce illegal border crossings by several hundred thousand if you had truly free trade with Central America for textiles, for the reasons I just described. So is that a panacea for the border issues? No. But would it help? Yes. And it is completely lost on our anti-immigration, anti-trade folks, the idea that trading more with places would actually reduce some pressures for more immigrants. They just want no trade and no immigrants, which just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Demsas: I want to get into some of the reasons for why tariffs haven’t been able to increase domestic manufacturing. There’s a really great study. Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce at the Fed—I hope, Aaron, I’m saying your last name correctly. I apologize if not. And they had this study where they looked at the Trump tariffs—the 2018, 2019 tariffs—and they find that the U.S. industries most exposed to tariff increases experienced reductions in employment.

And they also find that counties more exposed to rising tariffs show increases in unemployment—more people are unemployed in counties that are more exposed to rising tariffs—and, of course, declines in labor-force participation. So people are just exiting the labor force entirely there. Why is that happening? Because why is even this narrow case of tariffs—they’re big tariffs, but they’re nothing like they’re being proposed now—why did that not improve domestic manufacturing?

Lincicome: Right. For the moment, let’s just leave aside that the vast majority of us work in services. And if you work in services, you’re basically hurt by tariffs, regardless of anything.

Demsas: Okay. This is one of my hobbyhorses, that whenever everyone talks about the working class, we pretend like everyone’s a manufacturer, but really everyone’s in the service industry, and it’s like, No one cares about those people. McDonald’s? Don’t care about them. It’s just bizarre.

Lincicome: It’s crazy. Even for male-dominated professions—because we’re all worried about men not working and stuff—there are four times as many male-dominated, blue-collar jobs in services than there are in manufacturing. And we never talk about any of it, like you said. Whether it’s construction or security or repair, like automotive repair, you name it, there’s tons of jobs. Nobody talks about them. But anyway, we’re going to ignore all of those folks.

Demsas: Just like our political leaders.

Lincicome: Right. We’re going to ignore them. Sorry. Sorry, folks. We can get back to them later.

Manufacturing—there’s three big reasons why tariffs actually harm American manufacturing. The first is that American manufacturing today is very much global. About half of everything we import into the United States is actually stuff used by American manufacturers to make other stuff—things like steel or machinery and semiconductors. The huge example of that is: The most advanced semiconductor-production technology comes from the Netherlands.

We import that equipment to support semiconductor production in the United States, right?

Demsas: These are intermediate goods.

Lincicome: Yeah—intermediate. Oh, look at you! Nice. Yes. Exactly.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Lincicome: When people use trade wonky terms, I’m always impressed. That’s great.

So all these intermediate goods—you raise the price of those goods, which tariffs do, and you raise costs for manufacturers. That means those manufacturers spend less on employment and investment and the rest. You’re just raising their costs. It’s like a corporate tax but only for manufacturers that consume imports, which, again, is most of them.

The second big channel is the export side, and that is through retaliation. Foreign governments typically don’t just sit there after a tariff is imposed on products they’re exporting and say, Oh, you got us. We’re toast. No. They retaliate. And they retaliate because they have their own domestic political considerations. They have strategic considerations about preventing even more tariffs. So that harms American manufacturers that export—American manufacturers that are already hurt because they’re facing higher import costs. So those companies are getting hit two ways: higher input costs and retaliation.

The third channel is currency, and I won’t get into the weeds, but tariffs tend to increase the value of the domestic currency. So the dollar gets stronger. As the dollar gets stronger, there’s a good thing: That means that imports get a little cheaper. So it’ll offset some of that tariff pain. The bad thing is that it makes exports more expensive, and anybody who’s gone abroad and has a really strong dollar knows you can buy a ton abroad. That’s actually an import. You’re getting cheap imports. But if the dollar gets really weak and you go abroad, it’s the opposite. So just kind of think of it—it’s kind of those mechanisms, right?

So those three channels, effectively, eliminate any benefit that manufacturers might get from tariff protection. And thus, like you said, the literature tends to show that countries with higher tariffs don’t have wonderful trade surpluses or burgeoning manufacturing industries. And in the United States, the empirical research from the Trump era shows much the same thing.

Demsas: You’ve talked about the narrow cases in which tariffs make sense to you, which I think, largely, is around national security. But I think once you accept that logic, then it just becomes a political question about what things people value, right?

There is this sense that people really care about protecting the manufacturing legacy of specific areas in the United States. And this is, I think, a legacy of 2016, when a lot of people were surprised by the victory of Donald Trump to the presidency. There was a lot of indexing on the fact that he won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and seeing that this narrative—that he really spoke to the white working class who had been disaffected by free trade.

And this, of course, is right when the “China Shock” paper is becoming really central to the discourse. And so there’s a level here where I wonder if there’s a political-narrative thing that’s going on here, too, where, regardless of all the stuff that we’re talking about, if people want to win national elections, is this just necessary?

Lincicome: No. I’m a firm believer that a lot of what’s going on with our protectionist moment right now is political. The conventional wisdom in Washington today is that, to win national elections, you need to win a handful of gettable votes—so Obama–Trump voters, basically, people who flipped—in a handful of important places, mainly in the industrial Midwest. And to win those votes, you need to offer lots of protectionism and industrial policy too—manufacturing-centric policy.

And I think that is the reality—the conventional wisdom is. I think that is the case. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I’m not a political consultant, so I won’t dare to question it. And there was a good paper recently by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, another person—the “China Shock” authors—that said that Republicans did gain a little bit in places, thanks to the tariffs. Even though those places didn’t actually benefit economically, the tariffs were a political winner for Republicans, thanks to the idea that they were being protected. They weren’t actually being protected. The economy was actually a little worse. But they thought they were, and they were rewarding politicians for that.

So I think that is the case. And it’s unfortunate because, first, I am not entirely convinced that tariffs and protectionism were what tipped the 2016 election.

There’s a lot of other stuff bubbling under the surface. But the other big thing is: You actually look at the effect of import competition on these places pre-Trump, and it’s not nearly as devastating as the narrative makes it sound. Whether it’s the China Shock or NAFTA or anything else, these things undoubtedly had a small but significant negative effect on certain places, but it was small. There’s a lot of bigger things going on in terms of manufacturing job loss, in terms of communities surviving or dying.

There’s a great study a few years ago from Brookings that found that, like, 80 percent of old industrial cities in the United States had transitioned to successful economies—places like Pittsburgh. So not every place ended up being like Youngstown, Ohio, right? Yet there’s this narrative that it was all trade, and every place got crushed. And that’s just not the reality, you know?

And the other thing we ignore entirely is interstate competition. A lot of the jobs in the Rust Belt manufacturing—they’re still in the United States. They’re just not in the Rust Belt anymore. They’re in the Sun Belt. We don’t talk about that at all, either. It is all trade, trade, trade. And I think that’s really unfortunate.

At the end of the day, what does that do? It means that the real solutions—and there are a lot of policies that could be pursued to help people adjust, to give them better training and education, to help them move if they need to move by lowering housing prices (you know all about that)—we don’t do any of those. Or, at least, we don’t focus on those. Instead, it’s like, Ah. We’ll just slap a tariff on a toaster, and suddenly Youngstown will be thriving again. And that’s just not reality, not just in the literature. It just doesn’t make any sense. But that’s politics for you, right?

Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. I also think that one of the things that I wanted to get your—because you’ve thought about this for years as someone who’s working in trade. The political dynamics of tariffs, I think, are really important to understand. I think, broadly, my question for you is: Why are tariffs so popular if they’re so harmful? What is going on that, if you’re right, it’s creating all these problems, from baby-formula shortages, which is extremely politically costly, other kinds of shortages during the pandemic—very, very costly. If it’s leading to lower growth—all this stuff—what’s happening? Why doesn’t the political party just win 300 electoral votes by campaigning against tariffs?

Lincicome: Right. Because they are extremely politically attractive to voters.

There’s a guy named Bryan Caplan who wrote a wonderful book several years ago called The Myth of the Rational Voter. He’s a George Mason economist, libertarian guy. But this is more political-science oriented. He ticks through a bunch of biases we all have. And bias is kind of a bad connotation, but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean things that we innately feel.

And tariffs check all of the boxes: an anti-foreign bias, a make-work bias. We like things that produce jobs, right? We have a status-quo bias. Like, we want to protect things that we see that are right in front of us. We are less inclined to want the unseen or the things we don’t know. We can, in fact, fear them. You can go down the list, and tariffs check all of those boxes. So that’s the first thing. Voters innately think, Oh, that’s great. You’re going to protect jobs with that tariff. Wonderful.

But beyond that, the economics of tariffs are hard. It is counterintuitive that a tariff might actually reduce manufacturing output, right? It is counterintuitive, I think, that a trade deficit isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It sounds terrible, right? And it’s counterintuitive that if you cut imports, you actually cut exports too. So there’s all these little things in trade economics that make it a hard sell.

And then, finally: It’s opaque. I mentioned before, when you go to the gas station, you see how prices change. So even some voters that are somewhat connected to the news can be like, Oh, wow. There’s this new conflict with Iran and Israel, and gas prices are going to go up. I get that connection. You don’t really get that with tariffs.

Demsas: So you need a tariff ticker in grocery stores to show—

Lincicome: Yes. I’ve actually long said we need—just the gas station ticker, you need that as well. I think that if you got a receipt from the grocery store and a lot of the line items was the tariff amount, I think that probably would change a few minds. And then, finally, the other thing is that tariffs are oftentimes a corporate tax, and corporate taxes can be hidden. They can either be absorbed by companies or passed on to consumers, again, in invisible ways. And that makes it hard too. So it’s a very, very tough sell.

Now, I’ll note: We’ve known everything I just said for decades, if not centuries. And politicians came up with a fix. It’s called a trade agreement. Trade agreements are not, contrary to popular belief, primarily economic or even about foreign policy. They’re primarily political. There are ways for governments to tie their own hands when it comes to tariff policy. They’re like, I can’t be trusted with this. We went through Smoot-Hawley and all these other bad tariff episodes. We can’t be trusted with guiding tariff policy. So we’re going to delegate it all to the president, which, by the way, that was not the best idea, given Trump. But beyond that, we’re entering into agreements that essentially say that if we go back on our promises, well, what happens? Then the countries we’re trading with can retaliate, there can be litigation and the rest. And that can act as a check.

The other big thing is: We’re going to offset import-competing industries. We’re going to offset their political power with exporters, and trade agreements are going to do that too. Because that’s the other political attractiveness, right? Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits of protectionism are very narrow, like the steel industry. Costs of protection are diffused. We all bear those little costs—again, an invisible cost.

So how do you offset that? Well, a trade agreement does that, too, because you have exporters that are like, Oh, but I want access to that market. And I don’t just mean Boeing. I mean financial services and other companies. And so that was the political solution. Now, trade agreements have problems, but they were reasonably successful for 80 years in liberalizing trade, integrating economies, and checking the protectionist impulses of our political class. It was only in the last decade that Donald Trump hacked the whole machine. And we’re basically dealing with the aftermath.

Demsas: Yeah. This diffuse-benefits, concentrated-cost thing—I think it’s just so key. Also, because even after the political constituency has died, it’s kind of hard—in general, once a law gets passed, it’s really durable. Repealing that law, on not just tariff policy but all policies—it kind of just lives on its own. It develops a constituency, whether it’s in the government or outside the government, that wants its continuation. And there’s also very few people who are going to make their political hobbyhorse to do good-governance reforms.

But I write about housing policy a lot. And it’s funny—everyone is talking about housing policy now. Everyone’s talking about how to reduce the cost of housing, make it easier to do construction, all this sort of thing. I’ll have people who are in the Democratic Party or in the administration saying things like, Jerusalem, we need to lower costs. We need innovative ways for the federal government to do this. It’s really hard. It’s all at state and local level.

And I’ll often just say, Hey. Did you guys know there are, like, massive tariffs on Canadian lumber, on Canadian softwood lumber? And they doubled those tariffs in August. And there’s none of this thinking about the diffuse costs to the American people. Like, Congress isn’t working on fixing that. It’s just a level at which I believe that they all care about lowering the cost of housing. I think that’s not a fake thing that they’re talking about here. But we don’t even think about tariff policy when we’re thinking about broad economic costs to the public. We only think about them narrowly in the question of, How does it hurt or benefit this specific industry? and not, What is the harm to the rest of the public?

Lincicome: For sure. And every time you bring up potentially lifting the tariffs that are in place, what happens? Well, big lumber comes to your congressional office or big dairy when the—the dairy industry in the United States, highly protected. When the baby-formula thing was going down, they were vigorously opposing a long-term elimination of the tariffs on baby formula. Now, think about that for a second: baby formula. And these guys are out there, big dairy is out there fighting it. And it worked. Congress has not eliminated those tariffs, even though it’s the most sympathetic consumer possible, right?

Demsas: And it was broadly unpopular. It’s very unpopular, what happened with the baby formula.

Lincicome: Exactly. And every time you scratch a tariff, there’s a crony underneath, and they’re going to fight like heck to keep their windfall profits.

And they’re paying attention. They’re editing Wikipedia pages to make the protectionism sound better. They are the ones laser focused on keeping the protection in place, while the rest of us are like, Well, five cents for some food that’s subject to a tariff, a few dollars here and there extra for a refrigerator or washing machine. Oh, well.

But that stuff adds up, of course. Studies show that if you eliminated all of the protectionism that’s remaining in the U.S. economy—and we’re a pretty open economy—you would save consumers hundreds of dollars a year, if not more. And yet, because it is 10 cents here and 10 cents there, it just doesn’t resonate. And the other side is extremely motivated.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Scott. I have one last question for you. And it’s: What’s an idea that you had that seemed good at the time but turned out to only be good on paper?

Lincicome: Yeah. I struggled with this question.

Demsas: Because you’ve always been right? Yeah. (Laughs.)

Lincicome: Well, no, no, no. Because I wanted to find a good one. Self-checkout is my answer.

Demsas: Oh, yeah?

Lincicome: Yeah. I am a huge fan of self-checkout. And being me, I’m also a big fan of just efficiency, right? Waiting in line is terrible. I wrote a whole column about why you should never wait in line, because of the opportunity cost of doing so.

So self-checkout—in theory, self-checkout is this amazing life hack. And I still love it, but I’m realizing that—let’s face it—and companies are realizing that self-checkout is not nearly the labor-saving, time-saving miracle that we think. And that’s because humans, alas, are still human. And for every guy like me who literally treats it like I’m trying to beat my best time ever at Costco when I’m going through the self-check—my daughter’s, like, handing me stuff. I mean, we’re literally gamifying it. It’s so great.

Demsas: This is how I feel in the airport security line. I get so angry.

Lincicome: For every person like me, who’s trying to get out of there as soon as possible and trying to break his own personal record, there are, like, 74 other people who are utterly confused by the technology, in no rush, wanting to maybe chat with the person behind the counter, wanting to pay by a check, confused by their coupons, or trying to steal. That’s the other big thing. And so, unfortunately, it has turned out that self-check is not the miracle technology that I was hoping. So it looked good on paper but less so in reality.

Demsas: There’s a Safeway near my house. I moved recently, so I was checking out the nearby grocery stores. And the self-checkout is, like, I don’t know, an armed state. It’s so insane. You can’t exit the checkout without scanning your receipt. And I usually just throw my receipt away immediately, so I had to go get the receipt out of the trash. It wasn’t even functioning. Someone had to come and let me out and then look at all my stuff and make sure I wasn’t stealing. It was just this level of just—it genuinely would have taken me so much less time to wait in this line. But every time, I still go to the self-check. I don’t know why I’m doing it to myself.

Lincicome: Of course. No. And I have a dream of opening up my own supermarket where we actually time people, and there’s, like, posted records of all this. But no. Alas, it still runs into problems.

Demsas: Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lincicome: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great talk.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Lincicome: I’ve really worked this out on Twitter a few times. You’d put a bar right at the checkout area, so people could watch, and stadium seating around it. It’d be great. Scott Mart!