Election Night is upon us, with all of its finger-gnawing anxiety, its cortisol-driven fear, and, for roughly half the country, the possibility of ecstatic relief after another surreal presidential campaign.

Results could take days, even weeks, to shake out. But the state of the race could also reveal itself surprisingly quickly. At 7 p.m. eastern time tonight, polls will close in the battleground state of Georgia. At 7:30 p.m., polls will close in North Carolina, another crucial toss-up. Both swing states are known for counting their ballots quickly, due to state laws that allow them to tally early and mail-in votes before Election Day.

[Read: Election anxiety is telling you something]

So when will we know the results, how can we sensibly extrapolate the early returns, and—perhaps most important—what information and analysis should we ignore? David Wasserman, a political analyst with the Cook Political Report, joined my podcast, Plain English, to explain how to watch the election returns like a pro—without falling for false hope or conspiracy theories. Here are three tips for following Election Night without losing your mind.

1. This might sound weird, but don’t expect this election to be as close as 2016 or 2020.

Wait, what? Aren’t Kamala Harris and Donald Trump essentially tied in national and swing-state polling averages? Didn’t Nate Silver put the odds that Harris will win this election at an exquisitely decimaled number between 50.00 and 50.99 percent? Isn’t there a nonzero chance that both candidates win 269 electoral votes?

Yes, yes, and yes. “This is the closest election in polling that I’ve covered in my 17 years, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to produce the closest result,” Wasserman told me. The 2016 and 2020 elections were absurdly close contests, both of them decided by about 78,000 votes. But, he said, “even elections as balanced as 2024 aren’t likely to hinge on 80,000 votes distributed across a handful of states.” Close polling does not predict historically close elections.

To understand what Wasserman means, perhaps a sports analogy is useful. Both sports betting and political polling try to express uncertain future events in the language of probabilities. The 2016 and 2020 elections were a bit like Super Bowls that went into overtime—something that’s happened only twice in the game’s six-decade history. Let’s say the next Super Bowl, in 2025, looks like a statistical dead heat, with two 13–4 teams with the exact same point differential. Let’s furthermore say that Vegas sportsbooks throw up their hands and declare the game a “pick-’em,” meaning neither team is favored to win. Even with all of this balance, it’s still very unlikely that the game will go to overtime, because so few games ever go to overtime. It’s the same with this election. We are still a normal polling error from either Trump or Harris winning the seven closest swing states, which would be a decisive victory.

[Brian Klaas: The truth about polling]

We don’t know how to forecast future events in any language outside of probabilities, and it’s hard to make peace with a world of probabilities. If you flip a coin 10 times, the median outcome is five heads and five tails. But you shouldn’t expect that 10 flips will yield five heads, because that outcome has less than a 25 percent chance of occurring. You’re actually three times more likely to get a number of heads other than five. So don’t get too invested in any particular electoral map. It’s very unlikely that your highly specific prediction will come to pass, and that includes an election decided by 80,000 votes.

2.  Ignore the exit polls.

Exit polls are exciting, because they provide a morsel of data during a highly anxious evening when audiences and news organizations are starving to know what’s going to happen in the next four hours, or four days. But there’s nothing particularly special about an exit poll. In many ways, it’s just another poll, but with a larger—and possibly misleading—sample. Exit polls might actually be less useful than other public-opinion surveys, Wasserman said, because the majority of voters now cast their ballots before Election Day.

If you’re watching a newscast that’s making a huge deal out of exit polls, it might have more to do with the need to fill time before we get actual election results. Rather, if you want to get an early sense of how things are trending on Election Night, the best thing to do is focus on county-level results that report the complete tally of votes. That means you’ll also want to avoid being overconfident about election results that are incomplete.

3. For the earliest bellwether counties, watch Nash, Cobb, Baldwin, and Saginaw.

By the end of the night, we’re likely to have nearly complete results from counties in Georgia, North Carolina, and Michigan. Here are a few to watch:

Nash County, North Carolina

If you’re looking for a coin-flip county in a coin-flip election, it’s hard to find a better one than Nash, just outside North Carolina’s Research Triangle. According to Wasserman, the county has been decided by fewer than 1,000 votes in every presidential race since 2004. In 2016, out of about 47,000 votes counted, Trump won by fewer than 100 ballots. In 2020, out of about 52,000 votes counted, Joe Biden won by fewer than 200 ballots. If Harris keeps Nash in the Democratic column, it would suggest that she can fight Trump to a draw in poorer areas while she racks up votes in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill.

[Listen: It could all come down to North Carolina]

Cobb County, Georgia

Metro Atlanta makes up most of Georgia’s vote, and Cobb County is packed with the sort of highly educated suburban dwellers who have shifted left in the Trump years. In 2012, Mitt Romney won Cobb by more than 12 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won the country by 14 points. For Harris to win the election, she’ll need double-digit margins in highly educated counties like Cobb across other swing states.

Baldwin County, Georgia

Although most eyes will be on Atlanta’s Fulton County, Wasserman told me that he’ll also be scrutinizing smaller and midsize Georgia counties, such as Baldwin County. Just outside Macon, in the middle of the state, Baldwin County is about 40 percent Black, and as a college town, it has a lot of young people. In 2016, Baldwin voted for Hillary Clinton by 1.7 percentage points. In 2020, Biden won it by 1.3 points. If Trump breaks through in Baldwin, Wasserman said, “it would be a sign that Harris is perhaps underperforming in both turnout and vote preference among younger Black voters and young voters” across the country.

Saginaw County, Michigan

How will we know if polls yet again undercounted Trump’s support among white men without a college degree? By looking at working-class counties like Saginaw, where Democrats won cycle after cycle before 2016. No Republican presidential candidate had won the plurality of votes in Saginaw since 1984, until Trump carried the county by just over one percentage point against Clinton, only for Biden to claw Saginaw back into the Democratic column by a mere 0.3 percentage points in 2020. “This is a place where organized labor powered Democrats to victory for many years,” Wasserman said. “If Trump wins Saginaw by five points, it’s going to be very difficult for Harris to overcome that.”

Lately, I’ve developed an unhealthy fixation on the presidential election. Maybe you have too. The New York Times needle hasn’t started twitching yet, but for weeks now, I’ve had this full-body fourth-quarter feeling, and an impulse to speculate endlessly about people’s shifting moods in swing states. We are told that this race ranks among the closest in American history. I just want to know who will win. Nothing else seems to exist.

Today, while we wait for the networks to start calling states, I’m trying to zoom out, to remind myself that there is a cosmos beyond Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is not too difficult, once you work up the necessary resolve. Whatever cruelties plague our current historical era (and there are many), we do have cameras that can see across the universe, and anyone with a decent internet connection can freely peruse the snapshots that they’ve taken. I keep the photo archive for the James Webb Space Telescope, the farthest-seeing of them all, in my bookmarks bar. When I find myself a bit too immersed in the political news cycle, I click through the latest releases.

The image at the top of this page was posted in late October, and for me, it was an instant favorite. I love its rendered colors—the shock pink, pale chartreuse, and lightsaber blue. I love the three-dimensionality, the way your eye is drawn through torn veils of orange and red in the foreground into a glowing inner sanctum. I love the distant galaxies scattered across the frame, their shapes and orientations, the mind-shredding thought that together they contain many trillions of planets.

I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to experience these images purely on this level, as beautiful splatters of light. Sometimes it’s nice to gawk at a dark and sparkling expanse without any talk of metallicity or ionized gas. But last week, I was in the mood to follow any stray curiosity, so long as it did not relate directly to the election. I wanted to know what was happening in this image.

To capture it, the Webb telescope was pointed beyond the Milky Way’s edge, at one of its satellites, the Small Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers sometimes take on a bullying tone when talking about the Small Magellanic Cloud. They use diminutive terms. They refer to it as a dwarf and point out that it contains  only a few billion stars, at most, instead of hundreds of billions. But they are grateful that it was ensnared by the Milky Way’s gravitational heft, because it serves as a time capsule. The conditions inside it are similar to those that were common throughout the universe 5 billion years ago, eons closer to when star formation was at its peak. The Small Magellanic Cloud provides a vision of the cosmos as it was during a more generative period.

There are other ways of seeing what things were like back then: Astronomers can point cameras directly at galaxies that are 5 billion light-years distant and capture light that left them 5 billion years ago. But because those galaxies are so far away, the pictures end up blurry. You can’t make out single stars. That’s why it’s such a windfall to have the Small Magellanic Cloud right in our backyard.

The Webb telescope trained its awesome eye on it for 14 hours total, spread across three months. Its infrared sensors were able to peer past large clouds of dust and gas to capture a grand spectacle of creation, a cluster of blue stars erupting into being. You can see the cluster, just left of center. About 2 million years ago—yesterday, on cosmic timescales—the largest star’s thermonuclear core ignited. It quickly grew to a fearsome size, 40 times as massive as the sun. The blue stars near it ignited around the same time. Ultraviolet shock waves cascaded outward from each one, creating bubbles of light that overlapped across an enormous volume of space.

The new stars are still burning bright, but astronomers don’t expect any of them to last more than 10 million years. That makes them flashbulbs compared with our 10-billion-year sun. But even short-lived stars can set great chain reactions into motion. We can see one unfolding in this image. Fierce stellar winds are gusting out of the stars, compressing surrounding pockets of gas that are themselves now igniting. They’re the little bright spots dotting the innermost fringes of the red and orange veils.

I texted Matt Mountain, president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, which oversees not only the James Webb Space Telescope, but also many of America’s other flagship observatories. To do his job, Mountain has to think about many different kinds of light. I wanted to know what struck him most about the image. He said that it made him wonder what it would have been like to gaze at the whole universe with infrared eyes, 5 billion years ago. Back then, the cosmos hadn’t yet expanded to the degree that it has now. Galaxies would have been closer together. In every direction, a violent and creative process would have been unfolding.

I’m not here to peddle cosmic escapism. I won’t pretend that because the universe is so grand and so big and so old, human affairs are of little consequence. People are important. Across the whole cosmos, we don’t yet know of anyone else who builds space telescopes. Our elections have meaning, even if their consequences don’t extend for light-years. These celestial vistas don’t diminish any of that, but they can offer some respite, especially this evening. If you need to stare into an abyss, it might as well be beautiful.

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One thing tomorrow’s election will test is Americans’ appetite for chaos, particularly the kind that Donald Trump has been exhibiting in the last few months of his campaign. After weeks of running a disciplined campaign, Trump’s advisers lost control of their candidate, the Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta reported this week. Trump grew restless and bored and drifted off script in his campaign appearances. During a summer interview with the National Association of Black Journalists, for example, he mused aloud about Kamala Harris, “I don’t know. Is she Indian or is she Black?” From the perspective of his advisers, Trump’s string of offensive public statements needlessly alienated potential voters. Members of Trump’s campaign staff told Alberta that they became disillusioned about their ability to rein in their candidate and left the campaign.

Will this unleashed version of Trump affect the election outcome? In this week’s episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Alberta and another Atlantic staff writer, Mark Leibovich, about how candidate Trump transformed over the summer, how Kamala Harris’s campaign reacted, where each campaign stands now, and what it means for the election. Alberta and Leibovich also offer tips on how to manage your inner chaos while watching the election results.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is a bonus episode of Radio Atlantic. We are recording the Monday before Election Day. The candidates are furiously campaigning in the swing states. At some point, their planes were on the same tarmac in North Carolina.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump mused about shooting reporters; Kamala Harris said normal campaign things. And yet the race is still one of the closest in American history.

Anyway, in this episode, I want to get the inside view of both political campaigns in their last days. So I have with me today two seasoned political reporters, Mark Leibovich. Hi, Mark.

Mark Leibovich: Hi, Hanna.

Rosin: And Tim Alberta. Hi, Tim.

Tim Alberta: Hi, Hanna. Hi, Mark.

Leibovich: Hi, Tim. Isn’t it good to be seasoned today?

Alberta: I’m feeling very seasoned.

Rosin: Yeah, that’s a cliché word. It doesn’t mean old. What’s a more flattering word than seasoned? Like, experienced? Or longtime? Longtime: that’s flattering, I think.

Leibovich: It’s definitely flattering.

Alberta: We don’t use veteran.

Rosin: No, veteran is old. How about active?

Leibovich: Yeah, we’re very active. Yeah. Can you tell by our voices?

Rosin: (Laughs.) Anyway, Mark, I understand you’re writing up a preelection guide to how to approach Tuesday night.

Leibovich: Basically, I’m trying to collect a helpful toolkit to how to approach Election Day from sort of a practical standpoint as far as what information you can ignore, but also a habit or even mindfulness standpoint about how to not drive yourself needlessly crazy, how not to be triggered by the kinds of things that Election Night coverage will probably overload you with.

And that includes Donald Trump probably declaring victory wildly prematurely or erroneously, which, I mean, will be news because he’s one of the candidates, but it also should surprise no one. And there are ways to kind of condition yourself, or try to, going into what tomorrow night will be like—which will be obviously very anxious for a lot of people.

Rosin: I see. So instead of “We know it’s going to be like that,” like, “We know that we don’t have enough information.”

We know that there probably isn’t going to be, sort of, instant early clarity. So you’re going into it eyes wide open, doing what? Like, what? Because maybe Tim needs this advice.

Leibovich: Well, I’m trying. Well, I think we all need this advice, Hanna. I mean, I think it’s an approach to how we consume information, how we get information.

I talked to a couple of Democratic consultants who said that one of the first things they do is turn off all their text notifications, because any kind of text notification is designed to trigger you on Election Night.

There is a lot of manipulation of your emotions before the actual only information that is necessary, which, the most valuable information is going to come in probably after 11 o’clock, or quite late. It could be days later. The idea is the news will find you. Turn off your phone if you can. Information is coming in haphazardly from a million different directions, out of order, in no particular sequence whatsoever, about something that has already happened—meaning the voting has already happened. So no control is there. This is basically just people throwing information out in no order, and it is not necessarily—

Rosin: It’s not cumulative and it’s not adding up to—

Leibovich: —Not cumulative.

Rosin: Exactly. Exactly.

Leibovich: So anyway, that’s one reason you can skip that part.

Rosin: Interesting. Tim, do you think you could do that?

Alberta: I fear that in the attempt to not drive myself crazy, I would drive myself crazy. In other words, you would find your brain stacking up with all of the things that other people know that you don’t, because in that moment you have decided to sequester yourself or at least to sort of rigidly compartmentalize your emotions and your brain waves and your political intake.

And therefore the exit polling showing the number of non-college whites in Maricopa County breaking away from Trump is lost on you in that pivotal moment, when that could be the little parcel of information that is necessary for you to believe that you have finally figured out this electoral equation and that you have a bead on it in this moment.

It’s a game of inches, and the inches are everywhere around us, Hanna. So how could I give up any of those inches when we are so close to the end of the game? I want the zen that Mark is offering, but I just don’t find it realistic.

Rosin: Hmm. You know how sometimes you start with the moment of meditation? We’ll consider that our moment of meditation, and now we’re gonna go into the stressful part of this conversation. So, Tim, you’ve been covering the Republican side closely, and you recently spent a lot of time talking to Trump’s advisers.

How would you describe the state of the campaign in the weeks before the election?

Alberta: I would describe it as something slightly removed from the serenity that Mark has described for us.

Rosin: Yes. Okay. Yeah.

Alberta: Yeah, look, Hanna, I think the context here is really important: that this Trump campaign, unlike the previous two, was for the majority of its time in operation, really pretty disciplined, pretty smart.

The people running the campaign had done a pretty good job of keeping Trump out of his own way and talking him out of bad ideas and sort of curbing some of his most self-destructive impulses. And what we’ve seen in the last couple of months is basically Trump going full Trump, and an inability among those senior advisers to really do anything to stop it.

This has been kind of the proverbial slow-motion car wreck. And, you know, it’s not just Trump himself, although of course he is the inspiration for the chaos. He is the generator of all of the turmoil that you see.

He is at the center of this chaos, but the chaos ripples out away from him. And so when you ask yourself the question of how could it be that at the most important public event of the campaign, with 20,000-plus jammed into Madison Square Garden in prime time, the whole world watching, and you pay a million dollars to put on this event, and the guy who kicks it off is a vulgar, shock jock, insult-roast comedian who was dropped by his own talent agency for using racial slurs onstage—how could this person possibly be booked into that position to open for Trump in that environment? It’s exactly the sort of thing that the people around him had been really successful in avoiding for most of the campaign. But ultimately, in the key home stretch here, in the sort of the witching hours of this campaign, it’s all fallen apart.

Rosin: Mark, same for the Democrats. How would you describe where they are?

Leibovich: I would say I’ve talked to a fair number of Democrats on the campaign in the last few days.

It feels like something approaching the general area of the ballpark of confidence.

Rosin: Interesting! Anomalous for Democrats.

Leibovich: Well, they are so incredibly quick to embrace bad news and to go right from bad news to deep levels of doomsaying. I’ve not seen that in the last few days.

I mean, look, I think their numbers internally seem a little better. I think a lot of the external polls have been encouraging. And I think you can’t underestimate how much of a train wreck Trump’s last 10 days have been, in a way that, if he loses, I think people will very much point to.

Rosin: So, Mark, I remember we sat here in the spring and discussed how absolutely stagnant this race would be. Like, we were just sleepwalking into a repeat.

Leibovich: But it was a great podcast. Everyone should listen to it again. (Laughs.)

Rosin: But it was very, you know—we didn’t have much to say. And then for everybody, the reset button got pressed in July.

Tim, the full Trump who we’ve seen on the campaign trail for the last few months started, actually, according to your account, before Harris entered the race. So what happened?

Alberta: I think that maybe the proper visual here, Hanna, is like the wild animal that has chased down its prey and has mauled it mostly to death and is now just sort of pawing at it, toying with it, unsure of really what to do because, well, what’s left to do?

Donald Trump really found himself, according to all the reporting I did, sort of over it. Sort of bored with running against Joe Biden. Because here is, in his view, this sort of hapless old man who can’t even string together sentences, much less really defend himself or go on offense in a meaningful way against Trump. And so I think that he’s looking at Joe Biden thinking, Gosh this is sort of a bore, and around this time, of course, in late June, early July, Trump’s polling is better than it’s ever been in any of his three campaigns for the presidency.

The battleground polling is showing him consistently pulling ahead five, six, seven points across all of these states. The national polling is up. His favorability is up. Democrats are preparing for a bloodbath not just to lose the presidency but to lose the House and the Senate, and it’s, you know, The sky is falling. And everyone around Trump is sort of giddy and gleeful. They’re looking around like, Nothing can stop us.

And around this time is when you started to see Trump talking a little bit differently, behaving a little bit differently, according to people close to him—almost looking for some disorder and some mayhem to inject into the campaign. He starts talking to people on the outside. And when Kamala Harris gets in the race, he was angry, on the one hand, because he thought he had it sort of sewn up against Biden, and he liked running against Biden in the sense that Biden really, you know, couldn’t punch back.

But I think also he’s sort of excited in the sense that with Harris, he’s got this live target. He’s able to channel some of the base instincts that brought him to power in the first place. You know, Trump, I think, viewed the Harris switcheroo as a new lease on life in the sense that he was going to be able to go whole hog again.

But the people around him were saying, No, no, no, no. That’s exactly what we don’t want you to do. And frankly, the reason you’re in this position is because you’ve listened to us and because you haven’t been going rogue and running the kind of, you know, totally undisciplined #YOLO 2016 campaign that you would like to run and that you would run if you were left to your own devices. And around that time is when Trump started to lose confidence in those people who were giving him that advice, and he brought in other people to help with the campaign, and from there things really started to spiral.

Rosin: So, Mark, how are Democrats responding as Trump is reasserting this peak-Trump version of himself?

Leibovich: I think in a kind of measured way. I mean, I think, look, the peak Trump pretty much speaks for itself. It’s not like you need people to amplify. I mean, to some degree you do, because outlets that a lot of Republicans watch—like, say, Fox—are going to be insulated from a lot of this, because just Fox doesn’t show it.

I mean, that’s just not their point of emphasis, But I think they’ve been very deft—they’ve made a lot of ads around the kind of changing abortion messaging. I mean, even Melania Trump saying that she believes in a woman’s right to choose, things like that, to some degree, they’re trying to highlight it, but to another degree—this is a big political-operative cliché, but they are running their race.

And I think the Democrats, beginning when Biden stepped aside, I think Harris has performed much better than a lot of people thought she would, and I think her campaign has made a lot of good decisions, and she herself has made a lot of good decisions.

Rosin: It does, from the outside, seem exactly the opposite of the chaos inside the Trump campaign that Tim described, because if you think back to when Biden dropped out, there was some worry that the transition might not be smooth.

Leibovich: Oh, 100 percent. I mean, Tim and I, remember, we were at the Republican convention together, and that was such a moment, because Trump was really kind of at his peak then, which is kind of ironic to say, because the assassination attempt had taken place two days before the convention started. But his popularity, I mean—there was a sense of confidence at that convention which was just off the charts to a degree to which you could almost sense the boredom creeping into Trump when he’s giving this acceptance speech, and I guess it was Thursday night, and then about halfway through, he just kind of went off the rails, and he just sort of—it became just a very unhinged acceptance speech, went from kind of a gripping one where he’s describing the assassination attempt to something completely different, which kind of became a metaphor for how the rest of the campaign would unfurl for him.

And of course, three days later, Biden got out and then the world changed again.

Rosin: All right, up next, I ask Tim and Mark whether the chaotic final months of the Trump campaign could end up costing him the election. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: So from a campaign manager’s perspective, the chaos is disturbing, but what we actually care about is whether it has any impact on voting day. Tim, so what are the ways the drama you describe could affect the election? Like, say, turnout or whatever it is that we’re worried about?

Alberta: Well, look, if these episodes were contained to just Trump being a little bit goofy or going off message and sort of ranting and raving about the latest person who said something very nasty about him on cable news, I don’t think it would have much real-world effect. But I think that some of what we’re unpacking here over these past 10, 11, 12 weeks, Hanna, is something that actually gets to a fundamental weakness, which is a failure of the Trump team to expand its coalition.

Or at the very least what we’re seeing is the way in which the potential of expanding the Trump coalition has been undermined by Trump’s own actions or by the people close to him. So, for example, we know based on six months of really solid, consistent data that Trump is likely to perform better with Latino voters as a whole and particularly with Latino men under 40 than any Republican nominee in modern history.

And yet, when the dominant headline coming out of your rally at Madison Square Garden the week before the election is that one of your speakers calls the island of Puerto Rico floating trash in the ocean, this is self-sabotage.

Another core component of this Trump campaign, from the beginning, has been How do we keep our margins tight in the suburbs outside of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Vegas and elsewhere? How do we keep our margins tight with these college-educated, suburban women? We’re not going to win them, right? But how do we manage to keep it close? How do we lose them by just seven or eight points instead of by 16, 17, 18, 20 points?

And when you look at, for example, the selection of J. D. Vance and, you know, his old, greatest-hits reel around childless cat ladies, and he thinks abortion should be illegal nationwide, right?

And there’s just something that sort of went fundamentally awry over the summer. I think Mark is right. Both of us were remarking at the convention about how it was effectively an early Election Night victory party. I mean, they weren’t even—Republicans in Milwaukee weren’t even talking about the campaign as if it were going to be competitive. It was already over. The fat lady was singing onstage in prime time in Milwaukee. And yet, I remember corresponding with several smart Republicans—Trump supporters—while I was there, and they were a little bit nervous about the Vance selection. And then on Thursday night, to Mark’s point, Trump gives this sort of weird, meandering speech that seems to squander a lot of the goodwill that he had coming into that event because of the assassination attempt. And it felt like between those two things—the Vance selection and then the speech—and then, you know, 24 hours after leaving Milwaukee, Biden gets out, Harris takes over the ticket, and suddenly, those dominoes started to fall.

And what we saw was all of the best-laid plans of the Trump operation go awry. And it wasn’t just surface-level things where we say, Oh, that was sort of silly he said that. Or Oh, this was an unforced error, but it’ll be a quick news cycle and blow over. Some of what we’ve seen, I think, will have a real impact at the ballot box.

Rosin: So what you’re describing is a campaign strategy that is fairly traditional that they were following fairly successfully, which is: try and win over, you know, some middle-of-the-road voters, or at least not massively alienate those people.

But, Trump has been running a very different kind of campaign—like going to Madison Square Garden—and fewer on-the-ground resources. And that seems like a pattern across swing states, which for me raises the question whether what these managers are calling chaos, like, that is the strategy.

The strategy was always just: get a lot of attention.

Alberta: I think it depends on the type of attention you’re talking about. So when Trump goes to the southern border and has, you know, hundreds of cameras following him around there and talks about the lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants committing crimes—you know, that is attention, and it can even be attention that is rooted in some hyperbole, some demagoguing, some bombast. And yet it is productive attention politically for the Trump people, right? They look at this sort of cost-benefit analysis and they recognize that, sure, we might antagonize some people with this rhetoric. We might alienate some people with our focus on these issues, but we think that the reward is far greater than the risk.

So there is, I think, plenty of good attention that the Trump people do want. I think what they’ve tried to avoid is a lot of the sideshow that is appealing to some of the very online, right-wing, MAGA troll base but does nothing to add to the coalition that I was describing a minute ago. And ultimately at the end of the day, politics is a math equation. It’s multiplication and addition.

Leibovich: Right, and I think, to Tim’s point, immigration was an incredibly effective issue for Trump. When you tip that into people eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and just how that took over the narrative of the Trump campaign—I mean, one, they look like fools; two, it insults the intelligence of so many people, and it turns a very serious and effective issue for the Trump campaign, immigration, into a joke and into just something really, really problematic and gross.

Rosin: So the art of running a Trump campaign, then, is to siphon and manage and titrate the chaos exactly right. Like, you want the right kind of chaos, the right kind of attention, but if you lose control of it, it just comes back to bite you. Is that basically what’s happened?

Alberta: Yeah, and it’s always gonna be a high-wire act, right? These people aren’t stupid. They knew what they were getting themselves into. In fact, Chris LaCivita—who is one of the two people managing the Trump presidential campaign here in 2024—within a few weeks of his decision to join the operation back in the fall of 2022, you have Trump saying that he wants to terminate parts of the Constitution. You have Trump saying and doing these sort of crazy, self-destructive things. And LaCivita is sort of looking around saying, What have I gotten myself into?

And of course people who are friends with him are saying, Come on, dude, you knew exactly what you were signing up for. You know exactly what you were getting yourself into. So I think whatever degree of self-delusion may exist at the outset, when some of these folks ally themselves with Donald Trump, you know, it dissolves pretty quickly and they become clear-eyed about who they’re working for and what the challenges are.

And to your point, Hanna, yes, there’s inevitably going to be some chaos, some attention-seeking behavior, some stuff that is vulgar and inappropriate and racist and misogynistic and whatever else. Their job is to try to turn things that are kind of potentially toxic into productivity. They’re trying to mine coals out of manure here, and again, I can’t stress this enough: For most of the campaign, they were actually doing a pretty good job of it. But at a certain point I think it just becomes too much to manage.

Rosin: Mark, do you get the sense that the Harris campaign’s—you described it as, like, a little dose of confidence. Is that because of everything that Tim has described?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, I think Trump has given them so much to work with. And not just like, Oh, look, he said this and sort of putting that out there. I mean, early indications about the revulsion that women are having—women voters are having for Trump—even more so than usual. And the degree to which they seem to be voting and maybe even lying to their husbands about—to kind of use a new ad that the Harris campaign is using which is basically saying, you know, a lot of Republican women are secretly going into the ballot, and behind their husband’s back, they’re voting for Kamala Harris. So again, Trump made their job easier, but I think they have taken what has been given to them. And I do feel hopeful. Yeah. Again, from talking to a bunch of them, and levels of very, very cautious optimism—which I would say, you know, it would probably be an absolute verboten thing for anyone anywhere near the Harris campaign to show anything more than just a tiny bit of confidence. Because that’s going to harken back to the overconfidence of 2016 or the overconfidence of 2020, you know—Biden was supposed to win by a lot more than he did.

And I think what freaks everyone out is the idea that Trump, in the two times he’s been on a general-election ballot, has massively overperformed his polls. And now there’s a sense that perhaps that’s been accounted for in these polls and they’re undercounting African American voters, women voters, and so forth.

So anyway, I think all of that is kind of baked into this, but look, I don’t want to suggest that anything other than massive anxiety is the default for everyone around this campaign. And I assume both campaigns.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Let’s leave the listeners with thoughts about Election Night. There’s the zen option, and hopefully many of our listeners will take advantage of the zen option.

Take a long, 12-hour walk. Be home by 11 p.m. and then turn on the television. Short of that, the map is really wide and open. I mean, seven open states. It’s a lot. So for those who are not spiritually built for the zen option, how—literally—will you guys be watching? Like, give a listener a guide of what to watch out for on the night.

Leibovich: Well, yes, there are seven battleground states. But I think there’s a lot you can learn if you can get information from other states. You know, there’s a poll that everyone has been talking about—a lot of insiders have been talking about over the last few days—from Iowa. Iowa, no one considered a swing state. Safely red, certainly has been in the last few elections, certainly for Trump. Ann Selzer, a deeply respected pollster, came up with this Des Moines Register poll on Saturday night, having Harris ahead by three.

Now, putting aside whether Iowa’s now a battleground state—I mean, if it’s even in the ballpark of accurate, I mean, as a euphoric result for people on Team Harris. I mean, look, if there are some early numbers from, say, South Carolina, Florida, that, you know, maybe show Trump’s margins a little lower than you would expect, possibly that’s something that you can learn from.

So again, it’s not just the seven battlegrounds, which will probably take a while to count, especially in some of the states with laws that make it harder to count early votes. But, yeah, I mean, like, the whole country does vote. It’s like, margins do matter, and I think we can learn from a lot of people.

And look, even, like, Massachusetts, Vermont, Kentucky—I mean there are these early states that you know exactly who is going to win, but you can learn from.

Rosin: Because if the margins are smaller than they are expected to be, then that’s a bit of data that’s interesting. Tim, what about you?

Alberta: So there’s a known known, and a known unknown. The known known is that Democrats are continuing to see erosion in their coalition, specific to African American men, Latino men, and to some degree young voters.

And I think specifically if we’re looking at Detroit, at Milwaukee, at Philly, at Atlanta, at Maricopa County—there are places where we should be paying attention to this, right? I think the known unknown here is: Does Donald Trump get beaten up among suburban women, or does he get demolished among suburban women?

And I think that the answer to that question is probably determinative to who is sworn into office on January 20.

So I’m really paying very close attention to the collar counties outside of Philadelphia, to the WOW counties outside of Milwaukee. You have to look at Vegas and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Some of these places—I don’t want to be reductive, but I really do feel like, ultimately, that’s where the election is going to be won or lost.

Rosin: Both of you are saying: Look for signs. It’s not just big, broad swing states, but there are meaningful signs in smaller election results that you’ll be looking for.

Alberta: That’s right. It’s, again, it’s just a numbers game. And it so happens that the most dense, vote-rich areas of persuadable voters are just consistently found in these once re,d then purple, now pretty blue suburbs. And so whether you’re watching the presidential race or even if you’re looking for a potential upset in a Senate race, like in Texas, where Ted Cruz on paper looks like he’s going to win and maybe even win comfortably. But pay attention to Harris County, Texas, which, on Election Night in 2012, Obama and Romney fought Harris County to basically a draw. I think it was a matter of a few hundred votes that separated them. Fast-forward, you know, a decade. Democrats are carrying Harris County, which is the Houston suburbs—they’re carrying it by a quarter-million votes, 300,000 votes reliably, and that number’s only going up.

So those are the parts of the country where I think if you’re paying close attention, you’ll start to get a pretty good idea.

Rosin: Okay. I think we have options for the meditators and options for those who cannot bring themselves to meditate. Thank you both for joining me on this day before the election.

Leibovich: Thank you, Hanna. Thank you, Tim.

Alberta: Mark, I’ll call you tomorrow. We can meditate together.

Leibovich: I look forward to it. Yep, we’ll join figurative hands.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back later this week to cover the election, though possibly earlier than our usual Thursday release, depending on the results.

Thanks for listening.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Americans across the country are getting ready to wait.

Knowing the winner of the presidential election by tomorrow night is a real possibility. But the race could also take several days to be called, as it did in 2020, and some House races are likely to take days. In most other modern presidential elections (leaving aside the recount of the  2000 election), news outlets have declared a winner within hours of the polls closing. But in this week’s election, the closeness of the race and the popularity of mail-in voting could lead to a longer timeline. Amid all the unknowns, one American tradition may get lost: the social ritual of Election Night.

Over the generations, Election Night has brought Americans together and prepared them to accept the outcome of a race. Many voters missed out on that gathering in 2020, in part because they were in pandemic isolation. And as my colleague Kate Cray wrote at the time, “Watch parties and their kitschy decor don’t necessarily fit with an election in which many voters fear the collapse of democracy.” A communal gathering was even less appealing to liberals “still traumatized by 2016,” Kate noted. This year, Americans of all political loyalties are finding the election anxiety-inducing: A recent survey from the American Psychological Association found that 69 percent of polled adults rated the U.S. presidential election as a significant source of stress, a major jump from 52 percent in 2016 (and a slight bump from 68 percent in 2020).

Still, some Americans are preparing for classic election watch parties at friends’ homes or in bars. But this time around, voters’ self-preservational instincts are kicking in too. A recent New York magazine roundup of readers’ Election Night plans in the Dinner Party newsletter included streaming unrelated television, drinking a lot, and “Embracing the Doom Vibes.” For some, prolonged distraction is the move: The cookbook author Alison Roman suggests making a complicated meal. Even party enthusiasts seem wary: In an etiquette guide about how to throw a good Election Night party with guests who have different political views, Town & Country suggested that “hosting a soiree of this nature in 2024 is like setting up a game of croquet on a field of landmines.” One host suggested giving guests a “safe word” to avoid conflict.

Election Night was once a ritual that played out in public—generally over the course of several days, Mark Brewin, a media-studies professor at the University of Tulsa and the author of a book on Election Day rituals, told me. A carnival-like atmosphere was the norm: People would gather at the offices of local newspapers to wait for results, and winners’ names were projected on walls using “magic lanterns.” Fireworks sometimes went off, and bands played. With the popularity of radio and TV in the 20th century, rituals moved farther into private spaces and homes, and results came more quickly. But even as technology improved, “this process is always at the mercy of the race itself,” Brewin explained.

Election Night rituals of years past weren’t just about celebration. They helped create the social conditions for a peaceful reconciliation after impassioned election cycles, Brewin said. In the 19th century, for example, once an election was called, members of the winning party would hand a “Salt River ticket” to the friends whose candidates lost (Salt River is a real body of water, but in this case, the term referred to a river of tears). The humor of the gesture was its power: It offered people a way to move forward and work together. Such rituals marked the moment when people “stop being partisans and become Americans again,” Brewin said.

That concept feels sadly quaint. This week, Americans are bracing for chaos, especially if Donald Trump declares prematurely that he won or attempts to interfere in the results of the race. An election-watch gathering might seem trivial in light of all that. But Americans have always come together to try to make sense of the changes that come with a transfer of power, and doing so is still worthwhile—especially at a time when unifying rituals feel out of reach.

Related:

Is this the end of the Election Night watch party? How to get through Election Day

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy, Adam Serwer writes. Inside the ruthless, restless final days of Trump’s campaign The “blue dot” that could clinch a Harris victory How is it this close?

Today’s News

Vice President Kamala Harris will finish her last day of campaigning in Philadelphia, and Donald Trump will host his last rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A Pennsylvania judge ruled that Elon Musk’s America PAC can continue with its $1 million daily giveaway through Election Day. Missouri sued the Department of Justice in an effort to block the department from sending federal poll monitors to St. Louis.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores the appliances we’ve relied on for decades, and those that claim to usher in new ways of living—with varied success.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Jacopin / BSIP / Getty; Velimir Zeland / Shutterstock.

A ‘Crazy’ Idea for Treating Autoimmune Diseases Might Actually Work

By Sarah Zhang

Lupus, doctors like to say, affects no two patients the same. The disease causes the immune system to go rogue in a way that can strike virtually any organ in the body, but when and where is maddeningly elusive. One patient might have lesions on the face, likened to wolf bites by the 13th-century physician who gave lupus its name. Another patient might have kidney failure. Another, fluid around the lungs. What doctors can say to every patient, though, is that they will have lupus for the rest of their life. The origins of autoimmune diseases like it are often mysterious, and an immune system that sees the body it inhabits as an enemy will never completely relax. Lupus cannot be cured. No autoimmune disease can be cured.

Two years ago, however, a study came out of Germany that rocked all of these assumptions.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

David Frum: No one has an alibi. Donald Trump’s hatred of free speech The shadow over Kamala Harris’s campaign The institutions failed. Xi may lose his gamble. Samer Sinijlawi: My hope for Palestine

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Mourn. We’ll never get a universal cable, Ian Bogost writes. It’s the broken promise of USB-C.

Watch. Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance on Saturday Night Live, but another segment that night made a sharper political point, Amanda Wicks writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

One peek into Americans’ mental state on Election Night comes from their orders on food apps. In 2016, Election Night alcohol demand on Postmates was nearly double that of the prior Tuesday—and that demand spiked again at lunchtime the next day. For the delivery app Gopuff, alcohol orders were high on Election Night in 2020—especially champagne and 12-packs of White Claw. And, less festively, orders for Tums and Pepto Bismol rose too. However you pass the time waiting for results this year, I hope you stay healthy.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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