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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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).

[Read: Elon Musk wants you to think this election’s being stolen]

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.

[Read: How the Trump resistance gave up]

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.

For the past several years, I’ve been telling my friends what I’m going to tell you: Throw out your black plastic spatula. In a world of plastic consumer goods, avoiding the material entirely requires the fervor of a religious conversion. But getting rid of black plastic kitchen utensils is a low-stakes move, and worth it. Cooking with any plastic is a dubious enterprise, because heat encourages potentially harmful plastic compounds to migrate out of the polymers and potentially into the food. But, as Andrew Turner, a biochemist at the University of Plymouth recently told me, black plastic is particularly crucial to avoid.

In 2018, Turner published one of the earliest papers positing that black plastic products were likely regularly being made from recycled electronic waste. The clue was the plastic’s concerning levels of flame retardants. In some cases, the mix of chemicals matched the profile of those commonly found in computer and television housing, many of which are treated with flame retardants to prevent them from catching fire.

Because optical sensors in recycling facilities can’t detect them, black-colored plastics are largely rejected from domestic-waste streams, resulting in a shortage of black base material for recycled plastic. So the demand for black plastic appears to be met “in no insignificant part” via recycled e-waste, according to Turner’s research. TV and computer casings, like the majority of the world’s plastic waste, tend to be recycled in informal waste economies with few regulations and end up remolded into consumer products, including ones, such as spatulas and slotted spoons, that come into contact with food.

You simply do not want flame retardants anywhere near your stir-fry. Flame retardants are typically not bound to the polymers to which they are added, making them a particular flight risk: They dislodge easily and make their way into the surrounding environment. And, indeed, another paper from 2018 found that flame retardants in black kitchen utensils readily migrate into hot cooking oil. The health concerns associated with those chemicals are well established: Some flame retardants are endocrine disruptors, which can interfere with the body’s hormonal system, and scientific literature suggests that they may be associated with a range of ailments, including thyroid disease, diabetes, and cancer. People with the highest blood levels of PBDEs, a class of flame retardants found in black plastic, had about a 300 percent increase in their risk of dying from cancer compared with people who had the lowest levels, according to a study released this year. In a separate study, published in a peer-reviewed journal this month, researchers from the advocacy group Toxic-Free Future and from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that, out of all of the consumer products they tested, kitchen utensils had some of the highest levels of flame retardants.

Another food product, black plastic sushi trays, had the highest level of flame retardants in the study. Children’s toys also ranked high: A single pirate-themed plastic children’s necklace was almost 3 percent flame retardant by weight. “When you’re using black plastic items, there’s going to be a risk that they could be contaminated,” Megan Liu, the science and policy manager at Toxic-Free Future and the first author on the study, told me. Those flame retardants migrate into toddlers’ saliva and into the dust in our homes and, thus, in the air we breathe. Last year, Toxic-Free Future tested breast milk taken from 50 women in the U.S. and found flame-retardant compounds in each sample.

Many of the flame-retardant compounds that showed up in the tests that Liu and her co-authors conducted should no longer be in the product stream. Brominated flame retardants have mostly been phased out of products in the U.S. and Europe, including from many electronics. In the U.S. and elsewhere, some of the most harmful flame-retardant compounds are now illegal for use in most consumer goods. Massachusetts banned a list of 11 flame retardants in 2021. Starting this year, a New York bill restricts the use of organohalogen flame retardants—one large class of the compounds—in electronic casings, and a similar Washington State ban will go into effect in 2025.

But these compounds keep coming back. The sushi tray tested in Liu’s study contained 11,900 parts per million of decaBDE, also called BDE-209, which she described as a “really alarming” level of a chemical that was banned from most U.S. commerce in 2022 and largely phased out of production long before that. Because plastic recycling is a global economy with scant oversight, patchwork legislation may do little to keep these compounds out of the supply chain. “You send your electronic waste abroad, and you just haven’t got a clue what happens to it,” Turner told me. “I think the assumption is that it gets handled safely and it’s disposed of properly. But, you know, it comes back in the form of things that we don’t want.”

For a consumer, this problem would be simpler to handle if it was clear that only certain black plastic products posed a risk, or that all of them did. But Turner found that products were contaminated with flame retardants at random. Not all of the black plastic he tested in his 2018 study contained the compounds, and in those that did, “the amount of chemicals in the black plastic varied hugely,” he said. Some items would have the same chemical profile of what you’d expect from, say, the flame-retardant plastic housing of a television or a cellphone. Other objects would have just a trace of flame retardant, or none at all. Of the more than 200 black plastic products Liu bought at retail stores for her study, hardly any were labeled as being made from recycled materials, she said. Consumers have no way to tell which black plastics might be recycled e-waste and which aren’t. “It’s just a minefield, really,” Turner said.

Putting your black plastic in the recycling bin might seem like the right thing to do, but recycling isn’t a solution to the most noxious qualities of plastics. “I personally have been throwing out my black plastic takeout containers,” Liu told me, because if they are contaminated, “it’s scary to think that those might be reentering other products with the same flame retardants.” Until flame retardants and any dubious compounds that arise to replace banned ones are eliminated from the supply chain, reusing black plastic will perpetuate a potential health hazard. In her view, “the onus shouldn’t fall on consumers to have to make these daily changes in their lives.” Ultimately, federal bans or more ubiquitous state laws that go beyond single-compound phaseouts are the only way to keep flame retardants out of takeout containers and other black plastic intended for use in things such as foodware and toys. Until manufacturers use safer flame-retardant compounds and laws effectively prohibit recycled electronics material from entering consumer products, these chemicals will continue circulating through our kitchens, arising and re-arising like toxic zombies.

But that doesn’t mean we need to consume them by way of our kitchen utensils. Replacing a black plastic spatula with a steel or silicone option is an easy way to cut down on at least part of one’s daily dose of hormone disruptors. I’ve also taken this news as a reason to coax myself into carrying a reusable coffee mug more often, if only to avoid the black plastic lids on disposable cups—heat plus plastic equals chemical migration, after all. It’s a minefield of random hazards out there, as Turner said. Most of the time we’re trying to navigate without a map. But in at least some areas, we can trace a safer path for ourselves.

Alexza, a Midwest native, struggled with credit-card debt for 10 years, working multiple jobs—as a nanny, bartender, and distillery tour guide—just to meet the minimum payments. Collection agencies called her constantly. She stopped answering, but that wasn’t enough to escape her financial anxiety. She entered an inpatient therapy program in large part because of the stress, which compounded her debts further. (Alexza requested to be referred to by only her first name in order to speak candidly about her finances.)

She had considered bankruptcy, but she was afraid of what it would say about her. “You kind of feel like a failure,” she told me. The cost of filing—in her case, about $1,800 to cover legal fees—was also prohibitive for someone without any savings. But in September 2021, while working at a coffee shop, she decided, “I can’t afford to continue to just barely tread water.” She borrowed the money from a friend and met with a lawyer. Less than two weeks after she filed, the calls from collection agencies stopped. By January, she had erased nearly $20,000 of medical and credit-card debt.

[Read: ‘Nobody knows what these bills are for’]

Debt has long plagued many Americans like Alexza. Today, people in the U.S. carry more debt than they did a few decades ago. Household debt tripled between 1950 and 2022; as of 2020, 14 percent of Americans had so much debt that it outweighed the value of their assets. In this context, you might expect more people to reach for the kind of financial fresh start that bankruptcy can offer. Yet last year, fewer than 0.2 percent of American adults filed. Of course, not everyone in debt would benefit from bankruptcy—but a lot of people might. At a time when so many Americans are struggling, why aren’t more people taking that path to a second chance?

Until the early 19th century, Americans in debt had few mechanisms by which to dig themselves out. But beginning in the 1810s and 1820s, the political scientists Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston write in The Political Development of American Debt Relief, white farmers in the southern and Plains states, who sometimes had to take out loans if their crops failed, began demanding that their political representatives do something to help. Thanks in part to those efforts, legislators began working to create a process by which people could take their creditors to court, with the goal of erasing what they owed; the debtors would be free to start over. (The process was mostly concerned with helping farmers in debt keep their property; it did little for Black sharecroppers, who didn’t own any land to begin with.)

The first federal voluntary bankruptcy law was passed in 1841. It was repealed two years later but reintroduced and expanded in 1867. As one senator who supported the 1867 expansion put it, all the law proposed was that anyone should be able to “escape from [their debts] and be again a man.” That idea was radical: It turned the U.S. into one of the most debtor-friendly countries on earth. Within three years of the American law’s reintroduction, nearly 43,000 debtors had cleared what they owed.

Today, U.S. bankruptcy law looks a lot different. American laws remain more forgiving than those in many other wealthy countries, such as Australia and Austria. But over the past several decades, financial-industry groups in the U.S. have pushed legislators to amend the bankruptcy system in a way that prioritizes creditors over debtors. And with each legal update, “it just gets harder and harder on consumers,” Robert H. Scott III, an economics professor at Monmouth University, told me.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, bankruptcy was more common than it is now, and Americans were successfully canceling $4 billion per year in credit-card debt. But then credit-card lobbyists, worried about all of that lost revenue, began promoting the notion that certain debtors were abusing the system and driving up the cost of credit for everyone. (“What Do Bankruptcies Cost American Families?” one of their newspaper ads asked.) They argued that mass bankruptcies hurt the economy. So, however, does failing to help debtors: Debt is one of the greatest drivers of wealth inequality. Plus, many scholars contend that debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws foster entrepreneurship. But the creditor argument won out, and after much pushing, legislators passed the inelegantly named 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. Since then, filing has become riskier, more onerous, and more expensive.

To file, debtors owe an up-front fee that can exceed $1,000—a bizarre catch-22 for someone who can’t afford to pay their bills. The bankruptcy process can also affect your credit score. Although research on exactly what filing does to a score over time is limited, a bankruptcy can stay on your credit report for up to 10 years, potentially limiting your access to rental housing and bank loans. Depending on where you live and what type of bankruptcy you file for, you might also be more likely to have to give up your home or your car to repay your debts. People filing in some states are more fortunate. In states like Rhode Island, which has a generous $12,000 motor-vehicle exemption, the risk of losing what might be your only way to commute to work is low. Alexza, for instance, was able to keep her old car. Texas and Florida homeowners are also lucky, as their houses are essentially protected from creditors. But people living in places with less generous protections may have to accept bigger losses.  

The choice of whether to file gets more complicated when you factor in the different kinds of bankruptcy. While bankruptcy has many permutations, the two most common types for individuals are Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7, which Alexza filed for, erases most eligible debts but also demands that you give up any possessions over a certain value, with a few exceptions. For the poorest Americans, it’s a natural choice; 95 percent of people who file for Chapter 7 keep everything they own, and 96 percent have their debts discharged.

Chapter 13, by contrast, is essentially a long-term repayment plan. It comes with one major benefit—you can keep your assets—but it’s overall much less forgiving. If you miss payments, your whole case could be dismissed, leaving you solely responsible for paying off all of your debts once again. As Zackin and Thurston write in their history of debt relief, Chapter 13 was created in the 1930s not to protect debtors, but as a way to funnel money back to American business owners who worried that bankruptcies were costing them. One contemporaneous study found that few debtors could keep up with payments; today, only about half of people who file for Chapter 13 ultimately become debt free, and some filers wind up in worse financial shape than when they started the process.

However, the legal system pushes a lot of poor people who don’t own much toward Chapter 13. Some of the pressure is structural, as traffic tickets and other court fees, which are disproportionately levied on the poor, can be forgiven only through Chapter 13. But bias in legal representation also plays a role: A study published by the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review found that when advising debtors with identical financial situations, lawyers were more likely to recommend Chapter 7 to white clients and Chapter 13 to Black ones.

In various other ways, bankruptcy does not serve Americans equally. The typical filer is more likely to be middle income, even though low-income Americans have the most debt relative to their earnings—suggesting that the system may not be reaching them. This may be in part because many of the broadest exemptions are targeted at those who already own significant assets. Many states allow homeowners who file Chapter 7 to keep their house if it’s below a certain value, but renters don’t necessarily get to save possessions that most likely cost a lot less than a home. Meanwhile, many debts faced by formerly incarcerated people, such as restitution debts and parole fees, cannot be removed during Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. And student loans didn’t become easier to discharge in bankruptcy court until 2022.

[Read: Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem]

The inequities don’t end there. Even as bankruptcy has failed to reach many of the Americans who need it most, it has morphed into an escape hatch for the wealthy. Chapter 11 was designed specifically for wealthy people and corporations. It lets them pay back creditors over the long term, sometimes in part at a lower interest rate, while their companies operate as usual, in the name of protecting their employees’ jobs. Rudy Giuliani, Francis Ford Coppola, and Donald Trump have filed for Chapter 11—in Trump’s case, six times. Though the process is expensive and complicated, according to the scholar Melissa Jacoby, it is actually much friendlier than the bankruptcies the rest of us use.  

Leaving aside the difficulty of filing, the perhaps more significant barrier to choosing bankruptcy, for many Americans, is the stigma. Some scholars have likened the process to a kind of public penance. During it, a court scrutinizes your finances and choices. And because many people consider debt to be an individual failing, those going through bankruptcy can feel humiliated—even though, in many cases, debt is more properly seen “as a collective misfortune,” Daniel Platt, a legal-studies professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield, told me. In the 19th century, members of the debtors’ movement understood that their struggles were shared. Glimmers of that mindset emerged after the 2008 financial crisis, when many people drew a direct line between corporate exploitation and individuals’ money troubles. But even in the absence of widespread economic catastrophe, when someone declares bankruptcy “there has been a failure,” Dalié Jiménez, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, explained. “A lot of that failure is not on the person but on the system that has no other safety net for you.”

Of course, bankruptcy cannot save individuals from that systemic failure. Expunging your debts cannot, for instance, solve the problem of stagnating wages or rising housing costs. But for people like Alexza, it can offer some breathing room. One moment she couldn’t see a way out of her debts. Then, before she knew it, they were gone.

When a friend pulled out her vape at a playoff-baseball watch party earlier this month, it immediately caught my eye. I had grown accustomed to marveling at the different disposable vapes she’d purchase each time her last one ran out of nicotine—the strange flavors, the seemingly endless number of brands—but this product was different. It had a screen. While she vaped, the device played a silly little animation that reminded me of a rudimentary version of Pacman.

In the name of journalism, I went to my local smoke shop this week, and sure enough, vapes with screens were ubiquitous. One product on the shelves, a Geek Bar Pulse X, featured a screen that wraps around the device, displaying a constellation of stars when you inhale. Another, the Watermelon Ice Raz vape, displayed a rudimentary animation of moving flames. Vapes with screens first began to hit the market late last year, and only recently have become widely accessible. Online retailers sell vapes with screens that display what appear to be planets, rockets, and cars driving in outer space. The screens are small—just a few inches wide at most—and they are cheap: These products run as little as $25, and can last for several months.

The Watermelon Ice Raz vape that I spotted in the store reminded me of the loading screens on an old Game Boy Color. I could see how adults like me might be enticed by the nostalgia of it all. The problem is that these vapes might also appeal to kids. It’s illegal for anyone under 21 to buy a vape, but the gadgets have been popular among teens since they were first popularized by Juul. Although youth vaping rates have dropped in recent years thanks in part to public-service campaigns that have warned kids about the dangers of vaping and nicotine addiction, the inclusion of a screen risks backtracking the progress that has been made. A screen full of animations sends the message that an e-cigarette is “something for fun and games and recreation,” Robert Jackler, an expert on tobacco marketing at Stanford University, told me. Just imagine you’re in eighth grade and the cool kid in your class has a vape with a screen of moving flames. You’re going to want one.

These gadgets are new enough that it’s unclear to what degree kids are using them, but they have all the warning signs. Vape companies are notorious for selling products in kid-friendly flavors such as Banana Taffy Freeze and Cherry Bomb, and screen vapes may be the next ploy to hook kids. The vaping industry “will do anything that it takes to bring in novel features to attract new users, and this is just another example of that,” Laura Struik, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia at Okanagan who has studied youth use of e-cigarettes, told me. One of the most popular vape brands among teens, Mr. Fog, has already launched a screen vape.

Screen vapes run the risk of becoming a fad, and fads spread among kids because someone they look up to uses them, Emily Moorlock, a senior lecturer in marketing at Sheffield Hallam University who has written about youth vaping, told me. That was certainly my experience as a kid. I remember begging my parents for a Game Boy because other kids in my elementary school had them. Vaping is similar: When the government asks kids to explain the reason they tried vaping, the top explanation is because a friend does it.

Screens might also make vapes more addictive. Even the simplest visuals, such as retro video games, have been shown to cause the brain to release dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of pleasure and reward. Even the rudimentary vapes I encountered—those that just play little animations on a loop—could spike dopamine, and thus increase users’ desire for these products, three experts told me.

Tony Abboud, the head of the Vapor Technology Association, a lobbying group, described them to me as a technological advancement. Besides the animations, many of these screens tend to display how much battery and vapable nicotine juice is left in the device. Abboud said that public-health groups are trying to brand screen vapes as “the next bad example” of how the industry is marketing to kids, despite youth vape rates dropping. “Just because a new technology has a new feature doesn’t mean that feature was designed to allow the product to be marketed to kids,” he said.

Abboud and other vaping defenders have a point that e-cigarettes aren’t just an enticement for kids to get addicted to nicotine, but are also a tool to help smokers quit smoking. Vapes can benefit public health because they are safer than cigarettes and as effective, or more effective, than other anti-smoking products on the market. Even flavored vapes—which do attract kids—also can help entice adults to switch out their cigarettes for a vape.

But a screen serves no purpose except for some cheap entertainment. If adult vapers want a signal that their product is low on battery, that could be solved by a little power light, like on a smoke detector. The flames and constellations simply aren’t necessary. After years of panic over youth vaping rates, it seems like kids are finally understanding that they shouldn’t vape. Why risk messing that up because of a tiny screen?

When Bryan Jarrell, an Evangelical pastor in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, came across an election-themed episode of a podcast, he’d skip right over it. He would mute the TV when political ads came on, tried to teach his social-media feeds that he wasn’t interested in politics, and would throw campaign mailers straight in the trash. He’d skim news headlines sometimes, but if he could tell that the story was about national politics, he’d keep scrolling.

Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.

Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.

[Derek Thompson: Click here if you want to be sad]

Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.

“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”

A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.

The reason ostriches and others avoid political news is simple: “It’s all negative; it’s divisive; I’m sick of it,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, relaying the views she hears in focus groups.

In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.

Barker, who in 2016 supported Bernie Sanders, seemed disappointed by the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee that year. “Whoever’s running stuff behind the scenes is just gonna pick who they want to pick, and we just have to go along with it,” she said.

Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”

Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.

[James Fallows: The media learned nothing from 2016]

Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.

Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.

If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.

Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.

One freezing day this spring, Shammas Malik was slogging through an agenda that would overwhelm anyone. The new mayor of Akron, Ohio, had to meet with a city-council member who was upset over a recent shooting in his ward. The interim police chief stopped by to discuss the incident, which underscored that Malik still had to pick a permanent head for the troubled department. Meanwhile, the council was debating whether to fund his plan—a hallmark promise of his campaign—to open the government up for more direct resident involvement and input. He was planning for his State of the City address, which was due in just a couple of weeks, on his 100th day in office—also his 33rd birthday. Merely contemplating such a schedule exhausted me, and unlike Malik, I had the benefit of sustenance; he was fasting for Ramadan.

Malik, however, was plowing through it with the almost annoying equanimity of an ascendant political star. He is the youngest mayor and the first mayor of color in the city’s history, placing him among a crop of young, ambitious Democratic mayors of color in the Buckeye State, including Cleveland’s Justin Bibb, age 37, and Cincinnati’s Aftab Pureval, who is 42, both of whom were elected in 2021. In an election cycle where the top of the Republican national ticket—including Ohio’s junior senator, J. D. Vance—has offered up wild fabrications about immigrants eating pets in nearby Springfield, they offer a different version of Buckeye State politics.

Barack Obama won Ohio twice, but whether a young brown man with a “funny name” can still win statewide there is unclear. The state’s mix of impoverished rural precincts and aging, decaying Rust Belt bastions have tipped toward Republicans. Senator Sherrod Brown, the most recent Democrat elected statewide, is in the fight of his political life against the Republican Bernie Moreno. Malik, Bibb, and Pureval could represent a new generation of Ohio leaders, not only in their backgrounds and ages but also in their approach. They could, however, find their paths to higher office blocked by the country’s hyperpartisanship—a fate that has shortened the careers of countless promising Republicans in blue states and Democrats in red states, an invisible loss of talent that America pays for in ways immeasurable but profound.

[Stuart Stevens: I thought I understood the GOP. I was wrong.]

Malik, who is biracial, with a Pakistani father and a white mother, is young for the role and looks younger. With a high, reedy voice and a baby face only barely disguised with a beard, he usually wears a suit—“If I’m going to be a 32-year-old mayor, I can at least look the part,” he told me—but that just makes him seem a little like a kid dressed up for a special occasion. In fairness, Malik will always seem like a kid to me: I first met him as a teenager, when he was friends with my little sister. When I told J. Cherie Strachan, a political scientist at the University of Akron, that high-school friends used to joke that he was getting ready to be mayor, she laughed. “And now he's getting ready to be governor,” she said. “I can’t imagine that someone who is as ambitious as he is is going to stop at Akron.”

The real surprise might be that Malik is in Akron at all. Once, the city was the prosperous center of the nation’s tire industry, but its population has shrunk steadily since 1960. Firestone, Goodrich, and General Tire all left town; only Goodyear remains. The weather is bad. Any Akronite can reel off the names of many famous people from the city who left once they had a chance.

Malik could have been one of them. He excelled at Ohio State, graduated from Harvard Law School cum laude, and collected prestigious internships in Washington. He had no remaining family connections in Akron. Regardless, he decided to go home and take a job with the city’s lawyers in 2016, figuring he could always move to D.C. later. He found himself depressed and lonely, and when a friend asked if he’d be happier in the capital, he immediately answered yes. So why don’t you move? she asked.

“I think what I’m doing means something here, and I’m trying to find meaning here,” he said, recounting the conversation to me. “If I’m not [in Washington], probably somebody who thinks very similar to me, who’s going to work kind of the same as me, who’s going to do pretty much the same thing [will be]. If I’m not here, that’s not necessarily the case.”

The answer conveys a lot about Malik: his earnestness, his diligence and sense of responsibility, his openness around topics like mental health. Obama—another biracial, Harvard Law–educated politician—is an obvious model, evident in Malik’s pragmatic approach to politics, his seriousness of purpose, and his speaking style. A shelf in his sparsely decorated office captures the range of his influences: The New Jim Crow, Robert’s Rules of Order, Bill Simmons’s The Book of Basketball, and the Quran.

Malik’s character was shaped profoundly by both of his parents—but in very different ways. The greatest influence on his life was his mother, Helen Killory Qammar, a beloved chemical-engineering professor at the University of Akron. She instilled a sense of service, a love of vocation, and a focus on education. “She always was trying to do the right thing,” Malik  told the Akron Beacon Journal. “She was always treating people with kindness and dignity and respect and honesty.” Qammar died of cancer when Malik was 21.

Malik speaks frequently about her, but less so about his father, at least until the mayoral campaign. After Malik’s parents separated when he was 10, his father, Qammar Malik, a Pakistani immigrant, pleaded guilty to wire fraud, extortion, and impersonating a U.S. official in a blackmail scheme. During a mayoral debate in April 2023, Malik was asked how he thought about integrity. He shifted uncomfortably behind his lectern, as though wrestling with himself, then began to speak in a tremulous voice.

“I’m going to talk about something I never talked about in public before,” he said. “I have a father who’s a very dishonest guy, and this impacted me a lot as a kid. I talked to my dad through prison glass, and I don’t talk about it a lot because it’s something that is difficult to talk about, but it has guided my life to live every day with honesty.”

Despite his initial unhappiness upon returning to Akron, Malik stuck it out. When he learned that the city-council seat for the ward he grew up in was opening, he moved there and entered the race. Malik won the 2019 election in a stroll. (Driving around this spring, he was still new enough to his job that he was instinctively doing the work of a city-council member, sighing and making a note when he saw a light-pole banner that had become partially detached.) In June 2022, police shot and killed a 25-year-old Black man named Jayland Walker after a car chase, spurring protests. Three months later, Malik announced that he would run for mayor in 2023, challenging the incumbent Dan Horrigan in the Democratic primary. Within weeks, Horrigan announced that he would not seek reelection.

In Akron, as in many small and midsize cities, the Democratic Party dominates. The city hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1979, and the winner of the Democratic primary is a shoo-in for the general election. The city’s Democratic machine, including Horrigan, opposed Malik, which turned out to be a great asset in a city eager for change. Malik looked to Bibb’s successful race—featuring a young candidate who took on far more seasoned figures in Cleveland—as a model for his campaign.

The differences between Malik and other candidates were less about policy than philosophy. He ran down the middle on issues. In a race in which public safety was voters’ central concern, he promised both police reform and greater safety. Where he distinguished himself from the field was on governing style. During the campaign, he knocked on hundreds of doors and showed up at every event he could, leveraging his youth and energy. Wherever he went, he promised that as mayor he’d bring the same transparency and opportunity for public engagement into a city government that hadn’t felt very open or accessible for decades.

Strachan told me that Malik’s campaign was “facilitative, deliberative, inclusive, and focused on process.” These may be the hallmarks of a younger generation; Strachan noted that they’re also traditionally associated with a more feminine leadership style. And it was women who powered Malik’s victory. He won 43 percent of the vote in a seven-person field, and a postelection poll found that Malik won more votes from women than any other candidate won in total.

If anything, getting elected was the easy part. The council—perhaps eager to establish some leverage over an untested mayor—refused to fund a position to implement his public-engagement initiative. (“I don’t have to like it, but I’m gonna respect it,” he told me, paraphrasing the rapper Nipsey Hussle.) His attempt to change the city charter to allow him to seek outside candidates for police chief fell short. A mass shooting at a birthday party this summer shook the city and made national headlines; now some residents are clamoring for the police chief’s firing.

“It’s easy to get beaten down and just overwhelmed by the issues,” Tony O’Leary, a former deputy mayor who advised Malik’s transition into office, told me. “Shit just comes every day, no matter what you do or how well you prepare. It’s always the unexpected. It doesn’t matter what’s on your to-do list.”

When I spoke with Malik again in September, he said he was adjusting to the incrementalism of the job. The mayor has more power than a ward councilor, but also less chance to act unilaterally. His first nine months on the job, he joked, “have been like 54 years.” But Malik’s respect for process can mask a hard resolve.

“Everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, right? But I should be confident in the things that I’m putting forward,” he said. “That doesn’t mean yelling, that doesn’t mean arguing, but it does mean being firm. I’m not going to bring something to someone unless it’s well thought out.”

Mayors don’t always have the luxury, or the burden, of ideology. Many of their most pressing issues aren’t partisan, and they may have to work with state and federal politicians with whom they disagree.

“When you’re dealing with the extreme MAGA-led Republican state legislature that we have in Columbus, I think it’s important to find commonsense, pragmatic Republican lawmakers that I can work with across the aisle who share my vision and love for Cleveland,” Bibb told me.

This fall, Donald Trump and Vance spent weeks fueling a national news cycle based on false, racist claims about legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and promising to deport them if elected. It fell to Springfield Mayor Rob Rue and Governor Mike DeWine, both Republicans, to refute those claims. Migration has taxed Springfield’s housing supply, but local officials also credit it with helping revitalize the economy.

In September, Malik joined a delegation of Ohio mayors that went to Springfield to meet with Rue, offer support, and compare notes. Back home, he told me that although he had no patience for fearmongering or racism, he understood the tension in Springfield.

“When there is a significant rise in population in a community, especially a city of 60,000 people, certainly there are going to be impacts. There’s going to be positive impact. There’s going to be challenges,” he said.

Akron experienced an influx of several thousand people, including many from Nepal and Bhutan, in the early 2000s. Malik said he was conscious of the concerns of longtime Akronites, but noted that, as in Springfield, population growth can help everyone. “I’m walking around a city that was built for 300,000 people,” he told me. “It’s now a city of 187,000 people. It doesn’t run if the population is 100,000.” (A couple of times, Malik half-jokingly tried to persuade me to move home too.)

Residents of bigger cities, which have more room and more liberal politics, may be receptive to this kind of argument—and to immigrants. Elsewhere, however, many Ohioans have been amenable to Trump’s message, focused on economic protectionism, nativism, and reduced immigration. His success there has taken Ohio out of the swing-state column at the national level. Broad political shifts, weak candidates, and gerrymandering have all but locked Democrats out of power at the state level. According to a count by David Niven, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati, Democrats have won just one of 32 statewide races over the past decade, though the success last year of a constitutional amendment to protect abortion access has instilled some hope.

“To the extent that there’s a Democratic future, it’s the mayors, but what Ohio has been doing of late has been chewing up and spitting out Democrats with statewide aspirations,” Niven told me. Democrats hope that younger people and greater diversity will improve their statewide fortunes.

If the state ever turns purple again, Democrats will be looking to the people sitting in mayoral offices today and in the years ahead to win at the state level. “We need more mayors from big cities and medium-sized cities and small cities in this state working in the legislature, running for statewide offices,” he told me. (Bibb excluded himself from consideration, at least for the moment: “Right now, I’m just trying to get reelected in 2025.”)

Making the jump to statewide office isn’t easy, though, not only because of party affiliation but also because Ohio is regionally divided such that no mayor has much name recognition or reach across the state. In 2022, Dayton Mayor Nan Whaley ran for governor as a Democrat but was trounced by the incumbent DeWine. Malik told me that he’s heard the optimistic speculation about his future but he’s focused on his current job. “I ran for mayor because I think I can do this job,” he said. “I’m not running for state representative or state senator, because I don’t know state government. I’m not running for Congress. I want to do this job.”

For once, Malik doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. But if he ever wanted to kick the tires, he’d be in the right place.

Hypothetically, introducing friends from different social circles shouldn’t be that hard. Two people you like—and who like you—probably have some things in common. If they like each other, you’ll have done them a service by connecting them. And then you can all hang out together. Fun!

Or, if you’re like me, you’ve heard a little voice in your head whispering: Not fun. What if you’re sweet with one friend and sardonic with another, and you don’t know who to be when you’re all in the same room? Or what if they don’t get along? Worst of all: What if they do—but better than they do with you? What if they leave you behind forever, friendless and alone?

That might sound paranoid, but in my defense, it turns out these thoughts are common. Danielle Bayard Jackson, the author of Fighting for Our Friendships: The Science and Art of Conflict and Connection in Women's Relationships, told me that when she was a high-school teacher years ago, she’d often hear students airing anxieties: So-and-so’s befriending my friend or I think she’s trying to take her. She assumed it was a teenage issue—until she began working as a friendship coach and found that her “charismatic, high-achieving, successful” adult clients didn’t want to introduce friends either. The subject has been popping up online, too. A whole category of TikToks seem to consist of people just looking stressed, with a caption like “when your birthday is coming up and you gotta decide if u wanna mix the friend groups or not” or “POV mixing friendgroups and they’re about to watch you switch between personality 1 & 3.” In a recent Slate article, the writer Chason Gordon confessed to an “overwhelming horror at merging friend groups.”

Much of what can make linking friends scary—insecurity, envy, an instinct to hold tight to the people you love—isn’t new; it’s fundamentally human. But keeping your friends to yourself, what I call “friend hoarding,” is a modern practice. Before the Industrial Revolution, having different social circles was hardly possible: You were likely to eat, work, and pray with the same people day in and day out. Only once more people moved from close-knit farming villages to larger towns and cities did strangers begin coexisting in private bubbles and forming disconnected groups.

Today, this phenomenon has gone into “hyperdrive,” Katherine Stovel, a University of Washington sociologist, told me. With the internet and faster transportation, people can more easily maintain relationships from different parts of life; the more discrete the groups are, the harder it might be to integrate them.

But the thing is, many people want to benefit from the kinds of introductions they’re nervous to make. And ironically, though they might hoard friends out of fear of being abandoned, doing so could leave them feeling more lonely in the end. Marisa G. Franco, the author of Platonic: How Understanding Your Attachment Style Can Help You Make—And Keep—Friends, told me that people who have plenty of individual friends can still experience “collective loneliness,” or a yearning to be part of a group with common identity or purpose—something that a more connected, cohesive network could solve. Bayard Jackson mentioned something similar: “I've had people say to me how hungry they are to be a part of a friend group, this family feel,” she said. “And then in the same breath tell me they don't want to introduce their friends to one another. And I'll point out … do you understand how that doesn't work?”

If Americans let their friends mingle, they might form the communities they’ve been hoping for. But first they need to stop standing in their own way.   

Before the late 18th century, most relationships were either familial or, at least to some degree, practical; they were rarely just about having fun or developing intimacy, as friendship is usually conceived of now. But after industrialization, people suddenly had far more options in life: what they’d do for work, where they’d live, whom they’d meet. As Reuben Thomas, a University of New Mexico sociologist, told me, it became possible to be the only person “who works as a hospital technician but is also in a Sherlock Holmes book club, and is also in a rock-climbing club, who goes to Renaissance fairs and is part of the Swedish Lutheran church and lives in Wichita.” Each pocket of life can yield more pals.

These days, people can socialize online with scattered friends who’ll never end up at the same bar or party—and who might not even know of one another’s existence. Even if friends live in the same area, today there are fewer so-called third spaces: free, public areas where big groups can hang out. Just as romance has become privatized, with more people dating strangers from apps than acquaintances from their network, researchers told me that there’s been a shift toward privatized friendship too. “Everybody has to have a play date rather than just going out into the neighborhood and playing with whoever's there,” Stovel said.

Keeping friends separate can have its benefits. It allows people to freely express certain sides of themselves in the safety of simpatico groups—say, earnest geekiness with the Renaissance stans and adventurousness with the climbers. Stovel told me this can be particularly important for young adults, who might be “trying on personas” to figure out who they are.

[Read: What adults forget about friendship]

A more primal motivation also keeps many folks from making introductions: They’re nervous that their friends will grow close and that they’ll be cast aside. People have argued for decades that feeling threatened by friends’ other bonds is immature; or worse, that it reveals how capitalism has crept into relationships, driving us to compete, amass power, and treat one another like possessions, Jaimie Krems, a UCLA psychologist who studies friendship envy, told me. But the cold, hard fact, I’m sorry to report, is that friendship inherently does involve some competition. According to the “alliance theory,” humans have evolved to make friends because they’re in our corner—not someone else’s—in times of trouble, and we’re in theirs in return. Today, too, everyone has limited time, attention, and resources to share with the people they love, and more time with one friend inevitably means less time with another. Friendship envy is adaptive, Krems told me.

You can lose friends after introducing them; researchers have found that “friend poaching” is a very real phenomenon. But even if that worst-case scenario isn’t likely to happen, the thought of losing any closeness can be terrible. Bayard Jackson said that women in particular “really value feeling like we’re in this mutually exclusive private vault” with our besties. It’s cozy in there! And so many people already have a gnawing fear, she told me: “that I’ll be left behind, forgotten, that I don’t offer anything interesting enough.”

Being the person who introduces two friends—Stovel calls these people the “catalyst brokers”—nearly always involves some risk. Initially, the broker gains power because the two people she’s introduced are dependent on her for access; the friends are also, hopefully, grateful for the connection. At some point, though, the broker might become redundant, even disposable, the same way a matchmaker or a real-estate agent would be after a job well done.

People may have more to gain than they do to lose when mixing friends, though. Making those introductions might make you feel more whole, like the various versions of yourself are finally coming together. Combining circles could be the difference between sustaining friendships and letting them languish from neglect, given that finding time is a big obstacle to friendship today. Your friends may also be able to offer you more support together than they could individually, especially in a crisis; they can work together to care for you. And you might start feeling like part of something larger than yourself—a remedy for the “collective loneliness” that Franco described.

[Read: What if friendship, not marriage, was at the center of life?]

Drawing connections among people could even shift society as a whole, making it more equitable and less homogenous. For one thing, friend hoarding—however unintentionally—can lead to “opportunity hoarding,” in which privileged people circulate resources among themselves rather than distributing them to people with greater need outside their bubble. And if people all stay locked in the groups they formed from, say, high school, society is more likely to remain stubbornly segregated. The German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel believed that a society with separate but overlapping circles allows people to observe one another’s commonalities and differences, which, Stovel said, can “breed empathy, understanding, tolerance, and a richness of experience and curiosity.” It’s a sign, she said, of a “strong social fabric.”

This doesn’t mean that everybody needs to immediately invite all their buddies to the same place and keep the door locked until they’re ready to emerge as one mega-group. But maybe more people could start warming to the idea of being the broker. Bayard Jackson likes to remind people that friendships ebb and flow: Even if some of your friends do eventually get closer to one another than they are to you, that hierarchy isn’t static. And it might help to remember, too, that the reason this all can feel so hard is that friends mean so much. Krems believes that friend envy is functional in part because it motivates people to care for their relationships, to not take them for granted. In her research, she’s found that when people feel that their bond is threatened, they’ll take pains to protect it. This might involve telling a friend that you care about them—so much so that you fear them getting close to someone else, even if you know that reaction might seem silly.

The truth is that you probably can’t keep your friends separate even if you want to. You certainly can’t dictate whom they connect with. That’s the thing about friends: They’re not characters in your head but autonomous human beings with their own motivations and experiences. That’s why they’re interesting—and why they give us so much to lose.

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Americans are anxious about the election. The American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey found that, as of August, politics was the leading cause of stress for seven out of 10 adults across party lines. In a poll from a mental-health-care company the same month, 79 percent of respondents reported that the presidential election made them feel anxious this year, and more than half thought about the election every day. Now that the election is imminent, one can only assume that Americans’ anxiety is even higher.

Many U.S. media outlets have responded by offering their readers advice on how to calm down. Type election anxiety into Google, and you’ll find dozens of articles instructing you to focus on aspects of life outside of politics, to spend less time watching the news, or to use relaxation techniques such as breathing exercises to subdue the negative feelings.

But there’s another way to think about election stress: A big event should prompt big feelings. The stakes of this election go far beyond anyone’s preferred party winning or losing. “Voters on both sides of the aisle are being given a message that if the other side wins, this will be the end of American democracy as they know it,” Andrew Civettini, a political scientist at Knox College, told me. Why wouldn’t you feel anxious?

In Western philosophy and psychology, emotions have long been cast as the opposite of reason. In Stoicism, emotions are considered “non-reasoning movements,” wild inner beasts that a person has to keep in check in order to live well. During the Enlightenment, reason was widely considered a better guiding force than the senses or the emotions. This notion occasionally rears its head in cognitive-behavioral therapy, which teaches patients that feelings aren’t facts, so that they can act despite their anxiety or insecurity. This week, Arianna Huffington argued in Time magazine that Americans shouldn’t be stressed out by polls. “The way to best affect outcomes is to find the eye of the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength and wisdom,” she wrote.

But political emotions motivate action all the time. “When we experience anxiety about politics, it causes us to pay more attention, and that could have positive learning effects,” Civettini said. Steven Webster, a political scientist at Indiana University, has found that political anger can push people to vote and donate to campaigns. People can, Webster told me, get too emotional about politics: Too much anger, anxiety, or fear might motivate people to support political violence, or isolate themselves from any person or news source that doesn’t confirm their beliefs. But overall, he said, “it’s not obvious to me that we should want to reduce political emotions.”

Although emotions, with their heat and urgency, can overtake and weaken people, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that they reflect inner judgments and evaluations—in other words, that they are reasonable and intelligent responses to real-world events. For example, to have fear, as Nussbaum wrote in her book Upheavals of Thought, “I must believe that bad events are impending; that they are not trivially, but seriously bad; and that I am not entirely in control of warding them off.” In this way, Nussbaum noted, emotions—not some mythic, unemotional source of rationality—reveal what we require to live well and flourish.

Throughout history, major political shifts have been met with equally big feelings, says Kerstin Maria Pahl, a historian of political emotion at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and a co-editor of the 2022 book Feeling Political. Apathy, a longstanding Christian concept, became part of Western political language at the end of the 18th century. “Not being affected by something made you a bad person, because you didn’t take any interest in the common good of mankind, or welfare of humanity,” Pahl told me.

Allowing so much emotional interest to go unchecked might sound counterintuitive in 21st-century America, where cultural forces and psychological experts teach that emotions must be regulated for optimal well-being. But election anxiety highlights what emotions are for: to reveal what we care about, and what our moral values are. Thomas Szanto, a political philosopher at the University of Flensburg, in Germany, told me that many Americans’ political emotions are fitting responses to the election cycle. “There is something at stake for people,” Szanto said. Earlier this year, Szanto and his colleague Ruth Rebecca Tietjen argued in a paper that a political emotion is appropriate if it is functional—for example, if it pushes people to vote or seek out information about candidates—and if it has a moral component that mirrors a person’s concerns about their world, and their sense of right and wrong. Anxiety is an appropriate response from a voter who believes that Donald Trump is a threat to reproductive rights, which would violate their moral belief in bodily autonomy. Similarly, a voter who believes that abortion is murder would have a fitting emotional reaction to the idea that a Kamala Harris presidency would lead to more access to abortions.

In Philip K. Dick’s 1968 dystopian novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, people can conjure any emotion they want through the use of a machine called the “mood organ.” When Iran Deckard, the wife of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, programs for herself a six-hour “self-accusatory depression,” Rick asks why she would subject herself to that when she could feel anything else. She replies that it feels wrong to not respond emotionally to the ongoing calamities in their world. “That used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it ‘absence of appropriate affect,’” she tells Rick.

Americans in 2024 don’t need a mood organ to feel any variety of negative emotion in response to this election. They are feeling anxiety, sadness, and dread, all on their own. Surviving the remaining days until November 5 requires not simply turning off those emotions, but paying attention to what they are telling us.

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

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

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

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

[Read: The swing states are in good hands]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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