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.

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Democrats and liberal pundits are already trying to figure out how the Trump campaign not only bested Kamala Harris in the “Blue Wall” states of the Midwest and the Rust Belt, but gained on her even in areas that should have been safe for a Democrat. Almost everywhere, Donald Trump expanded his coalition, and this time, unlike in 2016, he didn’t have to thread the needle of the Electoral College to win: He can claim the legitimacy of winning the popular vote.

Trump’s opponents are now muttering about the choice of Tim Walz, the influence of the Russians, the role of the right-wing media, and whether President Joe Biden should not have stepped aside in favor of Harris. Even the old saw about “economic anxiety” is making a comeback.

These explanations all have some merit, but mostly, they miss the point. Yes, some voters still stubbornly believe that presidents magically control the price of basic goods. Others have genuine concerns about immigration and gave in to Trump’s booming call of fascism and nativism. And some of them were just never going to vote for a woman, much less a Black woman.

But in the end, a majority of American voters chose Trump because they wanted what he was selling: a nonstop reality show of rage and resentment. Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.

Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.

And so it came to pass: Last night, a gaggle of millionaires and billionaires grinned and applauded for Trump. They were part of an alliance with the very people another Trump term would hurt—the young, minorities, and working families among them.

Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.

Americans who wish to stop Trump in this assault on the American constitutional order, then, should get it out of their heads that this election could have been won if only a better candidate had made a better pitch to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania. Biden, too old and tired to mount a proper campaign, likely would have lost worse than Harris; more to the point, there was nothing even a more invigorated Biden or a less, you know, female alternative could have offered. Racial grievances, dissatisfaction with life’s travails (including substance addiction and lack of education), and resentment toward the villainous elites in faraway cities cannot be placated by housing policy or interest-rate cuts.

No candidate can reason about facts and policies with voters who have no real interest in such things. They like the promises of social revenge that flow from Trump, the tough-guy rhetoric, the simplistic “I will fix it” solutions. And he’s interesting to them, because he supports and encourages their conspiracist beliefs. (I knew Harris was in trouble when I was in Pennsylvania last week for an event and a fairly well-off business owner, who was an ardent Trump supporter, told me that Michelle Obama had conspired with the Canadians to change the state’s vote tally in 2020. And that wasn’t even the weirdest part of the conversation.)

As Jonathan Last, editor of The Bulwark, put it in a social-media post last night: The election went the way it did “because America wanted Trump. That’s it. People reaching to construct [policy] alibis for the public because they don’t want to grapple with this are whistling past the graveyard.” Last worries that we might now be in a transition to authoritarianism of the kind Russia went through in the 1990s, but I visited Russia often in those days, and much of the Russian democratic implosion was driven by genuinely brutal economic conditions and the rapid collapse of basic public services. Americans have done this to themselves during a time of peace, prosperity, and astonishingly high living standards. An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.

The bright spot in all this is that Trump and his coterie must now govern. The last time around, Trump was surrounded by a small group of moderately competent people, and these adults basically put baby bumpers and pool noodles on all the sharp edges of government. This time, Trump will rule with greater power but fewer excuses, and he—and his voters—will have to own the messes and outrages he is already planning to create.

Those voters expect that Trump will hurt others and not them. They will likely be unpleasantly surprised, much as they were in Trump’s first term. (He was, after all, voted out of office for a reason.) For the moment, some number of them have memory-holed that experience and are pretending that his vicious attacks on other Americans are just so much hot air.

Trump, unfortunately, means most of what he says. In this election, he has triggered the unfocused ire and unfounded grievances of millions of voters. Soon we will learn whether he can still trigger their decency—if there is any to be found.

Related:

What Trump understood, and Harris did not Democracy is not over.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

George T. Conway III: What we’re in for Voters wanted lower prices at any cost. Blame Biden, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Trump won. Now what?

Today’s News

The Republicans have won back control of the Senate. Votes are still being counted in multiple House races that could determine which party controls the House. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered a concession speech at Howard University, emphasizing that there will be a peaceful transfer of power. In an interview on Fox News, a Trump spokesperson said that Trump plans to launch “the largest mass-deportation operation of illegal immigrants” on his first day in office.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Trump’s victory is a reverberation of trends set in motion in 2020,” Derek Thompson writes. “In politics, as in nature, the largest tsunami generated by an earthquake is often not the first wave but the next one.”

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Evening Read

OK McCausland for The Atlantic

The Night They Hadn’t Prepared For

By Elaine Godfrey

The vibe shifted sometime around 10:30 p.m. Eastern.

For several hours beforehand, the scene at the Howard University Yard had been jubilant: all glitter and sequins and billowing American flags. The earrings were big, and the risers were full. Men in fraternity jackets and women in pink tweed suits grooved to a bass-forward playlist of hip-hop and classic rock. The Howard gospel choir, in brilliant-blue robes, performed a gorgeous rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” and people sang along in a way that made you feel as if the university’s alumna of the hour, Kamala Harris, had already won.

But Harris had not won—a fact that, by 10:30, had become very noticeable.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Watching the Blue Wall crumble There is no constitutional mandate for fascism. The Democrats’ dashed hopes in Iowa The tyranny of the election needle

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Photographs by Wesaam Al-Badry

It’s the evening rush hour on the Friday before Election Day in Omaha, and about two dozen die-hard Democrats are making a racket. They’re standing on a bridge overpass, cheering, whooping, blowing whistles, holding up little American flags, and waving white signs emblazoned with a blue circle. Even in this Republican area on the outskirts of Nebraska’s biggest city, the cars passing by are honking in approval.

The signs say nothing—it’s just that big blue dot in the middle—but their message is no mystery here. “I don’t think there’s anybody in this city who doesn’t know what the blue dot represents,” Tim Conn, a 70-year-old retiree who has spray-painted a few thousand of the signs in his backyard, told me. More than 13,000 blue dots have popped up on Omaha lawns in the past three months, an expression of political pride in what has become a Democratic stronghold on the eastern edge of a deep-red state.

The blue dots embody a surge of enthusiasm for both Kamala Harris and Omaha’s outsize significance to the national election. Nebraska allocates some of its electoral votes by congressional district, and if Harris defeats Donald Trump in the Rust Belt’s “Blue Wall” states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—while losing the battlegrounds to the south, Omaha and its suburbs would likely deliver her the 270th vote that she needs to win the presidency. The district is so important that Trump and his allies repeatedly pressured Republicans in Nebraska’s legislature to change the rules in his favor. (The legislators rebuffed him a final time in September, and Trump has made little effort since to win Omaha the old-fashioned way—by earning more votes.)

Omaha could also determine control of Congress. Democrats view the GOP-held House district as one of their best opportunities to flip a seat and help recapture the majority. And in at least one postelection scenario, an upset victory by the independent Dan Osborn over Senator Deb Fischer—polls show the race is close—would give him the power to choose which party controls the Senate.

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

All this has made a region that’s hundreds of miles from the nearest swing state a potential tipping point for the balance of federal power. “Nebraska is literally in the middle of everything,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, told me. “They try to say that we’re a flyover state, but ha-ha, joke’s on them.”

Nebraska began splitting up its electoral votes more than three decades ago, but only twice since then has Omaha’s vote in the Second Congressional District gone to a Democrat; Barack Obama won it by a single point in 2008, and Joe Biden beat Trump by six points in 2020.

This year, however, Harris is poised to carry the district by more than either of them. The area is filled with the white, college-educated voters who have largely recoiled from Trump since 2016, and a New York Times/Siena poll last week found the vice president leading by 12 points. Neither Harris nor Trump, nor their running mates, are campaigning in Omaha in the closing days of the election—a sign that both candidates see the district going to Harris.

Still, the Harris campaign and allied groups have spent more than $4 million in the area, which has also imperiled Omaha’s Republican representative, Don Bacon. Trump has spent only around $130,000. “That’s the biggest undertow for us,” Bacon told me on Saturday before a GOP get-out-the-vote rally in a more conservative part of the district. Public polls have shown Bacon’s opponent, the Democratic state senator and former middle-school science teacher Tony Vargas, ahead by a few points. Last week, the Cook Political Report, a leading congressional prognosticator, shifted its rating of the race as a “toss-up” to one that Vargas is slightly favored to win.

Public polls show Tony Vargas, right, narrowly leading his opponent, Republican Representative Don Bacon.  (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

A retired Air Force general serving his fourth term in Congress, Bacon outran Trump in 2020, winning reelection by 4.5 points. He defeated Vargas by a slimmer margin two years ago, and Vargas is running again—this time with more money and more backing from prominent members of his party.

Bacon has positioned himself as a moderate—he’s a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus—and frequently criticized the conservative hard-liners who ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But Bacon has been reluctant to cross Trump, and he lost some supporters by backing the former president’s late push to award all of Nebraska’s electoral votes to the statewide winner, which would have effectively stripped power from many of his own constituents. “They’re so mad about that,” Vargas told me on Saturday, noting that Bacon received an endorsement from Trump soon after he signed a letter supporting the change. “Now we know what Don Bacon actually is. He’ll sell out Nebraskans if it means holding on to his seat of power.” At an Osborn event the next day, I met a former Republican and Bacon voter, Paul Anderson, who told me that he wrote in a friend’s name on his ballot rather than support Bacon again. “He’s afraid of Donald J. Trump,” Anderson said.

Vargas’s previous campaign and his plentiful TV ads have made him a recognizable face in the district. When one elderly woman answered her door on Saturday and saw him standing on her stoop, her eyes widened as if he were Ed McMahon about to hand her a giant check. She assured Vargas that both she and her daughter would vote for him. “I’ll remember, don’t worry,” she said. As we walked away, Vargas showed me the canvassing app on his phone: The woman was a registered Republican.

For Nebraska Democrats, the most pleasant Election Night surprise would involve a race in which they haven’t even fielded a candidate. Osborn, a Navy veteran and local union leader, rejected the party’s endorsement and elected to campaign instead as an independent, and he’s stunned Republicans and Democrats alike by running nearly even with Fischer, a two-term incumbent who won both her previous races by more than 15 points.

Osborn has caught on with a cross-partisan, populist campaign that mixes support for abortion rights, labor unions, and campaign-finance reform with a hawkish, Trump-like stance on border security. Republicans in the state have accused him of being a Democrat in disguise, but he’s appealed to voters in Nebraska’s conservative rural west by backing so-called Right to Repair laws—popular with farmers. He has also hammered Fischer’s opposition to rail-safety measures and her vote that delayed the provision of benefits to military veterans injured by toxic burn pits. In one commercial, Osborn, a longtime mechanic, takes a blowtorch to a TV showing one of Fischer’s attack ads.

Mostly, though, he seems to be winning support by criticizing both parties, and his success is validating his decision to spurn the Democrats. “This wouldn’t be close if he were running as the Democratic candidate,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who has written about the “two-party doom loop,” a term Osborn has used during the campaign. Osborn has vowed to stay independent and said that he would refuse to align with the GOP or the Democratic Party as a senator (unlike the four independents currently serving in the Senate, who all caucus with the Democrats).

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Osborn’s pledge has its doubters, including fans such as Drutman. If either party has a clear majority, Osborn might be able to stay independent. But if both Osborn and Harris win, and Republicans wind up with exactly 50 Senate seats, his refusal to caucus with either party would hand the GOP a majority—and with it the ability to block Harris’s agenda and potentially her nominees to the Supreme Court. “There’s going to be so much pressure on him,” Drutman told me, “and he’s going to have to build a pretty strong infrastructure around him to manage that.”

Osborn has insisted that he wouldn’t budge. “I want to challenge the system, because the system needs to be challenged,” he told me. Osborn acknowledged that leaders in both parties “are gonna come knocking on my door, and then that’s going to allow me to use leverage to make deals for Nebraska.” Yet he gave other indications that he’d want to empower Democrats. He told me, for instance, that he supported filibuster reform and would back the Democrats’ push to remove the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to pass a law restoring abortion rights—a move the party might be able to make only if he helped them assemble a majority.

Republicans are confident that, come Wednesday morning, the question of Osborn’s party alliance will be moot. The national GOP has sent money and reinforcements to rescue Fischer’s bid—Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas was stumping for her on Saturday—and her campaign has released polls showing her ahead of Osborn by several points. Independent candidates have threatened Republican incumbents a few times in recent years, only to fall short when GOP voters rallied around their party’s candidate in elections’ final weeks; in Kansas in 2014, the independent Greg Orman was polling close to Senator Pat Roberts for much of the campaign, but he lost by more than 10 points.

Left: Veterans protest at Republican Senator Deb Fischer’s rally on Saturday. Center: Senator Tom Cotton stumps for Fischer. Right: Dan Osborn, Fischer’s challenger, has run nearly even with her in polling. (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

Fischer has kept a low profile as a senator, and Republicans privately say she initially did not take Osborn seriously enough as a challenger. She’s embraced Trump in the apparent hope that his coattails will carry her to victory. When I asked Fischer why the race was so close, she pointed at me and the other national reporters who had come to one of her final rallies. “I explain his success to you folks in large part,” she said, “because I think you wanted to see a race here and you believed a lot of his polls that he put out early. We are going to win this race, and we are going to have a strong, strong showing.”

For his part, Osborn is courting Trump voters aggressively, recognizing that he cannot win with Democrats and independents alone. He has refused to say whether he’s voting for Trump or Harris. “As soon as I say who I’m voting for, I become that,” he told me. But Osborn’s closing ads leave the distinct impression that he’s backing Trump. “I’m where President Trump is on corruption, China, the border,” he says in one. “If Trump needs help building the wall, well, I’m pretty handy.”

Osborn’s rightward turn has made it awkward for Democrats like Kleeb, the state party chair, who is clearly rooting for him even if she can’t say so publicly. “Yeah, it’s complicated!” she said when I asked about Osborn, letting out a big laugh. Kleeb told me she’s frustrated that Osborn has backed Trump on border policy and even more so that he assails both Republicans and Democrats as corrupt. “It’s unfair to criticize us as the same,” she said. Still, Kleeb continued, it’s obvious that on most issues, Osborn is preferable to Fischer, a down-the-line Republican: “We’ve told all of our Democratic voters—you need to weigh the issues that you deeply care about and who is closest to you. That’s who we suggest you vote for.”

To most Democrats in Omaha, the choice is easy. When I visited Jason Brown and Ruth Huebner-Brown, I found an Osborn sign on a front lawn festooned with campaign placards. None were bigger, however, than the one Jason created: the blue dot.

The Browns have been Harris enthusiasts since 2019, when she was their first choice in the crowded field of Democratic primary contenders then campaigning over the Iowa state line a few miles away. Inspired by the Democratic National Convention’s exhortation to “do something,” Jason began tinkering in their garage. He cut off the top of a bucket, used it to outline a circle, and spray-painted over a sign for a local lawn service. He showed it to Ruth and asked if he should add any writing, like Vote or Kamala. “No,” she replied. “It makes you stop and think for a second. Just leave it plain.”

Attendees pray at a Fischer rally (left), and the Browns make blue-dot signs (right). (Wesaam Al-Badry for The Atlantic)

They put the sign up in their yard in August, and soon after, neighbors started asking where they had gotten it and whether they could get one too. Before long, the Browns were ordering blank white signs from Amazon, first by the tens, and then by the hundreds. Jason made the first couple thousand by hand in their backyard, and then they enlisted the help of another neighbor, Conn, who had better equipment. After they had distributed 5,000 blue dots, the Browns finally gave up and started having them mass-produced by a political-sign company.

Jason and Ruth were telling me the story as we sat at their dining-room table, where they resembled the kind of superfans you might see satirized in a Christopher Guest movie. Both wore blue-dot T-shirts over blue jeans and blue long-sleeved shirts. Jason, 53, had a Kamala hat and blue shoes—he also has blue-shaded sunglasses—while Ruth, 58, wore blue-dot–shaped earrings. As we were speaking, the doorbell rang: A pair of young men were there to pick up more signs. (They give them out for free, though most people make donations that cover their costs.) The Browns have taken a leave of absence from their consulting business through the election; earlier this fall, they postponed a long-planned cruise.

At first, they told me, they saw the signs as part of an education campaign, because they found that many Omaha voters did not appreciate the city’s importance in the presidential election. Although the Second District has had its own electoral vote since the 1990s, the reapportionment following the 2020 census has made it more important for Harris than it was for past Democratic candidates—a result of shrinking blue states losing electoral votes to growing red ones. (In 2020, Biden wouldn’t have needed the district’s vote to reach 270, so long as he carried the Blue Wall states; he ultimately won 306 electoral votes.)

[Ronald Brownstein: The Democratic theory of winning with less]

As the blue dots took off, the Browns said they came to represent a sense of local pride, as well as inspiration to Democrats who feel isolated and powerless in red states. Ruth has tried to keep the vibe positive—she calls the signs “happy blue dots”—but she told me that the anxiety Democrats feel about the election has also played a part in the movement’s popularity. “I think there’s more enthusiasm because people are more scared this time,” she said.

I mentioned that I had spoken with one Democrat who worried that if Omaha delivered the election to Harris, Trump would make another attempt to lean on Republicans in the legislature to hand him all of Nebraska’s votes before the Electoral College meets in December. The Second District’s vote was saved in September by a GOP holdout, Mike McDonnell, who resisted pressure from other Republicans. Would he hold firm if he was all that stood in the way of Trump’s election?

Jason told me he’s sure that Republicans would come for the blue dot again, and he’s prepared for one more fight. If Omaha is responsible for electing Harris, “we’ll be running up and down that street, waving flags, tears of joy,” he said, “followed by, Oh, shit.”