New York authorities say Peanut the Squirrel bit a person while it was being confiscated this week.

Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised around violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

[David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message]

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.

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.”

Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, two of the nation’s prominent scholars and commentators on matters of democracy, freedom, and the American idea, are joining The Atlantic as contributing writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Both writers join The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they served as opinion columnists.

“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” Goldberg said.

Allen, who serves as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is a political philosopher and scholar of public policy. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published numerous books on justice and citizenship, including 2023’s Justice by Means of Democracy, as well as Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and the acclaimed memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. Allen has contributed several articles to The Atlantic, the most recent about the history of a forgotten Black Founding Father.

Kagan is a senior fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling books, most recently Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again. He is also the author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941; The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World; and Of Paradise and Power. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy-planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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.