The governing impulse of “heterodoxy” is a healthy skepticism of mass movements, overly broad claims meant to signal virtue, and rigid ideological positions. This orientation, within a segment of the center-left and center-right on the political spectrum, has proved a necessary check on the internet-stimulated, herd-like consensus so many others have adopted in recent years. During the summer of 2020 and the twin calamities of the death of George Floyd and the coronavirus pandemic, I was drawn to a heterodoxy that was conservative in its preservation of liberalism’s greatest achievements: tolerance of diverse perspectives and freedom of expression. It felt refreshingly unaligned, distinct from right-wing reactionary backlash, and like a genuine disavowal of dogma. Donald Trump and all he stands for, I thought, was clearly incompatible with such thinking.

But in the four years since, as Trump and his movement have strengthened their assault on our democracy, I have begun to wonder if this mindset that refuses, by definition, to pick sides contains a fatal flaw.

No single orthodoxy provides adequate solutions to every problem; no ideological team deserves your total allegiance. And yet, this election cycle has repeatedly shown that a reflex to be independent, to reject gatekeeping, to punch at “elites”—or, more simply, representatives of the status quo—can also leave people numb to existential threats that reasonable-consensus positions were developed to oppose. Our values can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is raised above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself.

Until recently, within the heterodox slice of the cultural spectrum, opposition to Trump was the obvious response to his singularly reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of self-described centrist “Never Trumpers”—starting with Trump’s current running mate, who once compared him in this magazine to “cultural heroin”—were legion. But as the race tightened in recent months, I’ve been struck by a palpable shift in attitude among many liberal and centrist voices—a slackening of vigilance, and a softening on Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot of prominent MAGA converts such as Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Ackman, as well as writers and journalists such as Naomi Wolf—erstwhile Democrats who’ve become outright Trump fans. What I observed this past summer, as Joe Biden’s campaign self-immolated and Kamala Harris seized the nomination, was a more general exhaustion among many heterodox thinkers, and a disinclination to support the alternative to Trump that was now on offer. Harris, many agree, is not an ideal candidate. But given the enormous stakes, I wanted to understand how anyone not already ensorcelled by the cult of MAGA could hesitate to support her.

[Kurt Andersen: Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character]

I reached out to two of the most thoughtful heterodox commentators I know in an earnest attempt to take this ambivalence seriously. Kmele Foster and Coleman Hughes are both podcasters with significant followings. Both are “Black,” though Hughes is an ardent advocate for colorblindness (he wrote a book this year called The End of Race Politics) and Foster (like me) rejects racial categories. They represent, in my view, the steel-man version of heterodox perspectives, and neither, they confirmed to me this week, is planning to vote.

Hughes told me, when we spoke in September, that he sees Trump’s behavior around January 6, 2021, as “disqualifying.” Yet he listed two reasons he couldn’t bring himself to support Harris. The first had to do with a growing sense that the Trump threat had simply been exaggerated. “If I really felt that Trump was going to end American democracy or run for a third term if he wins, or start a nuclear war, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And indeed, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He spoke loosely about putting Muslims on a registry. He spoke loosely about using nukes,” he recalled. “I would’ve voted for basically Bugs Bunny over him.”

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

[Read: An ethicist reads ]The Art of the Deal

In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he viewed as a moderate liberal and a politician with a record of reaching across the aisle. This is not at all how he perceives Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

Foster is an entrepreneur (he’s founded telecommunications and media companies) and a libertarian who seldom, if ever, feels represented by a mainstream politician, though he insists that he could vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

[Read: If Trump is guilty, does it matter if the prosecution was political?]

People who are concerned about Trump “deranging institutions” should have a similar concern about Democrats, Foster said. He brought up the idea floated by some prominent voices on the left of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices in order to dilute the conservative majority, which he believes shows an alarming disregard for norms that goes unnoticed because “there’s a greater sophistication on the part of Democrats that makes it a lot less obvious that some of the things that they’re trying to do are bad.”

He sees scant evidence of Harris speaking out against or countering such trends. On this point, it is hard to disagree with him. Harris has said precious little about what, if anything, she would do to distinguish herself not just from the Biden administration, but also from the iteration of herself who briefly and unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2019. Last month, she could not articulate to Anderson Cooper a single concrete mistake she has made in her capacity as a leader, even as most of the country knows that she covered for a president in cognitive decline.

Many of the concerns Hughes and Foster raise are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking. Both Hughes and Foster were signatories on the Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the writers of the letter.) It has frequently been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.

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.”

The revelation that North Korean troops have been gathering in Russia, ostensibly to assist President Vladimir Putin in his brutal invasion of Ukraine, has stoked Western fears of autocratic states banding together to undermine the interests of democracies. There is an authoritarian coalition, but it’s rickety—and it depends on China’s tolerance for chaos.

The war in Ukraine has been a showcase for cooperation among four states—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea—that share an antipathy toward the United States and the international order it represents. Since invading its neighbor in 2022, Russia has sourced drones and missiles from Iran. In October, Washington sanctioned Chinese companies for working with Russian firms to produce drones. According to U.S. officials, China has also been supplying Russia with vital components that help sustain its war machine. And now North Korean troops have come to Russia, where, Ukrainian officials believe, they are preparing to join the invading forces. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that if the troops did participate in the war, it would be a “very, very serious issue” with potential implications in both Europe and Asia.

Yet this cooperation masks divisions among the world’s major autocracies. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran don’t necessarily agree on how to achieve their shared goal of countering American domination. Putin has chosen an expansionist war. North Korea and Iran—impoverished, isolated from the West, and zealously anti-American—have little to lose, and something material to gain, from assisting Russia. But China’s calculus is more complicated, because its desire to change the current world order is tempered by its reliance upon that very same order. The Chinese economy remains too dependent on the United States and its partners to risk being heavily sanctioned for shipping arms to Putin.

Constrained by these competing interests, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has taken a generally cautious approach to his global ambitions. He apparently aims to preserve a measure of global stability to protect the Chinese economy while he steadily expands China’s power. At the same time, however, he has deepened his relationships with Russia and Iran, even as their leaders foment chaos in Europe and the Middle East.

Washington is pressing Beijing to intervene and curb North Korea’s cooperation with Russia, but Xi has not shown much interest in leveraging his influence to rein in his autocratic friends. He met with Putin just the day before the Biden administration revealed the presence of North Korean troops in Russia. What passed between the two isn’t known, but the troops remained.

A case can be made that China is not only allowing but indirectly bankrolling all this disruption. The U.S. has sanctioned Russia, Iran, and North Korea, leading all three countries to become heavily dependent on China. Trade between China and Russia reached a record $240 billion last year. Russian business is even turning to the Chinese currency, the yuan, to replace the U.S. dollar. China buys nearly all of Iran’s oil exports, and accounts for 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade. These three countries might have pursued their wars, nuclear programs, and terror campaigns without economic ties to China. But Beijing’s support is undoubtedly helping, and Xi is apparently willing to accept the result.

[Read: China might be the Ukraine war’s big winner]

The destabilizing activities of other autocracies might seem like a win for China, because they effectively drain the West’s resources and undercut its standing in the world. But they are also risky, because the turmoil they create could backfire on China. For instance, a wider war in the Middle East could puncture energy markets and hurt China’s economy. Xi isn’t in a diplomatic or military position in the Middle East to contain the damage. Meanwhile, the North Korean deployment to Russia is threatening to escalate the war in Ukraine: South Korea’s president has warned that Seoul may respond by supplying Ukraine with offensive weapons. China’s leadership has little to gain from concentrating the efforts of America’s European and Asian allies against Russia. In the event that the war widens, American and European leaders could step up sanctions on China to get it to curtail its support for Moscow.

The conundrum of China’s foreign policy is that it seeks at once to completely upend the international order in the long term and to preserve it in the short term. Xi’s solution to this problem is to reduce China’s reliance on the United States and the global system it dominates in the medium term. He is pursuing “self-sufficiency” and encouraging tighter ties of trade and investment with the global South to wean the Chinese economy off Western technology and consumer markets. Then China would have greater freedom to support autocracies such as Russia, Iran, and North Korea in their destabilizing activities.

But that’s the future. For now, Xi is willing to tolerate a world in flames, in the hope that China won’t get burned. By feeding tensions with the West, he stands to damage China’s economy and complicate its geopolitical ambitions. What will the Chinese leader do if this gamble doesn’t go his way? With friends like Xi’s, he may not need enemies.

BBC News NI's Chris Buckler talks to voters in Wilmington, Delaware, as Biden's presidency comes to an end.

The approach of the presidential election has people in both parties in doomscrolling mode. Some Republicans are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in swing states. Some Democrats are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about Nate Silver’s projections. Of course, this kind of internet-based obsession isn’t healthy. Although perhaps the best way to avoid a sense of impending dread about the coming presidential election is to actually participate in some form of civic engagement in the four days before November 5, those who are loath to leave their couches and interact with their fellow human beings have a well-adjusted alternative to volunteering: reading a book. As a journalist who has thought, talked, and written about electoral politics every day for as long as I can remember, I can suggest five books that might lend readers a new perspective on politics—without all the unpleasant mental-health side effects of spending hours online.

The Earl of Louisiana, by A. J. Liebling

Liebling’s chronicle of the 1959 gubernatorial campaign of Earl Long, Huey Long’s brother, who became the dominant figure in state politics in the decades after his brother’s assassination, is one of the great classics of literary journalism. Set in the byzantine world of Louisiana politics in the mid-20th century, the book is a remarkable character study of the younger Long, who served three stints as governor of the Bayou State (and was briefly institutionalized by his wife during his last term, as chronicled by Liebling). Although it’s arguably not even the best book about one of the Longs—T. Harry Williams’s biography of Huey is a masterpiece—it captures a precise moment of transition as American politics adjusted to both the rise of television and the beginnings of the civil-rights movement. Its glimpse into those changes also serves as a last hurrah for a certain type of traditional politics that seems remote in our very online age.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson’s tale of the 1972 presidential campaign has offered a rousing introduction to American campaigns for generations of teenage political junkies. His gonzo journalism is prone to treating the line between fact and fiction as advisory at best, but it also gets into the actual art of politics in a way that few others have managed. His depiction of George McGovern’s campaign’s careful management of the floor of the Democratic National Convention is genuinely instructive for professionals, while still accessible to those with only a casual interest in the field. In a year in which “vibes” have earned a new primacy in campaign coverage, reading Thompson is even more worthwhile, because he did a better job than anyone of covering the vibes of his moment.

[Read: Six political memoirs worth reading]

SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King

Americans frequently complain about their two-party system and wonder why no third party has yet emerged that could somehow appeal to a broad constituency. But sustaining such mass popularity is even harder than it sounds, as shown by this history of the Social Democratic Party in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the closest thing to a full-fledged third party that has emerged in the Anglosphere in the past century, the SDP was formed in 1981 as a breakaway from the Labour Party, which seemed irretrievably in control of fringe leftists and Trotskyites; meanwhile, all the Conservative Party had to offer was Margaret Thatcher. The SDP, in an alliance with the Liberal Party (a longtime moderate party of moderate means and membership), appeared positioned to shatter the mold of British politics. In the early 1980s, it polled first among British voters. But its momentum fizzled, as Crewe and King chronicle, due to both internal conflicts and external events such as the Falklands War. The party, which now exists as the Liberal Democrats, has had varying fortunes in British politics since, but it has never reached the heights that once felt attainable in the early ’80s. Crewe and King explain why, while also outlining just how close the SDP came.

This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns

If you feel the need to reflect on contemporary American politics right now, Martin and Burns’s book on the tumultuous end of the Trump administration and start of the Biden presidency provides a smart field guide for understanding how exactly Donald Trump went from leaving Washington in disgrace after January 6 to potentially winning reelection in 2024. It chronicles the series of compromises and calculations within the Republican Party that first enabled and then fueled Trump’s political comeback, and also goes inside the Democratic Party, dissecting Kamala Harris’s rise as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential nominee as well as the missteps that hampered her role in the early days after Biden took office. Days from the presidential election, this offers the best look back at how our country got here.

[Read: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?]

On Politics, by H. L. Mencken

Journalism rarely lasts. After all, many stories that are huge one day are forgotten the next. Seldom do reporters’ or columnists’ legacies live on beyond their retirement, let alone their death. One of the few exceptions to this is Mencken, and deservedly so. Mencken was not just a talented memoirist and scholar of American English but also one of the eminent political writers of his time. Admittedly, many of his judgments did not hold up: Mencken had many of the racial prejudices of his time, and his loathing for Franklin D. Roosevelt has not exactly been vindicated by history. However, this collection of articles covers the vulgar and hypocritical parade of politics during the Roaring ’20s, when Prohibition was the nominal law of the land. The 1924 election of Calvin Coolidge (of whom Mencken wrote, “It would be difficult to imagine a more obscure and unimportant man”) may be justly forgotten today. But it produced absurdities, such as a Democratic National Convention that required 103 ballots to deliver a nominee who lost to Coolidge in a landslide, that were ripe for Mencken’s cynical skewering. Today, his writing serves as a model of satire worth revisiting.

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.”

Every presidential election appears to pose one big question—who will win?—that is in fact made up of countless smaller questions: How do voters really behave? Which old rules of politics still apply, and which are obsolete? What kind of country do we live in? In 2016, we learned that white evangelical voters would overwhelmingly support a louche serial philanderer. Four years later, we learned that Florida had shifted from the quintessential swing state to a Republican stronghold. Here are five of the biggest outstanding questions heading into next week’s vote.

Will the polls finally be right?

Donald Trump’s stunning 2016 victory set off a reckoning among pollsters to figure out how they had gotten things so wrong. Then 2020 came around, and they somehow did even worse. Polling averages showed Joe Biden leading in Wisconsin, for example, by 10 points; he won the state by just half a point.

Pollsters have offered various overlapping explanations for their errors last time. Republicans seem to have been less likely to respond to surveys, because of a deep mistrust in institutions, which left them underrepresented in the results. And Democrats may have been more likely to respond, because they were more likely to be sheltering in place during COVID. Whatever the precise mechanism, the 2020 polls clearly underestimated support for Trump.  

[Gilad Edelman: The asterisk on Kamala Harris’s poll numbers]

In 2024, pollsters have been deploying a range of techniques to prevent that from happening again. One common approach: asking people whom they voted for in 2020 to ensure that surveys include enough Trump 2020 supporters. Such techniques, however, can introduce problems of their own. Voters are bad at recalling past votes, and tend to say that they voted for the winner of the previous election even if they didn’t. This raises the possibility, however remote, that polls are overestimating Trump’s support this time around.

Will we finally see a youth gender gap?

In an electorate deeply divided by race, class, geography, and education, gender has long been an exception. Since the 1980s, men have been slightly more likely to vote Republican and women to vote Democratic, but the gap has remained small and stable. Among young voters, it has hardly existed at all; young people have skewed overwhelmingly Democratic regardless of gender. In 2020, 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden compared with 70 percent of women in that age cohort. That was the same percentage gap as in 2008.

If the polls are to be believed, that pattern has radically changed this year. Across three recent New York Times/Siena polls, young women still support Democrats at about the same rate as they did in 2020, with 67 percent in favor of Kamala Harris. But young male support for Democrats has plummeted to just 37 percent. In swing states, the gap appears to be even larger.

What makes this shift especially strange is that its sudden timing rules out many of the most common explanations offered for it. The backlash to #MeToo, Trump’s hypermasculine appeal, changing gender roles, and the rise of an anti-establishment male online subculture have been many years in the making, and yet the youth gender-voting divide didn’t show up in 2018, 2020, or 2022. Why it might be showing up now remains a mystery. (It also doesn’t seem to be about the gender of the Democratic candidate; Joe Biden was polling just as poorly with young men as Harris is.)

[Rose Horowitch: Are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart?]

The possibility remains that the divide is an artifact of polling that will not extend to the voting booth. Trump’s youth support is concentrated among those who are least likely to actually vote. According to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, young men who “definitely” plan to vote favor Harris 55 to 38 percent. Young men might say they prefer Trump, but whether they will act on that preference is a different story.

Are Democrats losing Black and Hispanic support?

The American electorate has long been sharply divided on racial lines. Since the 1960s, white voters have mostly voted Republican and nonwhite voters have overwhelmingly voted Democrat. In 2020, Joe Biden won 92 percent of Black voters and 63 percent of Hispanic voters. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama performed similarly among those groups.

Four years later, Trump’s rhetoric toward nonwhite Americans and immigrants has become even more nakedly hateful, while Democrats have nominated a Black woman for president. And yet, according to a recent New York Times/Siena poll of the Black and Hispanic electorate, Harris is winning just 78 percent of Black voters and 56 percent of Hispanic voters. If those numbers hold on Election Day, Trump is on track to win a greater share of Hispanic voters than any other Republican candidate in two decades and a greater share of Black voters than any other Republican candidate since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

How can this be? One possibility is that economic concerns are overwhelming racial ones. Black and Hispanic voters have long been more likely than white voters to say the economy is their top issue, and right now the country’s economic mood is dismal. The same Times/Siena poll found that just 20 percent of Hispanic voters and 26 percent of Black voters say current economic conditions are good or excellent.

Another possibility is that the same forces that first caused white voters without a college degree to swing toward Trump in 2016 are now causing nonwhite voters to do the same. Many Black and Hispanic voters agree with Trump on issues such as immigration and crime: The Times/Siena poll found that 45 percent of Hispanic voters and 41 percent of Black voters support deporting undocumented immigrants, and about half the voters in each group say that crime in big cities is a major problem that has gotten out of control. And both groups have become disillusioned with the Democrats. The poll found that just 76 percent of Black voters and 56 percent of Hispanic voters see them as “the party of the working class,” while only six in 10 Black voters and fewer than half of Hispanics say that the Democratic Party “keeps its promises” more than Republicans.

[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]

Either way, a shift of this magnitude would overturn two interrelated assumptions that have dominated the thinking of both major parties for decades: first, that voters of color predictably vote according to their racial identities, and second, that as the U.S. continues to become a more racially diverse country, the electorate will automatically tilt in favor of the Democrats. A political system in which nonwhite voters are truly up for grabs has the potential to reshape the strategies of both parties and transform the electoral map.

Does the economy matter?

Historically, the state of the economy has been a pretty good predictor of who will win the presidency. An analysis by the political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck found that despite all the abnormalities of 2020—a pandemic, national protests, a uniquely polarizing president—models that factored in both economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment predicted the result and margin of that year’s presidential election more accurately than the polls did.

That should be good news for Harris. By most objective standards, the U.S. economy is performing remarkably well: Growth is up, unemployment is low, real wages are rising, and inflation has been tamed.

Except the voters seem to disagree. Despite a stretch of fantastic economic news—including interest-rate cuts, low inflation, plunging gas prices, and continued job growth—consumer sentiment remains well below where it was as recently as April of this year and at about the same level as it was in October 2009, when the economy was in freefall and the unemployment rate reached more than 10 percent. Even as the economy has improved in almost every possible way, voters don’t seem any happier with it. Many Americans are still outraged by the higher cost of goods, particularly groceries, relative to pre-pandemic prices. And, like voters around the world, they seem likely to take that frustration out on the incumbent party.

[Annie Lowrey: The worst best economy ever]

But here’s a further twist: Polls also show Harris’s standing improving along the specific dimension of economic issues. Every month this election cycle, the polling firm Echelon Insights has asked voters which candidate would make the economy work better. In June, voters favored Trump over Biden by 11 points; in September, they favored Harris over Trump by one point. That might help explain why Harris is doing better in the polls than Biden did, but it doesn’t explain the fact that Trump has been gaining ground in recent weeks to pull dead even with the vice president, even in some national polls. The relationship between the economy and voting behavior in the 2024 election appears to be anything but straightforward.

Do campaigns make a difference?

The core of every campaign is what’s known as the “ground game”: each side’s effort to canvass neighborhoods, knock on doors, and make phone calls in an attempt to turn out its supporters come Election Day.

But the ground game has been a remarkably poor predictor of success in recent elections. In 2016, Trump’s field operation was almost nonexistent, whereas the Hillary Clinton campaign oversaw a voter-outreach juggernaut. Trump won. In 2020, the Trump campaign boasted that its massive field operation knocked on a million doors every week, while the Biden campaign conducted almost no in-person canvassing because of worries about spreading COVID. Biden won.

Still, political-science research has consistently found—and common sense strongly suggests—that nudging potential voters to vote does, in fact, increase turnout. According to estimates by the political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green, a canvassing effort that gets a response at 1,000 doors generates about 40 new voters, and a phone bank that reaches 1,000 people produces approximately 28 new voters. Given that the 2024 presidential race could very well be decided by tens of thousands of votes in a few key states, these kinds of numbers could be enough to swing the outcome.  

So who has the better ground game this time around? By just about every conventional indicator, the answer is Kamala Harris. The Trump campaign claims to have “hundreds of paid staff”; the Harris campaign has 375 in Pennsylvania alone, and about 2,500 in total. During just one week in October, the Harris campaign says its volunteers knocked on 1.6 million doors and made 20 million phone calls. (Trump’s team has chosen not to release these kinds of details.)  

The disparity is partly a product of an imbalance in resources. The Harris campaign has raised more than $1 billion in the past three months, more than double the Trump campaign’s haul during the same period. The Harris campaign accordingly outspent the Trump campaign by more than three to one in September alone. (Making matters worse for Trump, his campaign has spent a large chunk of its war chest paying off his legal bills and funding efforts to monitor “election integrity.”)

The Trump campaign says it can make up for its lackluster on-the-ground numbers by relying on unconventional tactics, such as hyper-targeting “low-propensity voters” who support Trump but didn’t show up in 2020. It is also relying heavily on well-resourced but unproven outside organizations funded by conservative donors to get out the vote.

Judging by the past two elections, odds are that Trump’s lack of a ground game won’t be decisive. But in an election in which almost every single swing-state vote might count, it certainly isn’t doing him any favors.

Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the “Muslim ban,” his response to Charlottesville. “Shithole” countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t “go back to their huts.” The fabrications about Haitians eating pets. There’s Sunday’s horrifying Madison Square Garden rally, where Trump surrogates made racist comments about Harris and Puerto Rico. The list goes on. And grows. You would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act.

Future historians will therefore marvel at the fact that Trump has increased his support among African Americans since he was elected to the presidency in 2016. No serious person expects Trump to win anything close to a majority of Black voters in this year’s election. But months upon months of polls—from a welter of different pollsters—predict Trump substantially growing his share of those voters, particularly young Black men. In a recent poll of Black voters, 58 percent of Black men said they’d support Vice President Kamala Harris if the election were held today, and 26 percent said they’d vote for Trump—a percentage that would represent record-setting support for a Republican candidate.

Other forms of evidence—shoe-leather reporting, first-person testimony, 16 years of declining Black male support for Democratic presidential candidates, the presence of the Black manosphere—suggest that we are in the midst of a substantial racial realignment. If Democratic candidates have long benefited from Black magic—the near-universal support of African Americans—the spell has been broken for a growing share of Black men. Now Democrats, including the Harris campaign, are trying to figure out how to cast a new one. But the chances of stopping the realignment appear slim, because Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party.

[Read: Why do Black people vote for Democrats?]

Lauren Harper Pope, a political and communications strategist, told me politicians need to start thinking of Black men—in contrast to more reliably Democratic Black women—as politically independent. “I’ve been telling people for months: Black men, Hispanic men, minority men are independent voters,” she said. “People need to look past the concept that if you’re a Black man with a college degree, you’re going to vote for a Democrat. No. Absolutely not. I’ve got plenty of Black friends who have college degrees who are from the South, not from the South, whatever, who are genuinely concerned about things the Democratic Party is doing.”

Sharon Wright Austin, a political scientist at the University of Florida, also believes that some level of realignment is happening. “I do think we have to take the polls seriously, because they are showing that Donald Trump is getting more support among Black men,” she told me. “I don’t know if the numbers are going to be as high as the polls indicate. I do think there are going to be some African Americans who are going to vote for Trump because they find him to be a better candidate.” Austin noted that the strength of the economy under Trump, as well as some Black men’s discomfort with Democratic positions on cultural issues such as abortion, trans rights, and immigration, are likely driving some of this defection.

Other political scientists who specialize in Black politics contest the idea that Black voting habits are meaningfully changing. Justin Zimmerman, a political-science professor at the University of Albany, said that the kind of frustration Black men are exhibiting isn’t new. “It’s not so much that there’s no Black political disenchantment with the Democratic Party,” Zimmerman told me. “That’s always been there.” He said that most rankled African Americans will likely hold their nose and vote for a candidate they may not be enthusiastic about, something Black voters have had to do throughout American history.

Christopher Towler, who directs the Black Voter Project and is a partner at Black Insights Research, also dismissed the notion that African Americans are undergoing a meaningful transition away from the Democratic Party. He argues that polls frequently rely on small sample sizes of Black voters, which makes getting a representative cross-section of the Black community impossible.

“You have a sample that has [18 to19] percent support for Trump, but it has a nine-point margin of error,” Towler told me. “That means it could be as low as 10 or as high as 27 percent. That tells us absolutely nothing.”

Although this point about sample size is reasonable and was echoed by other political scientists I interviewed, it fails to explain why those sample-size errors would lead to polling consistently skewed in one direction. And, more important, it discounts historical trends: Democrats have been bleeding male Black voters for nearly two decades.

Some degree of realignment was probably inevitable, given the widening mismatch between the worldview of many Black men and that of the Democratic Party. Many Black voters are quite conservative, especially culturally, and they may hold views on issues like abortion and gender that are more at home in the Republican Party. In June, the Pew Research Center released what is perhaps the most comprehensive recent survey of American opinions about fraught cultural issues. Conducted when Joe Biden was still the Democrats’ presidential nominee, Pew’s polling illustrates notable contrasts between the views of Black and white supporters of the Democratic candidate. On an array of cultural questions, Black Biden supporters were not simply more conservative than their white peers; they were more conservative than any other demographic group in the Democratic coalition.

Pew found that Black Biden supporters were the least likely to answer questions about immigrants favorably, trailing white supporters by double digits. Similarly, Black Biden voters were about twice as likely to say that “an emphasis on marriage and family makes society better off” compared with their white counterparts. And whereas only 32 percent of white Biden supporters agreed that “gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth,” 64 percent of Black Biden voters said they agreed. Black Biden voters were also much less likely than any other group of Biden voters to say they were comfortable with they/them pronouns. When the questions turned to religion, the differences were even more stark: 35 percent of Black Biden voters said “government should support religious values” and more than half—a higher percentage than among Trump supporters —said “belief in God is needed for morality.” Only 7 and 8 percent of white Biden supporters, respectively, said the same. A different Pew survey from the same period also found that majorities of Black men and Black women agreed that “the government [promotes] birth control and abortion to keep the Black population small.” Again, these polls were not conducted when Harris was the candidate, but there is little reason to believe that cultural attitudes among Black Democrats suddenly changed when she became the nominee.

Since Trump’s rise, Democrats have seemed to assume that if they yell about his racism, misogyny, and authoritarian tendencies enough, African Americans will be scared or shamed into voting for Hillary Clinton, Biden, and now Harris. Eight years ago, the Clinton campaign dropped an ad tying Trump to Ku Klux Klan members; after she lost the election, she warned that Trump supporters wanted to take away the rights of Black Americans. For this year’s presidential race, the Harris campaign has commissioned former President Barack Obama to scold Black men for allegedly being too sexist to vote for the first Black woman president. Harris is hammering messages about fascism, racism, and democracy in the campaign’s final week even though polls have shown that these talking points are among the least popular with voters of all kinds—to say nothing of the fact that Black voters have been moving toward Trump despite nearly a decade of those messages being shouted from a bullhorn.

Democrats seem unwilling to believe that a small but significant portion of Black voters might be willing to overlook Trump’s racism, and are even drawn to aspects of his nationalism, xenophobia, and traditionalism. When Biden won in 2020, many liberal talking heads cheered that “Black voters saved democracy” and heaped praise on Black “superhero women”  as part of an outpouring of awkward gratitude that several Black pundits noted was a little fetishistic and traded in “magical negro tropes.” Some progressives seem to imagine minority voters as mythical beings, electoral angels who radiate light and virtue. In their minds, the Democratic Party is a Marvel movie coalition of Nice Whites and Saintly Blacks and Browns who team up every four years to try to save the country from the Bad Whites: the hodgepodge of unsavory working-class whites and car-dealership-owning whites and Christian-nationalist whites who make up Trump’s coalition. But people of color are people, not saints or saintly monoliths, and the cost of this idealization has been a certain blindness in Democratic circles to the actual, rather than imagined, political landscape within minority communities. And it’s not just African Americans: Other male minority voters are also generally less liberal than white Democrats. Recent polls found that 44 percent of young Latino men back Trump and more than half of Hispanic men support deportations of undocumented immigrants (51 percent) and building the border wall (52 percent). These men are more than twice as likely to say Trump, compared with Biden, helped them personally.

The question, then, is what to do about these growing tensions between the cultural views of Black Americans and other minority voters and those of the Democratic Party. Despite their competing views on realignment, the experts I spoke with largely agreed that Democrats tend to take Black voters for granted, and that the Harris campaign should have started doing targeted outreach to Black voters much sooner. “What Black folks want is an identifiable, explicit agenda,” the political scientist Sekou Franklin told me, one that appeals to their unique needs and interests. He added, “That’s what they’re seeing with LGBTQ+ persons … That’s what they’re seeing with women, so they want the same thing.” Others said that some in the Black community think too much money is going to help foreign countries overseas, while Black Americans—especially Black men—struggle at home. Black Americans are among the least supportive of sending military aid to Ukraine and Israel.

[Daniel K. Williams: Democrats can’t rely on the Black Church anymore]

What Harris has offered to combat these perceptions has been less than inspiring. Trying to court young Black men with policy proposals on crypto, weed legalization, and mentorship programs—the focus of a recent policy rollout—is both confusing and condescending. One ambitious proposal, handing out loans to Black Americans on the basis of race, is very possibly illegal, and thus likely an empty promise. And although Harris has moved to the right explicitly and implicitly on a number of cultural and economic issues, there is approximately zero chance that she can outflank Donald Trump on problems such as immigration, no matter how much she wants to expand the border wall. Anyone whose primary concern is the southern border is almost certainly going to vote for the former president. So if shifting right on cultural and social issues is unlikely to move the needle, what will?

The answer is staring Democrats in the face. If Black voters are perhaps the most culturally conservative wing of the Democratic coalition, they also tend to be among the most progressive on economic issues. A survey this summer found that Black voters are almost twice as likely as other racial demographics to say that “the government should provide more assistance to people in need” and also more likely than any other group to say that Social Security benefits should be expanded. And roughly two-thirds of African Americans say that the government should have a more active hand in solving problems. Another survey found that a majority of African Americans have critical views of the country’s prison system (74 percent), courts (70 percent), policing (68 percent), big businesses (67 percent), economic system (65 percent), and health-care system (51 percent). These are issues that the Democratic Party can credibly claim to be better at addressing than Republicans.

Black voters’ realignment seems less like a sea change than something akin to coastal erosion: a grinding process that can be stopped with concerted collective effort. Democrats cannot out-Republican the Republicans on cultural issues, and it would be a fool’s errand to try. What they can do is spend the final days of the campaign playing to their strengths: loudly championing the kind of bold populist vision that is actually popular with voters, including African Americans.

The news agency says the email it obtained shows a White House transcript was altered despite stenographers' objections.