Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the bear-fondling, gravel-voiced Camelot scion, is President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, where presumably he will “go wild on health,” to quote Trump. His nomination has raised concerns among public-health experts because many of Kennedy’s views on health are, well, wild.

To be sure, among Kennedy’s battier ideas are a few reasonable ones, such as reducing obesity and cracking down on direct-to-consumer drug commercials and conflicts of interest among researchers. But these are eclipsed by some troubling ones, such as the ideas that common cooking oils are poisonous, that fluoride doesn’t belong in tap water, and that childhood vaccines are questionable.

What if Kennedy did, in fact, go wild on health, get his way, and remake America in his own image? If his worst ideas come to pass, experts tell me, heart attacks might increase, dental infections might spike, and children might needlessly die of completely preventable diseases.

[Read: RFK Jr. collects his reward]

Even if he is confirmed as health secretary, Kennedy’s influence on some of these domains might be limited. Most public-health measures—including water fluoridation and vaccines—are a matter for states and localities, not the federal government. (This is why different states had such different COVID-19 responses.) But even so, a Secretary Kennedy would have a prominent perch from which to espouse his ideas, and his position would give him a veneer of credibility that he has not earned. Right-leaning states and judges might listen, and adapt local policies to suit his worldview. At the very least, parents who support Trump and Kennedy might take the administration’s views into account when making decisions for their families.

Let’s begin with seed oils, which keep popping up in Kennedy’s speeches and media clips. (He even mentioned them while suspending his presidential bid.) Kennedy has called seed oils, which include common cooking oils such as canola oil and sunflower oil, “one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods,” and says Americans are being “unknowingly poisoned” by them.

Kennedy believes that seed oils cause “body-wide inflammation” and disease. But this isn’t true, Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford, told me. In fact, replacing foods high in saturated fat, such as butter, with those high in unsaturated fat, such as canola oil, has been proven again and again to lower cholesterol levels and reduce the risk of heart disease. To the extent that seed oils are bad, Gardner said, it’s because they often show up in highly processed junk and fast food.

And Kennedy’s solution to this supposed health crisis—to replace seed oils with beef tallow—is troubling. (Several of his seed-oil clips end with a promo of red Kennedy swag that reads MAKE FRYING OIL TALLOW AGAIN.) Whatever you do with seed oil, “don’t replace it with beef tallow,” Gardner said. “That’s friggin’ nuts.” Replacing all the oil you eat with beef fat can cause cholesterol to pile into plaques in your arteries, impeding the flow of blood. “That’s how you get a heart attack,” Gardner said.

Kennedy has also said he wants to remove fluoride from tap water, claiming that the compound is an “industrial waste associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease.”

There is some risk associated with excessive fluoride intake: Consuming fluoride above a level of 1.5 milligrams a liter—about twice the level that’s in most fluoridated tap water—has been linked to lowered IQ in children. Fluoridated water can also cause light stains on teeth, which affect about 12 percent of people in the United States.

But researchers say these risks are generally worth it because the consequences of removing fluoride from the water are much worse. Fluoride helps strengthen tooth enamel, and it also fights off the acid that attacks our teeth any time we eat carbohydrates. If the teeth lose this battle, decay can set in—and if the decay goes untreated, it can cause excruciating pain and, in extreme cases, pus-filled abscesses. “There will certainly be an increase in dental decay if fluoride is removed from the drinking water,” Gary Slade, a dentistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Slade found in a study that fluoride in drinking water reduces decay by 30 percent in baby teeth and 12 percent in permanent teeth.

Some cities and countries have removed fluoride from the water, and kids’ dental health suffered as a result. After Israel ceased water fluoridation in 2014, dental treatments in a clinic in Tel Aviv increased twofold across all ages. In Canada, after Calgary ceased water fluoridation in 2011, second graders there experienced more cavities than those in Edmonton, where water was still fluoridated. After Juneau, Alaska, ceased water fluoridation in 2007, children younger than 6 underwent more cavity-related dental procedures—at a cost of about $300 more a year per child. Some cities have even reintroduced fluoride into the water supply after noticing an uptick in tooth decay among children.

Kennedy is perhaps most infamous for his skepticism of vaccines, and this is also likely the issue where his views are most consequential and worrisome. Although Kennedy sometimes shies away from calling himself anti-vaccine, he is the founder of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense and once wrote a (now-retracted) magazine story on the (false) link between vaccines and autism. He’s called vaccines “a holocaust” and has claimed that “there’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” A co-chair of the Trump-Vance transition team has said that Kennedy would be given access to federal health data in order to assess the safety of vaccines.

Though school vaccine requirements are determined by states, a prominent national-health figure casting doubt on vaccines’ safety can influence both state policy and individual parents’ decisions to vaccinate. If vaccination rates do drop, among the diseases that health experts worry will return is measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases.

A person infected with measles is most contagious right before they develop symptoms. They can infect others simply by sharing their air space; tiny droplets infected with measles can hang in the air for two hours “like a ghost,” Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me.

Kids with measles are sick and miserable. They’re photophobic—afraid of the light—and may struggle to breathe. Before the measles vaccine came along in 1963, 48,000 people were hospitalized with measles each year in America, many with pneumonia or inflammation of the brain. Five hundred of them died each year. When Samoa suffered a measles outbreak in 2019, 83 people died, out of a population of just 200,000.

Measles can also weaken the immune system, Matthew Ferrari, a biology professor at Penn State, told me. For two to three years after contracting measles, you’re likely to be hit harder by flu and other viruses. In rare cases, measles can cause a chronic form of brain inflammation that leads to a gradual loss of mental faculties and motor skills, and eventually, death.

[John Hendrickson: The first MAGA Democrat]

Measles is such a menace, in fact, that giving people “a choice” about whether to vaccinate their kids, as Kennedy often suggests, is not sufficient. People who have received two doses of the MMR vaccine are 97 percent protected against measles. But about 9 million people, including kids who are undergoing chemotherapy or who are on some kinds of immunosuppressants, can’t get vaccinated. These individuals rely on herd immunity from other vaccinated people, and when more than 5 percent of people choose not to be vaccinated, herd immunity suffers.

“Is it your right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection? No, it’s not,” Offit said. “You are part of this society, and you have to recognize that what you do affects other people.” Offit told me he’s already talked with pediatricians who say parents are hesitant to get their children vaccinated because of what they’ve heard Kennedy say.

Of course, there is a way to prevent Kennedy from having this much influence over public health: The Senate could reject his nomination. But that would require Republicans to stand up to Trump, which is a wild idea in itself.

The New York Times is once again poking readers’ eyes with its needle. A little digital gauge, like the one that might indicate that your boiler or nuclear-power plant is about to explode, “estimates the outcome of the race in real time based on polling data,” as the Times puts it. As we write this, the needle is piercing the red “Likely” side of the gauge, indicating that the decision is “Likely Trump.” To validate this qualitative assessment, the needle also clarifies, again in the moment we’re writing this, that Donald Trump has an 88 percent chance of victory. That’s good to know, or bad, depending on your preferences.

The Times is not alone in offering minute-to-minute assessments, of course. On television, news anchors talk endlessly about anything, or nothing, reporting live from Nevada or North Carolina. At CNN.com, the network’s familiar election map offers live results too, in an interface now so confusing that one of us couldn’t figure out how to back out of Georgia’s results after zooming in. The whole affair is meant to provide updates on a result entirely out of our control. At some point, probably not tonight and maybe not tomorrow, we will know who won the presidential race—and all of the other federal and state contests and ballot initiatives and the like too.

There is no good way to consume Election Night information anymore, if there ever was. Cable news is the loud, exhausting, touch-screen-assisted option for those who’re looking for the dopamine of an inoffensive Key-Race Alert. Social media is the best option if you’d like all of that, but updated each second, with commentary from Nazis and people who have placed big crypto bets on the outcome. Wrangling the data coming out of more than 100,000 precincts in fits and starts, across a country that spans six time zones and upwards of 161 million registered voters, is a glorious feat. The process is not, however, conducive to the human need to actually know things. In a way, the needle is the ChatGPT aggregation of the output of toxic sludge and useful information coming out of all of it. It is the supposed signal in the noise. But it may just be noise itself … until it isn’t.

For some time now, we’ve been chuckling at an ongoing joke on X about “building dashboards to give executives deeper insight into critical business functions.” (At least, we think they are jokes.) What would you do if a giant kaiju attacked the city? Make sure the dashboards are providing actionable insights into critical business functions. What do you do in your 30s? Get married, start companies, or … build dashboards to provide actionable insights. You get the picture.

The jokes are funny because they implicate a terrible everyday-life business thing called “business-intelligence dashboards.” Big data, data science, data-driven decision making, and a host of related biz buzz holds that you, me, him, them, everyone should collect as much data as possible about anything whatsoever, and then use those data to make decisions. But that’s hard, so it should be made easy. Thus, the dashboards. As if a car’s speedometer but scaled up to any level of complexity, a dashboard provides easy, quick, at-a-glance “insights” into the endless silos of data, making them “actionable.” This is a contradiction—thus the jokes.

So it is with the Times forecast needle (and the CNN map, and all the rest). Elections are ever more uncertain because they are always so close; because polling is fraught or broken; because disinformation, confusion, suppression, or God knows what else has made it impossible to have any sense of how these contests might turn out beforehand. The promise of synthesizing all of that uncertainty moments after a state’s polls close, and transforming it into knowledge, is too tempting to ignore. So you tune in to the news. You refresh the needle.

But what you learn is nothing other than how to feel good or bad in the moment. That the needle has clearly caused many extremely online coastal elites to have some gentle form of PTSD is clearly a feature, not a bug. It is a reminder of the needle’s power or, perhaps more accurately, its ability to move in such a way that it appears to usher in its own reality (when, really, it’s just reflecting changes in a spreadsheet of information). The needle is manipulative.

Worst of all, nothing about it is “actionable,” as the business-insights-dashboard fanatics would say. Dashboards promise a modicum of control. But what are you going to do, now that the polls are closed and you are in your pajamas? Cheer, or bite your nails, or attempt to lure your spouse away from the television or the needle, or eat cake or drink liquor or stare into space or high-five your buds or clean up after you ferret. There is nothing you can do. It’s out of your hands, and no amount of data, polling, chief analysis, or anything else can change that. You know this, and yet you still stare.

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.”

Strange things can happen in the desert. On Wednesday morning in San Tan Valley, Arizona, I watched Kari Lake, the Republican Senate candidate, come within a few feet of violating a fundamental election law.

Lake’s campaign bus had just rolled up to an early-voting site roughly an hour southeast of Phoenix. Along the path leading to the precinct’s entrance was a yellow sign that read 75 FOOT LIMIT. The post warned that electioneering beyond that threshold would constitute a Class 2 misdemeanor. Lake, as is her proclivity, waltzed right up to the line with a knowing smile.

I stood nearby, watching Lake glad-hand and pose for selfies with voters, who seemed surprised to see her. I heard her ask a man if he’d voted for Donald Trump. Amid the campaigning, she found time to attack the media. When I told her I was reporting for The Atlantic, she replied, “Oh, is that that really, really, really biased outlet?” (Three reallys.) Lake appeared to be performing for the cameras, but at that stop, there were none, save for those of her own campaign. It was just me and three other journalists with notebooks. No matter: This was, after all, Kari Lake. Bombast is her brand.

Lake may be the most MAGA-fied downballot candidate in the country. (The phrase MAKE ARIZONA GRAND AGAIN is splayed across the side of her bus next to a giant image of her head.) A former local-TV news anchor, Lake first gained national attention by promoting Trump’s lies and conspiracy theories about Arizona’s 2020 election results. When she ran for Arizona governor in 2022, she refused to accept her defeat. Most candidates make their name on a particular issue; election denialism, more than anything, has come to define Lake.

Once seen as Trump’s potential 2024 running mate, Lake is now battling the Democrat Ruben Gallego for the Arizona Senate seat soon to be vacated by Kyrsten Sinema. The RealClearPolitics polling average suggests that she could be on the verge of another loss. Trump, meanwhile, appears poised to retake the state at the top of the ticket. Although no outcome is guaranteed, on Tuesday, in a border state plagued by division and extremism, both a Democrat and a Republican might emerge victorious.

Such a result would come as a shock to many. It might particularly rankle conspiracists and those who have spent years casting doubt on the validity of America’s electoral systems. People, in other words, such as Kari Lake.

[Read: In Kari Lake, Trumpism has found its leading lady]

That morning, she took questions from the three other reporters, but looked at me and said, “I’m not talking to your outlet.” So I instead approached one of her surrogates, Richard Grenell, who served as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and later as the acting director of national intelligence. Grenell, too, had antagonized The Atlantic alongside Lake just minutes before. (Just as Trump did in a recent rally, Grenell claimed without evidence that our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had “made up a lot of stuff.”) But now, in a quieter setting off to the side of the scene, he was willing to speak with me.

I informed Grenell that I had planned to ask Lake a straightforward question: Would she commit to accepting next week’s election results? He scoffed at the premise.

“It’s a dumb question to be like, ‘Do you accept the results of an election?’” Grenell told me. He said that “of course” she would accept the outcome if it were a free and fair election. “Let me ask you this question,” he said. “Do you think there’s no fraud in the election? Zero fraud?”

Lake saw me speaking with Grenell, and as she was heading back to her bus, she and I made eye contact. The crowd was smaller now, and Lake was chatting in a slightly dialed-down register. Professional wrestlers have a term to describe the performative antagonization of an opponent: kayfabe. Based on what I had seen of Lake prior to that moment, though, I didn’t think she ever snapped out of her combative persona when dealing with the media. As we briefly spoke one-on-one, Lake wasn’t exactly friendly, but she was at least willing to let me finish a sentence. I asked her if she’d accept the election results.

“A legally run election? Yes, absolutely,” she said. “One hundred percent.”

But how do you define that?

Suddenly her switch flipped. With a bright smile and sarcasm in her voice, Lake said, “I will accept the results of the election, absolutely!” Then she swiftly got back on the bus.

[George Packer: What will become of American civilization?]

Later that afternoon, I drove to a strip mall in Maryvale, a predominantly Latino neighborhood in metro Phoenix, to meet Gallego, Lake’s challenger. Between a barber shop and a check-cashing place, Arizona Democrats had set up a bustling field office. Inside the room, papel picado banners hung from the drop ceiling, the walls were plastered with posters—Latinos Con Harriz Walz, Democratas Protegen El Aborto—and, on the far side of the room, someone had handwritten a slew of motivational quotes (“If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don’t, then you are wasting your time on Earth.” — Roberto Clemente). When I turned around, I spotted Gallego chatting with that day’s volunteers. He was dressed casually in a short-sleeve button-down and jeans, and he wasn’t surrounded by a large entourage, as Lake had been. He and I found a quiet corner, and I asked him the same question I had asked Lake: Would he commit to accepting the election results? He didn’t hesitate.

“I trust the Arizona election system. I trust the Republicans and Democrats that have been running the state, and I will trust the results of the election, win or lose,” Gallego said.

Right now, the 44-year-old is in a rare position: He knows he stands a chance of winning over Lake-wary Republicans. He’s a Democrat, but, as a former Marine who has spoken out on culture-war issues, such as against the use of Latinx, he may appeal to some centrists and independents as well. Above all, he’s positioned to woo some of the most sought-after persuadable voters in the region: Latinos. He sometimes tells a story about how he grew up sleeping on the floor and didn’t have a bed until he got to college. On the stump, he often delivers remarks in both Spanish and English.

What Gallego is not doing is running a straight Democratic-party-line campaign. When I asked him how he felt about Joe Biden’s comments that Trump supporters are “garbage,” he didn’t rush to unequivocally defend the president. “No matter what, we shouldn’t be castigating people for how they vote,” he said. I also asked him if he anticipated civil unrest next week, given the chaos that had unfolded in Arizona in previous elections. “I really have faith in the voters of Arizona—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—that they’re going to go vote, and they’re going to keep it civil,” Gallego said. “I hope that the politicians would actually keep it civil and not try to bring election denialism into it, like Kari Lake has. That’s where the danger has happened.”

Gallego had stopped by that office to rev up volunteers for a canvassing operation. Joining him was Senator Mark Kelly and his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords. That afternoon, I asked Kelly what sort of challenges he and his fellow Arizona Democrats were anticipating after Election Day, and whether he believed that Lake (and Trump, for that matter) would accept the election’s outcome. “They should,” Kelly said cautiously. “I mean, I don’t expect their behavior to be much different than it was in the 2020 and 2022 election, though. I mean, I have no reason to expect that. But you know, you can always dream that maybe they’ve learned a lesson,” he said. “Kari Lake certainly should have learned her lesson.”