Once she became the nominee, I expected Vice President Kamala Harris to win the 2024 presidential election.

More exactly, I expected ex-President Donald Trump to lose.

What did I get wrong?

My expectation was based on three observations and one belief.

Observation one: Inflation was coming under control in 2024. Personal incomes rose faster than prices over the year. As interest rates peaked and began to subside, consumer confidence climbed. When asked about their personal finances, Americans expressed qualms, yes, but the number who rated their personal finances as excellent or good was a solid 46 percent, higher than in the year President Barack Obama won reelection. The same voters who complained about the national economy rated their local economy much more favorably.

None of this was great news for the incumbent party, and yet …

Observation two: All through the 2024 cycle, a majority of Americans expressed an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Almost one-third of Republicans were either unenthusiastic about his candidacy or outright hostile. Harris was not hugely popular, either. But if the polls were correct, she was just sufficiently less unpopular than Trump.

Arguably undergirding Harris’s popularity advantage was …  

Observation three: In the 2022 midterm elections, abortion proved a powerful anti-Republican voting issue. That year in Michigan, a campaign based on abortion rights helped reelect Governor Gretchen Whitmer and flipped both chambers of the state legislature to the Democrats. That same year, almost a million Kansans voted 59 percent to 41 percent to reaffirm state-constitutional protections for abortion. Democrats posted strong results in many other states as well. They recovered a majority in the U.S. Senate, while Republicans won only the narrowest majority in the House of Representatives. In 2024, abortion-rights measures appeared on the ballot in 10 states, including must-win Arizona and Nevada. These initiatives seemed likely to energize many Americans who would likely also cast an anti-Trump vote for president.

If that was not enough—and maybe it was not—I held onto this belief:

Human beings are good at seeing through frauds. Not perfectly good at it. Not always as fast as might be. And not everybody. But a just-sufficient number of us, sooner or later, spot the con.

The Trump campaign was trafficking in frauds. Haitians are eating cats and dogs. Foreigners will pay for the tariffs. The Trump years were the good old days if you just forget about the coronavirus pandemic and the crime wave that happened on his watch. The lying might work up to a point. I believed that the point would be found just on the right side of the line between election and defeat—and not, as happened instead, on the other side.

My mistake.

[Read: Donald Trump’s most dangerous cabinet pick]

In one of the closest elections in modern American history, Trump eked out the first Republican popular-vote victory in 20 years. His margin was about a third the size of President Joe Biden’s margin over him in 2020. For that matter, on the votes counted, Trump’s popular-vote margin over Harris was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.

Yet narrow as it is, a win it is—and a much different win from 2016. That time, Trump won by the rules, but against the expressed preference of the American people. This time, he won both by the rules and with a plurality of the votes. Trump’s popular win challenges many beliefs and preconceptions, starting with my own.

Through the first Trump administration, critics like me could reassure ourselves that his presidency was some kind of aberration. The repudiation of Trump’s party in the elections of 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022 appeared to confirm this comforting assessment. The 2024 outcome upends it. Trump is no detour or deviation, no glitch or goof.

When future generations of Americans tell the story of the nation, they will have to fit Trump into the main line of the story. And that means the story itself must be rethought.

Trump diverted millions of public dollars to his own businesses, and was returned to office anyway.

He was proved in court to have committed sexual assault, and was returned to office anyway.

He was twice impeached, and was returned to office anyway.

He was convicted of felonies, and was returned to office anyway.

He tried to overthrow an election, and was returned to office anyway.

For millions of Americans, this record was disqualifying. For slightly more Americans, however, it was not. The latter group prevailed, and the United States will be a different country because of them.

American politics has never lacked for scoundrels, cheats, and outright criminals. But their numbers have been thinned, and their misdeeds policed, by strong public institutions. Trump waged a relentless campaign against any and all rules that restrained him. He did not always prevail, but he did score three all-important successes. First, he frightened the Biden administration’s Justice Department away from holding him to account in courts of law in any timely way. Second, he persuaded the courts themselves—including, ultimately, the Supreme Court—to invent new doctrines of presidential immunity to shield him. Third, he broke all internal resistance within the Republican Party to his lawless actions. Republican officeholders, donors, and influencers who had once decried the January 6 attempted coup as utterly and permanently debarring—one by one, Trump brought them to heel.

Americans who cherished constitutional democracy were left to rely on the outcome of the 2024 election to protect their institutions against Trump. It was not enough. Elections are always about many different issues—first and foremost usually, economic well-being. In comparison, the health of U.S. democracy will always seem remote and abstract to most voters.

[Read: Trump’s first defeat]

Early in the American Revolution, a young Alexander Hamilton wrote to his friend John Jay to condemn an act of vigilante violence against the publisher of a pro-British newspaper. Hamilton sympathized with the feelings of the vigilantes, but even in revolutionary times, he insisted, feelings must be guided by rules. Otherwise, people are left to their own impulses, a formula for trouble. “It is not safe,” Hamilton warned, “to trust to the virtue of any people.”

The outcome of an election must be respected, but its wisdom can be questioned. If any divine entity orders human affairs, it may be that providence sent Trump to the United States to teach Americans humility. It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a famous 1930s novel about an imagined future in which the United States follows the path to authoritarianism. Because it didn’t happen then, many Americans have taken for granted that it could not happen now.

Perhaps Americans require, every once in a while, to be jolted out of the complacency learned from their mostly fortunate history. The nation that ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was, in important ways, the same one that enacted the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850; the nation that generously sent Marshall Plan aid after the Second World War was compensating for the myopic selfishness of the Neutrality Acts before the war. Americans can take pride in their national story because they have chosen rightly more often than they have chosen wrongly—but the wrong choices are part of the story too, and the wrong choice has been made again now.

“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause,” T. S. Eliot observed in a 1927 essay (here he was writing about the arguments between philosophical Utilitarians and their critics, but his words apply so much more generally). “We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

So the ancient struggle resumes again: progress against reaction, dignity against domination, commerce against predation, stewardship against spoliation, global responsibility against national chauvinism. No quitting.

Democrats will spend the next four years debating why the party suffered a sweeping defeat last week. Maybe it was inflation, or the culture wars, or Joe Biden’s hubris, or podcasts, that drove voters in every swing state to the Republican presidential nominee. At least one theory, however, can already be put to rest: Elon Musk did not “steal” the election for Donald Trump.

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Republican officials and operatives architected a second “Stop the Steal” campaign, ready to deploy should their presidential candidate lose. Musk laid much of this groundwork himself, for instance by aggressively promoting the false narrative that the Democrats had brought foreigners into the United States to vote illegally, among other falsehoods. Yet following Trump’s election, it was the left sowing doubts: “#donotconcedekamala” and “Trump cheated” both trended on X. One post on Threads read, “20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own,” and pointed to Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vladimir Putin as likely culprits. “If anyone could fund a massive election fraud scheme it’s Elon musk. He also has motive,” Dean Obeidallah, a progressive radio host, posted to Threads and X on Friday. Such posts have been viewed tens of millions of times.

[Read: Why Democrats are losing the culture war]

There is no evidence to support these claims—but they’re still fundamentally different from the original “Stop the Steal” movement. Democratic leadership, for example, is not repeating these conspiracy theories, nor is there a coordinated attempt to amplify, validate, or act on them. (Obeidallah himself eventually clarified his position, writing on his Substack yesterday that although skepticism is healthy, “there is currently no credible, objective evidence of fraud or any other criminal conduct” suggesting that the outcome was illegitimate.) In fact, the 2024 election was by all accounts extremely secure. There is no evidence that foreign interference affected the results, nor did any domestic conspiracy materially hurt election administration. “Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said in a statement on November 6. “We have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.” Top officials in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, all key battlegrounds, have said the election was safe, free, and fair.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from implying otherwise. Musk, as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters and an extremely online enemy of the extremely online left, has become an obvious target. Maybe the world’s richest man hacked the election with his Starlink satellite network; maybe Democratic ballots were systematically not counted; even if the mechanism is unclear, the math isn’t mathing. Even if such suspicions are raised in good faith, they are counterproductive. Musk—who is now close enough to Trump to have joined him on a recent call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—is dangerous. His willingness to amplify brazen lies in order to help advance the outcome he wanted was on display for months leading up to the election. But the misinformation about him or any major Republican figure stealing the election obscures and diminishes the actual threat at hand: The authoritarian bent in American media, business, and politics that Musk represents has profoundly warped many Americans’ political discourse, trust in one another, and grip on reality, all without needing to mess with any ballots.

Believing that Musk rigged this November’s outcome has become, at least for some, easier than accepting the truth: Trump, an openly racist and misogynistic candidate who tried to overthrow the government and has said he wants generals like those of the Third Reich, just won the Electoral College and is poised to claim the popular vote in the United States. Yet fantasies about election fraud are dangerous this time around, not because they will actively undermine or mount a physical threat to democracy, but because they blunt, and even willfully ignore, reality. This is Trump’s party now, everyone knows it, pundits should know that everyone knows it, and the GOP still won back control of the Senate and will likely claim a narrow majority in the House of Representatives. As of Friday, Trump had improved his vote margin in more than nine out of every 10 counties with near-complete results, including many progressive strongholds. Fixating on fraud disregards the material factors that brought the nation and its citizens to this choice, and detracts from the daunting work that must be done to recover.

[Read: Voters just didn’t believe in Biden’s economy]

And Elon Musk, “hacking” aside, played a substantial role in Trump’s reelection campaign by spreading and normalizing a wide range of hateful rhetoric and conspiracy theories. He has been the spearhead of a growing segment of the ultra-wealthy technocratic class that rapidly coalesced around Trump this year. The far-right rhetoric about voter fraud that Musk has amplified helped trigger a wave of death threats against election officials. He is trying to single-handedly replace objective sources of information and reporting with his white-supremacist social network, degrading America’s information environment to the point that it has become unclear how, exactly, to change anyone’s mind about anything.

It is not surprising that suspicion about the election has cropped up. Conspiracy theories frequently emerge around election time, and they have for decades. These Democrats are not being uniquely, or even especially, whiny or hypocritical. Before Trump decried a “steal” in 2020, Democrats blamed Russian trolls and Facebook in 2016. (In that case, to be clear, U.S. intelligence officials did find evidence of Russian interference—but not evidence that it was what decisively swung the outcome in Trump’s favor.) Four years prior, Trump called Barack Obama’s victory a “total sham,” and in 2008 John McCain’s campaign was reportedly collecting reports of “Election Day irregularities” before his overwhelming defeat. Both times, a poll found that roughly half of Republicans thought the election was stolen. In 2004, some Democrats blamed shenanigans in Ohio for John Kerry’s exit-poll-defying loss, and in 2000 the culprit was then–Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state’s infamous “hanging chads.”

Yet Trump’s political foes should be striving to prove that cognitive flexibility, grounded in reality, is possible. Anyone who believes in democracy, registered Democrat or not, should accept the results—and, instead of retroactively fixating on polling and data, focus all their energy on the economic, social, political, and other aspects of people’s lives that caused this outcome, and on how to make those people’s lives better.

Republicans five seats short of a majority in House of Representatives, with 20 races still uncalled.

Every seat in the lower chamber of Congress is up for grabs this election cycle.

It's too early to determine if Republicans will keep their majority in the US House of Representatives.

Americans are headed to the polls today, to cast their ballots in a crucial election. People are anxious, hopeful, and scared about the stakes of the election and its aftermath. But this is not the only such electoral test that American democracy has faced. An earlier contest has much to say to the present.

The presidential election of 1800 was a crisis of the first order, featuring extreme polarization, wild accusations, and name-calling—the Federalist John Adams was labeled “hermaphroditical” by Republicans, and Federalists, in turn, warned that Thomas Jefferson would destroy Christianity. People in two states began stockpiling arms to take the government for Jefferson if necessary, seeing him as the intended winner. Federalist members of Congress considered overturning the election; thousands of people surrounded the Capitol to learn the outcome; and an extended, agonizing tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr took 36 votes to resolve in the House of Representatives.

We’re not looking at a replay of the 1800 election; history doesn’t repeat itself. But two key components of that electoral firestorm are speaking loudly to the present: the threat of violence, and the proposed solution to the electoral turmoil after the contest’s close.

The unfortunate truth is that democratic governance is often violent. When the promises and reach of democracy expand, it almost always brings an antidemocratic blowback, sometimes including threats and violence. Black men gaining the right to vote during the Civil War was met with bluntly hostile threats, intimidation, and voter suppression during Reconstruction. The advancing demands for the civil rights of Black Americans in the 1960s led to vicious beatings and murders. In both eras, white Americans who felt entitled to power—and who felt threatened by the expanding rights and opportunities granted to racial minorities through democratic means—resorted to violence.

[Elaine Godfrey: The real election risk comes later]

At the end of the 18th century, the Federalists were the party of extreme entitlement. They favored a strong central government with the power to enforce its precepts and were none too comfortable with a democratic politics of resistance, protest, and pushback. They wanted Americans to vote for their preferred candidates, then step aside and let their betters govern.

When Jefferson and Burr—both Democratic Republicans—received an equal number of electoral votes, the Federalists were horrified. They faced the nightmare choice between Jefferson, a notoriously anti Federalist Republican, or Burr, an unpredictable and opportunistic politico with unknown loyalties. They largely preferred Burr, who seemed far more likely to compromise with the Federalists.

Tied elections are thrown to the House of Representatives to decide, with each state getting one vote. Given this chance to steal the election, Federalists inside and outside Congress began plotting—perhaps they could prevent the election of either candidate and elect a president pro tem until they devised a better solution.

Federalist talk of intervention didn’t go unnoticed. Governors in Pennsylvania and Virginia began to stockpile arms in case the government needed to be taken for Jefferson. This was no subversive effort; Jefferson himself knew of their efforts, telling James Madison and James Monroe that the threat of resistance “by arms” was giving the Federalists pause. “We thought it best to declare openly & firmly, one & all, that the day such an act [of usurpation] passed the middle states would arm.”

Ultimately, there was no violence. But the threat was very real—a product of the fact that Federalists felt so entitled to political power that they were unwilling to lose by democratic means. And losing is a key component of democracy. Elections are contests with winners and losers. Democracy relies on these free and fair contests to assign power according to the preferences of the American people. People who feel entitled to power are hostile to these contests. They won’t accept unknown outcomes. They want inevitability, invulnerability, and immunity, so they strike out at structures of democracy. They scorn electoral proceedings, manipulate the political process, and threaten their opponents. Sometimes, the end result is violence. In the election of 2024, this is the posture adopted by former President Donald Trump and his supporters. As in 1800, a steadfast sense of entitlement to power is threatening our democratic process.

The election of 1800 was just the fourth presidential contest in American history, and only the election of 1796, the first without George Washington as a candidate, had been contested. After the crisis of 1800, some people sought better options. Unsettled by the uproar of 1800, at least one Federalist favored ending popular presidential elections altogether. Thinking back to the election a few years later, the Connecticut Federalist James Hillhouse proposed amending the constitutional mode of electing presidents. The president should be chosen from among acting senators, he suggested. A box could be filled with balls—most of them white, one of them colored— and each senator who was qualified for the presidency would proceed in alphabetical order and pull a ball from the box. The senator who drew the colored ball would be president. Chief Justice John Marshall, who agreed that presidential contests were dangerous, declared the plan as good as any other.

Most people didn’t go that far, but Federalists and Republicans alike understood that the threat posed by fiercely contested partisan elections could be dire. Although the presidency had been peacefully transferred from one party to another, the road to that transfer had been rocky. Stockpiling arms? Threats of armed resistance? Seizing the presidency? The entire nation rocked by political passions, seemingly torn in two?

One Republican asked Jefferson in March 1801: What would have happened if there had been the “non election of a president”? Jefferson’s response is noteworthy. In that case, he wrote, “the federal government would have been in the situation of a clock or watch run down … A convention, invited by the republican members of Congress … would have been on the ground in 8 weeks, would have repaired the constitution where it was defective, and wound it up again.”

The political process would save the nation. A convention. Perhaps amending the Constitution. The solution to the crisis, Jefferson argued, lay in tried-and-true constitutional processes of government. As he put it, they were a “peaceable & legitimate resource, to which we are in the habit of implicit obedience.”

[David A. Graham: How is it this close?]

And indeed, that is the purpose of the Constitution, a road map of political processes. As Americans, we agree to abide by its standards or use constitutional and legal political means to change them. When people attack the Constitution—threaten it, ignore it, violate it—they are striking a blow to the constitutional pact that holds us together as a nation. We don’t often think about this pact, or even realize that it’s there—until it’s challenged.

Which brings us to the present. Today’s election presents a stark choice. Americans can either respect the basic constitutional structures of our government, or trample them with denial and lies. The Constitution is far from perfect. It needs amending. But it is our procedural starting point for change.

By voting, you are signaling your belief in this process. You are declaring that you believe in the opportunities presented by democracy, even if they sometimes must be fought for. Democracy isn’t an end point; it’s a process. This election is our opportunity to pledge our allegiance to that process—to the constitutional pact that anchors our nation. The choice is ours.