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When Mary-Claire King discovered the first gene linked to hereditary breast cancer in 1990, she also got to decide its name. She settled on the four letters BRCA, which had three distinct meanings. The name paid homage to UC Berkeley, where King worked at the time; more to the point, it was a nod to Paul Broca, the 19th-century French physician whose work established a link between family history and breast cancer. It was also an abbreviation for breast cancer.

A few years after King discovered BRCA1, a second BRCA gene, BRCA2, was identified. Together, they now have more name recognition than probably any other gene, their profile boosted by research that has shown staggering effects on cancer risk. Awareness campaigns followed. A 2013 New York Times op-ed in which Angelina Jolie revealed she’d had a preventive double mastectomy because of her own BRCA mutation drove many women to seek DNA tests themselves. The BRCA genes became inextricably linked with breasts, as much as the pink ribbons that have become an international symbol of breast cancer. And in driving more women to find out if they have BRCA mutations, it’s helped to greatly reduce the risk of hereditary breast cancer.

But in the three decades since the genes were discovered, scientists have learned that BRCA mutations can also lead to cancer in the ovaries, the pancreas, and the prostate. More recently, they have been linked with cancers in other parts of the body, such as the esophagus, stomach, and skin. As many as 60 percent of men with changes in BRCA2 develop prostate cancer, yet men are generally far less aware than women that BRCA mutations can affect them at all.

“It’s a branding problem,” Colin Pritchard, a professor of laboratory medicine and pathology at the University of Washington, told me. Men with family histories of breast cancer may not realize that they should get screened. Physicians, too, lack awareness of which men should get tested, and what steps to take when a mutation is found. Now Pritchard and other researchers are working to rebrand BRCA and the syndrome associated with it so that more men and their doctors consider testing.

Normally, the BRCA genes produce proteins that help repair damaged DNA throughout the body. Most people who carry mutations that impair the gene’s function are diagnosed with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer syndrome. (Having HBOC means a person is at increased risk for cancer, not that they already have an illness.) Most breast-cancer cases have no known hereditary link, but more than 60 percent of women with a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast cancer, compared with about 13 percent of the wider female population. Men, of course, can get breast cancer too, but it's rare, even among BRCA-mutation carriers.

[Read: Cancer supertests are here]

The full significance of the link between BRCA mutations and pancreatic and prostate cancer has become clear only recently—perhaps in the past decade, said Pritchard. The exact risk these mutations impart to men varies widely in studies. But it’s clearly significant: Not only are men with BRCA mutations more likely to develop prostate cancer, they are also more likely to develop the more aggressive forms of the disease.

Roughly one in 400 people carry a harmful mutation in BRCA1 or BRCA2, and half of them are men. But women are far more likely to have been tested for the mutations—up to 10 times as likely, according to one study. “Beyoncé’s dad was the only man that I had ever heard of who had it,” Christian Anderson, a 46-year-old social-sciences professor in Washington State who carries a BRCA2 mutation, told me. Anderson got tested after his sister was diagnosed with breast cancer, but countless men like him go undetected. Only about half of Americans get an annual physical, and doctors aren’t always aware of BRCA-screening recommendations for men. Many men who do test for a BRCA mutation report doing it for their daughters, and studies have shown that they tend to be confused about their risks of developing cancer themselves.

BRCA-awareness campaigns have led many women to get tested; in the two weeks after Angelina Jolie’s viral op-ed, researchers found that BRCA-testing rates went up by 65 percent. In that case, more people may gotten tested than needed to, but in general, the rise in cancer screenings and elective surgical interventions have helped reduce the rates of deaths from breast and ovarian cancers. Education about the genes’ links to other cancers could do the same for men. To that end, Pritchard argued in a 2019 Nature commentary that Hereditary Breast and Ovarian Cancer syndrome should be renamed King Syndrome after Mary-Claire King. “We need to really rethink this if we're going to educate the public about the importance of these genes for cancer risk for everyone, not just women,” he told me.

[Read: I’ll tell you the secret of cancer]

As understanding of BRCA’s risks for men has grown, Pritchard’s idea has started to catch on. King, who is now a professor of genome sciences and medicine at the University of Washington, demurred when I asked her whether the syndrome associated with the BRCA genes should be renamed after her, but agreed that awareness campaigns have focused too narrowly on breasts and ovaries. “We need to bring this awareness to men in the same way that we have for 30 years now to women,” she told me.

How exactly Pritchard’s plan might be put into action is unclear. Gene names are overseen by an international committee and rarely changed. That’s part of why Pritchard is suggesting that the name of the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations become King Syndrome—no single governing body oversees that. Recently, ClinGen, an international group of researchers that works to parse the medical significance of genes, recommended that HBOC be rechristened BRCA-related cancer predisposition. (Pritchard told me he thinks that name isn’t quite as “catchy” as King Syndrome.)

Uncoupling the syndrome associated with BRCA mutations from breasts would likely be only the first step in getting more at-risk men screened for cancer. It would also be an important step in understanding the full impact of BRCA mutations on men. Because fewer men than women have been tested for BRCA mutations, scientists still don’t have a complete picture of their risk. For example, Pritchard told me, it’s only as more attention has been drawn to male BRCA risk that researchers have discovered mutations are linked to especially aggressive forms of prostate cancer. Penn Medicine recently launched a program dedicated to men and BRCA in part to continue this sort of research.

[Read: Scientists have been studying cancers in a very strange way for decades]

BRCA’s name is a legacy of a time when scientists thought genetics would offer a simple way to diagnose and treat disease—that one specific mutation would point definitively to one specific cancer. But today, “the idea that a gene would only affect one type of cancer risk is probably outmoded,” Pritchard said. The more scientists explore the human genome, the more complex its connections to health appear. It turns out that when genes don’t work like they should, the possible consequences may very well be infinite.

The show will be the first time Beyoncé has performed tracks from her latest album, Cowboy Carter.

How closely have you been paying attention to what's been going on in the world over the past seven days?

The pop star was previously tied with her husband on 88 nominations each.

Photographs by Jonno Rattman

Updated at 8:50 a.m. ET on November 3, 2024

An hour’s drive from downtown Pittsburgh is one of the most beautiful places in America—Fallingwater, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s late masterpiece. The house is a mass of right angles, in ochre and Cherokee red, perched above the Bear Run waterfall that provides the house its name.

Fallingwater was commissioned in 1934 by a couple, Edgar and Liliane Kaufmann, whose family had made its fortune from a brick-and-mortar business—a department store in Pittsburgh founded in 1871, when the city was flush with steel and glass money. Edgar became a generous patron of the arts in Pittsburgh and helped raise money for a local arena. Before he bought the Fallingwater site outright, the land had been leased to the store’s employee association, which allowed workers to spend their summers there.

Unlike today’s rich, many of whom make their money from ones and zeros, the Kaufmann family’s money came from a place and its people—the matrons of Pittsburgh who needed new pantyhose, the girls who met under the store’s ornate clock, the parents who took their children to see Santa. In the age before private jets, the Kaufmanns spent their leisure time near that place too. Fallingwater was built to be their summer retreat.

[George Packer: The three factors that will decide the election]

Lately, though, Pennsylvania has been on the receiving end of a different display of wealth and power. Elon Musk has made Donald Trump’s return to the White House his personal cause. He has so far donated at least $119 million to his campaign group, America PAC, and has devoted considerable energy to campaigning in the state where he went to college. The South African–born Tesla magnate, who usually lives in Texas, set up what The New York Times described as a “war room” in Pittsburgh. He has held town-hall meetings in several counties across the state. He announced at a Trump event in Harrisburg that he would write $1 million checks to swing-state voters, in what the Philadelphia district attorney has described as an “illegal lottery scheme.” And Musk is presenting himself, to some skepticism, as a fan of both of the state’s NFL teams, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Pennsylvania, which supported Democrats in six consecutive presidential elections before narrowly voting for Trump in 2016 and then returning to the Democrats in 2020, is widely expected to be the tipping-point state in the Electoral College next week. “Pennsylvania is caught in the middle of a realignment of the American electorate,” the polling analyst Josh Smithley, who runs the Pennsylvania Powered Substack, told me. The wealthier suburbs have been moving left as the rural areas “have been rocketing to the right, propelled by diminishing white working-class support for the Democratic Party.” The commonwealth is one of only six states in the country where more than 70 percent of current residents are homegrown. It is three-quarters white, and a third of its residents have a bachelor’s degree—lower than in neighboring Northeast Corridor states.  

At the moment, Musk is merely the wealthiest and most frenetic of the many political operatives showering Pennsylvanians with attention. If you found yourself caught in unexpected traffic there in October, it’s quite possible that a motorcade or rally roadblock was responsible. Every television ad break is stuffed with apocalyptic messaging from the two campaigns. Leaflets are slid under doors in quantities that would make environmentalists apoplectic.

Along with the economy, Republican messaging here has focused on the border wall and crimes committed by immigrants. But Pennsylvania is also the home of one of the Democrats’ most intriguing—and most promising—pushbacks to this narrative. Folksy populists including Senator John Fetterman and vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz are peddling their own version of “beware of outsiders.” In their telling, however, the interlopers are predatory plutocrats—such as Musk—and carpetbagging candidates from out of state. During the Eagles game on October 27, a Democratic ad used a clip of Trump saying that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.” A narrator intoned, “They don’t like us. We don’t care. Because here’s the thing that people like Donald Trump don’t understand: We’re Philly. F***ing Philly.” Perhaps with a male audience in mind, the underlying visuals were ice-hockey players having a punch-up and Sylvester Stallone smacking someone in Rocky.

Both campaigns, then, are posing versions of the same question: Who are the real outsiders? Who are “they”?

Reading, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic) Reading, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

In the past several months, Trump has held more than a dozen rallies and roundtables in Pennsylvania—including the one in Butler where he was nearly assassinated, and a second at the same spot, where Musk joyfully gamboled behind him before formally delivering his endorsement.

The mid-October event I attended in Reading, a small city where two-thirds of the population is Latino or Hispanic, was more low-key. But waiting to get into Santander Arena, I realized something: This was the Eras Tour for Baby Boomers. The merch. The anticipation. The rituals. The playlist of uplifting bangers. The length.

In towns and cities that feel forgotten, these rallies create a sense of community and togetherness. Taylor Swift concerts have friendship bracelets; this crowd had red Make America Great Again hats. (The “dark MAGA” version popularized by Musk was not yet en vogue.) For the Eras Tour, a concertgoer might make their own copy of Swift’s green Folklore dress, or her T-shirt that says NOT A LOT GOING ON AT THE MOMENT. The slogans at the Reading event were infinitely varied, but most were at least mildly aggressive. IF YOU DON’T LIKE TRUMP, YOU WON’T LIKE ME read one woman’s T-shirt. The men were just as fired up. For months, I have been arguing to friends that the widespread, illicit use of muscle-building steroids—which can cause rage, paranoia, and mood swings—might explain some of the political currents among American men. I usually can’t prove it, but here a large man wore a sleeveless vest that read MAKE ANABOLICS GREAT AGAIN.

Behind me in line were a mother and her two daughters—very Swiftie-coded, except they wanted to talk about “how the economy went to shit when Biden got in,” as the elder daughter put it. The mother raised the specter of Trump’s family-separation policy—which The Atlantic has extensively chronicled—only to dismiss it as a myth. She liked Trump, she told me, because he was a businessman: “People say he went bankrupt, but I think that’s smart. Finding a loophole.” Not so smart for the people he owed money to, I observed. The conversation died.

Inside the arena, I got to chatting with 34-year-old Joshua Nash, from Lititz, in Lancaster County. He was sitting alone at the back of the arena wearing a giant foam hat that he had bought on Etsy for $20 and then put in the dryer to expand. He was both a very nice guy and (to me) an impenetrable bundle of contradictions. He would be voting for Trump, he said, despite describing himself as a pro-choice libertarian who was “more left-leaning on a lot of issues.” He worked for Tesla maintaining solar panels, “but I’m not big on the whole climate thing.” He had given up on the mainstream media because of its bias and had turned to X—before Community Notes, the social-media platform’s crowdsourced fact-checking program, repelled him too. “I just want the facts,” he told me.

The campy, carnivalesque atmosphere of Trump rallies—halfway between megachurch and WrestleMania—is hard to reconcile with the darkness of the sentiments expressed within them. How could anything be alarming, many of the former president’s supporters clearly think, about such a great day out? After all, like the Eras Tour, Trump’s rally circuit has created its own lore. At the front, you might see the “Front Row Joes,” who arrive hours early to bag the best spots in the arena, or Blake Marnell, also known as “Mr. Wall,” who wears an outfit printed with bricks meant to resemble Trump’s promised border barrier. Another regular is “Uncle Sam,” who comes decked out in candy-striped trousers and a stars-and-stripes bow tie. He leads the crowd in boos and cheers.

Trump feeds off his fans’ devotion, making them part of the show. In Reading, he praised the Front Row Joes while claiming that his events were so popular, they struggled to secure front-row seats, and then moved on to “the great Uncle Sam. I got to shake his hand. I have no idea who the hell he is. I got to shake his hand two weeks ago. He has the strongest handshake. I’m saying, ‘Man, that guy’s strong.’ Thank you, Uncle Sam. You’re great. Kamala flew to a fundraiser in San Francisco, a city she absolutely destroyed.”

Did you catch that curveball there? It wasn’t any less jarring in real time. Listening to Trump’s style of speaking—which he calls the “weave”—re-creates the experience of falling asleep during a TV program and missing a crucial plot point before jerking awake and wondering why the protagonist is now in Venice. Every time I zoned out for a few seconds, I was jolted back with phrases like “We defeated ISIS in four weeks” (huh?) and “We never have an empty seat” (fact-check: I was sitting near several hundred of them), or the assertion that Howard Stern is no longer popular, so “I dropped him like a dog.” You have to follow the thread closely. Or you just allow the waves of verbiage to wash over you as you listen for trigger words like the border and too big to rig.

Along U.S. Route 30 (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

At his rally in Reading, Trump made several cracks about the “fake news” media, which had turned out in droves to record him from an elevated riser in the middle of the arena. “They are corrupt and they are the enemy of the people,” he said. “We give them the information and then they write the opposite, and it’s really disgusting.” A wave of booing. A man in the crowd shouted, “You suck!”

A few days later, at a rally for Vice President Kamala Harris in the windswept western city of Erie, Senator Fetterman emerged in a sweatshirt, shorts, and a yellow wool Steelers hat with a bobble that made him look like an oversize Smurf. During his short speech, Fetterman twice mentioned the media’s presence, and people actually cheered. (About a third of Democrats trust newspapers, compared with just 7 percent of Republicans, according to Gallup.) “The national media is here,” Fetterman told the audience. “Want to know why? Because you pick the president!”

Fetterman’s speech attacked a series of Republican politicians whom he depicted as outsiders—disconnected elites. He roasted the vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance for allegedly not wanting to go to Sheetz, the convenience-store chain whose headquarters are in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He mocked his former Senate rival, the Trump-endorsed television personality Mehmet Oz, whose campaign never recovered from the revelation that he ate crudités and lived in New Jersey. He urged the crowd to vote against the Republican Senate candidate Dave McCormick, who was born in Pennsylvania but spent his hedge-fund millions on a house in the tristate area. “You’re going to send that weirdo back to Connecticut,” Fetterman told the crowd.

[Read: Five of the election’s biggest unanswered questions]

The signs and T-shirt slogans at the Erie rally tended to be less stern than twee. I saw a smattering of CHILDLESS CAT LADY and a lot of Brat green. During the warm-up, Team Harris entertained the crowd with a pair of DJs playing Boomer and Gen X hits: Welcome to America, where your night out can include both a sing-along to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and a warning about the possible end of democracy. When Harris finally arrived onstage, to the sound of Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” her speech was tight, coherent … and clichéd. At one point, she asked the crowd: “Why are we not going back? Because we will move forward.” But you can’t say that Harris isn’t working for this: After the speech, she stuck around to fulfill a dozen selfie requests. At one point, I saw her literally kiss a baby.

The Democrats have placed a great deal of hope in the idea that Harris comes off as normal, compared with an opponent who rants and meanders, warning about enemies one minute and swaying along to “Ave Maria” the next (and the next, and the next …). This contrast captures what most people in the United Kingdom—where a majority of Conservative voters back Harris, never mind people on the left—don’t understand about America. How is this a close election, my fellow Britons wonder, when one candidate is incoherent and vain, the generals who know him best believe he’s a fascist, and his former vice president won’t endorse him? That message has not penetrated the MAGA media bubble, though: Time and again, I met Trump voters who thought that reelecting the former president would make America more respected abroad.

In Western Europe, many see America’s presidential election this year not as a battle between left and right, liberal and conservative, high and low taxes, but something more like a soccer game between a mid-ranking team and a herd of stampeding buffalo. Sure, the buffalo might win—but not by playing soccer.

Scenes along U.S. Route 30 (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

The next day, I got up early and set my rental car’s navigation system for a destination that registered, ominously, as a green void on the screen. This was a farm outside Volant (population 126), where Tim Walz would be talking to the rare Democrats among a fiercely Trump-supporting demographic: Pennsylvania farmers.

The work ethic of farmers makes Goldman Sachs trainees look like quiet quitters, and the agricultural trade selects for no-nonsense pragmatists who are relentlessly cheerful even when they’ve been awake half the night with their arm up a cow. Accordingly, many people I met at the Volant rally didn’t define themselves as Democrats. They were just people who had identified a problem (Trump-related chaos) and a solution (voting for Harris). “I don’t think we’re radical at all,” Krissi Harp, from Neshannock Township, told me, sitting with her husband, Dan, and daughter, Aminah. “We’re just down the middle with everything … All of us voted straight blue this year, just because we have to get rid of this Trumpism to get back to normalcy.”

Danielle Bias, a 41-year-old from Ellwood City, told me she was the daughter and granddaughter of Republicans, and she had volunteered for Trump in 2016. “This will be the first time I cross the line, but this is the first time in history I feel we need to cross the line to protect our Constitution and to protect our democracy,” she said. Her husband— “a staunch Republican, a staunch gun owner”—had followed her, as well as her daughter. But not her 20-year-old son. “He believes a lot of the misinformation that is out there, unfortunately,” Bias said, such as the idea that the government controls the weather.

The Democratic plan to take Pennsylvania rests partly on nibbling away at the red vote in rural counties. The farm’s owner, Rick Telesz, is a former Trump supporter who flipped to Biden in 2020 and has since run for office as a Democrat. Telesz’s switch was brave in the middle of western Pennsylvania, Walz said in his speech, and as a result, Telesz would “probably get less than a five-finger wave” from his neighbors.

Walz is the breakout star of 2024, one of those politicians in whom you can sense the schtick—folksy midwestern dad who’s handy with a spark plug—but nevertheless get its appeal. He walked out to John Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” in which the singer expresses the hope that he will live and die in the place where he was born. Walz had dressed for the occasion in a beige baseball cap and red checked shirt, and he gave his speech surrounded by hay bales and gourds. “Dairy, pork, and turkeys—those are the three food groups in Minnesota,” he told the crowd, to indulgent laughter, in between outlining the Democrats’ plans to end “ambulance deserts,” protect rural pharmacies, and fund senior care through Medicare.

Walz also wanted to talk about place. He grew up in Minnesota, where each fall brought the opening of pheasant season, a ritual that bonded him, his father, and his late brother. “I can still remember it like it was yesterday,” he said. “Coffee brewing … The dogs are in the field. You’re on the land that’s been in your family for a long time, and you’re getting to participate in something that we all love so much—being with family, being on that land and hunting.”

Then Walz turned Trump’s most inflammatory argument around. Yes, the governor conceded, outsiders were coming into struggling communities and causing trouble. “Those outsiders have names,” he said. “They’re Donald Trump and J. D. Vance.” Why were groceries so expensive when farmers were still getting only $4.10 a bushel for corn and $10 for soybeans? Middlemen, Walz said—and venture capitalists like Vance. “I am proud of where I grew up,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade that for anything. And Senator Vance, he became a media darling. He wrote a book about the place he grew up, but the premise was trashing that place where he grew up rather than lifting it up. The guy’s a venture capitalist cosplaying like he’s a cowboy or something.”

A roadside stand off U.S. Route 30 sells Trump gear. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

On a sunny day at the Kitchen Kettle Village in Lancaster County, shoppers browsed among quilts, homemade relishes, and $25 T-shirts reading I ♥ INTERCOURSE in honor of a charming community nearby, whose sign presumably gets stolen quite often. Everyone I spoke with there was voting for Trump, and most cited the economy—specifically, inflation, which is immediately visible to voters as higher costs in stores. Among them was Ryan Santana, who was wearing a hat proclaiming him to be Ultra MAGA. He told me that money was tight—he was supporting his wife to be a stay-at-home mom to their young daughter on his salary as a plumbing technician—which he attributed to Biden’s policies. He also mentioned that he had moved from New York to Scranton to be surrounded by people who found his opinions unremarkable. “The left can do what they want,” he said. “Out in the country, we do what we want.”

Throughout my journey around Pennsylvania, I asked voters from both parties what they thought motivated the other side. Kathy Howley, 75, from Newcastle, told me at the Walz rally that her MAGA neighbors seemed to be regurgitating things they had heard on the news or online. “I try to present facts,” Howley said. “Why aren’t people listening to facts?” Many Trump voters, meanwhile, saw Democrats as spendthrifts, pouring money into their pet causes and special-interest groups, unwilling to tackle the border crisis in case they are called racist—or, more conspiratorially, because they think that migrants are future Democrats.

While out driving, I twice saw signs that read I’M VOTING FOR THE FELON. This was a mystery to me: Conservatives who in 2020 might have argued that “blue lives matter” and decried the slogan “Defund the police” as dangerous anarchy were now backing the candidate with a criminal record—and one who had fomented a riot after losing the last election. For those who planned to vote for Trump, however, January 6 was an overblown story—a protest that had gotten out of hand. “If he didn’t respect democracy, why would he run for office?” asked Johanna Williams, who served me coffee at a roadside café. When I pressed her, she conceded that Trump was no angel, but she believed he could change: “He does have a felony charge, but I still think that there is a little bit of good that he could do.” For the 20-year-old from rural Sandy Lake, stopping abortion was the biggest election issue. Even if a woman became pregnant from sexual assault, Williams believed, she should carry the pregnancy to term and give the baby to a couple who couldn’t have children.

I also met Williams’s mirror image. Rachel Prichard, a 31-year-old from Altoona, was one of those who snagged a selfie with Harris at the rally in Erie, which she proudly showed me on her phone as the arena emptied. She was voting Democratic for one reason: “women’s rights.” She had voted for Trump in 2016 “for a change,” and because she thought “he gave a voice to people who felt they didn’t have one.” Instead of helping, though, Trump had “taught them to yell the loudest.” Rachel had come to the arena with her mother, Susan, who had an even more intriguing voting history: She was a registered Republican who worried about high welfare spending and had voted for Trump twice, but she switched allegiance after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The Prichards are part of a larger female drift toward the Democrats in this election cycle, prompted by the repeal of Roe. Many such women are unshowy and private, the type who turn out for door-knocking but would be reluctant to get up on a podium—the opposite of the male MAGA foghorns who now blight my timeline on X. If Harris outperforms the polls in Pennsylvania, and across the country, it will be in no small part because of these women.

Leaves blowing on the battlefield of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic) Gettysburg, Pennsylvania (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)

Fallingwater might be a relic of an era when the social contract seemed stronger, but another Pennsylvania landmark reminded me that Americans have endured polarization more bitter than today’s.

In Gettysburg, the statues of Union General George Gordon Meade and Confederate General Robert E. Lee stare at each other across the battlefield for eternity— although the solemnity is somewhat disrupted by a nearby statue of Union General Alexander Hays that appears to be lifting a sword toward a KFC across the road. A stone boundary at what’s known as High Water Mark—the farthest point reached by Confederate soldiers in the 1863 battle—has become a modest symbol of reconciliation. In 1938, the last few living veterans ceremonially shook hands across the wall.

I was visiting Gettysburg to understand how the country came apart, and how its politicians and ordinary citizens tried to mend it again. The Civil War pitted American against American in a conflict that left about 2.5 percent of the population dead. During three days of fighting at Gettysburg alone, more than 50,000 soldiers were killed or wounded. The Civil War still resonates today, sometimes in peculiar ways. In Reading, Trump had asked the crowd if it wanted Fort Liberty, in North Carolina, restored to its former name of Fort Bragg, after Confederate General Braxton Bragg. His listeners roared their approval—never mind that Pennsylvania fought for the Union.

The address that Abraham Lincoln gave when he dedicated the Union cemetery there is now remembered as one of the most poignant (and succinct) in American history. By some accounts, though, it flopped at the time. “He thought it was a failure,” William B. Styple, a Civil War historian who was signing books in the visitor center’s gift shop, told me. “There was no crowd reaction.” Only when Lincoln began to read accounts of the address in newspapers was he reassured that anyone would notice his plea “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

When I reached the cemetery where Lincoln spoke, a ranger named Jerry Warren pointed me to the grass that marks historians’ best guess for the precise spot. When I told him that I was there to write about the presidential election, he paused. “In the middle of a civil war,” he said, “Lincoln never mentioned us and them.”

[McKay Coppins: This is not the end of America]

Now, I can’t quite believe that—the discrete categories of enemies and allies are sharply defined during wartime, as the blue and gray military caps in the gift shop made clear. But I see why Pennsylvanians might reject the suggestion that the gap between red and blue is unbridgeable. What I heard from many interviewees across the political spectrum was a more amorphous sense that something has gone amiss in the places they hold dear, and that nobody is stepping in to help. Perhaps a fairer way to see things is that many communities in Pennsylvania feel overlooked and underappreciated three years out of every four—and the role of a political party should be to identify the source of that malaise.

When I came back to Pittsburgh from Fallingwater, I got to talking with Bill Schwartz, a 55-year-old lifelong city resident who works the front desk at the Mansions on Fifth Hotel—another legacy of the city’s industrial golden age, built for the lawyer Willis McCook in 1905. Within a minute, he began to tell me about the diners and dime stores of his youth, now gone or replaced with vape shops and empty lots. (The Kaufmann family’s once-celebrated department store rebranded after Macy’s bought the chain in 2005. Its flagship location later closed.)

Schwartz, who is Black, lowered his voice as he recounted the racial slurs and insults that were shouted at him in the 1980s. But he fondly remembered the Gus Miller newsstand, dinners at Fat Angelo’s downtown, and nights at Essie’s Original Hot Dog Shop in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, home of a gnarly stalagmite of carbs known as “O Fries.” “It was a great hangout spot,” he said—his version of the bar in Cheers. But after the pandemic, he wandered down there and discovered a load of guys in construction gear. They had already gutted the place down to its wooden beams.

Did anyone try to save the Original Hot Dog Shop? Schwartz sighed. “That would require rich people to care about where they came from.”

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Wednesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into facism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: Claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-Constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Wednesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”