Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

It’s the evening rush hour on the Friday before Election Day in Omaha, and about two dozen die-hard Democrats are making a racket. They’re standing on a bridge overpass, cheering, whooping, blowing whistles, holding up little American flags, and waving white signs emblazoned with a blue circle. Even in this Republican area on the outskirts of Nebraska’s biggest city, the cars passing by are honking in approval.

The signs say nothing—it’s just that big blue dot in the middle—but their message is no mystery here. “I don’t think there’s anybody in this city who doesn’t know what the blue dot represents,” Tim Conn, a 70-year-old retiree who has spray-painted a few thousand of the signs in his backyard, told me. More than 13,000 blue dots have popped up on Omaha lawns in the past three months, an expression of political pride in what has become a Democratic stronghold on the eastern edge of a deep-red state.

The blue dots embody a surge of enthusiasm for both Kamala Harris and Omaha’s outsize significance to the national election. Nebraska allocates some of its electoral votes by congressional district, and if Harris defeats Donald Trump in the Rust Belt’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—while losing the battlegrounds to the south, Omaha and its suburbs would likely deliver her the 270th vote that she needs to win the presidency. The district is so important that Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured Republicans in Nebraska’s legislature to change the rules in his favor. (The legislators rebuffed him a final time in September, and Trump has made little effort since to win Omaha the old-fashioned way—by earning more votes.)

Omaha could also determine control of Congress. Democrats view the GOP-held House district as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat and help recapture the majority. And in at least one postelection scenario, an upset victory by the independent Dan Osborn over Senator Deb Fischer—polls show the race is close—would give him the power to choose which party controls the Senate.

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

All this has made a region that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest swing state a potential tipping point for the balance of federal power. “Nebraska is literally in the middle of everything,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, told me. “They try to say that we’re a flyover state, but ha-ha, joke’s on them.”

Nebraska began splitting up its electoral votes more than three decades ago, but only twice since then has Omaha’s vote in the Second Congressional District gone to a Democrat; Barack Obama won it by a single point in 2008, and Joe Biden beat Trump by six points in 2020.

This year, however, Harris is poised to carry the district by more than either of them. The area is filled with the white, college-educated voters who have largely recoiled from Trump since 2016, and a New York Times/Siena poll last week found the vice president leading by 12 points. Neither Harris nor Trump, nor their running mates, are campaigning in Omaha in the closing days of the election—a sign that both candidates see the district going to Harris.

Still, the Harris campaign and allied groups have spent more than $4 million in the area, which has also imperiled Omaha’s Republican representative, Don Bacon. Trump has spent only around $130,000. “That’s the biggest undertow for us,” Bacon told me on Saturday before a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in a more conservative part of the district. Public polls have shown Bacon’s opponent, the Democratic state senator and former middle-school science teacher Tony Vargas, ahead by a few points. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a leading congressional prognosticator, shifted its rating of the race as a “toss-up” to one that Vargas is slightly favored to win.

Public polls show Tony Vargas, right, narrowly leading his opponent, Republican Representative Don Bacon.  (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

A retired Air Force general serving his fourth term in Congress, Bacon outran Trump in 2020, winning reelection by 4.5 points. He defeated Vargas by a slimmer margin two years ago, and Vargas is running again—this time with more money and more backing from prominent members of his party.

Bacon has positioned himself as a moderate—he’s a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus—and frequently criticized the conservative hard-liners who ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But Bacon has been reluctant to cross Trump, and he lost some supporters by backing the former president’s late push to award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner, which would have effectively stripped power from many of his own constituents. “They’re so mad about that,” Vargas told me on Saturday, noting that Bacon received an endorsement from Trump soon after he signed a letter supporting the change. “Now we know what Don Bacon actually is. He’ll sell out Nebraskans if it means holding on to his seat of power.” At an Osborn event the next day, I met a former Republican and Bacon voter, Paul Anderson, who told me that he wrote in a friend’s name on his ballot rather than support Bacon again. “He’s afraid of Donald J. Trump,” Anderson said.

Vargas’s previous campaign and his plentiful TV ads have made him a recognizable face in the district. When one elderly woman answered her door on Saturday and saw him standing on her stoop, her eyes widened as if he were Ed McMahon about to hand her a giant check. She assured Vargas that both she and her daughter would vote for him. “I’ll remember, don’t worry,” she said. As we walked away, Vargas showed me the canvassing app on his phone: The woman was a registered Republican.

For Nebraska Democrats, the most pleasant Election Night surprise would involve a race in which they haven’t even fielded a candidate. Osborn, a Navy veteran and local union leader, rejected the party’s endorsement and elected to campaign instead as an independent, and he’s stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by running nearly even with Fischer, a two-term incumbent who won both her previous races by more than 15 points.

Osborn has caught on with a cross-partisan, populist campaign that mixes support for abortion rights, labor unions, and campaign-finance reform with a hawkish, Trump-like stance on border security. Republicans in the state have accused him of being a Democrat in disguise, but he’s appealed to voters in Nebraska’s conservative rural west by backing so-called Right to Repair laws—popular with farmers. He has also hammered Fischer’s opposition to rail-safety measures and her vote that delayed the provision of benefits to military veterans injured by toxic burn pits. In one commercial, Osborn, a longtime mechanic, takes a blowtorch to a TV showing one of Fischer’s attack ads.

Mostly, though, he seems to be winning support by criticizing both parties, and his success is validating his decision to spurn the Democrats. “This wouldn’t be close if he were running as the Democratic candidate,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has written about the “two-party doom loop,” a term Osborn has used during the campaign. Osborn has vowed to stay independent and said that he would refuse to align with the GOP or the Democratic Party as a senator (unlike the four independents currently serving in the Senate, who all caucus with the Democrats).

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Osborn’s pledge has its doubters, including fans such as Drutman. If either party has a clear majority, Osborn might be able to stay independent. But if both Osborn and Harris win, and Republicans wind up with exactly 50 Senate seats, his refusal to caucus with either party would hand the GOP a majority—and with it the ability to block Harris’s agenda and potentially her nominees to the Supreme Court. “There’s going to be so much pressure on him,” Drutman told me, “and he’s going to have to build a pretty strong infrastructure around him to manage that.”

Osborn has insisted that he wouldn’t budge. “I want to challenge the system, because the system needs to be challenged,” he told me. Osborn acknowledged that leaders in both parties “are gonna come knocking on my door, and then that’s going to allow me to use leverage to make deals for Nebraska.” Yet he gave other indications that he’d want to empower Democrats. He told me, for instance, that he supported filibuster reform and would back the Democrats’ push to remove the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass a law restoring abortion rights—a move the party might be able to make only if he helped them assemble a majority.

Republicans are confident that, come Wednesday morning, the question of Osborn’s party alliance will be moot. The national GOP has sent money and reinforcements to rescue Fischer’s bid—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was stumping for her on Saturday—and her campaign has released polls showing her ahead of Osborn by several points. Independent candidates have threatened Republican incumbents a few times in recent years, only to fall short when GOP voters rallied around their party’s candidate in elections’ final weeks; in Kansas in 2014, the independent Greg Orman was polling close to Senator Pat Roberts for much of the campaign, but he lost by more than 10 points.

Left: Veterans protest at Republican Senator Deb Fischer’s rally on Saturday. Center: Senator Tom Cotton stumps for Fischer. Right: Dan Osborn, Fischer’s challenger, has run nearly even with her in polling. (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

Fischer has kept a low profile as a senator, and Republicans privately say she initially did not take Osborn seriously enough as a challenger. She’s embraced Trump in the apparent hope that his coattails will carry her to victory. When I asked Fischer why the race was so close, she pointed at me and the other national reporters who had come to one of her final rallies. “I explain his success to you folks in large part,” she said, “because I think you wanted to see a race here and you believed a lot of his polls that he put out early. We are going to win this race, and we are going to have a strong, strong showing.”

For his part, Osborn is courting Trump voters aggressively, recognizing that he cannot win with Democrats and independents alone. He has refused to say whether he’s voting for Trump or Harris. “As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I become that,” he told me. But Osborn’s closing ads leave the distinct impression that he’s backing Trump. “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border,” he says in one. “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.”

Osborn’s rightward turn has made it awkward for Democrats like Kleeb, the state party chair, who is clearly rooting for him even if she can’t say so publicly. “Yeah, it’s complicated!” she said when I asked about Osborn, letting out a big laugh. Kleeb told me she’s frustrated that Osborn has backed Trump on border policy and even more so that he assails both Republicans and Democrats as corrupt. “It’s unfair to criticize us as the same,” she said. Still, Kleeb continued, it’s obvious that on most issues, Osborn is preferable to Fischer, a down-the-line Republican: “We’ve told all of our Democratic voters—you need to weigh the issues that you deeply care about and who is closest to you. That’s who we suggest you vote for.”

To most Democrats in Omaha, the choice is easy. When I visited Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown, I found an Osborn sign on a front lawn festooned with campaign placards. None were bigger, however, than the one Jason created: the blue dot.

The Browns have been Harris enthusiasts since 2019, when she was their first choice in the crowded field of Democratic primary contenders then campaigning over the Iowa state line a few miles away. Inspired by the Democratic National Convention’s exhortation to “do something,” Jason began tinkering in their garage. He cut off the top of a bucket, used it to outline a circle, and spray-painted over a sign for a local lawn service. He showed it to Ruth and asked if he should add any writing, like Vote or Kamala. “No,” she replied. “It makes you stop and think for a second. Just leave it plain.”

Attendees pray at a Fischer rally (left), and the Browns make blue-dot signs (right). (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

They put the sign up in their yard in August, and soon after, neighbors started asking where they had gotten it and whether they could get one too. Before long, the Browns were ordering blank white signs from Amazon, first by the tens, and then by the hundreds. Jason made the first couple thousand by hand in their backyard, and then they enlisted the help of another neighbor, Conn, who had better equipment. After they had distributed 5,000 blue dots, the Browns finally gave up and started having them mass-produced by a political-sign company.

Jason and Ruth were telling me the story as we sat at their dining-room table, where they resembled the kind of superfans you might see satirized in a Christopher Guest movie. Both wore blue-dot T-shirts over blue jeans and blue long-sleeved shirts. Jason, 53, had a Kamala hat and blue shoes—he also has blue-shaded sunglasses—while Ruth, 58, wore blue-dot–shaped earrings. As we were speaking, the doorbell rang: A pair of young men were there to pick up more signs. (They give them out for free, though most people make donations that cover their costs.) The Browns have taken a leave of absence from their consulting business through the election; earlier this fall, they postponed a long-planned cruise.

At first, they told me, they saw the signs as part of an education campaign, because they found that many Omaha voters did not appreciate the city’s importance in the presidential election. Although the Second District has had its own electoral vote since the 1990s, the reapportionment following the 2020 census has made it more important for Harris than it was for past Democratic candidates—a result of shrinking blue states losing electoral votes to growing red ones. (In 2020, Biden wouldn’t have needed the district’s vote to reach 270, so long as he carried the Blue Wall states; he ultimately won 306 electoral votes.)

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

As the blue dots took off, the Browns said they came to represent a sense of local pride, as well as inspiration to Democrats who feel isolated and powerless in red states. Ruth has tried to keep the vibe positive—she calls the signs “happy blue dots”—but she told me that the anxiety Democrats feel about the election has also played a part in the movement’s popularity. “I think there’s more enthusiasm because people are more scared this time,” she said.

I mentioned that I had spoken with one Democrat who worried that if Omaha delivered the election to Harris, Trump would make another attempt to lean on Republicans in the legislature to hand him all of Nebraska’s votes before the Electoral College meets in December. The Second District’s vote was saved in September by a GOP holdout, Mike McDonnell, who resisted pressure from other Republicans. Would he hold firm if he was all that stood in the way of Trump’s election?

Jason told me he’s sure that Republicans would come for the blue dot again, and he’s prepared for one more fight. If Omaha is responsible for electing Harris, “we’ll be running up and down that street, waving flags, tears of joy,” he said, “followed by, Oh, shit.”

US Senate election 2024 live results: Who will take control of the Senate?

Scholars and advocates for democracy who have tried to warn voters about the dangers posed by a second Donald Trump term are, to some extent, victims of their own success—or, rather, the perception of it. Having fought to defend the nation’s institutions during Trump’s first term, they now worry that Americans have become complacent about the risks of a potential second term.

“There’s this mythology that permeates that Trump didn’t damage institutions in the first term,” Amanda Carpenter, a former GOP staffer who now works for the civil-society group Protect Democracy, told me recently. “And I think that’s completely wrong.”

Indeed, institutions at nearly every level of American society failed during Trump’s first term, which is a big reason a second Trump term is even possible. The press, all three branches of the federal government, nongovernmental organizations such as the Republican Party, and the private sector all crumpled when confronted. The failures were of both personal leadership and systems. A reelected President Trump won’t just have figured out how to better fight a healthy system. He will face one that is already in dire condition.

[David A. Graham: We’re watching an antidemocratic coup unfold]

An exhaustive account of institutional collapses would be, well, exhausting, but a tour d’horizon should suffice. In 2015 and 2016, a majority of Republican-primary voters and an overwhelming majority of Republican Party leaders opposed Trump’s candidacy for president, but the party revealed itself to be incapable of organizing—one of its most basic functions—to resist the threat posed by a charismatic outsider. The traditional press also showed its susceptibility to a candidate able to attract almost endless attention, and how powerful that attention was, even when negative. The result was a narrow Trump victory in 2016.

The first constitutional check on a president is Congress. In the first two years of Trump’s presidency, both the House and the Senate were controlled by Republicans, who showed little interest in serious oversight work. After Democrats took over the House following the 2018 midterms, they began investigating Trump. They even impeached him after he attempted to withhold funds from Ukraine in exchange for helping Trump’s reelection campaign, but the GOP-led Senate declined to convict him, moving the goalposts. Elsewhere, however, Democrats were slow to respond to Trump’s stonewalling. For example, they sought his tax returns and were finally able to release them—in December 2022, nearly two years after he’d left office.

This was in part because Trump was able to recognize that the courts were a weak link in the constitutional order. The justice system is designed with lots of protections to ensure that no one is deprived of due process, but that also means that a defendant with sufficient money and bad faith can manipulate those protections to run down the clock.

The nature of the failures in the executive branch was more complex. Many members of the administration cooperated with Trump on legally, ethically, or morally dubious schemes. Others resisted them, sometimes bravely: Whistleblowing and public testimony from White House and State Department officials rattled by Trump’s pressure on Ukraine was courageous and came at a cost to them. In other cases, administration officials resisted Trump simply by refusing to execute bad ideas. This may have sometimes staved off acute disasters, but the federal government cannot function correctly if unelected officials feel empowered to decide when to follow lawful orders from the president. This is one of the institution’s vulnerabilities: Officials of conscience sometimes have no good options.

Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election demonstrated the disastrous convergence of all of these failures. The president’s attempts to railroad state officials into supporting his efforts were prevented by people such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, but Trump demonstrated how brittle the systems were by coming close to subverting the election. Some local election officials also showed far less integrity.

After January 6, the House once more impeached Trump, but the Senate again refused to convict. One major factor was that the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, concluded that Trump’s career was finished, thus excusing himself from taking any political hit by supporting a vote to convict.

The judicial branch is frequently celebrated as the institution that best resisted Trump’s election subversion. Courts did reject the Trump campaign’s legalistic efforts to keep him in office, but that is largely because its claims were so flimsy and lacking in evidence that judges had no other choice. The judiciary’s actions since then have revealed it to be as fragile as the other two branches. Trump has managed to thus far avoid criminal trials for his election subversion and for pilfering sensitive national documents and trying to hide them from the government; he has promised that will obstruct justice to ensure that remains true if he wins. Politico recently reported that judges have repeatedly expressed concerns about Trump gumming up the legal system with frivolous process arguments.

[Read: Trump is being very honest about one thing]

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has played along with Trump. It ruled this past summer that nearly anything a president does under cover of the presidency is immune from prosecution, giving Trump sanction for past actions and opening up new avenues for future chicanery. One of the justices in the majority is married to a prominent participant in Trump’s election subversion. Another had a pro-Trump flag flying over his house, for which he blamed his spouse.

The private sector is no more resilient. After January 6, social-media companies banished Trump, and major corporations pledged not to contribute to politicians involved in election denial. But Trump is back on Facebook and X, and many of the companies that made the pledge have since quietly begun donating to such politicians once again. Major private institutions have continued to bend the knee to Trump, even before the election has taken place. The press has also weakened. The Washington Post spent years warning that “democracy dies in darkness,” but last month, the paper opted not to endorse a candidate for president, reportedly at the direction of its owner, Jeff Bezos.

The bad news is that the only major institution left is the American electorate. That is also the good news. A majority of voters rejected Trump in 2016 and again in 2020. They rejected his party in 2018 and only weakly supported it in 2022, with Trump out of office. In a democracy, the people are the most important institution—the source of legitimacy for all parts of government, and of accountability for the private sector. The choice is in their hands.