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.

If this wasn’t the Podcast Election, it was certainly a podcast-y election. Millions of people watched the results come in on a handful of livestreams hosted by popular podcasters, including one hosted by Tucker Carlson from Mar-a-Lago, on which Donald Trump’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump appeared as guests.

Trump also enjoyed a late-breaking endorsement from Joe Rogan, host of the world’s most popular podcast. For the past several months, much was made about the Trump campaign’s podcast strategy, reportedly masterminded by Trump’s son Barron, which included interviews with the tech-world whisperers Lex Fridman and the All-In Podcast. Trump took advantage of every opportunity to be interviewed at length and in casual conversation for huge audiences of young men; Harris did not, and immediately after her loss, this stood out to many people as a big problem. As New York Times editor Willy Staley put it in a wry (or grim) post on X, there is now palpable “soul-searching among Democrats about the podcast situation.”

I spent Election Night watching a livestream hosted by The Free Press, the media company founded by the former New York Times writer Bari Weiss. The guest list was a strange assemblage of iconoclasts and establishment castoffs, and it was obvious from the comments that many viewers were just there to watch It Girls Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan, hosts of the cultish podcast Red Scare, smirk and sip teensy glasses of champagne while barely saying anything. (One of Nekrasova’s longer sentences of the night was “He’s winning like crazy, right?”)

[Read: Bad news]

A little after 8 p.m., the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang called in from a parking lot in Philadelphia. “I gotta say, the vibe’s kind of Trumpy,” he told Weiss. He had voted for Kamala Harris, he told her, though he hadn’t been excited about it. He offered his critique of the campaign run by Harris and Tim Walz, which he felt was overly risk-averse and uncharismatic. Specifically, he called out the missed opportunity to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience, as both Trump and J. D. Vance had done. (Harris purportedly could have appeared on the show if she followed the host’s terms; in late October, Rogan wrote on X that, contrary to the campaign’s desires, he would not accept a one-hour time limit on the interview and that he wanted to record in his studio in Austin.) “It pisses me off,” Yang said.

“That was a gimme,” he went on. “The Rogan interview would have been almost entirely upside. It’s low-propensity male voters, people that are not inclined to vote for you, so you have nothing to lose.” On Carlson’s Election Night livestream, Elon Musk made a similar argument, alluding to the parasocial, possibly persuasive power of podcasts: “To a reasonable-minded, smart person who’s not hardcore one way or the other, they just listen to someone talk for a few hours, and that’s how they decide whether you’re a good person, whether they like you.”

As I watched, I felt annoyed. Rogan’s anti-vaccine rhetoric and anti-trans shtick—among many other bizarre statements, such as his claim that intelligence agencies provoked January 6—should make him radioactive for any politician, let alone a Democrat in 2024. And anyway, “more podcasts” sounds like a pretty desperate response to such a monumental loss. But these are stupid times.

According to exit polls, Harris did do poorly with young men. Yang was clearly correct that she had nothing to lose. As my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote on Thursday, Harris may have avoided Rogan’s three-plus-hour, formless interview format for fear of messing up, “but given who ended up winning the election, this … seems like an antiquated concern.” Was this the difference? Definitely not. But it was a difference. Next time, I would guess, Rogan and his ilk will not be snubbed; the oddball internet is mainstream enough to seriously court.

Obviously, political campaigns always prioritize making their candidates appear accessible, relatable, authentic, and so on. For a useful historical parallel, I looked to 1976—another election in which a key issue was inflation, a key concern was turning out disaffected young voters and restoring faith in American institutions, and a key problem with the Democratic presidential campaign was that many people said they had no idea what it was about.

Jimmy Carter, after seeing what an interview in Playboy had done for California Governor Jerry Brown’s polling numbers during the primaries, agreed to sit for his own. The interviewer, Robert Scheer, wrote in the introduction: “For me, the purpose of the questioning was not to get people to vote for or against the man but to push Carter on some of the vagueness he’s wrapped himself in.” But in September 1976, when the magazine published the 12,000-word Q&A, it was regarded almost immediately as a disaster. Carter infuriated Christians and gave satirists plenty to lampoon with his description of feeling “lust” and “adultery” in his heart at times. (Many also read parts of the interview as obliquely referring to his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, as a liar.)

Scheer later said that the idea was to use the length and intimacy of the interview to answer the questions of young voters who “wondered if he was this Southern square.” He also thought that the interview had done exactly what the campaign wanted it to, even if it had made them nervous in the process.

Voter turnout in 1976 was abysmal, as expected in the aftermath of Watergate. But, although the interview was regarded by the national media as a major gaffe, apparently many voters didn’t think about it that way. Some were asked about it in polling conducted the same week it was published—of 1,168 respondents, 289 said they hadn’t heard about the interview, while 790 said they had but it hadn’t changed their minds. Carter did lose some small number of voters, at least in the moment—28 respondents said that the interview had caused them to change their vote from Carter to Gerald Ford, while only four said it had caused them to change their vote from Ford to Carter.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

In the end, Carter won with a narrow margin in the popular vote and outperformed Ford with voters ages 22 to 44, while falling short with voters 45 or older as well as with those 18 to 21. Voters recorded their feelings about the Playboy interview again in exit polls. They were asked whether there was anything they disliked about Carter and given eight choices of response, “I didn’t like his Playboy interview" among them. Again, the respondents said that they cared little about it. (They cared more that he was too pro-union.)

If you read all the critiques of the Harris campaign being written right now, you could come to the conclusion that she was both too online and not online enough. She misunderstood her youth support by looking too much at the wrong parts of TikTok; she went on Call Her Daddy, a massively popular podcast that began as part of the Barstool Sports extended universe but was, I guess, the wrong part. She won the endorsement of the two most popular musicians in the world, whose fans wield a ton of online “power,” however you define it. The default political and cultural stance on the Girl Internet is liberal to leftist and was pro-Harris, so maybe she spent too much time there and not enough in unfriendly corners.

There’s a more compelling case this time around that online misogyny had something to do with the results than there was after Trump’s first victory, in 2016, when reporters were so quick to explain how young men were radicalized in spaces like 4chan—a website that was always fairly niche, even if it did influence broader internet culture in certain ways. Today, discontented men are among the most popular influencers on major platforms.

The next Democratic candidate will surely sit for Rogan wherever he asks them to sit. They won’t have a choice. They’ll have to take the risk and act like they have nothing to lose—right now, that’s certainly the truth.

In September 2020, I took my kids apple picking at a small, quiet orchard in Massachusetts called Windy Hill Farm. It was our first weekend away from home since the pandemic had started. The trees dripped with so much fruit, they looked like they were wearing jeweled capes. My son was 10 and my daughter 13, and as they ran and played and picked, the fears I’d been carrying about the virus, the changing world, and the terrible news fell away. At home that night, my daughter made apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast.

Four years later, as her college-application deadlines loom, time feels like a gale. Our apple-picking tradition seemed like something we couldn’t miss—but choosing an orchard near our home, outside Philadelphia, was more complicated than we anticipated. One farm we used to love now offers a “Premium Package” admission fee of $31.99 per person, which includes a one-quarter peck picking bag plus a corn maze, a hayride, and goat food. (The apple cannon, which shoots apples at targets, costs extra.) Another farm nearby doesn’t charge an admission fee—hayrides, mini golf, face painting, and their apple cannons are à la carte—but even if we skip those extras, it’s usually so crowded that parking is akin to a death duel.

Farms like these, offering what has become known as “agritainment,” have transformed apple picking from a simple activity into one that can resemble visiting a theme park. Some people might dismiss this sort of spectacle (or apple picking of any kind) as trivial. “Cosplay outdoorsiness with us!” the Saturday Night Live cast member Aidy Bryant says in a 2019 sketch parodying the harvest experience. But going to a farm each autumn—even if it’s not the most tranquil orchard—can offer more than it may seem to on the surface: a ritual, an encounter with nature, and a connection to history.

The apple is closely woven into American culture. Apple is the first word many schoolchildren associate with the letter A. It is the main ingredient in our quintessential pie, the key to keeping the doctor away (according to one aphorism), and, of course, our most popular phone brand. In a way that many Americans may not realize, apples are also “part of the fabric of our history,” Mark Richardson, who works at the New England Botanic Garden, in Massachusetts, and who spearheaded the restoration of its historic apple orchard, told me. In the 17th century, for example, alcoholic apple cider was an incredibly popular drink in America. Children even drank a diluted version, which was often considered to be safer than water.

[Read: Wild apples]

Today, farms across America, apple orchards included, are under threat. At the country’s founding, farming was the most common way to make a living. But over roughly the past hundred years, the number of farms in the country has dropped significantly. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms; in 2023, it had 1.89 million. The reasons for the decline are multifaceted. Many farmers left the profession to move to cities, and some of those in younger generations chose not to take over family farms. Policy changes and financial hurdles have pushed others out.

Running a farm can be expensive, hard work. The costs of production and labor can be high. For small farms, which the USDA defines as those that make less than $350,000 in revenue each year, it’s hard to compete with larger farms and international operations. And for any farmer, there’s no guarantee you’ll have a viable crop to sell at the end of a season. Elizabeth Ryan, an apple farmer and owner of Breezy Hill Orchard, in New York’s Hudson Valley, told me that her farm lost nearly $1 million last year because of a May frost. Climate change is making apple growing harder. Fire blight, which is caused by a bacterial pathogen that is active in warmer temperatures, can decimate orchards, Richardson told me. “I don’t think there’s any better example of the impact of climate change on an agricultural crop,” he said. As temperatures continue rising, fire blight may become even more prevalent.

In this uncertain economic landscape, many small farmers, seeking new forms of revenue, have opted to turn their farms into full-fledged recreational experiences, like those I saw when I was searching for a farm to visit. This kind of agritainment has “literally saved farms,” Ryan told me, though she said her orchard largely sticks to the basics. Andre Tougas, a second-generation farmer who owns Tougas Family Farm, in Northborough, Massachusetts, told me his farm primarily focuses on the picking experience, but has also expanded its offerings to draw in visitors beyond the short window of apple season. It provides wagon rides under the apple blossoms in spring, and it grows strawberries and other fruits that visitors can pick from spring through fall. After the picking window has ended, the farm also continues selling its own apples, which tend to be special varieties you can’t find in most grocery stores—Rosalees, Ambrosias, Ludacrisps. The past two years, one of the farm’s busiest days was in December, Tougas said, weeks after the official end of apple season, right before it closed for the winter.

Before I spoke with Ryan and Tougas, I had spent only about one day a year on a farm. I had understood so little about a farmer’s life and struggles, and nothing about the lengths to which farms had to go to survive. Now I feel lucky to be able to visit any farm at all—even those with mini golf and apple cannons. The activities that once seemed unnecessary and carnivalesque now seem more vital. And even at the farms with all the bells and whistles, you can still create a tradition of escaping into nature, and finding a quiet spot to linger in the orchard.

I’ve always gone in autumn, when time passes in a last burst of full color—leaves morphing into bright shades, fruit swelling, plants going dormant. Ryan told me that every fall her farm has visitors who “come when they get engaged, and they come back when they’re pregnant, and they come back when they have a little kid … We feel very connected to people.” These connections—to other humans, to the natural world—are especially valuable considering we spend much of our lives in a “digital landscape,” Timothy Erdmann, a horticulturist at Chanticleer Garden, a public garden in Pennsylvania where I sometimes teach writing classes, told me. When you buy admission to an orchard, he said, “you’re buying a right to forget what you heard on the radio driving to the farm.”

I go with my kids because I love the time outside as a family, away from our screens, and because it feels as if we’re creating memories my children will hold on to for a long time. “Memory is wildly complicated,” Lisa Damour, a psychologist and an author whose books and podcast on raising teens helped guide me through the pandemic, told me. But whether or not my kids form lasting memories of the apple orchard, they’re likely to appreciate the trip, Damour said, because “what kids really want is our agendaless presence, above all”—to know that their parents can let go of the pressures of modern life and simply “delight in them.” When she said that, I thought of how rarely any advice I’d read on parenting teenagers mentioned delight. And it made me think of how my mother raised me.

The fall I was 18 was the last one I had with my mom. She got sick very suddenly that December, and a few weeks later was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her liver. She died nine days after the diagnosis. Now, more than 30 years after her death, I barely remember picking apples together. But I can picture the mason jars of cinnamon applesauce she made afterward and her apple crisp, which we ate for dessert and breakfast. And I remember her delight for the world, and for me.

This year, my kids and I ended up going to the farm nearby with the terrifyingly crowded parking lot. We wandered past mountains of pumpkins and gourds and laughed at their names: Lunch Lady, Pink Porcelain Doll, Heap of Happy Harvest. We rode through the orchards on a hayride and splurged on a “Harvest Float,” a cider slushie swirled with vanilla ice cream and topped with a cider doughnut, like a hat. It was outrageously delicious. We also walked among the trees, and when we did, my teenage son and daughter both held my hands. It confirmed for me the truth of something Ryan had said when we spoke: When people go apple picking, “I don’t think it’s really about getting the apples.”

Donald Trump’s decisive victory may proclaim an unpredictable new era for American government and society, but it also reaffirmed an enduring political truth: It is virtually impossible for the incumbent president’s party to hold the White House when Americans are discontented with that president’s performance.

Americans provided Trump with a sweeping victory after a campaign in which he had darkly promised “retribution” against a long list of enemies and offered an agenda centered on mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Trump seems within reach of winning the popular vote, becoming the first Republican to do so since 2004. Republicans, exulting in winning at least three Senate seats as well as the White House, instantly called the magnitude of the victory “a mandate”—and Trump seems sure to treat it as a license to pursue his most aggressive ideas.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her team, recognizing the threat of widespread disillusionment with President Joe Biden, tried to transform the Democratic campaign from a retrospective referendum on the performance of the administration in which she served into a prospective choice about the agenda and style of leadership she and Trump would bring to the next four years. Ultimately, she could not overcome the widespread unhappiness over the country’s current conditions. Biden’s approval rating among voters never exceeded 43 percent in any of the major swing states, according to exit polls. At least 55 percent of voters in each of those states said that they disapproved of Biden’s performance, and Trump typically won four-fifths or more of them.

Overall, despite any expectation to the contrary, the gender gap was not especially large. Harris’s inability to amass a greater advantage among women likely reflected the fact that they were at least as dissatisfied with the economy and Biden’s performance as men were, according to exit polls. Just 44 percent of women in exit polls said they approved of Biden’s performance, and nearly seven in 10 described the economy in negative terms—a view even more emphatic than the one men expressed.

Disapproval of Biden’s record and disaffection over the economy proved a headwind that Harris could not overcome. Exit polls showed that Americans remained concerned about the possible excesses of a second Trump presidency. But in their deep frustration over current conditions, they placed less weight on those worries.

[Read: How Donald Trump won everywhere]

As Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser to Bill Clinton, wrote in an email yesterday: “The 2024 election marks the biggest shift to the right in our country since Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.” The New York Times calculated that nine in 10 U.S. counties moved at least somewhat toward Trump in this cycle. A striking sign of that change was his dramatic improvement in big urban centers with large populations of Black and/or Latino voters, including the counties encompassing Philadelphia, Detroit, and Las Vegas. But Trump also improved (compared with 2020) in communities dominated by working-class white voters, such as Macomb in Michigan, Luzerne in Pennsylvania, and Kenosha and the small cities around Green Bay in Wisconsin.

Harris maintained the Democratic hold on the prosperous, well-educated inner suburbs around major cities. But in most of them, her party’s margins declined relative to its 2020 results. She slipped just slightly in predominantly white-collar areas such as Montgomery and Delaware Counties outside Philadelphia, and Oakland outside Detroit, and failed to improve on Biden’s deficit in Waukesha, around Milwaukee. The result was that in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Harris’s margins in these big suburbs were closer to Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 than Biden’s in 2020. That wasn’t enough to withstand what I’ve called the “pincer” move of Trump’s concurrent gains in the smaller, mostly white, blue-collar places and the much more diverse urban cores.

The geographic pattern of actual vote tallies for Trump captured the magnitude of the red shift more vividly than the two major surveys that try to measure voters’ behavior for media organizations: the exit polls conducted by Edison Research and the VoteCast survey done by NORC. Neither found any increase from 2020 in the national level of support for Trump among white voters; nor did the exit polls show more than minimal improvement for him among white voters in the Rust Belt states. The exit polls recorded modest improvements for Trump among Black voters, with his gains coming entirely from men, and a big improvement among Latinos. (VoteCast found solid advances for Trump among both Black and Latino voters.) In each survey, Trump made his most dramatic gains with Latino men but scored notable improvements among Latina women as well. Young voters, in both data sets, moved notably toward Trump as well.

The exit polls showed Harris winning women (of all races) by eight percentage points and losing men by 13 points. The VoteCast study similarly showed Harris winning women by seven points and Trump winning men by 10 percentage points. At that level, Harris’s lead with women was much smaller than Biden’s in 2020, and even smaller than Clinton’s advantage in 2016.

The story on the economy was similar. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls described the economy as only fair or poor; roughly that many expressed negative views in each of the three former “Blue Wall” states and Arizona, with discontent rising to about seven in 10 in North Carolina and Nevada, and beyond that in Georgia. Solid majorities of those economically discontented voters backed Trump in each state. So did a big majority of the roughly 45 percent of voters who said they were worse off than four years ago.

Harris did win handsomely among those who said they were better off, but they constituted just one in four voters. She also won the narrow backing of those who said their condition was unchanged. But none of that was enough to overcome Trump’s preponderant advantage among those who thought their condition had deteriorated under Biden.

Working-class voters without a college degree—many of them living paycheck to paycheck—were especially down on the economy. More than three-fourths of white voters without a college degree nationwide described the economy in negative terms—as did seven in 10 Latino voters. (An even more telling eight in 10 Latinos did so in the Sun Belt swing state of Nevada.)

The issues that Harris and the Democrats had hoped would offset economic discontent simply did not have enough bite. Two-thirds of voters in the national exit polls said that abortion should be legal in all or most circumstances, but about three in 10 of those voters supported Trump anyway. More than a quarter of women nationwide who supported legal abortion backed Trump.

[Read: Why Biden’s team thinks Harris lost]

The muting of the abortion issue was especially dramatic in the former Blue Wall states that ultimately settled Harris’s fate. In 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania each won about four-fifths of voters who supported legal abortion, while Tony Evers in Wisconsin carried about three-fourths of them. But, in a crucial erosion of that pro-choice support, Harris won only about two-thirds of those voters in Michigan and Wisconsin and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. A much smaller share of voters in each state said abortion should be illegal most of the time, but Trump won about nine in 10 of those.

Harris did not entirely fail at raising alarms about Trump. In the national exit polls, 54 percent of voters agreed that Trump was “too extreme.” But about one in nine voters who viewed Trump as too extreme voted for him anyway—a striking measure of their willingness to risk an uncertain future over an unacceptable present. Likewise, in the VoteCast survey, 55 percent of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned that Trump would steer the U.S. in a more authoritarian direction; yet nearly one in six of those voters supported him.

“I think that Trump has been helped by this sense that things are careening out of control at home and abroad, and it makes people more willing to contemplate the smack of authority,” William Galston, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, told me.

Jackie Payne, the founder and executive director of Galvanize Action, which studies moderate white women, told me that according to her research, many female voters who believed Trump would improve their economic situation simply brushed aside rhetoric and proposals from him that they found troubling. “They were choosing to believe a vision of him that was aligned with what they wanted to get out of him—a strong economy—and they were absolutely discounting anything that felt extreme as disinformation or hyperbole, even if he said he would do it,” she said.

Voters around the world have reached similar judgments this year in the aftermath of the inflation that followed the coronavirus pandemic: As a Financial Times analyst pointed out this week, incumbent parties have lost ground, or lost power altogether, in all 10 major democracies that held elections in 2024. The priority voters gave to current economic conditions in their decision making followed a long U.S. tradition too. Incumbent presidents with low public-approval ratings almost never win reelection—as Jimmy Carter in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1992, and Trump himself in 2020 demonstrated. The similar but less discussed scenario is the difficulty facing a party seeking to hold the White House even when its unpopular president isn’t running. That applied when Harry Truman in 1952, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008 were off the ballot; their party lost the race to replace them in each case. Biden now joins that dour procession.

But the most apt precedent for this election may be 1980. Laboring under widespread discontent, including over a raging bout of inflation, Carter tried to use his campaign to shift attention to the risks he said his right-wing rival, Ronald Reagan, represented, with some success: Doubts about Reagan did keep Carter close in the polls. But in the campaign’s final days, voters decided that continuity with Carter represented a greater risk than change with Reagan—and flocked to the challenger in crushing numbers.

[Read: How Trump neutralized his abortion problem]

Voters were willing to take an even greater leap this time. Trump made almost no accommodation for voters uneasy about him. Instead, he intensified his false accusations, inflammatory racist rhetoric, and profane personal attacks. Trump has surrounded himself with extreme figures who promise a revolution in government and society.

His senior immigration advisers have promoted plans for a militarized mass-deportation operation, complete with internment camps, and the possible removal of U.S.-citizen children of undocumented adults. His party is likely to control both chambers of Congress—and in any case, the president has broad unilateral authority to set immigration policy, as well as to impose the large tariffs Trump has pledged. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has already rendered him virtually immune to criminal prosecution for any action he takes as president. Trump is returning to the White House unbound.

Reagan’s victory in 1980 solidified a realignment in American politics that began under his Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Reagan cemented working-class white voters into the conservative movement’s electoral coalition—both white southern evangelical Christians and northern industrial workers in places such as Michigan’s Macomb County—who became lastingly known as “Reagan Democrats.” Those voters remain a cornerstone GOP constituency: Even four-plus decades later, they were the two groups that supported Trump in the largest numbers on Tuesday.

Many Republicans believe that Trump now has the chance to secure an equally significant shift in the party allegiance of Black men and Latino voters of both genders, who voted for him in historic numbers this week. That opportunity surely exists. But realizing it in a lasting way will require Trump and the Republican Party to maintain the support of millions of voters of color and justify their faith in him on the economy over any concern about policies such as mass deportation and more aggressive law enforcement.

Now those communities, along with all of the other Americans disappointed in Biden over the past four years, will learn whether Trump can deliver the economic benefits he promised without plunging the country into deeper acrimony.

Photographs by Ross Mantle

Maybe the tell was when the mayor of Philadelphia didn’t say Kamala Harris’s name. Cherelle Parker looked out at her fellow Democrats inside a private club just northeast of Center City last night. Onstage, she beamed with pride about how, despite Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims on social media, Election Day had unfolded freely and fairly across her city. But Parker did not—could not—telegraph victory for her party. “You’ve heard us say from the very beginning that we knew that the path to the White House had to come through our keystone state. And to get through the keystone state, you had to contend with our city of Philadelphia. And I want to thank each and every Philadelphian who participated in democracy in action,” she said. Her remarks were bland, vague, safe. Soon, the mayor slipped out of the venue.

The watch party trudged along. Four ceiling fans blew hot air. Stacks of grease-stained Del Rossi’s pizza boxes filled a rear table. Anxious Philadelphians sipped $5 bottles of Yuengling from the cash bar. But no single word or phrase could encompass the swirl of emotion: anticipation, dread, denial, despair. Across two floors of what might technically be considered “partying,” attendees peered up at projection screens that showed MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki pacing and pointing. His big map was glowing red. The revelers were blue.

Early on, many partygoers were still clinging to fleeting moments of zen. Around 9 p.m., after Rachel Maddow declared Michigan “too early to call,” the venue erupted in earnest applause. The hooting grew even louder when, shortly thereafter, Maddow announced that Pennsylvania, the place that most of these voters called home, was also in toss-up territory. But by 9:30, when Kornacki showed Trump comfortably up in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, enough people could grasp that the “Blue Wall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—which Harris had been counting on to win the White House—was now crumbling, brick by brick, county by county.

[Read: This was the second COVID election]

I saw genuine fear in people’s eyes when, just after 9:50, zooming in on the Pennsylvania map, Kornacki mentioned Trump and Lackawanna County. A union leader named Sam Williamson told me about all the door-knocking he’d done. He had been “really confident” Harris would win Pennsylvania. But by 10:30 or so, even the formerly blue Centre County, where Penn State University is located, had flipped red. Was this actually happening? Hardly anyone even murmured when Kornacki spoke of Harris’s success right there in Philadelphia. People were pissed. Demoralized. Many began to filter out. Democrats had spent this twisty, complex presidential campaign with a narrow path to victory, and now that path was narrowing to a close.

People gather for an election night watch party at the Ruba Club in Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

Each voter I spoke with processed the night a little differently. A 38-year-old nurse named Abena Bempah conceded, somewhat sheepishly, that she had tuned out this election until late June, when President Joe Biden had his disastrous debate against former (and future) President Donald Trump. After that night, Bempah had an awakening: “It actually reminded me that I need to be an engaged citizen throughout a candidate’s entire term.” So she spent the summer and fall volunteering with the Philadelphia Democrats. She told me that to preserve democracy, people need to do so much more than vote—they need to voice their concerns to elected officials. “I think that Republicans are planning on Democrats to rest on our laurels and not be as active,” she said.

Near a billiards table, I met a father and son, Shamai and Liv Leibowitz, who live in Silver Spring, Maryland, and had driven up to Pennsylvania to volunteer. Liv, who is 21, is taking a year off from school, and had recently been canvassing in nearby Bucks County and Chester County. He wore a baseball hat with Representative Jamie Raskin’s name on the dome. “I was here for the past two weeks,” he told me with a smile. Half of the undecided voters he’d met felt that they didn’t know enough about Harris and her positions. But many, he said, were staying home because of her support of Israel.

Liv’s father, Shamai, told me that he had the gut feeling that Trump would win. Shamai had grown up in Israel, and he moved to the United States in the early 2000s. He believed that Harris was doomed in this election because she wouldn’t substantively deviate from Biden’s Middle East policy. “I’m worried right now because she didn’t come out forcefully for a weapons embargo, or even hint at a weapons embargo. We met people canvassing who told us, ‘We’re voting Green Party’; ‘We’re staying home,’” he said. Shamai knew it would have been politically risky for her to criticize Israel, but, he told me, in the end, not changing course was hurting her more.

Philadelphia, PA (Ross Mantle for The Atlantic)

I also spoke with two people who might be considered interlopers. One was a 27-year-old Swede named Gabriel Gunnarsson, who had flown to Philadelphia from his home in Stockholm just to witness the U.S. election with his own eyes. As he nursed a beer, he told me that everyone he knew in Sweden had been following our election particularly closely this year. “I’m feeling bad,” he told me. “I’m sort of dystopic about the future, I think, and just seeing this, it’s a horrible result for the world.” I asked him if he recalled one of Trump’s more vile comments from his first term in office: He’d said that America was bringing in people only from “shithole countries,” and he’d lamented that we don’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. Gunnarsson laughed and shook his head. “He did this when he was president as well: He just randomly said, ‘Look at what’s happening in Sweden!’” Gunnarsson recalled. “And we were all like, ‘What did happen?’”

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

Finally, as the evening was winding down, I met a man named Tim Brogan, who very quietly told me he was an independent, not a Democrat. Would you care to share whom you voted for today? I asked. Brogan looked down at his feet, then off to the corner, then back at me. “I voted for the other party,” he said. “I did in fact vote for Trump, yes.”

He had come out to this particular event because he lives in the neighborhood and wanted to be around some friends. He told me he works in real estate, and as a lifelong Philadelphian, he was distressed to see inflation and more crime in the city. This was, in fact, Brogan’s third consecutive time voting for Trump, even though he had previously voted for Barack Obama. He earnestly believed that Trump was the only person who could set America back on the right path. “There’s just so many things that we missed—and we’re allowing—with the Democratic Party,” he said. “I think my choice was a good direction for my beliefs.”

I asked him how he talks about politics with his friends, family, and neighbors.

“Simple,” he said. “We don’t like to get into it.”

How Democrats in Philadelphia watched the US election slip away

For the third consecutive election, the nation remains divided almost exactly in half around the polarizing presence of Donald Trump.

Early this morning, the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris appears likely to again come down to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the same states that decided Trump’s 2016 and 2020 races by razor-thin margins. Trump held a narrow but clear advantage in all of them as of midnight.

In 2016, those three Rust Belt battlegrounds made Trump president when he dislodged them by a combined margin of about 80,000 votes from the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats had won in all six presidential races from 1992 to 2012; four years later, they made Joe Biden president when he wrested them back from Trump by a combined margin of nearly 260,000 votes. Now, with Trump regaining an upper hand across Sun Belt battlegrounds where Biden made inroads in 2020, the three Rust Belt behemoths appeared likely to decide the winner once more.

The results as of midnight suggested that those three states were tipping slightly to Trump; the patterns of returns looked more like 2016, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton in them, than 2020, when Biden beat Trump. Given that Trump appears highly likely to also win the Southeast battlegrounds of North Carolina and Georgia, and has a strong hand in Arizona, Trump will likely win the presidency again if he captures any of the three Blue Wall states. He would become only the second man, after Grover Cleveland in the late 1800s, to win the presidency, lose it, and then regain it again on a third try.

Not only are the same industrial-state battlegrounds at the fulcrum of Trump’s third race, but they remain mostly divided along very familiar lines. As he did in both 2016 and 2020, Trump is running up big margins in exurbs, small towns, and rural communities where most voters are white, culturally conservative people without a college degree. Harris is amassing big—though, in some cases, diminished—margins in the populous, well-educated suburbs around the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee. The one potentially crucial shift from 2020: The exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media organizations showed Trump making gains among Black and Latino voters, and especially men, not only in the pivotal former Blue Wall states but also elsewhere.

In many respects, the results available as of midnight were a reminder that even in a race involving a figure as unique as Donald Trump, in politics (as in Casablanca), the fundamental things apply. Since World War II, it has been extremely difficult for parties to hold the White House when an outgoing president was unpopular: The White House flipped partisan control when Harry Truman left office in 1952, Lyndon Johnson in 1968, and George W. Bush in 2008. Popular presidents haven’t always been able to guarantee victory for their party when they leave (the White House changed hands when relatively popular chief executives stepped down in 1960, 2000, and 2016), but unpopular outgoing presidents have usually presented an insurmountable obstacle.

If Harris ultimately falls short, that pattern would represent a big part of the reason. Biden’s deep unpopularity at the end of his term operated as a huge headwind for her. In the national exit poll, only 40 percent of voters said they approved of Biden’s job performance as president. In the battlegrounds, Biden’s approval rating ranged from a low of only 39 percent (in Wisconsin) to a high of 43 percent (Pennsylvania). Harris ran better than usual for a nominee from the same party among voters who disapproved of the outgoing president’s performance. But even so, the large majority of discontented voters in all of these states provided a huge base of support for Trump. In the national exit poll, fully two-thirds of voters described the economy in negative terms. Only one in four said they had suffered no hardship from inflation over the past year.

A lot has changed for Trump since the 2020 election. He launched a sustained campaign to overturn the results of that election, which culminated in the January 6 insurrection; Supreme Court justices he’d appointed helped overturn the constitutional right to abortion; he was indicted on multiple felony counts in four separate cases, and convicted on 34 of them; and he was hit with civil judgments for financial fraud and sexual abuse.

Yet the exit polls, at least, found remarkably little change in his support levels from 2020 among white voters across the battlegrounds. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, his white support was virtually unchanged from 2020; he suffered a small decline in Pennsylvania, and a slightly larger one in North Carolina.

Compared with 2020, white voters with at least a four-year college degree moved slightly, but not dramatically, away from Trump in those five big battlegrounds. Harris won about three in five white women with a college degree, a big improvement from what the exit polls recorded in 2020. But Trump offset that by improving at least slightly since 2020 among white voters without a college education, who tended to give Biden especially low marks for his performance. Crucially for Trump, he retained overwhelming support among white women without a college degree everywhere except Wisconsin, where he split them evenly. Democrats had hoped those women might abandon him over abortion rights and a general revulsion to his demeaning language about women. Because those blue-collar white women appeared on track to provide Trump as big a margin as they did in 2016 and 2020, the national exit polls showed Trump winning most white women against Harris—just as he did against Biden and Clinton. That will likely be a subject of intense frustration and debate among Democrats in the weeks ahead, whether or not Trump wins the race.

Overall, the abortion issue benefited Harris substantially, but not as much as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates who swept Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2022, the first election after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe. In that election, the exit polls found that Democrats Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan and Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania won more than four-fifths of voters who said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances; in Wisconsin, Democrat Tony Evers won three-fourths of them. But this time—with the economy weighing on those voters—Harris won only about two-thirds of those pro-choice voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, and about seven in 10 in Pennsylvania. That slight shift might prove decisive. (In the national exit poll, Trump won almost three in 10  voters who said abortion should be legal all or most of the time; one-fourth of women who supported legal abortion backed Trump.)

Because abortion rights did not give her as much of a lift as it did the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in 2022, Harris did not appear on track to expand on Biden’s margins in many of the big suburban counties key to the modern Democratic coalition. She looked to be roughly matching Biden’s huge advantages in the big four suburban counties outside Philadelphia. But she did not narrow the roughly 3–2 deficit Biden faced in Waukesha County, outside Milwaukee, perhaps the biggest Republican-leaning white-collar suburb north of the Mason-Dixon line, as of midnight. In Oakland County, outside Detroit, Trump appeared on track to slightly narrow her margin, perhaps dealing a fatal blow to her chances.

In the well-educated county centered on Ann Arbor, Harris’s margin of victory seemed on track to decline from 2020, in what might be a reflection of youthful discontent over the support she and Biden have provided for Israel’s war in Gaza. In Dane County, Wisconsin, centered on Madison, she appeared in line to match only Biden’s 2020 share and not the even higher number Evers reached in 2022. Overall, in several of the suburban counties across the Blue Wall states, Harris appeared on track to finish closer to Hillary Clinton’s margins in 2016, when she lost these states, than Biden’s in 2020, when he won them.

The failure to expand on Biden’s performance in suburban areas left Harris vulnerable to what I’ve called Trump’s pincer movement against her.

As in both of his earlier races, he posted towering numbers in rural areas and small towns. Trump posted his usual imposing advantages in the blue-collar suburbs around Pittsburgh, and appeared to gain dramatically in the mostly blue-collar counties including and around Green Bay.

From the other direction, he appeared to further narrow the traditional Democratic margins in heavily minority central cities. That was particularly evident in Philadelphia. Exit polls showed Trump slightly improving among Black voters in North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; that contributed to his win in North Carolina and gave him gains that placed him on the brink of flipping Wisconsin and Michigan as of midnight. In the national exit poll, Harris basically matched Biden’s vote share among white voters overall—but she fell slightly among Black voters and more substantially among Hispanic voters.

Almost lost in the ominous news for Democrats from the battleground states was the possibility that Harris would win the national popular vote, even if Trump also appeared likely to improve on his showings on that front from 2016 and 2020. If Harris did win the national popular vote, it would mark the eighth time in the past nine presidential elections that Democrats have done so—something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system, in 1828.

Yet even if Democrats achieved that historic feat, they faced the bracing prospect that Republicans could win unified control of the House, the Senate, and the White House while losing the national popular vote. Until the 21st century, that had happened only once in American history, in 1888; if it happens again this year, it would mark the third time in this century that Republicans will have won complete control of Washington while losing the popular vote.

Trump isn’t likely to view losing the national popular vote, if he does, for a third time (something only William Jennings Bryan had previously done) as a caution light. If anything, he will likely view the prospect that he could win the decisive battleground states by bigger margins than he did in 2016 and gain among voters of color as a signal to aggressively pursue the combative agenda he laid out this year. That includes plans for massive new tariffs, the largest deportation program in U.S. history, a purge of the civil service, and the use of the military against what he calls “the enemy from within.” Unless something changes dramatically in the final counts from the decisive states, American voters will have chosen, once again, to leap into that murky unknown.

Philadelphia officials refuted Donald Trump’s claims of voter fraud after alleging "massive cheating" in the city.

Trump's claim of 'cheating' in Philadelphia refuted by officials

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How do you transform something so big, so existential, into something people can grasp? Last night, Oprah Winfrey gave it a shot as the penultimate speaker at Kamala Harris’s grand-finale rally in Philadelphia: “If we don’t show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Every presidential election is the biggest ever, but this one lacks an adequate superlative. Throughout 2024, both parties have leaned on the imagery and messaging of our Founding Fathers. The Donald Trump acolyte and former GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy frequently says that we’re living in a “1776 moment.” Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s democratic governor, last night invoked Benjamin Franklin’s warning about our still-young country: “a republic, if you can keep it.” It’s an oft-repeated line, but that “if” lingered in a way I’d never felt before.

Shapiro was peering out at the tens of thousands of people standing shoulder to shoulder along Benjamin Franklin Parkway at the chilly election-eve gathering. Many attendees had been there for hours, and more than a few had grown visibly restless. Each emotion, both on the stage and in the crowd, was turned up to 11—fear, hope, promise, peril. At the lectern, Shapiro’s inflection mirrored that of former President Barack Obama. So much of Harris’s campaign send-off had the feel of Obama’s 2008 celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Will.i.am came ready with a song (a sequel to his Obama ’08 anthem, “Yes We Can”) titled—what else?—“Yes She Can.”

Around 11:30 p.m., Harris finally appeared at the base of the Rocky Steps to make her final pitch. Beyond the symbolic proximity to the Constitution Center, the Liberty Bell, and Independence Hall, this particular setting was a visual metaphor for, as Harris put it, those who “start as the underdog and climb to victory.” (Sadly, no one in the A/V booth thought to blast the Rocky horns as she walked up.) The truth is, it’s a bit of a stretch to call Harris the underdog. She is, after all, the quasi-incumbent, and polls suggest that the race is tied. Still, you sort of knew what she was getting at with the Rocky thing.

For the past nine years, the whole political world, and much of American life, has revolved around Donald Trump. He is an inescapable force, a fiery orange sun that promises to keep you safe, happy, and warm but, in the end, will burn you. Harris is running on preserving freedom and democracy, but she’s really just running against Trump. In surveys and interviews, many Americans say that they, too, are voting against Trump rather than for Harris. The election is about the future of America, but in a real sense, it’s about fear of one person.

Harris had already been in Scranton, Allentown, and Pittsburgh yesterday. But now her campaign had reached its finish line, in Philadelphia, and though I heard cautious optimism, none of the Harris campaign staffers I spoke with last night dared offer any sort of prediction. The closest I got was that some believe they’ll have enough internal data to know which states are actually in their column by late tonight, and that they expect the race might be called tomorrow morning or afternoon.

Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, wrapped up in an expectedly apocalyptic and campy manner. The truth is, some of his chaos worked—he never lost our attention. Consider the weeklong national conversation about the word garbage. A comedian’s stupid joke deeming Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean” might end up being a determining factor in a Trump defeat, but President Joe Biden’s comment likening Trump supporters to garbage also proved a pivotal moment for the MAGA movement. In response to Biden, Trump appeared in a bright-orange safety vest as a way of owning the insult—a billionaire showing solidarity with the working class. In a similar late-campaign moment, Trump donned an apron and served fries at a (closed) McDonald’s. It wasn’t the work wear so much as the contrast that told the story: In both instances, Trump kept his shirt and tie on. These theatrical juxtapositions, however inane, have a way of sticking in your brain.

But not everyone gets the reality-TV component of his act. Many of his supporters take his every utterance as gospel. At Trump’s final rallies, some showed up in their own safety vests or plastic trash bags. Trump’s movement had quite literally entered its garbage phase. In his closing argument last night, Trump’s running mate, J. D. Vance, called Harris “trash.” And Trump, days after miming oral sex onstage, kept the grossness going, mouthing that House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is a “bitch.”

Trump’s campaign was much longer than Harris’s, and for that reason, I spoke with far more Republicans than Democrats at campaign events this year. Across different cities and states, it was clear that people stood for hours at Trump rallies because they still obsess over Trump the man, and because Trumpism has become something like a religion. Trump makes a significant portion of the country feel good, either by stoking their resentments or simply making them believe he hears their concerns. In the end, though, he’s also the one feeding their fears.

It can be easy to write off American politics as a stadium-size spectacle that’s grown only cringier and uglier over the past decade. But last night, in my conversations with Philadelphians who’d braved the chill to see Harris, it became clear that the show was just the show, and that they had other priorities. Sure, they’d get to see Ricky Martin perform “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and hear Lady Gaga sing “God Bless America,” but all of that was extra. A trio of 20-year-old Temple University students—two of whom wore Brat-green Kamala beanies, one of whom wore a camo Harris Walz trucker hat—told me about their hometowns. One had come from nearby Bucks County, which he’d watched grow Trumpy over his teen years. Another was from the Jersey Shore and said she believed that people would egg her house if she put a Harris sign in the front yard. Another, who was from Texas, summed up the risks posed by Trump more succinctly than almost anyone I’ve spoken with over the past two years of covering the campaign: “He’ll let people get away with promoting hate and violence in our country, and I think that is my biggest fear.”

This election has been an elaborate traveling circus, with performers playing into all manner of dreams and nightmares. Trump has long relied on the allure of the show, and the preponderance of celebrity cameos at Harris’s recent rallies proves that she, too, understands the importance of star power. But now that all of the swing states have been barnstormed, and the billions of dollars have been spent, what’s left? The pageantry has entered its final hours. Tomorrow (or the next day … or the next day), a new iteration of American life begins. We won’t be watching it; we’ll be living it.

Related:

Trump’s followers are living in a dark fantasy. Podcast: Does America want chaos?

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This election is a test. Three tips for following election results without losing your mind X is a white-supremacist site, Charlie Warzel writes. The micro-campaign to target privately liberal wives

Today’s News

A federal judge ruled against state and national Republicans who tried to invalidate roughly 2,000 absentee ballots returned by hand over the weekend and yesterday in some of Georgia’s Democratic-leaning counties. The FBI said that many of the bomb threats made to polling locations in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” Officials in Georgia and Michigan reported that their states received bomb threats linked to Russia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, over their differences on how the war in Gaza should be conducted. Gallant, who was seen as a more moderate voice in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, will be replaced by Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz.

Evening Read

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The Right’s New Kingmaker

By Ali Breland

Charlie Kirk took his seat underneath a tent that said Prove Me Wrong. I wedged myself into the crowd at the University of Montana, next to a cadre of middle-aged men wearing mesh hats. A student standing near me had on a hoodie that read Jesus Christ. It was late September, and several hundred of us were here to see the conservative movement’s youth whisperer. Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, was in Missoula for a stop on his “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour,” in which he goes from college to college doing his signature shtick of debating undergraduates …

I had not traveled to Montana simply to see Kirk epically own college kids. (That’s not a hard thing to do, and in any case, I could just watch his deep catalog of debate videos.) I’d made the trip because I had the feeling that Kirk is moving toward the core of the conservative movement.

Read the full article.

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