One week ago, in the middle of early voting, an arsonist attached incendiary devices to two ballot-drop boxes, one in Oregon and another in Washington State. Hundreds of ballots were scorched or burned beyond recognition. Affected voters will have to be identified, contacted, and asked to resubmit their ballot. Police are still searching for the culprit, who they fear may strike again.

Set aside the high-minded talk of saving democracy; this was a literal attack on voting—and officials are preparing for even more. Election experts and local leaders anticipate that this week, and probably some weeks after, will bring a torrent of election disinformation, online threats, and in-person tensions that could boil over into violence.

In response, officials across the country have transformed their tabulation centers into fortresses, with rolls of razor wire atop their fences and ballistic film reinforcing their windows. Election staffers are running drills with law-enforcement officers, studying nonviolent de-escalation tactics, and learning protocols for encountering packages containing mysterious white powder.

The more pressing concern, however, is what happens after Tuesday, in that period, fraught with impatience, between when election workers are counting votes and the results are confirmed. During this interval—which may be only hours, but may run to days in some places—there will be little actual news and many attempts to create some: At the very moment when a watchful press will be desperate for new developments, conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump’s allies will be intent on sowing chaos and doubt.

“It’s going to be a time of high drama,” Darrell West, a senior fellow specializing in governance at the Brookings Institution, told me. There are always small, human-caused errors in polling, but in many decades of American elections, only a handful of cases of voter fraud have ever been found. Any glitch is “likely to be seriously elevated this time, and people will take isolated examples and turn them into system-wide problems that could fuel outrage,” West said. But instead of another concentrated day of “Stop the Steal” violence, as January 6 was in Washington, D.C., West and other experts say that we’re likely to see a more dispersed, harder-to-track election-denial movement. “The violence, if it takes place, will be during the vote-counting process,” he said.

[Listen: Is journalism ready for a second Trump administration?]

America has had four years to prepare—legally and logistically—for this election week. Election workers have received new training in case things get rowdy in polling places. Many states have passed laws to clarify the role of poll observers, who can provide valuable transparency but who were deployed by election conspiracists to disrupt the 2020 election—and might be again.

Authorities have also shored up their facilities. In Phoenix, the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center, which was ground zero for protests and so many baseless allegations of fraud in 2020, is now surrounded by concrete barriers, armed officers, and a 24/7 video feed for public observation. The county has also developed “robust cybersecurity measures,” J. P. Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, told me, and it has employed on-call experts called “tiger teams” to troubleshoot any tech and security issues.

At the federal level, the Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force has already brought 20 charges against people accused of threatening election officials. Each of the 94 U.S. Attorney’s Offices across the country has designated a district elections officer to handle any Election Day complaints. Still, officials in many states—Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina, to name just a few—have purchased panic buttons for their poll workers; some have Narcan on hand in case they find fentanyl in ballot envelopes. “Election officials are risk managers by nature” and have always been well aware of Election Day threats, Kim Wyman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center and the former Washington secretary of state, told me. “What’s new since 2020 is the more personal nature” of those threats.

Although police officers will not be stationed at every polling site in America this year, the presence of law enforcement, including plainclothes officers, will be higher than normal, even if their presence will be intentionally inconspicuous, Chris Harvey, who works with the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a coalition of election and law-enforcement officials, told me. “Police at polling places should be like fire extinguishers,” he said: available but not obtrusive.

Harvey and his colleagues have spent the past year holding “tabletop exercises” in states across the country. At these trainings, election officials and police collaborate to work through alarming scenarios, including bomb threats to a voting precinct, active-shooter reports, and what, exactly, should happen if a group of armed men turns up outside a polling place in a state with open-carry laws. We “let each side sort of express their concerns: what the election officials would like the cops to do, what the cops tell the election officials they have the ability to do,” Harvey said. “If nothing else, they at least get familiar with each other.”

When Harvey first started this project, most of the law-enforcement attendees seemed bored, he told me—but in the past six months, “interest has increased dramatically.” Officers are realizing that this election season could be more volatile than any in recent memory. “People have had four years of marinating in conspiracy theories,” Harvey said. So when they go to vote, “they’ll be primed for any type of confrontation—or something they see as suspicious or evidence of fraud.” Before 2020, police officers could generally assume that most of the hard work was done when the polls closed. Now, Harvey said, they’re aware that when polls close on Election Day, that “might just be the beginning.”

That brings us to what experts believe is a more realistic hypothetical than violence on Election Day itself: a breakdown of public order resulting from days of confusion and impatience. Think hordes of people rioting outside polling centers across America, and stalking or physically attacking election officials. Imagine 2020, experts say, only worse.

Trump’s supporters do not seem at all prepared to accept a loss. And any claim of a stolen election this year could prompt them to take matters into their own hands. In 2020, cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Phoenix, and Atlanta witnessed swarms of angry people, riled up by false claims of voter fraud. These are places where, to this day, election officials receive a high volume of threats.

Delays will make things worse. Most states allow election workers to begin processing early ballots before Election Day, which helps speed up the counting process. Unfortunately, two states that still do not allow this are Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both electoral battlegrounds that could determine the outcome. Results are expected to take a while in the key states of Georgia and North Carolina, too. Counting, auditing, recounting—“all that stuff will draw a crowd and have an intimidating effect on the poll workers,” Harvey said.

Take Pennsylvania, a state seen as a must-win for both Kamala Harris and Trump. “We could end up in a situation where early tabulation shows Trump ahead, and Wednesday through Friday [that lead] starts to slip away,” West said. “That’s a bad formula for people who don’t trust the system.” Trump has again primed his supporters to pay special attention to Philadelphia. If it looks like Harris is edging ahead, West said, the city “will be the epicenter of a lot of the anger.”

Philly leaders are aware of this. Since 2020, they’ve moved the entire central election operation away from downtown to the northeastern part of the city. Certified poll watchers are still allowed inside, and there will be designated demonstration areas outside. But the new facility is also defended by a fence, barbed wire, and security checkpoints. “We are prepared, with our partners in law enforcement throughout the city, for anything that could come our way,” Lisa Deeley, a city commissioner, told me. Other states say that they, too, are ready for any contingency. In emailed statements, officials in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada confirmed to me that they had enhanced safety measures to protect the count. “We just have to be on the watch for outside agitators,” Darryl Woods, the chair of the Detroit Board of Police Commissioners, told me. “Foolishness will not be tolerated.”

No one seems too worried about D.C. this year. The Department of Homeland Security has designated January 6, 2025, as a National Special Security Event, and D.C. police have given press conferences assuring citizens of law-enforcement preparedness for any election-related disorder before or on that date. Some experts told me that the days with greater potential for risk this time are December 11, the deadline by which states must certify their election results, and December 17, when electors meet in their states to vote for president. If the election is close, both days could see protests and violence in the states where the margin is tightest, West said.

One welcome bit of reassurance is the fact that experts don’t anticipate the kind of paramilitary mobilization America saw in 2020, when unrest over the police killing of George Floyd and the COVID-19 lockdowns had people marching in the streets and extremist groups deploying around the country. Prominent members of militia-type organizations, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, that achieved national prominence in 2020 are thankfully in jail, and many groups have refocused their efforts at a local level, Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor and a law professor at Georgetown, told me.

Still, McCord is watching the parts of the country where these militias have regrouped, which, in some cases, happen to coincide with parts of the country where experienced election officials have been replaced with election deniers, including parts of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and Arizona. If there are moves, after the election, to implement independent state legislature theory and replace slates of electors, McCord said, “you can imagine extremists glomming onto that.”

[Read: A brief history of Trump’s violent remarks]

Whatever intimidation and violence may occur in the coming weeks, election workers and volunteers will almost certainly feel it most. Many of them have been receiving threats for years, and continue forwarding them, by muscle memory, to local authorities. Paradoxically, the election officials most likely to come under hostile pressure from MAGA activists are themselves Republicans.

Stephen Richer, the Republican recorder in Maricopa County, faced immense pressure and vile threats in 2020. But so did Leslie Hoffman, a Republican in deep-red Yavapai County. So did Anne Dover, the election director in Trump-voting Cherokee County, Georgia. And so did Tina Barton, a Republican clerk in Rochester Hills, Michigan, who was accused of cheating to help Joe Biden, and received a voicemail promising that “10,000 patriots” would find and kill her. No evidence of fraud was uncovered in any of these counties. (The threatening “patriot” was identified, charged, and later sentenced to 14 months in jail.)

This year, despite everything, some of those same officials remain remarkably hopeful. “While I have anxiety and concern about what we could see over the next few days and weeks, and maybe even into a few months,” Barton, who now works for the nonpartisan Elections Group, told me, “I have to think that the good in humanity and the good in America will ultimately win.”

On August 18, 2020, Americans marked the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and of women’s right to vote. The next day, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for her current role, vice president of the United States. The consonance punctuated an already historic candidacy: Harris was the first woman of color to seek that office on a major-party ticket. She acknowledged the moment’s gravity at the beginning of her acceptance speech, thanking Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, Mary McLeod Bethune, and many of the other women whose paths had led to the ground she broke that evening.

Harris now seeks to go further still, aiming for the U.S. presidency. But the history-making possibilities of her campaign have been easy to overlook, in large part because of the man Harris faces in her bid. Donald Trump, so ignorant of the past and so careless about the future, is a present-tense kind of candidate. The history he has brought to his fight for a second term—the attempt to overturn an election; the promises of deportations and retributions and violence; the racism; the misogyny; the incompetence, lies, and fraud; the assault; the boast that he has grabbed women “by the pussy”; the installation of judges who have grabbed away women’s rights—has imbued the 2024 contest with a sense of latent emergency. His flaws, as so often happens, have become someone else’s problem.

If the Democrats’ 2020 campaign was a “battle for the soul of America,” its 2024 counterpart has been a battle for the national body: the policies and practicalities that allow the country to function as a democracy. An opponent whose party is “Republican” but whose posture is “dictator” turns talk of history-making into a luxury. Harris rarely mentions her gender or race on the campaign trail. Her recent ads, MSNBC noted, have described her childhood primarily in terms of class. During the nomination speech she delivered at the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris briefly described her background—her South Asian mother, her Jamaican father—but focused on her career as a prosecutor. (The most conspicuous mention of history-making came from Hillary Clinton, whose speech acknowledged the structural integrity of “the highest, hardest glass ceiling.”) As Vox’s Constance Grady put it, “A woman is running for president and has decent odds of making it. She just seems to think her chances of being the first woman president are better as long as she never, ever talks about it.”

[Read: Kamala Harris’s ambition trap]

That reticence may well be good strategy. Clinton’s 2016 loss chastens strategists still: once bitten by the Electoral College, twice shy. And the brevity of Harris’s campaign—Joe Biden’s decision to step down in July left her just over three months at the top of the ticket—has required her to triage her messaging. “Well, I’m clearly a woman,” Harris told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson. Better, she suggested, to spend the time she had telling voters what they might not already know. “My challenge,” she said, “is the challenge of making sure I can talk with and listen to as many voters as possible and earn their vote.”

You could read Harris’s disinclination to talk about history-making as, in its own way, historic. She is campaigning to become the president, full stop, no other qualifier required. This doesn’t mean she has not focused on traditionally feminist priorities—reproductive freedom and care-related policies are at the center of her campaign messaging. She just hasn’t made her identity an explicit part of her pitch. This is a notable departure from the era of “I’m with her.” Progress can be exhilarating. It can also be condescending. (After Biden promised early in his 2020 campaign that he would name a woman as his running mate, the satirical website Reductress offered a headline that neatly captured the resulting discourse: “Biden Says VP Pick Is Between Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and a Beautiful Lady Ostrich.”)

The candidate who has most directly acknowledged the historical nature of Harris’s candidacy has been, instead, her opponent. After “Sleepy Joe” stepped aside, Trump began auditioning insults with the frenzy of a Hollywood casting agent, suggesting by turns that Harris “happened to turn Black”; that she is “mentally impaired”; that she has the “laugh of a crazy person”; that she will be seen by world leaders as a “play toy”; that she’d traded sexual favors to propel her rise to power. In a rally held shortly after Biden left the race, Trump made a great show of mispronouncing the name of a politician who has been nationally famous for years—butchering “Kamala” more than 40 times over the course of a single speech. J. D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, tried to denigrate Harris by accusing her of membership in that shadiest of cabals: “childless cat ladies.”

Americans tend to talk about history’s march as a matter of physics: movements, momentum, progress, resistance. The language can imply that the advancement is inevitable, an arc that moves ever forward as it bends toward something better. It can, as such, mislead. Susan Faludi’s 1991 book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America’s Women, was premised on the fallacy, expressed repeatedly in the American media of the time, that feminism’s fights had by that point been, essentially, won. Clinton’s 2016 loss, and the many other kinds of losses that followed, served as a further rebuke: Gains can be ungained in an instant. Rights are inalienable, until they’re not.

Backlash was published the year before a record number of women ran for, and won, national office. Media outlets, in a fit of ahistorical optimism, dubbed it the “year of the woman.” What they might not have realized was that the “year of the woman” had already been proclaimed (as an analysis in Slate found) in 1966. And in 1968, 1984, and 1990. It would be declared again to describe the electoral results of 2008, 2010, 2016, 2018, and 2020.

History warns, in that way, against the easy comforts of “making history.” The progress and backlash that Faludi identified tend not to take turns—the one giving, the other taking away—but instead to crash together. The 2016 election failed to produce a woman president and in that sense preserved the status quo, but many more people voted for Clinton than for Trump, and this was its own bit of progress. Polls attempting to measure Americans’ opinions about a potential woman president have reflected a fairly steady increase in comfort since the idea was first tested, in the mid-1930s. But the endurance of such surveys—their treatment of a woman in the White House as a question to be debated, a disruption to be endured—is, itself, a concession.

[Read: Pop culture failed to imagine Kamala Harris]

Harris has had to contend with these tensions in her campaign. She has navigated them by emphasizing what her presidency might do rather than what it might mean. (“I am running,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash, “because I believe that I am the best person to do this job at this moment for all Americans, regardless of race and gender.”) Along the way, though, she has also navigated backlash in human form. Some of the enduring images of the 2016 debates captured Trump looming over Clinton, blithely and menacingly, belittling her not only with his words but with his movements. He has been attempting to do something similar to Harris, even from a distance: Take up her space. Get in her way. Put the whole thing on his terms. The moments when his campaign has seemed the most flummoxed, the most pessimistic, are the ones when everyone seems to be paying attention to her, not him.

Trump has a unique kind of gravitational pull—a way of forcing everything else into his orbit, however strongly it might resist. And he has brought those brute physics to the 2024 campaign. When Harris delivered her “closing argument” speech in Washington on October 29, the location chosen for the event was the same one Trump had used for the speech that preceded the January 6 insurrection. And the address did not merely evoke Trump; it discussed him. As she spoke, Harris emphasized the disparities between herself and her opponent. She warned of what a second Trump presidency could do to the country. She expressed her desire to “turn the page.” She emphasized the future she wants to prevent more than the history she herself wants to make.

This was the right speech, the rousing speech, the prudent speech—the speech Harris needed to deliver. In its message, though, the candidate who has argued that she is the “best person” for the presidency “regardless of race and gender” was consigned to the stereotypically feminine role: He acts, she responds. The man so accustomed to taking what he wants robbed her of her full moment, and the moment of its full meaning. Crises fix things to the present. They demand sacrifice for the sake of the future. In pursuing the presidency, Harris is “not concerned about being the first,” a campaign official said. “She’s concerned about making sure she’s not the last.”

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