This might be nostalgia talking, but I miss the old Election Nights, the kind we used to have before the stakes became so gruesomely high. No one was warning of “existential consequences” or calling trauma counselors into the office.

The end of a campaign was once something to celebrate, a shining marker of our participatory traditions—a jubilee of civic duty, a peaceful transfer of power. Now the once-routine exercise of certifying electoral votes has been officially designated a “National Special Security Event.”

Ideally, this ordeal won’t last too long, and we will have something in the ballpark of clarity soon enough. Ideally, no one will get hurt or killed this time. I wish I could reassure you that our democracy will survive, no matter what.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

Alas, I can say only this: Elections matter. And this one really matters. I’m guessing that you’re with me on this, and that you’re not one of those “undecideds” from the cable focus groups “still waiting to hear more specifics” from Kamala Harris or whatever. But if you’re reading this, I’m assuming that you’ll be watching tomorrow with a rooting interest. And you will not be calm.

Why not at least try? Perhaps attempt something that approximates “grief minimization,” a term I came across recently that has been bubbling back up into my brain a lot. Grief minimization is a choice—or at least a worthy goal, especially this week.

I’ve spent the past several days gathering wisdom. I’ve gone back and revisited some of the solace I found useful after the earthquake of 2016. “This is not the apocalypse,” then-President Barack Obama said in a postelection interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker. “I don’t believe in apocalyptic—until the apocalypse comes. I think nothing is the end of the world until the end of the world.” Certainly, Donald Trump’s presidency was bad, maybe worse than feared. But I took Obama’s point to be that prolonged grieving would be counterproductive, a kind of self-inflicted paralysis.

Likewise, preemptive anguish achieves nothing good. My friend Amanda Ripley wrote in The Washington Post last week about a study in which women waiting to learn the results of breast biopsies were found to have similar levels of stress hormones in their saliva as women who had already learned that they had cancer. “In experiments, people who believe they have a 50–50 chance of getting a painful electric shock become significantly more agitated than people who think they have a 100 percent chance,” Ripley wrote. “Anticipating possible pain feels worse than anticipating certain pain.”

In other words, don’t wallow in the potential for, or inevitability of, a worst-case scenario. Instead, seek out distractions. Maybe edibles too.

Shop for enlightenment beforehand, which you can apply during the white-knuckle hours. To that end, I spent a few days last week reaching out to some of my favorite campaign gurus. I wasn’t seeking intel about the election itself. Rather, my goal was to assemble a last-minute tool kit of coping mechanisms and best mental-health practices.   

As much as possible, we should try to make ourselves sensible consumers of the treacherous and triggering torrent of information we will soon be drowning in. Note the metaphor here, as it segues into the important piece of guidance: Be careful where you swim. Avoid needless waves and currents. This includes the majority of information you get on TV before a critical mass of returns are processed, not to mention most of the inane opinions and guesswork and “partial data” you’re getting from the various walls of broadcast noise (disguised as maps) before 9 or 10 o’clock.  

“It’s extremely important to consume news on your own terms,” CNN’s Paul Begala, the longtime Democratic consultant, told me. As Election Day approaches, Begala tries to turn off every news notification on his phone that could increase his level of tension. “You cannot let anyone weaponize your amygdala against you,” Begala said, referring to the brain area that helps regulate emotions such as fear. Text bulletins, algorithms, and (God knows) social media are engineered to prey on our amygdala. But resist. You do not need this information right now, let alone predictions or useless speculation. It’s just empty-calorie pregaming. Trust me, you will learn who won and who lost. The news will find you.  

In the meantime, be humble and surrender to the unknown. Again, no one knows who is going to win. I’m pretty sure it will be Donald Trump or Kamala Harris (you’re welcome). Yet people still have a primal need for certainty, even when it’s obvious that none is possible. They are convinced that some special class of TV decoders exists that is in possession of secret knowledge otherwise off-limits to the uninitiated. They want to believe that these alleged super pundits are hoarding the “big secret” for themselves and their various co-conspirators.

“Some woman at LaGuardia came up to me and said, ‘Who’s going to win?’” James Carville, who will be yapping on Election Night with Brian Williams on Amazon Prime, told me. “And the guy who’s with her said, ‘Oh, he knows who’s going to win. He’s just not telling you.’”

Carville gets this a lot. “People think people like us have all the answers,” he said. Here’s a not-so-big secret: They do not.

I used to watch a lot of live sports on TV. I did this in large part because I wanted to see what happened in real time. Now, thanks to any number of screens that didn’t exist 30 years ago, I can be confident of learning exactly what happened and seeing what it looked and felt like as many times as I want. I partake of far more 10-minute YouTube synopses of NFL games than I do of full three-hour slogs (with the endless penalty flags, referee huddles, commercials, injury time-outs, official reviews, etc.). This saves me a whole lot of time and spares me a whole lot of the roller coaster.

I’m always hesitant to make sports analogies, especially with events of such terrifying magnitude as this election. Excluding those who have money on a game, sports will have very little real-life impact on most of the people who are choosing to invest emotionally in them.

Regardless, sporting events are much better-suited to television than election coverage is. When you watch a live game, the result is unfolding chronologically in front of you. That’s not possible for an event as huge and diffuse as Election Night, where partial data, secondhand projections, and “unconfirmed reports” are flying in haphazardly from all around the country. Chris Hayes had a good riff about this on MSNBC: “When you think about Election Night,” he said, “it’s like hearing the results of a full basketball game, basket by basket, but being read totally out of order, after the game already ended.”

You should really consider skipping most of this. Take a walk. Leave your phone at home. Steer clear of any news, stimuli, or people that could raise your blood pressure. This almost certainly includes Trump, who will probably declare a massively premature (and maybe erroneous) victory, no matter what the early returns say. Yes, this will be deeply irresponsible, but it should surprise no one. And any energy you devote to reacting will only sap your reserves for later, when you will need them.

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

I’ve seen landslide projections for both sides, and cogent arguments for why pollsters might be undercounting the support of both candidates. But a very close race remains the most likely scenario. Pace yourself and be realistic. Breathe, meditate, pray, seek simple pleasures, and be kind. It’s okay to be scared about whatever might unfold. Appropriate, even.

Rest assured, you will have a sizable community of fellow basket cases to commiserate with. Take comfort in them. Reach out and say you love them.

“This is easily the highest-stakes election of my life where I have not been personally involved,” Mac Stipanovich, a longtime GOP operative and lobbyist in Florida, told me. Stipanovich, a Never Trump Republican, says he is as nervous about tomorrow “as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”

Stipanovich wouldn’t speculate on an election result. But I got the gist: Anxiety is a natural side effect of this exercise, and maybe even a privilege of a democracy—if we can keep it.

A little over a week ago, campaigning in Kalamazoo, Michigan, former First Lady Michelle Obama had a moment of reflection. “I gotta ask myself, why on earth is this race even close?” she asked. The crowd roared, but Obama wasn’t laughing. It’s a serious question, and it deserves serious consideration.

The most remarkable thing about the 2024 presidential election, which hasn’t lacked for surprises, is that roughly half the electorate still supports Donald Trump. The Republican’s tenure in the White House was a series of rolling disasters, and culminated with him attempting to steal an election after voters rejected him. And yet, polling suggests that Trump is virtually tied with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

In fact, that undersells how surprising the depth of his support is. Although he has dominated American politics for most of the past decade, he has never been especially popular. As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has written, the United States has thus far been home to a consistent anti-MAGA majority. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination by splitting the field, then won the Electoral College that November despite losing the popular vote. He lost decisively in 2020. In 2018, the GOP was trounced in the midterm elections. In the 2022 midterms, Trump was out of office but sought to make the elections about him, resulting in a notable GOP underperformance. Yet Trump stands a good chance of winning his largest share of the popular vote this year, in his third try—now, after Americans have had nearly a decade to familiarize themselves with his complete inadequacy—and could even capture a majority.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Trump’s term was chaos wrapped in catastrophe, served over incompetence. He avoided any major wars and slashed taxes, but otherwise failed in many of his goals. He did not build a wall, nor did Mexico pay for it. He did not beat China in a trade war or revive American manufacturing. He did not disarm North Korea. His administration was hobbled by a series of scandals of his own creation, including one that got him impeached by the House. He oversaw a string of moral outrages: his callous handling of Hurricane María, the cruelty of family separation, his disinformation about COVID, and the distribution of aid to punish Democratic areas. At the end came his attempt to thwart the will of American voters, an assault on the tradition of peaceful transfer of power that dated back to the nation’s founding.

One common explanation for Trump’s popularity is that voters have amnesia about his time in office. This may be true, and it might be more understandable if Trump had spent his time since leaving office remaking his identity into something less divisive, as many Republicans urged him to do.

He hasn’t, though. Instead, he has amplified many of his most outrageous attributes. The past few years have seen the FBI turn up some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, where they had been stashed haphazardly (this, after his 2016 campaign criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, relentlessly for her handling of her email security). The former president has also been indicted on dozens of felony charges and convicted on 34 of them. In civil proceedings, he’s been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll (he denies this) and to have committed millions of dollars of business fraud.

His 2024 presidential campaign has been built around two main promises: a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and retribution against his political enemies. He’s said he wants to deploy the military against domestic enemies, a category that he has made clear begins with elected Democrats. As I wrote after his October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden, hate and fear are his message. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, recently reported that Trump had complained that he wanted generals like Hitler’s, and an aide allegedly assaulted an employee at Arlington National Cemetery who tried to prevent Trump from using it for crass politicking. Every administration has a few disgruntled staffers; no other administration has ever seen so many former top staffers say that a president is a fascist, a liar, or unfit for the presidency.

Harris is running a very different campaign. In contrast to Trump’s bleak vision, she has spent most of her short campaign offering a cheerful, patriotic vision of the sort that has traditionally appealed to American voters. Harris has been criticized for offering insufficient detail about her plans and granting too few interviews, and more detail and more transparency are always better. But Trump is just as vague, if not more so, about his plans—his explanation for his plans on tariffs and child care, for example, are downright naive—and he has avoided or canceled several interviews with interlocutors not considered friendly.

Some of the important reasons the election is so close are structural and have little to do with Trump or Harris. Underlying characteristics of the election benefit the Republican nominee: Voters in the United States are unhappy about the direction of the country, and voters around the world have been punishing incumbents. Although Harris is not the president, she has struggled to figure out how much to distance herself from Joe Biden and the administration in which she serves as vice president. Americans are also sour on the economy, and although the U.S. has weathered the post-COVID world and global inflation better than any of its peers, saying that is no use if voters don’t feel and believe it.

[Read: The case for Kamala Harris]

Trump has also benefited from the media environment. A robust right-wing press has opted to become effectively a wing of the MAGA movement. Harris faces scrutiny from both the mainstream and conservative press, but he receives it only from the mainstream. Some parts of the mainstream press still seem perplexed by how to cover Trump. Moreover, Trump has benefited from a huge range of attention outside the traditional news media. Podcasts have become an important driver of support for him. So has X. Elon Musk bought the platform out of a supposed concern for political interference, and has spent the past few months turning it into a gusher of pro-Trump disinformation.

Harris has run the shortest presidential campaign in history, a product of Biden’s late exit from the race. Whether a longer run would have helped or hurt her is impossible to answer clearly, though some Democrats fret that she has not sufficiently introduced herself to the nation in that time. Puzzlingly, her campaign has spent much of the past couple of weeks attacking Trump rather than emphasizing the affirmative case for her—setting aside the message that had won her a small lead in the polls and taking up the one that had been a loser for Biden.

In most respects, Harris is a totally conventional Democratic nominee—to both her advantage and her disadvantage. One might imagine that, against a candidate as aberrant as Trump, this would be sufficient for a small lead. Indeed, that’s exactly the approach that Biden used to beat Trump four years ago. But if the polling is right (which it may not be, in either direction), then many voters have stuck with Trump or shifted toward him. For many others, the closeness of the race is just as baffling. “I don’t think it's going to be near as close as they’re saying,” Tony Capillary told me at an October 21 rally in Greenville, North Carolina. “This should be about 93 percent to 7 percent, is what it should be.” He’s sure that when the votes are in, Trump will win—by a lot.