This article was originally published by Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Donald Trump’s fans and critics alike have compared him to some of history’s most famous rulers: Cyrus the Great, Adolf Hitler, King David, and more.

But on the eve of the election, a celebrity pastor named Jonathan Cahn wants his evangelical followers to think of the Republican candidate as a present-day manifestation of a far more obscure leader: the biblical king Jehu, who vanquished the morally corrupt house of Ahab to become the tenth ruler of the Kingdom of Israel.

“President Trump, you were born into the world to be a trumpet of God, a vessel of the Lord in the hands of God. God called you to walk according to the template; he called you according to the template of Jehu, the warrior king,” Cahn told the hundreds of Christian leaders who gathered last week for the National Faith Summit outside Atlanta. He also shared a clip of his prophecy about Trump on his YouTube channel, which has more than a million followers.

What Cahn means—and why at least one scholar of the Christian right says he is worried—requires some background. Cahn, 65, is the son of a Holocaust refugee and grew up in a Jewish household in New Jersey. When he was 20, he says he had a personal revelation that led him to Jesus, and he eventually became the head of a Messianic congregation, blending Jewish rituals with Christian worship and a focus on doomsday prophecies.

Cahn helped popularize the interpretation of 9/11 as an apocalyptic biblical allegory. In his telling, the terrorist attacks were akin to God’s rebuke of the biblical nation of Israel, and they happened because God wanted the United States to revert to a time before legalized abortion and gay rights when religion held a more central place in society—or else. His book on the topic, The Harbinger, came out in 2011 and spent months on the New York Times best-seller list.

Cahn continued to release commercially successful books, and combined with his social-media activity, he established a growing and enthusiastic audience for his prophetic warnings.

Then Trump came along. During Trump’s first term, many evangelical-Christian supporters explained his lack of religiosity by comparing him to Cyrus, the pagan ruler of ancient Persia, who served as God’s agent by, according to the Bible, helping the Israelites return home from exile. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, amid an effort to build stronger ties with the evangelical movement, praised Trump as a modern-day Cyrus.

But Cahn had spun a different prophetic narrative about the new American president. He released a book called The Paradigm the year after the 2016 election, which cast Trump as Jehu, the biblical king who took control of and restored the Kingdom of Israel, whose territory largely overlapped with parts of present-day Israel and Lebanon. Just as Jehu killed the idol-worshippers who had taken over the kingdom, Trump would “drain the swamp” of Washington and “make America great again.” In this contemporary rendition, Hillary and Bill Clinton play the role of Ahab and Jezebel, the evil rulers who had led the kingdom astray. Jezebel is also seen as wicked in the Jewish tradition, but she is far more prominent as a symbol in evangelical discourse today, representing feminism, sexual promiscuity, and moral decay.

In the 2024 election, Joe Biden’s replacement with Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate challenging Trump allowed the template of Jehu versus Jezebel to get updated and become salient again.

Two weeks before Cahn spoke at the National Faith Summit, an ally of his named Ché Ahn evoked the comparison at another mass religious event. Ahn heads Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, California, as well as a network of thousands of ministries all over the world. He is a leader of a spiritual movement known as New Apostolic Reformation, which aims for Christians to dominate society and government. Major Republican figures such as Mike Pompeo, Sarah Palin, and Josh Hawley have visited Ahn’s church, reflecting the growing influence of Christian nationalism on the Republican Party.

On October 12, Yom Kippur, Ahn appeared at the “Million Women March” event on the National Mall, speaking before a crowd of tens of thousands, with many wearing prayer shawls or blowing shofars—traditionally Jewish symbols highlighting the movement’s overlap with Messianic Judaism.

“Jehu will cast down Jezebel,” Ahn said, and prophesized a victory by Trump over Harris.

The social-media user who brought the recent Jehu comparisons to wider notice through posts on X is Matthew Taylor, a scholar of the Christian right at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, a Baltimore-based interfaith research and advocacy group, dedicated to “[dismantling] religious bias and bigotry.”

“Since Harris became the candidate this summer, we’ve seen the Jehu image really rise to the surface much more,” Taylor said in an interview. “This is the story [Cahn and Ahn] want running through their followers’ heads, their lens for interpreting the election and its aftermath.”

In the grim biblical story, recounted in the book of 2 Kings, as Jehu ascends the throne, he kills Jezebel by ordering her thrown out of a palace window, after which he stomps on her body, which is then eaten by dogs. The new warrior king then goes on a killing spree, slaying the families of Ahab and Jezebel and other Baal-worshipping pagans who had despoiled the kingdom.

“Jehu came to the capital city with an agenda to drain the swamp,” Cahn said in his speech, addressing Trump, who also spoke at the National Faith Summit. “Jehu formed an alliance with the religious conservatives of the land. So, it was your destiny to do the same. Jehu overturned the cult of Baal by which children were sacrificed. So, God chose you to overturn America’s cult of Baal, Roe v. Wade.”

Cahn and Ahn did not respond to my request to their ministries to discuss the theology of their recent statements.

Neither pastor elaborated on the analogy they were drawing, and neither made an explicit call for violence. But Trump has generated widespread concern by speaking of retribution, calling his political opponents “the enemy from within,” and talking about using the military against political enemies if he wins.

Given the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Trump challenged the election results, and his ongoing promotion of election-fraud narratives, independent experts and government agencies are warning of increased political violence. Many Jewish leaders are particularly concerned because Trump recently blamed Jews for his potential defeat.

Taylor says the pastors’ followers would be familiar with the biblical story of Jehu, and he believes that they are priming their audience to accept violence during the election or afterward.

In a post on X, formerly Twitter, that surfaced the Jehu prophecies, Taylor voiced his alarm.

“If Trump wins in this election, the Jehu ‘template’ tells Trump’s Christian supporters: some real-world violence may be needed to purge America of her demons,” Taylor wrote. “If Trump loses this election, particularly to Kamala Harris their ‘Jezebel,’ the Jehu template prescribes vengeance.”

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.