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When Americans went to the polls last week, they wanted cheaper food. Groceries really are more expensive than they used to be, and grocery costs are how many Americans make sense of the state of the economy at large. In September, Pew Research Center reported that three-quarters of Americans were “very concerned” about them. And this month, many of those people voted for Donald Trump, the candidate who touted his distance from the economic policy of the last four years, and who promised repeatedly to lower prices.

But two of Trump’s other big promises—mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and more restrictive trade regulations—would almost certainly raise food prices, economists told me. American-grown staples would get more expensive owing to a domestic labor shortage, and imported foods would too, because they would be subject to double-digit import taxes. This cause-and-effect dynamic “could be my final exam,” Rachel Friedberg, who teaches “Principles of Economics” at Brown University, told me. “It’s just very straightforward principles of economics.”

The main issue is labor. American farming depends on undocumented workers; if the Trump administration were to enact “the largest deportation operation in American history” and deport every undocumented immigrant living in the United States, somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the people who plant our crops and pick our fruit would leave the domestic workforce. Proponents of immigration enforcement typically say these jobs could be taken by documented or American-born workers. But the farm industry is already in a prolonged labor crisis, and undocumented immigrants tend to be willing to work for less money—that’s why employers hire them, even though it’s illegal. Fewer workers means higher wages means higher prices, straight up.

[Read: Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation]

Some farms might be able to get by shorthanded, at least for a little while. Some might embrace technology more quickly, investing in automated systems that could help fill the labor gap. But that would take time, and as David Anderson, a Texas A&M University agricultural economist, told me, “You gotta get the cows milked and fed every day.” America’s agricultural system relies on hands and feet, arms and legs, day in and day out.

If the Trump administration does, in fact, deport millions of people, produce prices would likely increase the most, Bradley Rickard, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, told me in an email, because “labor represents a significant share of total costs.” Prices would probably go up quickest and most dramatically for the crops that are most labor-intensive to harvest: strawberries, mushrooms, asparagus, cherries. So would those for the foods farmed in California, which grows three-quarters of the fruit and nuts, and a third of the vegetables, produced domestically, and is home to about half of the country’s undocumented agricultural workers.

Mass deportations would also drive up prices for dairy and meat, whose industries have also been in a labor shortage, for at least the past half decade. According to a 2022 analysis from the American Immigration Council, which advocates for immigrants and seeks to shape immigration policy, a scarcity of workers led the median wage in the dairy and meat sectors to increase 33.7 percent from 2019 to 2022, and prices to rise between 4.5 and 7 percent. In 2015, Anderson and some colleagues conducted a survey on behalf of the dairy industry and found that eliminating immigrants from the sector would reduce production, put farms out of business, and cause retail milk prices to increase by about 90 percent.

Anderson’s study is 10 years old, and assumed a total loss of all immigrant labor, documented and undocumented. Last week, he told me that he has no reason to believe the dynamic wouldn’t hold to a lesser degree if a smaller amount of the workforce were deported now. “We wouldn’t be able to produce all the stuff that we do today. Less production means less supplies,” he said, “and less supplies means food prices would go up.”

Immigration policy affects food that is grown domestically. But about 15 percent of the American food supply is imported, including about 60 percent of fresh fruit, 80 percent of seafood, 90 percent of avocados, and 99 percent of coffee. Our reliance on, or taste for, imported goods has ticked up steadily over the past few decades, as we have become accustomed to Italian olive oil and raspberries in winter. On the campaign trail, Trump proposed taxing these—and all—imported goods, in an attempt to raise domestic production and to reduce the deficit. If his plan goes through, Chinese imports—which include large amounts of the fish, seafood, garlic, spices, tea, and apple juice we consume—would be subject to 60 to 100 percent tariffs. All other imports would be subject to 10 to 20 percent tariffs. Those taxes would be passed onto consumers, especially in the short term, as domestic production ramps up (if it can ramp up), and especially if undocumented immigrants are simultaneously leaving the workforce. “There’s no safety valve,” Marcus Noland, the executive vice president and director of studies at the nonpartisan think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics, told me. “If you start deporting people, it’s not like you can import the product and make up for it if you have these tariffs.”

[Read: The immigration-wage myth]

We all need food to live, and all food needs to come from somewhere. The process by which it makes it to our plate is complicated, resource-intensive, and subject to the vagaries of policy, weather, disease, and labor supply. The system does not have a large amount of slack built into it. If sticker-shocked milk fans start gravitating toward other drinks, those prices will also go up. If California’s berry industry is squeezed by a labor shortage, and the market for imported berries is squeezed by tariffs, berries will cost more.

And although farms are the biggest employer of undocumented workers, these workers are also a major part of the mechanism that processes, butchers, cooks, and delivers our food, from the sprawling poultry-processing plants of the South to the local fried-chicken place. The restaurant industry—which employs more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants, according to a Center for American Progress analysis—is already struggling to fill jobs, which is driving higher prices; even a small reduction in the workforce would increase operating costs, which will almost definitely result in either restaurants closing or costs being passed onto eaters.

The immigration and tariff policies, in other words, would affect all the food we eat: snacks, school lunches, lattes, pet food, fast food, fancy restaurant dinners. People will not stop eating if food gets more expensive; they will just spend more of their money on it.

Trump’s team proposed deportations and tariffs as a way to fix America’s inflation-addled economy. But voters are unlikely to be comforted by what they see over the next few years. Toward the end of our call, I asked Friedberg if she could see any scenario under which, if the new administration’s policies are enacted, prices don’t go up. “No,” she said, without pausing. “I am extremely confident that food will get more expensive. Buy those frozen vegetables now.”

After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app’s algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia’s actions.) At first, the company’s executives dismissed these concerns—shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was “pretty crazy” to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role—but they soon grew contrite. “Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,” Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did “not contradict” the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives “to stop the spread of misinformation, click-bait and other problematic content on Facebook.” He added: “We’ve learned things since the election, and we take our responsibility to protect the community of people who use Facebook seriously.”

Nowhere was the effort more apparent than in the launch of the company’s “war room” ahead of the 2018 midterms. Here, employees across departments would come together in front of a huge bank of computers to monitor Facebook for misinformation, fake news, threats of violence, and other crises. Numerous reporters were invited in at the time; The Verge, Wired, and The New York Times were among the outlets that ran access-driven stories about the effort. But the war room looked, to some, less like a solution and more like a mollifying stunt—a show put on for the press. And by 2020, with the rise of QAnon conspiracy theories and “Stop the Steal” groups, things did not seem generally better on Facebook.

[Read: What Facebook did to American democracy]

What is happening on Facebook now? On the eve of another chaotic election, journalists have found that highly deceptive political advertisements still run amok there, as do election-fraud conspiracy theories. The Times reported in September that the company, now called Meta, had fewer full-time employees working on election integrity and that Zuckerberg was no longer having weekly meetings with the lieutenants in charge of them. The paper also reported that Meta had replaced the war room with a less sharply defined “election operations center.”

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its plans, the company did not give many specific details. But Corey Chambliss, a Meta spokesperson focused on election preparedness, told me that the war room definitely still exists and that “election operations center” is just another of its names. He proved this with a video clip showing B-roll footage of a few dozen employees working in a conference room on Super Tuesday. The video had been shot in Meta’s Washington, D.C., office, but Chambliss impressed upon me that it could really be anywhere: The war room moves and exists in multiple places. “Wouldn’t want to over-emphasize the physical space as it’s sort of immaterial,” he wrote in an email.

It is clear that Meta wants to keep its name out of this election however much that is possible. It may marshal its considerable resources and massive content-moderation apparatus to enforce its policies against election interference, and it may “break the glass,” as it did in 2021, to take additional action if something as dramatic as January 6 happens again. At the same time, it won’t draw a lot of attention to those efforts or be very specific about them. Recent conversations I’ve had with a former policy lead at the company and academics who have worked with and studied Facebook, as well as Chambliss, made it clear that as a matter of policy, the company has done whatever it can to fly under the radar this election season—including Zuckerberg’s declining to endorse a candidate, as he has in previous presidential elections. When it comes to politics, Meta and Zuckerberg have decided that there is no winning. At this pivotal moment, it is simply doing less.

Meta’s war room may be real, but it is also just a symbol—its meaning has been haggled over for six years now, and its name doesn’t really matter. “People got very obsessed with the naming of this room,” Katie Harbath, a former public-policy director at Facebook who left the company in March 2021, told me. She disagreed with the idea that the room was ever a publicity stunt. “I spent a lot of time in that very smelly, windowless room,” she said. I wondered whether the war room—ambiguous in terms of both its accomplishments and its very existence—was the perfect way to understand the company’s approach to election chaos. I posed to Harbath that the conversation around the war room was really about the anxiety of not knowing what, precisely, Meta is doing behind closed doors to meet the challenges of the moment.

She agreed that part of the reason the room was created was to help people imagine content moderation. Its primary purpose was practical and logistical, she said, but it was “a way to give a visual representation of what the work looks like too.” That’s why, this year, the situation is so muddy. Meta doesn’t want you to think there is no war room, but it isn’t drawing attention to the war room. There was no press junket; there were no tours. There is no longer even a visual of the war room as a specific room in one place.

This is emblematic of Meta’s in-between approach this year. Meta has explicit rules against election misinformation on its platforms; these include a policy against content that attempts to deceive people about where and how to vote. The rules do not, as written, include false claims about election results (although such claims are prohibited in paid ads). Posts about the Big Lie—the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen—were initially moderated with fact-checking labels, but these were scaled back dramatically before the 2022 midterms, purportedly because users disliked them. The company also made a significant policy update this year to clarify that it would require labels on AI-generated content (a change made after its Oversight Board criticized its previous manipulated-media policy as “incoherent”). But tons of unlabeled generative-AI slop still flows without consequence on Facebook.

[Read: “History will not judge us kindly”]

In recent years, Meta has also attempted to de-prioritize political content of all kinds in its various feeds. “As we’ve said for years, people have told us they want to see less politics overall while still being able to engage with political content on our platforms if they want,” Chambliss told me. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing.” When I emailed to ask questions about the company’s election plans, Chambliss initially responded by linking me to a short blog post that Meta put out 11 months ago, and attaching a broadly circulated fact sheet, which included such vague figures as “$20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016.” This information is next-to-impossible for a member of the public to make sense of—how is anyone supposed to know what $20 billion can buy?

In some respects, Meta’s reticence is just part of a broader cultural shift. Content moderation has become politically charged in recent years. Many high-profile misinformation and disinformation research projects born in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection have shut down or shrunk. (When the Stanford Internet Observatory, an organization that published regular reports on election integrity and misinformation, shut down, right-wing bloggers celebrated the end of its “reign of censorship.”) The Biden administration experimented in 2022 with creating a Disinformation Governance Board, but quickly abandoned the plan after it drew a firestorm from the right—whose pundits and influencers portrayed the proposal as one for a totalitarian “Ministry of Truth.” The academic who had been tasked with leading it was targeted so intensely that she resigned.

“Meta has definitely been quieter,” Harbath said. “They’re not sticking their heads out there with public announcements.” This is partly because Zuckerberg has become personally exasperated with politics, she speculated. She added that it is also the result of the response the company got in 2020—accusations from Democrats of doing too little, accusations from Republicans of doing far too much. The far right was, for a while, fixated on the idea that Zuckerberg had personally rigged the presidential election in favor of Joe Biden and that he frequently bowed to Orwellian pressure from the Biden administration afterward. In recent months, Zuckerberg has been oddly conciliatory about this position; in August, he wrote what amounted to an apology letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, saying that Meta had overdone it with its efforts to curtail COVID-19 misinformation and that it had erred by intervening to minimize the spread of the salacious news story about Hunter Biden and his misplaced laptop.  

Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used to donate large sums of money to nonpartisan election infrastructure through their philanthropic foundation. They haven’t done so this election cycle, seeking to avoid a repeat of the controversy ginned up by Republicans the last time. This had not been enough to satisfy Trump, though, and he recently threatened to put Zuckerberg in prison for the rest of his life if he makes any political missteps—which may, of course, be one of the factors Zuckerberg is considering in choosing to stay silent.

Other circumstances have changed dramatically since 2020, too. Just before that election, the sitting president was pushing conspiracy theories about the election, about various groups of his own constituents, and about a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. He was still using Facebook, as were the adherents of QAnon, the violent conspiracy theory that positioned him as a redeeming godlike figure. After the 2020 election, Meta said publicly that Facebook would no longer recommend political or civic groups for users to join—clearly in response to the criticism that the site’s own recommendations guided people into “Stop the Steal” groups. And though Facebook banned Trump himself for using the platform to incite violence on January 6, the platform reinstated his account once it became clear that he would again be running for president

This election won’t be like the previous one. QAnon simply isn’t as present in the general culture, in part because of actions that Meta and other platforms took in 2020 and 2021. More will happen on other platforms this year, in more private spaces, such as Telegram groups. And this year’s “Stop the Steal” movement will likely need less help from Facebook to build momentum: YouTube and Trump’s own social platform, Truth Social, are highly effective for this purpose. Election denial has also been galvanized from the top by right-wing influencers and media personalities including Elon Musk, who has turned X into the perfect platform for spreading conspiracy theories about voter fraud. He pushes them himself all the time.

In many ways, understanding Facebook’s relevance is harder than ever. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center found that 33 percent of U.S. adults say they “regularly” get news from the platform. But Meta has limited access to data for both journalists and academics in the past two years. After the 2020 election, the company partnered with academics for a huge research project to sort out what happened and to examine Facebook’s broader role in American politics. It was cited when Zuckerberg was pressed to answer for Facebook’s role in the organization of the “Stop the Steal” movement and January 6: “We believe that independent researchers and our democratically elected officials are best positioned to complete an objective review of these events,” he said at the time. That project is coming to an end, some of the researchers involved told me, and Chabliss confirmed.

The first big release of research papers produced through the partnership, which gave researchers an unprecedented degree of access to platform data, came last summer. Still more papers will continue to be published as they pass peer review and are accepted to scientific journals—one paper in its final stages will deal with the diffusion of misinformation—but all of these studies were conducted using data from 2020 and 2021. No new data have or will be provided to these researchers.

When I asked Chambliss about the end of the partnership, he emphasized that no other platform had bothered to do as robust of a research project. However, he wouldn’t say exactly why it was coming to an end. “It’s a little frustrating that such a massive and unprecedented undertaking that literally no other platform has done is put to us as a question of ‘why not repeat this?’ vs asking peer companies why they haven't come close to making similar commitments for past or current elections,” he wrote in an email.

The company also shut down the data-analysis tool CrowdTangle—used widely by researchers and by journalists—earlier this year. It touts new tools that have been made available to researchers, but academics scoff at the claim that they approximate anything like real access to live and robust information. Without Meta’s cooperation, it becomes much harder for academics to effectively monitor what happens on its platforms.

I recently spoke with Kathleen Carley, a professor at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science, about research she conducted from 2020 to 2022 on the rise of “pink slime,” a type of mass-produced misinformation designed to look like the product of local newspapers and to be shared on social media. Repeating that type of study for the 2024 election would cost half a million dollars, she estimated, because researchers now have to pay if they want broad data access. From her observations and the more targeted, “surgical” data pulls that her team has been able to do this year, pink-slime sites are far more concentrated in swing states than they had been previously, while conspiracy theories were spreading just as easily as ever. But these are observations; they’re not a real monitoring effort, which would be too costly.

“Monitoring implies that we’re doing consistent data crawls and have wide-open access to data,” she told me, “which we do not.” This time around, nobody will.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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