Since Donald Trump won reelection, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have both done what the now-president-elect and his fellow Republicans refused to do in 2020: publicly accept loss and advocate for a peaceful transition of power.

In a Thursday morning speech outside the White House, Biden told Americans, “We accept the choice the country made.”

“I’ve said many times,” he continued, “you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.” He added, “Something I hope we can do, no matter who you voted for, is to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Bring down the temperature.”

The remarks, both unifying and a call for calm, sharply contrasted with the Trump campaign’s rhetoric in the final stretch of the election, which included Trump just this weekend saying he would be “ok” with journalists being shot at. Biden’s speech was also radically different from the near-constant conspiracy theories Trump and his allies promoted after Trump lost the 2020 election—which, as recently as today, he has continued to insist he won.

President Biden: "Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable … The American experiment endures. We're going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged. We need to keep going." https://t.co/627FiKv7Sz pic.twitter.com/hZoGsFc7yl

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2024

Seemingly alluding to Trump’s attacks on the voting system, Biden on Thursday also added that he hoped “we can lay to rest a question about the integrity of the American electoral system. It is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent, and it can be trusted, win or lose,” he said. Of course, now that Trump has won, the GOP suddenly appears to agree with this, despite the fact that they and their candidate spent years sowing doubt in the electoral system—including up until election night.

The president also told Americans who voted for Harris they had to keep the faith and keep peacefully fighting for what they believe in. “Setbacks are unavoidable,” Biden said. “Giving up is unforgivable.”

“The American experiment endures, we’re going to be okay, but we need to stay engaged,” the president added. “We need to keep going, and above all, need to keep the faith.”

Harris struck a similar tone during her concession speech at Howard University on Wednesday. “The outcome of this election is not what we wanted, not what we fought for, not what we voted for,” Harris told the crowd. “But hear me when I say, hear me when I say, the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting.”

Harris also acknowledged that “folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now,” but urged her supporters to still accept the election results.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she continued. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

The dual speeches came at a moment of widespread concerns that American democracy and so many civil liberties hang in the balance with Trump’s return to power. But with a future so unknown—and even frightening—to many, both Harris’ and Biden’s post-election remarks reminded Americans what leadership looks like: recognition of, and respect for, the will of the people, and a reminder that the future of American democracy remains worth peacefully fighting for.

Spokespeople for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the coming days, you will hear every imaginable take on why Americans voted to put Donald Trump back in office.

Pundits will say toxic masculinity was to blame—and men feeling usurped by women. They’ll say it was the Christian nationalism movement. A surprising shift in Latino voting patterns. Sexism. Racism. Transphobia. Elon Musk. Crypto bros. “Theo bros.” Housing prices. Gaza! Propaganda from Fox News and Newsmax. Misinformation on X.

Perhaps it was the cowardice of powerful men like Jeff Bezos and Jamie Dimon. The anti-immigrant frenzy—Trump’s incessant false claims about vicious murderers and rapists and mental patients swarming across the border like locusts. Property crime. Inflation. Interest rates. Lingering malaise from the pandemic. The Democrats’ failure to sell their economic wins. Kamala Harris’ inability to distance herself from an unpopular president.

Or maybe a combination of all these things. Gender and Gaza clearly made a difference. Inflation is a notorious regime killer—it was high inflation that underpinned the rise of fascism in Europe in the last century—and rising wages haven’t kept pace. When the Dems say, “Look, inflation is back to normal,” well, the price of groceries sure ain’t.

But I’m talking here about something even more basic, something that undergirds so much of America’s discontent. The best explanation, after all, is often the simplest:

Wealth inequality.

There is little that leaves people as pissed off and frustrated as the feeling that no matter how hard they work, they can’t ever seem to get ahead. And this feeling has been slowly festering since the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and his cadre of supply-side economists launched the first salvos in what would become the great fucking-over of the American middle and working classes.

Half of the families in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all. Is it any wonder some of them are willing to see the system burn?

The frustration was evident in something two very different women in two very different states told me on the very same day in 2022 for a story on how America spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year subsidizing retirement plans mostly for rich people: “I’m going to have to work until I die.”

The great fucking-over commenced with President Reagan’s gutting of unions and the wealth-friendly tax cuts he signed into law in 1981 and 1986. The trend continued with George W. Bush’s tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, and culminated with the Trump tax cuts of 2017—which, like all of those other Republican initiatives, failed to generate the degreee of growth and prosperity the supply-siders promised. They did, however, make the rich richer as wages stagnated and the middle class shriveled.

We talk a lot about income inequality, but wealth and income are different beasts. Income is what pays your bills. Wealth is your security—and in that regard, most American families are just not feeling sufficiently secure.

In January 1981, when Reagan took office, the households of the Middle 40—that’s the 50th to 90th wealth percentiles—held a collective 31.5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Fast-forward to January 2022: Their share of the pie had dwindled to 25.7 percent, even as the combined wealth of the richest 0.01 percent of households soared from less than 3 percent of the total to 11 percent.

Put another way, 18,300 US households—a tiny fraction—now control more than a tenth of the nation’s wealth.

And what of the bottom 50 percent? How have they fared over the past four decades or so? When Reagan came in, their average household wealth was a paltry $944. (All figures are in 2023 dollars.) Today they have even less—just $659 on average, according to projections from Real Time Inequality, a site based on data from the Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. All told, those 92.2 million households now hold less than 0.05 percent of the nation’s wealth—which rounds down to zero. In short, half of the people living in the richest nation on the planet have no wealth at all.

They’re not doing so hot income-wise, either. In September, the Congressional Budget Office reported that average income of the highest-earning 1 percent of taxpayers in 2021 was more than $3.1 million, or 42 times the average income of households in the bottom 90 percent, according to the nonprofit Americans for Tax Fairness. That’s the most skewed income distribution since CBO began reporting this data in 1979, the group noted. Back then, the disparity was only 12 to 1.

And the billionaires? I’m glad you asked. Based on Forbes data, from January 1, 2018, when the Trump cuts took effect, to April 1 of this year, the nation’s 806 billionaires saw a 57 percent gain in their collective wealth—after adjusting for the inflation that has plagued working families.

Team Biden has actually done a good bit for the middle class, and tried to do more, but nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month.

“It’s a class and inequality story for sure,” Richard Reeves, the author of 2017’s Dream Hoarders, concurred when I ran my premise by him. “But it’s also a gendered class story.” (His latest book, Of Boys and Men, examines how “the social and economic world of men has been turned upside down.”) And he’s right.

But are you starting to see why the broader electorate, race and gender notwithstanding, might be just a little fed up?

I suppose, having also written a book about wealth in America, that I know enough to assert that wealth insecurity is fundamental.

But why, you might ask, would someone living on the edge vote for Republicans, whose wage-suppressing, union-busting, benefit-denying policies have only tended to make the poor and the middle class more miserable?

And why in the name of Heaven would they vote for Trump, a billionaire born with a silver spoon in his mouth who has lied and cheated his way through life? A man whose latest tax-cut plans—though some, like eliminating taxes on tips and Social Security income, can sound progressive—will be deeply regressive, giving ever more to the rich and rationalizing cuts that will hurt the poor and middle class and accelerate global climate chaos.

The reason, my friends, may well be that those on the losing end of our thriving economy don’t see it as thriving. Historically, every election cycle, when reporters fan out to ask low-income voters in swing states what they are thinking, the message has been roughly the same: Presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans, come around here every four years and talk their talk, and then they leave and forget about us when it comes to policy.

Now that’s not entirely fair, because the Biden administration actually has done a good bit for working people and families of color, and has proposed all sorts of measures to make the tax code fairer and reduce the wealth gap (both the racial one and the general one)—including increasing taxes and IRS enforcement for the super-rich. But one can only get so far with a split Senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on your team, and a rival party that would just as soon throw you into a lake of fire as support your initiatives.

And nuance is a hard sell when you’re pitching yourself to families worried about whether they can make it to the end of the month. Roughly half of the population barely gets by, has no stocks, no wealth, no retirement savings, and can’t imagine how they’ll ever afford a house—certainly not at current interest rates. Meanwhile, the billionaire techno-dicks are strutting around, publicly flexing their wealth and power with Democrats and Republicans alike.

In courting Americans who, fairly or not, feel like the system has never done them a bit of good, Team Trump has the rhetorical advantage, because he says he’ll destroy that system—even if that really just means he’ll subvert it to further enrich his buddies. “Populist Revolt Against Elite’s Vision of the U.S.” was one of the New York Times’ headlines after the race was called on Wednesday morning. And that’s absolutely right.

Because when the Republicans say, “The economy is a nightmare under Biden and Harris, and illegal immigrants are committing heinous crimes and taking your jobs and we’re gonna cut your taxes,” and the Dems counter, “Hey, none of that is really true and we actually did a lot and we feel your pain and the economy is going gangbusters and Trump’s tariffs will destroy it,” well, whom do you think a person struggling from paycheck to paycheck might be more inclined to believe?

Sure, the economy is doing great—if you own stock. If you have a well-paying job and a retirement plan. If you are in the top fifth of the wealth and income spectrums.

If not, even if you rightly suspect that the Republicans won’t do a damn thing to improve your lot, you might just be tempted to say, “Fuck it.”

And watch the system burn.

Kamala Harris conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon in a speech at Howard University. Addressing a crowd of sometimes tearful supporters, Harris emphasized the need to accept Trump’s victory but continue “the fight for our country.” “While I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign,” she said.

In her concession speech, Vice President Kamala Harris urged her supporters to accept her election loss against President-elect Donald Trump. pic.twitter.com/cwr3XjJzwH

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 6, 2024

Harris told the crowd she had spoken to Trump earlier in the day and pledged to “engage in a peaceful transfer of power” and help the next president’s team with the transition. In the speech, Harris urged her supporters to accept the outcome of the election. “A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election we accept the results,” Harris said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.” She also added, “We owe loyalty not to a president or a party, but to the constitution of the United States.”

Harris struck an energizing note, pointing to the need to continue pushing to protect abortion rights and the right to freedom from gun violence. “I will never give up the fight for a future where Americans can pursue their dreams, ambitions, and aspirations, where the women of America have the freedom to make decisions about their own body,” she said.

The vice president encouraged her supporters “to organize, to mobilize, and to stay engaged.” “On the campaign, I would often say, ‘when we fight, we win,'” she said. “But here’s the thing. Sometimes the fight takes a while. That doesn’t mean we won’t win.”

“Do not despair,” Harris concluded. “This is not a time to throw up our hands. This is a time to roll up our sleeves.”

Inside a museum in Oakland, not far from where Kamala Harris launched her first bid for the presidency back in 2019, Lateefah Simon, a Democrat whom Harris mentored, declared victory in her congressional race on Tuesday night. Early ballot returns showed her with 63 percent of the vote, though results were still coming in Wednesday morning.

Simon is regarded as “a rising star within Bay Area politics and the Democratic Party,” and Oaklanders tried to celebrate her win as a bright spot while television screens around the room showed Donald Trump claiming more and more electoral votes. “We have no idea what our reality will be tomorrow: the threat of mass deportation…of women not having control over their bodies. Let’s keep organizing,” Simon told a crowd of supporters.

“Our fight has always been an enduring fight,” she added. “We have been in this place before of uncertainty.”

Simon’s political career owes much to two mentors: US Rep. Barbara Lee, whose seat Simon now plans to take in the House, and Vice President Kamala Harris. Simon met Harris more than 20 years ago. At the time, Simon was a young mother who’d been running a San Francisco nonprofit helping girls in the criminal justice system and organizing sex workers. Harris was a lawyer at the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office, and they both served on a task force that aimed to stop criminalizing young people who’d been sex trafficked. When Harris became DA in 2004, she asked Simon, who’d started running the nonprofit at age 19, to come over to the prosecutor’s office and try to make the system better.

Simon demurred—she’d spent time in the juvenile justice system herself and “never wanted to work for The Man,” she told my colleague Jamilah King in 2018—but Harris was persistent: “She was like…Do you forever want to be on the stairs yelling and begging for people to support you, your cause? Why can’t you fix it from the inside?” Simon recalled.

“Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process, but I’ve never shied away from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.”

Together, Harris and Simon created a program called Back on Track that helped nonviolent offenders earn a diploma and get job training instead of going to prison. Today, Simon describes Harris as a mentor and “auntie”—Harris gifted Simon her first suit and urged her to go to college, even inspecting her report cards. “She saw me before I saw myself, in a lot of ways,” Simon told King.

It was at Mills College where Simon met Lee, who held her House seat for more than a quarter century before running an unsuccessful campaign to replace Dianne Feinstein in the Senate after Feinstein’s death last fall. Over the weekend, Lee and Simon went together to cast their ballots at the former Mills campus. “Congratulations again, my sister!” Lee said from a video at the election night party, calling in from DC, as the polls showed Simon leading handily over her opponent, Jennifer Tran, a political newcomer who campaigned in part on getting tougher on crime.

The party continued, but no one could ignore the presidential results trickling in from outside this progressive enclave. Some people in Oakland had been hopeful that Harris, who was born in the city, would make history. But as the night went on, it was hard for the partygoers to mask their concern. “Shit, he improved his performance from 2020,” a woman said as she waited outside for a ride, looking anxiously at Trump’s results on her phone. A Trump presidency would be “devastating for disabled people, for women, for people of color,” Simon told me earlier in the evening, shortly after California polls closed.

Progressives in Oakland also appeared to be marching toward losses in other important races, including the recall of the Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and District Attorney Pamela Price, both progressive women of color. Inside, I ran into Pastor B.K. Woodson, who’d opposed the recalls. “I’m very concerned,” for the nation, he told me, “because we have a large part of America that’s okay with retribution, violence, and intolerance.”

“We’re going to push forward, we’re going to organize,” Simon told me, bringing the conversation back to her constituents: “There are literally thousands of people tonight that are sleeping on the streets of Alameda County; they deserve leaders that are going to focus on shifting their material conditions.” During her campaign, Simon pledged to invest more in affordable housing, addiction treatment, and mental health care; close loopholes in federal gun laws; and push for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

Though Harris’ outcome in this election was not as rosy, Simon’s win is a sign of Harris’ impact, and the impact of other Black leaders before her. On the video at the event, Rep. Lee spoke of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to run as a major party presidential candidate, who “opened that door for you and for me.” Months ago, before the primary, Simon told me that Simon’s oldest daughter, who as a kid spent time playing in Harris’ office, recently became a prosecutor in DC. “She saw Kamala do it, and she was like, I can be a Black woman and a prosecutor” who helps people.

Simon, herself, has left a legacy to uphold: After working with Harris, she led an organization focused on racial justice in Oakland and was later elected to the Bay Area Rapid Transit Board of Directors. (Simon was born legally blind and depended on BART trains to get to work and take her daughter to school.) She also co-chaired Gov. Gavin Newsom’s task force on police reform in 2020. And the nonprofit she ran in her youth, now called the Young Women’s Freedom Center, remains important to her. Several of the center’s staffers were there at the museum on Tuesday to support her, including Julia Arroyo, its executive director. “It means a lot for a lot of our young people to see her in this position of leadership,” Arroyo said.

“Lateefah was born in the revolution,” Simon’s uncle, Timothy Simon, told the crowd. “She was born of parents who believed in a Black economic agenda. She was born of grandparents who were part of the great migration here to California, seeking opportunity and fleeing those red states that Lateefah is about to take on in the House of Representatives.”

It’s a mandate that Simon seems eager to embrace. “I’m ready to go,” she told me. “Vitriol is poisonous to our democratic process,” she said, referring to Trump’s message, “but I’ve never shied away from any fight, and I’m gonna lead us forward.”

Former President Donald Trump will be returning to the White House for a second time after beating Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election.

After running on a dark campaign of retribution, Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in his victory speech at the Palm Beach County convention, where thousands of his jubliant supporters had assembled for what Trump promised would be “the last rally.” In his speech, he declared his intention to “help the country heal,” and promised that his next administration would be “the golden age of America.” He thanked his campaign, and after Sen. JD Vance said a few words, Trump quipped, “Turned out to be a good choice!”

Among the others he thanks for his victory were podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von, in an acknowledgement of the underappreciated role that the medium played in his outreach to the young men who helped return him to office. Trump barely mentioned his opponent in the race and instead focused on his remarkable comeback, which Trump called “a triumph of democracy.”

“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said.

After President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee in July, polls showed the race at a virtual dead heat, with both candidates within the margin of error in all the major swing states. But Trump succeeded in breaching the “blue wall” state of Pennsylvania that Harris could not afford to lose. He also won handily in North Carolina, Georgia, and appeared very likely to take Wisconsin, meaning he was certain to exceed the 270 electoral votes he needed to win a second term.

Harris did well with women voters of all ages and regions, but it wasn’t enough to make up the lost ground she lost among Black men and especially Latino voters, who appeared to break in surprisingly large numbers for Trump. Trump’s campaign had focused on peeling off support from those traditionally Democratic groups, and while they still voted in force for Harris, enough switched sides to make a difference.

As a 2024 candidate, Trump himself was no more disciplined than he was in 2016 or 2020. But his campaign was far more professional than it had been in his previous races. “Donald Trump is a movement,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told me in the spring. “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.”

A lot of that, Davis suspected, could be credited to campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.”

In October, though, Trump seemed to revert to form when he brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold and promised to put him in charge of “making America healthy again.” Kennedy proceeded to make news with kooky promises that the second Trump administration would ban childhood vaccines and get rid of fluoride in drinking water.

Trump also briefly brought back Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager who in 2021 fell out of Trump’s orbit after the wife of a big donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Despite this series of self-inflicted wounds, campaign co-chairs LaCivita and Susie Wiles ultimately let “Trump be Trump” while keeping the rest of the campaign on track and focused.

During the closing days of the campaign, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was “double dipping” and making millions from Trump’s campaign and its ad buys (he denied the claim vociferously). The Atlantic later reported that the story had infuriated Trump, who considered firing LaCivita. In previous campaigns, Trump had hired and fired a handful of campaign managers, including Paul Manafort, who ended up going to prison for money laundering, tax fraud, and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. (Trump later pardoned him.) But Wiles and LaCivita managed to stay on for the strong finish.

Trump also consolidated his support among the nation’s business leaders in a way he had not in his previous two campaigns. Most notably, billionaire Elon Musk took a starring role in Trump’s campaign, spending $150 million of his own money to fund a last minute get-out-the vote effort by paying an army of canvassers to knock on doors for the candidate. Whether Musk can really take credit for Trump’s victory is an open question. Especially because some of those workers seemed to be doing a good job of taking Musk’s money and not too much else.

News reports noted that as many as a quarter of the voter contacts made by Musk’s canvassers in Arizona and Nevada were bogus, as the workers figured out how to game the canvassing app to look as though they were out beating the bushes for every last vote when in fact they were hanging out at Starbucks. But Trump’s victory will undoubtedly be viewed as a victory for Musk as well, and perhaps serve as encouragement for other oligarchs to take a more direct role in running campaigns, leaving the national party even weaker.  

Trump has promised that among his first acts upon taking office will be to close the border, free some of the incarcerated January 6 rioters, fire Special Counsel Jack Smith (who has been investigating Trump for his mishandling of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 riot), and launch his campaign of mass deportations.

Some time before the race was called, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign informed her supporters that she would not be speaking tonight, and would address them in the morning.

This article has been revised to reflect the latest election results.

Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation.

Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance.

Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The answer is yes.

Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—more than half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe autocrat to lead the nation once again. Trumpism triumphed, and the godhead of this cult has become both the first fascist and the first convicted felon to win an American presidential election.

Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Vice President Kamala Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a criminal awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution?

The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites.

There was nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.”

Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, more than 71 million Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris campaigned not only to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics, but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate.

The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance.

At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything and former President Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared, “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them.

Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted President Joe Biden and Harris were to blame.

Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.

It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.”

American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he lied, he insulted, he appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems.

These were profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to choose which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash in values for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, voters were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms.

At this fork in the road, Americans made a decision on what sort of country the United States will be. A judgment has been reached: This is a nation to be ruled by Trump’s politics of hate. It can happen here, and it has.

Former President Donald Trump will be returning to the White House for a second time after beating Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s election.

After running on a dark campaign of retribution, Trump tried to strike a conciliatory tone in his victory speech at the Palm Beach County convention, where thousands of his jubliant supporters had assembled for what Trump promised would be “the last rally.” In his speech, he declared his intention to “help the country heal,” and promised that his next administration would be “the golden age of America.” He thanked his campaign, and after Sen. JD Vance said a few words, Trump quipped, “Turned out to be a good choice!”

Among the others he thanks for his victory were podcasters Joe Rogan and Theo Von, in an acknowledgement of the underappreciated role that the medium played in his outreach to the young men who helped return him to office. Trump barely mentioned his opponent in the race and instead focused on his remarkable comeback, which Trump called “a triumph of democracy.”

“It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us,” he said.

After President Joe Biden stepped down and Harris became the Democratic nominee in July, polls showed the race at a virtual dead heat, with both candidates within the margin of error in all the major swing states. But Trump succeeded in breaching the “blue wall” state of Pennsylvania that Harris could not afford to lose. He also won handily in North Carolina, Georgia, and appeared very likely to take Wisconsin, meaning he was certain to exceed the 270 electoral votes he needed to win a second term.

Harris did well with women voters of all ages and regions, but it wasn’t enough to make up the lost ground she lost among Black men and especially Latino voters, who appeared to break in surprisingly large numbers for Trump. Trump’s campaign had focused on peeling off support from those traditionally Democratic groups, and while they still voted in force for Harris, enough switched sides to make a difference.

As a 2024 candidate, Trump himself was no more disciplined than he was in 2016 or 2020. But his campaign was far more professional than it had been in his previous races. “Donald Trump is a movement,” former Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told me in the spring. “That’s how he won this thing originally. But it was kind of rag tag. This time he has everything going for him. He has a huge, disciplined ground operation, a coordinated message operation.”

A lot of that, Davis suspected, could be credited to campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita. “He’s the kind of guy that Trump listens to outside of the family and can take control.”

In October, though, Trump seemed to revert to form when he brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold and promised to put him in charge of “making America healthy again.” Kennedy proceeded to make news with kooky promises that the second Trump administration would ban childhood vaccines and get rid of fluoride in drinking water.

Trump also briefly brought back Corey Lewandowski, his 2016 campaign manager who in 2021 fell out of Trump’s orbit after the wife of a big donor accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. Despite this series of self-inflicted wounds, campaign co-chairs LaCivita and Susie Wiles ultimately let “Trump be Trump” while keeping the rest of the campaign on track and focused.

During the closing days of the campaign, the Daily Beast published a story alleging that LaCivita was “double dipping” and making millions from Trump’s campaign and its ad buys (he denied the claim vociferously). The Atlantic later reported that the story had infuriated Trump, who considered firing LaCivita. In previous campaigns, Trump had hired and fired a handful of campaign managers, including Paul Manafort, who ended up going to prison for money laundering, tax fraud, and illegal foreign lobbying connected to his years working for Ukrainian politicians. (Trump later pardoned him.) But Wiles and LaCivita managed to stay on for the strong finish.

Trump also consolidated his support among the nation’s business leaders in a way he had not in his previous two campaigns. Most notably, billionaire Elon Musk took a starring role in Trump’s campaign, spending $150 million of his own money to fund a last minute get-out-the vote effort by paying an army of canvassers to knock on doors for the candidate. Whether Musk can really take credit for Trump’s victory is an open question. Especially because some of those workers seemed to be doing a good job of taking Musk’s money and not too much else.

News reports noted that as many as a quarter of the voter contacts made by Musk’s canvassers in Arizona and Nevada were bogus, as the workers figured out how to game the canvassing app to look as though they were out beating the bushes for every last vote when in fact they were hanging out at Starbucks. But Trump’s victory will undoubtedly be viewed as a victory for Musk as well, and perhaps serve as encouragement for other oligarchs to take a more direct role in running campaigns, leaving the national party even weaker.  

Trump has promised that among his first acts upon taking office will be to close the border, free some of the incarcerated January 6 rioters, fire Special Counsel Jack Smith (who has been investigating Trump for his mishandling of classified documents and his role in fomenting the January 6 riot), and launch his campaign of mass deportations.

Some time before the race was called, Cedric Richmond, co-chair of Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign informed her supporters that she would not be speaking tonight, and would address them in the morning.

This article has been revised to reflect the latest election results.

Every election is a Judgment Day, but this one more so than any other in the history of the nation.

Never before has a major party run a nominee described by retired military leaders who worked with him as a “fascist” and a serious threat to American democracy. Never before has the electorate been provided the choice of a nominee who previously refused to accept vote tallies, falsely declared victory, covertly schemed to overturn an election, and incited a violent assault on the US Capitol to stay in power, as well as one whose mismanagement of a pandemic caused the avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of Americans. Never before have Americans been asked to return to office a politician who waged a massive disinformation operation fueled by the most vicious vitriol to exploit hatred, racism, misogyny, and ignorance.

Is America a nation that accepts and embraces all that? The answer is yes.

Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—more than half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe autocrat to lead the nation once again. Trumpism triumphed, and the godhead of this cult has become both the first fascist and the first convicted felon to win an American presidential election.

Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, Vice President Kamala Harris, a latecomer to the race, ran a conventional campaign. She touted the accomplishments of the Biden-Harris administration, presented a compelling personal story, offered a host of generally realistic policy proposals, and critiqued her opponent—doing all of this mostly accurately. Her last-minute elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket raised the question of whether the United States could elect a Black woman president. Counterpoised was another question: Can a criminal awaiting sentencing (found guilty of falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to keep secret his supposed extramarital affair with a porn star) who has been indicted for other alleged crimes, and who has called for the termination of the Constitution (so he could be reinstalled as president), be elected commander in chief and the nation’s top defender of the Constitution?

The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites.

There was nothing subtle about the 2024 election. It pit the political extremism Trump has embraced and fomented to drive his red-meat base to the polls against Harris’ effort to expand her pool of voters by forging an alliance of progressives and independents, centrists, and Republicans concerned about the danger Trump poses to democracy. More so than in his previous campaigns, Trump endeavored to demonize his opponents. He peddled the false claim that the United States has descended into a hellscape with an economy in a “depression” and gangs of criminal migrants armed with military-style weapons conquering towns and cities across the land. Looking to stoke grievance, resentment, and bigotry, he asserted that “evil” Democrats, assisted by a subversive media, have purposefully conspired to destroy the country. He essentially QAnonized American politics. He dismissed Harris as “low IQ” and not truly Black. He called her supporters “scum.”

Trump debased the national discourse further than he had in the years since he launched his first presidential bid in 2015. That included violent talk of retribution, which included suggesting deploying the US military against “radical left lunatics,” putting Liz Cheney on trial for treason before a military tribunal and placing her before a line of guns, and executing retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

For years, Trump has forced American politics into a downward spiral of unprecedented indecencies and anti-democratic impulses. And this year, more than 71 million Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris campaigned not only to implement a host of left-leaning policies related to such fundamental matters as health care, women’s freedom, and middle-class economics, but to prevent a would-be autocrat from gaining control of the US government. That’s a heavy lift for any one candidate.

The visions of America presented by the two candidates were black-and-white opposites. At Trump rallies, the former reality TV celebrity staged his own version of the Two Minutes Hate that George Orwell envisioned in 1984. He decried his rivals—“the enemy within”—for sabotaging America and directed his followers to vent tribalistic fury at these targets, exploiting their rage and, yes, ignorance.

At one of his final rallies—held in a half-empty arena in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday—when Trump called Harris dumb, he was met by approving and angry shouts from the crowd: “She’s an idiot.” “She’s a moron.” “She’s a puppet.” “Lock her up.” One Trump supporter there told me Harris was too stupid to make a decision about anything and former President Barack Obama was calling all the shots. Another Trump devotee wore a sweatshirt that declared, “Say No to the Hoe.” (Racism and misogyny in a single slur.) One of the most anticipated moments of Trump’s rambling and repetitive speech occurred when he assailed the press. As soon as he started his now-familiar anti-media screed, many in the audience pivoted to face the journalists and TV crews on the riser toward the rear of the arena, shook their fists at them, and screamed profanities. This seemed to be fun for them.

Attendees I spoke with echoed Trump’s talking points, insisting that gangs of thugs from overseas are terrorizing American cities, that the nation is a crime-ridden disaster, that US government funds are being siphoned from a host of programs and handed to immigrants, and that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One fellow said he was for Trump because his 401(k) retirement fund was strong when Trump was president and now was in the dumps. When I explained that’s virtually impossible, given the Dow Jones average is now more than 44 percent higher than its best mark during the Trump years, he just shrugged and insisted President Joe Biden and Harris were to blame.

Some were unaware that retired Gens. John Kelly and Milley had called Trump a “fascist.” Those in the know dismissed these remarks as comments uttered by traitorous men envious of Trump or being paid by dark forces to undermine the Republican nominee. Many in the audience were wearing hats and T-shirts proclaiming Jesus backed Trump, and the ones I asked about this said that since Jesus had chosen Trump to be the victor in this race, only cheating could defy God’s will. (Apparently, God and Jesus can’t stop the steal.) Indeed, most of the Trump people I encountered said they would not accept a Harris win as legitimate, and a few remarked that there would be violence if Trump were declared the loser. They were fundamentalists: The nation must be Trump-led or all is lost.

It’s not a radical observation that Trump tried to win through hate. Harris, as was much commented upon when she became the presidential nominee, talked up joy. At her rallies, she highlighted the rhetoric and values of community, noting that Americans can work together to address challenges. She repeatedly promised to listen to those who oppose her views and consider Republicans for posts in her administration if she were to prevail. That might have been just nice talk. But it was better than fueling division and, as Trump did, vowing to use the power of the presidency to investigate and prosecute critics and opponents and to root out of the federal government civil servants deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. Certainly, there was anger on the Democratic side: over the Dobbs decision and those politicians enacting or advocating severe restrictions on women, over the lack of action on climate change, over the horrific war in Gaza. But at Harris events, she did not seek to channel that into paranoid and dehumanizing assaults against Americans on the other side. Her stance—at least, rhetorically—was that all Americans count. Trump’s position: Trump uber alles, all others are “vermin” and the “enemy.”

American politics has always contained an us-versus-them element, and the battle can be fierce. But Trump turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he lied, he insulted, he appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He waged war on reality, seeking to lead millions into a cosmos of fakery and false narratives that boosts an ultra-Manichean view of the world. He saw his path to power as exacerbating the divisions within American society. He has been an accelerationist for tribalistic discord, explicitly threatening the norms and values of democratic governance. His answer to what ails the United States is strongman government, in which he is the authoritarian savior. Harris ran as a feisty Democrat who wants to work with Congress to tackle assorted problems.

These were profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to choose which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash in values for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, voters were forced to pick a side, to render a verdict on Trump’s war on truth, democracy, and decency and Harris’ traditional embrace of pluralism and established norms.

At this fork in the road, Americans made a decision on what sort of country the United States will be. A judgment has been reached: This is a nation to be ruled by Trump’s politics of hate. It can happen here, and it has.

As Americans cast their votes in an election dominated by debates over inflation and the cost of living, a ballot measure in Vice President Kamala Harris’ home state is dividing the Democratic Party on the issue of how to address skyrocketing rents.

Proposition 33—dubbed the Justice for Renters Act—would repeal the state’s controversial Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which for decades has restricted local governments’ ability to cap rent increases. Currently, Costa-Hawkins blocks counties and cities from imposing rent controls on apartments, condos, and single-family homes built after a certain date—1995 in much of the state, but years earlier in some cities, such as San Francisco. It also prohibits vacancy control, meaning that even landlords who are subject to rent controls can raise rents up to the market rate when a new tenant moves in.

Some cities have already enacted new rent control plans in anticipation of Prop. 33 passing. In October, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve legislation that would expand rent control to approximately 16,000 additional units if the initiative passes. 

In some ways, Prop. 33 is similar to President Joe Biden’s proposal this past summer to cap annual rent increases at 5 percent over the next two years for large landlords who want to obtain federal tax breaks. Two weeks after it was rolled out, speaking to a crowd in Atlanta, Harris appeared to voice support for the president’s plan, vowing to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases.” But since then, according to the Nation, she has largely left promises for direct tenant protections out of her public statements. The outlet observed that instead of renters, Harris seemed to be focusing on homeowners, pushing policies like tax incentives for developers to build for first-time homebuyers. 

Harris’ reluctance to embrace rent control may mark a small victory for YIMBYs, the “yes-in-my-backyard” pro-housing movement that first emerged in San Francisco in the 2010s as a more market-based approach to the housing affordability crisis. YIMBYs, many of whom are Democrats, have largely opposed Prop. 33, arguing it would cause new rental construction to grind to a halt. An analysis by California YIMBY, an advocacy group focused on ameliorating the state’s housing shortage, argued that passing the measure “will likely worsen housing affordability by empowering NIMBY jurisdictions to block new housing.” 

NIMBY, a largely pejorative label meaning “not in my backyard,” describes locals who oppose construction and redevelopment in their neighborhoods—ranging variously from affordable housing, to homeless shelters, to luxury condos, to public transportation infrastructure. According to Matthew Lewis, the communications director at California YIMBY, NIMBYs include residents from across the political spectrum. While conservative NIMBYs might oppose new buildings to maintain the status quo or inflate property values in their neighborhoods, many left-aligned NIMBYs strongly oppose market-based development out of fears over gentrification or ideological commitments. Between those poles lies a significant group of mainstream liberal NIMBYs, who, as New York Magazine’s Curbed puts it, “believe in affordable housing until it’s in their neighborhood.” In 2022, Barack Obama called them out, specifically arguing that resistance to “affordable, energy-sustainable, mixed-use and mixed-income communities” contributes to the housing crisis. 

“When you have very right-wing NIMBYs agreeing with left NIMBYs that we should do all the things necessary to prevent more homebuilding, it kind of makes you go, huh?” Lewis said.

For Lewis, the story of a rent-controlled city like San Francisco characterizes the debate. According to the city’s housing plan, about 70 percent of San Francisco renters live in rent-stabilized units, built before June 1979. But this hasn’t helped the affordability crisis, as the percentage of the city’s households who were rent-burdened—that is, who spent more than 30 percent of their income on rent—increased by roughly 15 percent from 1990 to 2015 for residents making 50 to 80 percent of the median San Francisco income. And according to the Public Policy Institute of California and the California Housing Partnership, in 2024, over half of all renters in the state—roughly 3 million residents—are rent-burdened. 

“I think our opponents on the left misconstrue that rent control is this mechanism of broad affordability,” Lewis said. “But what it’s supposed to do is provide stability and security of tenure for lower income tenants. In a city like San Francisco, what you end up with is millionaires living in rent-controlled housing.” 

To get it right, Lewis suggests that the city first has to “unleash a building boom” by constructing housing and renting it out at market rate so developers can recoup investment costs and continue to build. “Then when those buildings become eligible for rent control—after 15 or 20 years—you have this abundant supply of rent-stabilized units because you’ve never stopped building,” he argues. 

Many housing justice advocates reject that argument. In a 2021 article for Housing is a Human Right, a prominent group now backing Prop. 33, Patrick Range McDonald wrote that such market-based strategies resemble the real estate industry’s failed “trickle-down housing policy” that has led to the ongoing crisis. Comparing it to giving tax cuts to the rich, McDonald wrote that “corporate landlords and major developers will generate billions in revenue by charging sky-high rents for market-rate apartments, making massive profits off the backs of the middle and working class.” 

In a May 2024 analysis charging that California YIMBY has sided with corporate landlords to defeat Prop. 33, McDonald wrote that this YIMBY proposal of “filtering” actually “fuels gentrification and displacement in working-class neighborhoods, including communities of color,” since, he says, developers will only build luxury housing to maximize profits. 

For his part, Lewis contends that many of Prop. 33’s leftist supporters are acting in direct opposition to affordability by arguing that only government-funded social housing projects can solve the problem. “I think that this is where YIMBYs really part ways with the left,” he said. “The market can just move substantially faster than the government can, if you let it.” While Lewis concedes that the government should play a substantial role in providing subsidized housing for low-income residents, he says that “you can’t have a functioning system where the government is basically shutting down housing production for most of the market.” 

Rent control, Lewis says, contributes to the housing shortage. He points to New York City, which has an estimated 26,000 older, rent-stabilized units that are empty, according to findings from the 2023 survey, because limits on rent increases make it difficult for landlords to keep up with maintenance costs and building codes. 

The debate is raging among economists, too. A University of Chicago poll found that an overwhelming 81 percent of economists surveyed opposed rent control. But in 2023, 32 prominent economists signed a letter supporting nationwide rent control. The document referred to a 2007 study following rent control policies for 30 years across 76 cities in New Jersey. It found “little to no statistically significant effect of moderate rent controls on new construction.” There is also research connecting housing supply reductions to systemic loopholes, such as exceptions that allow landlords to evict all tenants in a building to convert their rental units into market-rate condos. 

Shanti Singh, the legislative and communications director at Tenants Together, a coalition of local tenant organizations in California, argues that rent control and new development can work in concert. “We fight for housing that folks can afford. Millions and millions of people’s wages simply are not anywhere close to meeting market rates,” Singh says. “We’re fighting for people living in crowded conditions, people who are homeless, and people one step away from being homeless.” 

It’s not tenant advocates but current laws restricting rent control that are the real problem, Singh claims: “Because of Costa-Hawkins, we are actually bleeding the supply of rent-controlled housing that’s affordable at below market rates. That’s a unit that you’ve lost. That’s the supply loss.”

According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, there is a shortage of nearly one million affordable rental units in California for “extremely low income renters,” or residents who earn less than 30 percent of the state median income. “There’s a huge issue with folks with disabilities on fixed incomes, including seniors, who need accessible housing,” Singh says. They can’t access rent-controlled housing in places like San Francisco because the units are too old to have the necessary accommodations—they’re all constructed before 1979. 

Instead of working on legislation that will solve the affordability crisis, Singh says that many YIMBYs are “leaving a status quo in place that’s untenable” by bringing up “insane hypothetical scenarios.” 

Susie Shannon, the policy director at Housing Is A Human Right—which has put over $46 million into its support for Prop. 33—says Tony Strickland is one of these hypotheticals. Strickland, a conservative city council member in wealthy Huntington Beach, is an example of a NIMBY to many pro-development advocates. YIMBYs argue that he would use rent control laws like Prop. 33, if passed, to circumvent California’s affordable housing mandates by setting unreasonably low rent caps designed to stifle new housing development, according to the Orange County Register. 

Shannon pointed to an op-ed by Strickland, in which the councilman said his words had been taken out of context and affirmed that he has been “a lifelong opponent of rent control.” He clarified that he does support some language in the ballot measure that stops the state from using the court system to block local rent control decisions. Strickland did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. 

Dean Preston, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the number one enemy of several California pro-development groups, says the amount of money backing the campaign against Prop. 33—over $120 million according to the Los Angeles Times—is telling. The two largest opposition donors are the California Apartment Association at nearly $89 million and the California Association of Realtors at $22 million.

“What has sucked up a lot of the debate from [Prop 33] opponents is discussing…what impacts rent control has on construction financing,” Preston says. “But what’s really driving the opposition is vacancy control”—the possibility that with the repeal of Costa-Hawkins, local governments would limit the amount a landlord could increase rents between tenants.

Preston believes that without vacancy control, cities are essentially powerless to regulate rents. “That’s why it is worth it for the California Association of Realtors, the California Apartment Association, and the landlord lobby to invest,” he says. 

While more than 650,000 people in the United States experience homelessness on any given night and living without shelter has increasingly become a crime, everyone I talked to maintains that there is a way to solve the housing crisis. 

For Lewis, it’s expanding funding for programs like the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, which offers developers incentives for making a portion of their construction affordable for low-income residents. He also favors upzoning to increase housing density by allowing more multifamily units in areas previously reserved for single-family homes. 

For tenant advocates like Singh and Preston, it’s about the increased dialogue around housing on the national stage, as well as the repeated attempts to create a federal social housing authority.

“I think there’s a sense within the tenant movement in California that it is inevitable at some point that Costa-Hawkins will be repealed because most people support rent control,” Preston says. “I hope Prop. 33 passes, but if it doesn’t, I expect it’ll be back on a future ballot and in future legislative efforts.”

The first time I met Kamala Harris, in 2007, I was a reporter profiling her for San Francisco magazine. She was in a basement near City Hall, trying to persuade a roomful of low-level ex–drug dealers to find time in their lives for a little self-care. “I have a job that’s just crazy,” she told the crowd of 100 or so young men and women, sounding more like a motivational speaker than the San Francisco district attorney and possible future president of the United States. “I get calls day and night. That’s a lot of stress.” What helped her stay sane, she explained, was waking up early every morning, jumping on the treadmill, and tuning the TV to something upbeat. “My life is like the news, and I don’t need to watch the news. So I watch MTV and VH1. I know every song!” 

Her audience—participants in a program Harris created for young, nonviolent ex-offenders called Back on Track—was there because, if they fulfilled all the program’s requirements and stayed out of trouble, their criminal records would be wiped clean. Harris knew that for these mostly Black and brown young people, the keys to their eventual success included educational opportunities, decent jobs, stable housing, and affordable childcare. Helping them move toward economic security was Back on Track’s—and Harris’—primary mission. 

But taking care of their bodies and their emotional health was also important. Instead of self-medicating with booze and drugs, she wanted to help them develop the mental habits that could help them persevere when they felt worn down by the world—a mindset for believing they did have the power to determine the course of their futures. Going to the gym wasn’t the point, she told them— though she had wrangled free passes to 24-Hour Fitness for anyone who wanted one. “It’s about being happy and healthy and figuring out ways to cope.” Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch of former drug dealers felt?

Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch of former drug dealers felt?

Flash forward almost two decades: The Democratic presidential nominee who has spent the past 107 days running an ultramarathon on a tightrope in designer pantsuits and high heels seems light years away from that earnest young DA preaching about the healing power of cardio. Consider Harris’ urgent closing message on the Ellipse a week before the election, flanked by a parade of flags and 75,000 people who were terrified by the prospects of a second Trump presidency. Donald Trump is a “petty tyrant,” the vice president declared—“unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.” America is better than he is, she insisted, “America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”

The 2024 election feels like a second chance, if not the last chance, for the nation, a back-on-track moment. In much the same way that she was encouraging young offenders to seize control of their lives decades ago, Harris spent a good chunk of her speech trying to convince her listeners that they can control the fate of a democracy threatened by bullies, demagogues, and oligarchs. “Each of you has the power,” she told the cheering but jittery crowd, “to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” 

For me, the most striking moment in her speech came when Harris talked about her adored mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died from colon cancer in 2009 at the age of 70. “I took care of my mother when she got sick, cooking foods that she had a taste for, finding clothes that would not irritate her skin,” Harris told her audience, describing intimate acts of love and kindness that public figures, much less politicians, rarely discuss. Harris the candidate was touting her plan to expand Medicare coverage to include home health care for seniors: “Currently, if you need home care and you don’t have some money to hire someone, you and your family need to deplete your savings to qualify for help. That’s just not right.” Harris the daughter was speaking from a personal place that she has often tried to guard. “Caregiving is about dignity,” she said. “It is about dignity.” 

It was a profoundly empathetic moment. And I wondered if her capacity to communicate empathy might just end up saving democracy.

As Americans reach the finish line of the most stomach-wrenching, soul-sucking, exhausting, consequential presidential campaign in memory, many factors will help determine whether Harris will be able to beat back Trump and pull America from the brink. 

If she wins, pundits will point to the innumerable GOP mistakes. Abortion bans transforming health care for women (and families) across the US, infuriating not just the tens of millions of people capable of getting pregnant but also their mothers and grandmothers old enough to remember the coat-hanger-abortion era before Roe v. Wade. Then there is the far-right’s embrace of Project 2025 and other extreme policies that would catapult the country back to the 19th century. The grotesque, proto-fascist spectacle at Madison Square Garden. Trump’s rapidly degenerating mental capacity, his accelerating physical decline, his unapologetic embrace of corrupt dictators, his incessant lies. His vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s repulsive views about women, especially unmarried ones with no children. Elon Musk’s full-on transformation into a Marvel supervillain, one who turns out to be clueless about politics even as he spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to disrupt a democracy that helped make him the richest person on the planet. 

“Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle. But it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will be a case study for future political scientists.”

Then there’s the Harris campaign, which people who pay close attention to these things are calling one of the best Democrats have ever run. “Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin posted on Twitter. “But it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will be a case study for future political scientists.” Harris, who spent four years being dismissed as a DEI lightweight, has been a revelation since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race in July, even to her longtime supporters. “It seems to us that something happened to you,” Oprah Winfrey marveled in September, as if “a veil or something dropped… and you just stepped into your power.” Harris responded by (of course) laughing, then added, “You know, we each have those moments in our lives where it’s time to step up.” In the weeks since that virtual rally, despite a schedule that has sometimes seemed to require her to be in 12 places at once, Harris has seemed to gain in strength and clarity of purpose. Through it all, her sunny stamina has been one of her greatest attributes.

But for me, another quality that distinguishes Harris and may even be a determinative superpower in this race is empathy. Obviously, empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think—people who at minimum lack any semblance of emotional intelligence and at worst, seem to have learned their social skills on 4chan. It’s not what Democratic strategists have emphasized when they’ve framed her candidacy; she’s the tough-talking prosecutor who recognizes in Trump the type of criminal and predator she spent much of her career trying to put in jail. But scratch the surface of her prosecutorial rigor and consider the policy ideas she’s been talking about on the campaign trail—health care, reproductive care, child care, elder care.

Empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think.

Of course, those are perennially Democratic issues, embraced with special fervor by female candidates and their voters. It’s hardly surprising that Harris—who was raised by a single mother and focused on victims of violence and crime for much of her career—would espouse a public policy agenda that is fundamentally about treating people with dignity and kindness.

But you can support empathic policies and still be a terrible person. What’s notable is how many people have a story about her kindness out of the public eye, going back decades. A young woman named Tanene recently went viral on TikTok, talking about how, when she was a homeless teenager in the early 2000s, Harris—not yet a politician—plucked her from the San Francisco streets, deciding “she was going to love me and guide me and cheer me on for literally my entire life.” Twenty years later, she considers Harris her “big sister Auntie mentor friend.”

Lateefah Simon, a MacArthur fellow who ran Harris’s Back on Track program for a few years in the mid-2000s, recalls how, soon after she’d been hired, she showed up to work wearing a hoodie and sweats, like the kids she would be meeting with that day. Harris was not amused. “Why would you ever disrespect your people?” Harris demanded, sending her home to change. “You work for this office. You work for the state, so you represent. Would you go to Pacific Heights”—one of the city’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods— “wearing that?” But the next day, Harris presented Simon with a brand-new suit, the very first she ever owned. (Today, Simon is expected to be elected to replace Representative Barbara Lee, representing Berkeley and Oakland in Congress.)

Some of these stories can edge into a kind of Frank Capra sentimentality—except they happen to be true. One of them comes from her former boss, one-time San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne. One day Harris—then a young lawyer heading their division on children and families—arrived in Renne’s office with an armful of stuffed toys for kids whose adoptions were being finalized. “She said, Louise, it’s Adoption Day, we’re going to hand out teddy bears to the children so they can remember this day.” Renne recalled. “So off we went, teddy bears in arms, over to the courthouse. Well, that had never been done before. And I just thought, what an insightful thing to do.” 

Now, 25 years later, what Renne remains struck by is Harris’s unusual alchemy of toughness and kindness. “Nobody should ever mistake her for not being tough enough,” Renne told me recently. But Harris also cares about people and consequences, Renne says: “What’s going on in the real world? What is the impact here? Who’s it hurting most? How do we solve the problem to get around the hurt?”

Imagine JD Vance handing out teddy bears. As Adam Serwer famously wrote about the first Trump presidency, “The cruelty is the point.” Four years later, that cruelty continues to be manifest in hideous, even jaw-dropping ways—were we still able to be shocked—but especially in Trump and Vance’s ugly rhetoric about immigrants and in their callous reactions to stories about women who have died and nearly died because of restrictions on abortion care.

Harris, meanwhile, has reached out to Republicans in part by acknowledging their misgivings about voting for a Democrat. The quality of empathy helps explain why she and her vice presidential running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—the football coach who helped launch his high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance club, the governor who supported free meals and tampons for school kids, the proud dad of a special-needs son—seem to genuinely connect. Theirs is not the Bill Clinton-esque “I feel your pain” schtick that often seems performative. 

Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. Where she really catches fire is when she talks about how abortion bans have brutalized the lives of women and families.

Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. From the moment that the Dobbs decision was announced and Biden gave her the responsibility to lobby for reproductive rights in ways he never did, she has offered a full-throated defense of reproductive freedom the likes of which we have never before heard from a sitting vice president or a presidential candidate. She’s been exceptional in her attacks on Trump and his allies overturning Roe v. Wade, passing extreme abortion bans, threatening access to birth control and IVF, and stripping away the ability of women and girls to make decisions about their own bodies. Admittedly, on the what-she-plans-to-do-about-it side, Harris is more circumspect. During the debate, for example, when asked if there were any limits to abortion care that she would support, she replied that she wanted to “restore Roe.” She knows how limited her powers are likely to be on that front, especially if she lacks majorities in the House and/or Senate. 

Harris really catches fire when she talks about how abortion bans have brutalized the lives of women and families, like the young Georgia woman, Amber Thurman, whose 2022 death from delayed abortion care left her six-year-old son without a mother. Or what happens to victims of rape or incest or domestic violence: “The idea that a woman who survives a crime of a violation to her body should not have the authority to make a decision about what happens to her body next—that is immoral,” Harris declared in her speech on the Ellipse. “That is immoral.” 

So now it’s Election Day and the polls continue to forecast a tight race, though with some unexpected, late-breaking reasons for optimism for Democrats. If Harris wins, it will be because she has managed to break through the Trump–Musk–Fox News chaos machine and convince millions of people who knew hardly anything about her three months ago to support her and her vision of America’s future. Voters have myriad choices this election, with down-ballot races and ballot measures. But at the top of the ticket, if voters don’t choose empathy, that future will be cruel indeed.

Claudia Garcia had never watched a televised presidential debate. On September 10, she tuned into ABC News’ showdown between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and was stunned to hear the Republican nominee repeat lies about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. “I was like, what?” Garcia recalls. “What is he saying? We are not that [as] people. We don’t eat dogs. We don’t eat cats.” 

An infrequent voter, Garcia will be going to the polls for only the third time in her life this November. Born in Riverside, California, but having spent most of her childhood in Mexico, she felt disconnected from politics. Her father told her voting did not make a difference. “If it’s not affecting me directly,” she thought, “it’s not affecting me.” But her husband, Salvador, a newly naturalized US citizen born in Mexico, felt otherwise. This year, he will be casting his first vote since pledging the Oath of Allegiance in February. Their two adult children will also be voting.

“Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

“I think a lot of these migrant and Hispanic homes,” Garcia says, “it’s not just they don’t want their kids to vote or they don’t want to vote themselves. I think we’re not informed…There’s a lot of education still to do in many of our communities.”

The Garcias live in Tulare in California’s Central Valley. Latinos account for 60 percent of eligible voters in the 22nd Congressional District. As my colleague Noah Lanard recently reported from the area, Democrats’ waning support in the region could determine the balance of power in Congress. In one of the closest House races of this election, Rudy Salas is facing a rematch against Republican incumbent Rep. David Valadao to become the first elected Latino congressman from the Central Valley. In 2022, Valadao, who is of Portuguese descent, beat Salas by three percentage points.

For Democrats to have a shot at picking up that seat, they need to not only hold on to Latino voters, but also hope for an end to—as one political strategist put it to NBC News—“anemically low” turnout. In the midterms, the 22nd Congressional District had the third lowest voter turnout of the House districts across the country. To do so, they could use the help of people like the Garcias: Latino voters who have not traditionally voted, or even first-time voters. In California and beyond, the path to controlling Congress and securing the White House may hinge on it. 

The main issues on their mind? The cost of living and immigration. “I was an immigrant myself,” Salvador, who gained legal status as a result of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the 1980s, says, “and I want more for the immigrant workers of this country.” He and his wife oppose Trump’s plans to mass deport millions of people from the United States and fear that more family separations are on the horizon if he returns to the Oval Office. 

They also hope comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s racist remarks about Latinos at a recent Trump rally where he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” can persuade voters to go for Democrats. “In his mind,” Garcia says of Trump, “we don’t matter. If you don’t look like him, then you’re you’re not worth it for him…Why would we support someone who sees us as trash?”

Immigration isn’t the single, or even the most, salient issue for Latino voters nationwide. But it intersects with broader concerns Latino communities have about the economy, jobs, and housing. In the battleground state of North Carolina, a pre-election poll by the civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS found that pocketbook issues rank as high priority for the state’s Latino voters. (Many also favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.) There are about 300,000 registered Latino voters in North Carolina.

Numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters.

The daughter of two Mexican immigrants, Irene Godinez started Poder NC Action in 2020 to foster civic participation among the growing US-born Latino youth population in the state. That year, the organization sent out thousands of political mailers featuring the face of iconic Puerto Rican astrologer Walter Mercado as a strategy of tapping into culture to mobilize young people. In that election—which Trump carried by fewer than 75,o00 votes—first-time Latino voters comprised a large share of total voter turnout in North Carolina.

This year, Poder NC Action released a multi-part telenovela called “Alexia the Voter,” inspired by the Netflix show Jane the Virgin, to encourage young North Carolinians to vote. They have also hosted voter engagement events where people can learn about who’s on the ballot while getting their nails or hair done. “Our ultimate goal is to build independent political power,” Godinez, who served as Latino outreach director in North Carolina for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, says, “But while we do that, we are building a political home for progressive Latinos in the state.”

Prior to Election Day, she says, numbers showed that 19 percent of the more than 100,000 Latinos who had already voted in North Carolina were first-time voters and 39 percent were infrequent voters. “These are exactly the people that we’ve been targeting and activating because that’s where we see the opportunity to expand the electorate.”

Among the issues driving that electorate in the state are the economy, reproductive rights, and climate justice, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The young Latino voters Poder NC Action courts also tend to bring up the war in Gaza as a point of concern. (The organization didn’t endorse President Joe Biden, but released a “defensive endorsement” of Kamala Harris because her victory would block a right-wing opponent.)

“The thing I have been hearing from voters that we’ve been talking to is how they haven’t felt seen by the parties whether they’re Democrats or Republicans,” Godinez says, “They don’t feel that either party is reaching out to them and trying to talk to them.” She believes the Democratic Party could have done more to appeal to Latinos in North Carolina, including sending bigger surrogate names to the state and crafting political mailers with original messages that weren’t just translated to Spanish from English.

“Even if we are 300,000 voters in the state right now,” Godinez adds, “we’re going to continue to increase at a faster pace than any other demographic because 50,000 Latinos will age into the electorate every single year. This could have been a really great year for them to lay the foundation of what it could look like to do Latino outreach in a very intentional way.”

In California, Garcia attributes her political awakening to her work, first as a canvasser and later as an organizer, with the group Poder Latinx to get people registered and out to vote. “I cannot be preaching and not doing,” she says. “I need to be a voice to those who don’t have one.”

She says she would like to see immigration reform that would benefit her neighbors and family members who “work out in the field, picking the food that we have on our table.” She also thinks of her nephews who are DACA recipients and whose lawful presence and ability to work and study in the country are in jeopardy. “It hits home,” Garcia says, adding: “Immigration is what motivates me and scares me, and that’s why I’m going to make sure that my ballot gets in the mail today.”

In the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election, GOP consultants were fighting over strategy: Would going all-in on anti-trans messaging deliver then-President Donald Trump the suburbs in his race against former Vice President Joe Biden? Or should his campaign stay away from the issue, given widespread support among the electorate for LGBTQ rights like same-sex marriage? “This might become a hot cultural issue, but it’s not a thing yet,” one Republican consultant told Politico in the summer of 2020. “Right now, it’s just an easy issue for the other side to attack us on. They will call us bigots.”

So much has changed, as a network of conservative and religious-right groups coordinated to push hundreds of bills to wipe out trans youth health care, bar them from sports teams that match their gender identity, and censor discussion of LGBTQ issues in schools. With more than 129 anti-LGBTQ laws passed across the country in the last two years, GOP candidates now are betting that they’ve seeded enough anti-trans sentiment among voters to use transphobia as a motivating issue. It doesn’t seem to matter to Republicans that trans issues still tend to rank last among voters’ priorities: From August through early October, GOP candidates dropped $65 million on anti-trans advertising, according to a New York Times analysis. The hateful rhetoric has been deployed all the way down the ballot, in Senate races, statehouse contests, and state constitutional amendment campaigns.

Now, as the presidential race draws to a close, Trump’s campaign has made anti-trans ads the biggest focal point of its spending. The TV spots and social media posts spread falsehoods about medical care for trans youth, cast trans athletes as predators, and link support for trans people with support for (nonexistent) “partial-birth abortions.” Sports fans will recognize the constant refrain—“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”—from game-day commercial breaks.

None of this bodes well for trans rights under either Trump or Harris, no matter what happens on Election Day, or in the weeks afterward. “​​I’ve been calling this the most anti-LGBTQ election since 2004,” says Sean Meloy, vice president of political programs at the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, which works to elect queer and trans candidates. In 2004, George W. Bush used same-sex marriage as a wedge issue in his reelection campaign, betting it would drive conservatives to the polls. (As it turns out, right-wing voters were motivated by other priorities.) “They’re doing exactly the same thing now,” Meloy says. “Gay and lesbian people are understood and represented, and now they’re trying to dehumanize and use trans people and their experiences to get votes.”

Trump has pledged to defund gender-affirming care—and to ban it for minors.

Just being exposed to hateful political rhetoric can harm trans youth. Last year, in a Trevor Project survey, 86 percent of trans and nonbinary youth said debates about anti-trans bills negatively affected their mental health; half said they experienced cyberbullying; and a third didn’t feel safe going to the doctor. And when states pass anti-trans laws, the consequences for mental health are devastating: A study published in Nature Human Behavior in June found suicide attempts by trans youth ages 13 to 17 rose by as much as 72 percent a year after anti-trans laws were enacted.

Such laws are now the norm in Republican-dominated states. “In either scenario in November, we’re still facing that reality, where transgender people’s and also LGBTQ people’s rights more broadly depend almost entirely on what state they happen to live in,” says Logan Casey, director of policy research for the Movement Advancement Project. Already, trans people and their families are facing a “really difficult choice,” he says. “Stay in the place that they call home, seek healthcare somewhere else, or move out of state for potentially safer environments.”

If Trump wins the presidency, Casey says, the attacks succeeding now on the state level can be expected to graduate to the federal government. In his first term, Trump already provided a model for targeting transgender people. He banned them from the military; permitted anti-trans discrimination in health care; rolled back protections for trans students; and created a broad license for businesses to discriminate based on “religious objections”—often against LGBTQ people. More clues for a second term come from Project 2025, much of which was written by former Trump administration members, which equates “transgender ideology” with pornography and declares that it should be banned. The blueprint for a second Trump administration proposes wiping the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” completely out of all federal policy.

And if the GOP wins both Congress and the White House, Trump has pledged to go further than before—cutting off federal funding for gender-affirming medical care and making it illegal nationwide for doctors to provide such care to minors.

But even without Congress, Trump would still have immense power to target transgender people through executive agencies. First on the list: reinterpreting federal laws in ways that eliminate protections for transgender people. That includes the Affordable Care Act, as well as Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination in education. Are schools and doctors expected to treat people according to their gender identity? The Obama and Biden administrations said yes. But in the years between, Trump appointees reversed those rules. “What they mean in terms of bathrooms, what they mean in terms of sports, what those regulations look like is very dependent on, is [Betsy] DeVos in charge or not?” says Jess Braverman, legal director at Gender Justice. 

Legal and policy experts who specialize in LGBTQ rights also warn that Trump appointees could create broad religious exemptions to federal nondiscrimination rules. One potential consequence: Government contracts going to organizations that exclude queer and trans people or insist on misgendering them. For example, during the first Trump administration, Catholic Charities was the only organization in Texas contracted to provide foster care placements for refugee children. The organization disqualified a lesbian couple, allegedly because they did not “mirror the Holy Family.” (Lambda Legal sued, and won.) Jennifer Pizer, Lambda Legal’s chief legal officer, says she’s particularly concerned about federal agencies giving contractors free rein, because the people they serve are often in dire need. “Whether it’s providing shelter or food or disaster relief, when they discriminate, then the people who are entitled to receive services, they don’t necessarily stay,” she explains.

The Project 2025–obsessed loyalists and ideologues who will staff a second Trump administration will not only set a tone for the massive federal workforce—one likely to be hostile to LGBTQ employees—but they’ll also be in charge of deciding how federal program money is distributed. “That money can go to responsible, community-based organizations and professional institutions that provide services consistent with professional standards, in a nondiscriminatory way,” Pizer says, “or to expand the religious infrastructure that we have in this country.”

“No matter which way the regulations go, no matter what they say, there’s always going to be litigation.”

Pretty much any agency moves are guaranteed to wind up in the courts, where lawsuits are already raging over trans-inclusive interpretations of Title IX and the ACA. Even when the Supreme Court weighs in—as it did in 2020 when it ruled that Title VII, the federal law banning sex discrimination in employment, protected transgender workers—the underlying issues aren’t put to rest. “No matter which way the regulations go, no matter what they say, there’s always going to be litigation,” Braverman says.

So it matters immensely who’s on the bench—another presidential power. During Trump’s first term, he appointed nearly 200 judges, reshaping the federal judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court. As a result, those justices didn’t just overturn Roe v. Wade, they widened religious exemptions to civil rights law in ways that let more business owners refuse to serve LGBTQ clients. And, with all the recent state laws targeting transgender youth, a profusion of litigation over trans issues is making its way through the federal court system. In the most prominent case, United States v. Skrmetti, the DOJ has teamed up with trans families and has asked the court to decide if states can ban puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans youth while permitting the same treatments for cisgender patients.

Oral argument for Skrmetti is scheduled for December—meaning the case should be submitted before the next president takes office. Pizer notes that it remains to be seen whether a Trump White House would try to reverse the DOJ’s current position on the case, and whether the justices would allow it.

In some ways, the backsliding in support for trans people is bipartisan. Democratic candidates this cycle have often appeared tentative or afraid of how conservative messaging about trans issues has already shaped public opinion. 

Some Democrats have adopted anti-trans rhetoric defensively, referring to trans people not by their gender identity but by the sex they were assigned at birth. “Let me be clear, I don’t want boys playing girls’ sports,” said Democratic Senate candidate Texas Rep. Colin Allred, running against Ted Cruz in Texas, in his response to a right-wing attack ad. Some LGBTQ-rights advocates chalked Allred’s response up to “messy” allyship; others called it a “dog whistle.” Either way, anti-trans activists were thrilled: “Beautiful Ted gets a major W here,” American Principles Project president Terry Schilling posted.

Even Kamala Harris, who dedicated an entire interview to describing her support for trans people during her first run for president in 2019, and who otherwise has a strong record advocating for the queer community, has stopped short of giving a robust defense of trans rights in her campaign. When attacked for allowing incarcerated people to access gender-affirming care, she shot back that such care was offered in federal prisons under the Trump administration. Gender-affirming care “is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary,” Harris elaborated under further questioning by NBC anchor Hallie Jackson. 

“It feels like that’s a long way from ‘we see you and we love you,’ which was your message to trans Americans in May,” Jackson pushed back. “What do you want the LGBTQ+ community to know as they’re looking for a full-throated backing from you for trans Americans?”

“I believe that all people should be treated with dignity and respect, period, and should not be vilified for who they are, and should not be bullied for who they are,” Harris replied. 

To some queer and trans observers, Harris’ general rebuttal about a need for inclusion is a disappointment, failing to meet the intensity of the anti-trans backlash. Others see it as an appropriate calculation for a dangerous political moment. “There are attacks against multiple groups of people, and so a counter-message that says, ‘Targeting people is not good, we need to come together as a country, we need to be inclusive as a country’—that is an apt message for these times,” Pizer says.

The stakes of the rhetoric are extremely high. While the average American’s opinions about transgender policies—from bathroom bans to gender-affirming care restrictions—are largely unformed and in flux, according to research from the University of Minnesota, politicians’ anti-trans messages have broadened support for restrictive policies. “As public opinion continues to evolve in this area,” the researchers concluded, “much will depend on the behavior and framing offered by elites.”

And the anti-trans rhetoric from Trump and his allies has already had a profound impact on queer people—none more so than the trans women and drag queens featured in the ads without their consent. “I haven’t been able to sleep,” Gabrielle Ludwig, a trans woman whose college basketball career was exploited in multiple ads, told The Hill. “I don’t want my family affected. I have granddaughters, daughters who are in college. I only did this because I love to play basketball. That’s all it ever was.”

With so much ultimately being up to the courts—and political battles sure to continue in the states, if not the federal government—Braverman believes a Harris win could be a chance to change the narrative. “The demonization and the discussion and the ‘let’s just debate people’s humanity’—that is the thing that is really making life hard for people,” they say.

Harris cannot unilaterally reverse the tide of anti-trans legislation in states; beyond her ability to affect policy areas like health and education, her greatest power lies in her words. “Laws and regulations are really important,” Braverman says, but “there needs to be more. There needs to be education, there needs to be understanding. There needs to be support from people in power.”

J. Ann Selzer has earned several nicknames throughout her 37-year-long stint leading the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll. She’s called the “Outlier Queen” when she breaks from what appears to be the consensus of political polls. And when her final pre-election polls paint a complicated picture for otherwise favored candidates, political insiders refer to her as the “Harbinger of Doom.”

Now, as the Election Day countdown timer inches toward zero, Selzer’s latest polling may be the specter that has worried some Republicans—the rageful spirit of Iowa women who lost abortion access this past summer. Contrary to every other poll, this poll of 808 likely Iowa voters shows that Kamala Harris has a 3-point lead over Donald Trump in one of the reddest red states. It’s within the poll’s margin of error but a far cry from Selzer’s previous tallies: In September, Trump enjoyed a 4-point lead over Harris, and in June, he was 18 points ahead of President Joe Biden.

“Nobody in their right mind would predict it,” Selzer said on the self-described “Never Trump” podcast The Bulwark. “Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”

“Nobody in their right mind would predict it. Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”

Selzer has gone against the polling consensus before—and has been proven right. She was one of the few pollsters who predicted Trump’s significant lead over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she broke from the crowd in 2008 when her poll predicted Barack Obama’s 2008 win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The driving force behind the latest shift? Selzer says it’s women—particularly older and independent women—incensed by the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to allow a six-week abortion ban to go into effect. 

The state Supreme Court’s June decision overruling a lower court’s block on the six-week ban may have come as a surprise, considering previous court decisions. In 2018, four years before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, the Iowa court upheld the fundamental right to abortion, striking down a 72-hour waiting period and dooming the six-week ban, which was then the most restrictive abortion law in the United States. 

But this past summer’s opinion wasn’t a fluke; as I reported in July, it was the desired result of a yearslong scheme to rig Iowa’s courts against abortion. The GOP, which holds every statewide office and controls both legislative chambers, used its unencumbered power to overhaul the judicial selection process, giving Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds majority control over the committee that nominates justices. Her conservative appointees changed the makeup of the court. When lawmakers passed another six-week ban last year, the justices delivered on the Republican promise to restrict abortion—despite Iowans repeatedly signaling their support for abortion rights. The shift of a significant number of Iowa voters toward supporting Harris represents more than just anguish at the fall of abortion rights; it’s a strong rebuke to the GOP for its manipulation of the court.

The court’s opinion has likely produced what Selzer called a “jaw-dropping” result: Women age 65 and older, a typically Republican group, favor Harris over Trump 63 percent to 28 percent. Women overall favor Harris by 20 points, while Trump has a 4-point lead among men. “You need to win with women more than you lose with men,” Selzer said, “and we’re seeing that in these data.”

For his part, Trump dismissed the poll as “heavily skewed.” But Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst says the results reflect what Democrats have been seeing on the ground. “They are sick and tired of politicians interfering in their doctor’s offices and are looking for people up and down the ballot who are going to actually fight for their freedoms,” Konfrst told the Des Moines Register. “And this issue is salient and real, and the fact that Vice President Harris all the way down to candidates for the Iowa House are talking about the same rights and freedoms shows that this is what Iowans are looking for.”

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

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In public remarks, former President Donald Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims about the threat of widespread voting by “illegal aliens” and noncitizens in the 2024 election.

Away from the spotlight, though, at least one Republican National Committee official is telling volunteer poll watchers a completely different story: that such voting is close to impossible.

In a private Oct. 29 training session for poll watchers in Pennsylvania, an RNC election-integrity specialist told volunteers not to worry about noncitizen voting in the 2024 election because the electoral system had safeguards in place to prevent illegal votes.

ProPublica obtained a recording of the training session. The RNC official’s comments have not been previously reported.

The RNC official’s assurance contradicts statements made by Trump and his Republican allies warning about “illegal aliens” casting ballots this year and potentially swinging the election in favor of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris.

“It is good to see the RNC official recognizing the truth, in contrast to the many lies about noncitizen voting coming from Trump and his allies,” said Rick Hasen, a professor and election-law expert at the UCLA School of Law. “It would be even better for the officials to say it publicly.”

The RNC official who led the training session and a spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ProPublica that Democrats were “pushing for non-citizens to vote and influence the future of our country,” adding, “President Trump and the RNC will continue the fight to secure tomorrow’s election so that every American vote is protected.”

Voting by noncitizens is illegal under federal law and it almost never happens. State and federal elections require voters to be U.S. citizens. Government election officials from both parties have emphasized that there are protections in place across the country to prevent noncitizens from casting a ballot.

Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump and some of his most high-profile supporters from making unfounded claims that noncitizens are registering and voting in large numbers this year. “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS,” Trump posted on Truth Social in September. Other prominent Trump supporters, including billionaire tech investor Elon Musk and House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, have also amplified unfounded claims about Democrats seeking to “import” such voters.

But on the ground, Trump’s own party, at least in the important battleground state of Pennsylvania, is undercutting those dark visions of illegal voting. During the Oct. 29 training session, Joe Neild, a member of RNC’s election integrity team in the state, said such a scenario is nearly impossible.

A participant in the training session asked Neild about the potential for noncitizens to cast votes in the election and what poll watchers could do to stop them.

Neild replied that, in Pennsylvania, undocumented people can’t legally register to vote and so they would not be included in the list of eligible voters used at voting precincts, known as poll books.

Here is the exchange:

Training participant: “I have two questions. The first one is: How do you know if they are illegal aliens or not, like, when they’re voting, as far as what you were explaining with the ID? And if they’re from another country it was OK as long as they had an ID. How do you know if they’re illegal aliens? How can you stop that?”

Neild: “Well, if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be inside the poll book. Because if they’re illegal aliens, they’re not going to be able to register to vote, because they’ll need a driver’s license number or a Social Security number.

“And since the recent litigation in the years past, you do have—to be able to get a driver’s license here in Pennsylvania, you have to show proof of citizenship. So that is one way that they will not be able to get a driver’s license.

“And then you have to be—since they’re illegal, they’re not going to be able to get a Social Security number either.”

Three election-law experts reviewed the exchange between Neild and the poll-watcher trainee. All of them said that Neild’s description of the law and the safeguards in place against noncitizen voting were accurate.

Adam Bonin, a lawyer in Philadelphia who practices election law, said Neild gave an accurate description of Pennsylvania law and the safeguards against noncitizen voting there. Bonin said Neild’s comments were “absolutely consistent” with what Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, Al Schmidt, a Republican, has said about preventing noncitizen voting.

“As has been the case before, Trump has local experts on his team who know what the law is here in Pennsylvania and who understand the reality of how our elections work,” Bonin said.

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and an expert on voting rights who worked in the Obama and Biden administrations, said he applauded Neild for using factual information in his training session. Levitt added that he was not surprised to hear Republican volunteers raising fears of noncitizen voting given Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

“There’s been a very effective effort to misinform,” Levitt said. “But I’m glad that when push comes to shove and it comes time to really get training, they’re being set straight.”

In addition to the registration hurdles Neild pointed out, Levitt explained that there are clear incentives to discourage noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. Criminal penalties can include a hefty fine and prison time as well as deportation and losing the ability to become a U.S. citizen in the future. What’s more, Levitt added, the very act of voting creates a clear and obvious paper trail, making it that much easier for law enforcement to bring criminal charges for illegal voting.

“Every once in a blue moon you see noncitizens showing up on the rolls,” he said. “It’s usually by mistake because it’s just not worth it, and they’re gonna get caught, guaranteed.”

Levitt said that he only wished the factual information given out by the RNC at the grassroots level was also reaching the party’s presidential nominee. “It sounds like the former president should be sitting in on some sessions with the people training his poll watchers,” Levitt said.

Do you have information about the Trump campaign or voting irregularities that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by phone or Signal at 202-215-6203.

Across the country, you can find small town diners and watering holes proudly displaying photos of a president stopping by on the campaign trail. It’s not only a memento of how the person who got the nuclear codes may have ordered a burger or a slice of rhubarb pie—it’s a reminder of how voters have looked to national candidates’ food and beverage choices as one way to understand if inherently elite politicians are salt of the earth.

In forming her public image, Harris has showcased prowess in the kitchen.

This year, campaign season served up a buffet of food-related happenings and candidate signals, that sometimes, explains University of Buffalo political scientist Jacob Neiheisel, reveal politically salient “boundary markers between groups” and “status anxieties.” 

One food gaffe that stands out in history came during incumbent Gerald Ford’s 1976 campaign, when he bit into a tamale in Texas, husk and all, and nearly choked. Such missteps are consequential, Neiheisel says, because it’s “seen as some kind of indicator that they’re out of touch with the electors, that they don’t know the people who they would be representing.” 

This year, the closest we’ve come was JD Vance’s stop at Holt’s Sweet Shop, a Florida doughnut seller. His inability to engage the counter staff while standing draped in a suit and a seeming expectation that he’d be recognized—along with his order of “whatever makes sense”—brought national derision. As one succinct YouTube commenter put it, they had “never seen a VP candidate act with less charisma.” 

Mountain Dew, also largely thanks to JD Vance, became a token of a certain kind of white manhood, after he, in attempting a jab against overreaching “woke” politics, spoke about drinking a Diet Mountain Dew and how Democrats were for some reason “going to call that racist.” A week later, Democrat vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz proved him wrong by reaffirming his historic love for Diet Dew, telling a voter online that drinking one was the best way to start a morning. In October, the Harris campaign published a video of a blaze orange-bedecked Walz hunting and holding a shotgun, saying he’s looking to “grab a Diet Dew” and “pound one down.” As that guns-and-ammo display suggests, “Diet Mountain Dew has something to say about masculinity,” Contois says, “but also about regionality,” referencing the drink’s “hillbilly”-tied branding and popularity across a so-called “Mountain Dew Belt” spanning parts of Appalachia and rural, middle America.

Despite Walz’s language calling to mind frat basement chugging, the Minnesota governor brings nearly 30 years of sobriety to the ticket. But when Kamala Harris went on Stephen Colbert’s show, the late night host brought up what he called one of the “old saws” of political likability: would I grab a beer with the candidate? (To play along, she was served a can of Miller High Life.) 

But when it comes to playing politics with eating and drinking, Harris has largely been focused on letting voters know she likes to cook. That’s no surprise, according to the University of Tulsa’s Emily Contois, who has written that female candidates, in walking “an impossible line” of identity politics, often “navigate voter perceptions of both gender and electability through food and cooking.” 

“You have to be masculine enough that they believe you can do the job,” Contois, a professor of media studies, says. “You have to be feminine enough that they think you’re a real woman and a believable one.”

Trump’s campaign bought McDonald’s more than 150 times—there’s no record Harris’ has once.

When Hillary Clinton ran for president, it was against the backdrop of the cultural controversy kicked off by her comments, amid her national introduction during her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, about how she had prioritized a legal career over staying at home and baking cookies. While men seeking the highest office sometimes seem to relish stuffing their faces on camera, in her 2016 campaign Clinton told the press—during an appearance where she was offered but refused cheesecake—that she had long ago “learned early on not to eat in front of all of you.”

“When it comes to women and food and eating and dieting and bodies,” Contois says, “it becomes a tangled thing.”

In forming her public image, Harris has repeatedly showcased interest and prowess in the kitchen. In her 2020 democratic presidential primary campaign, she ran a video series called “Cooking with Kamala” where she cheffed it up with celebrities, comedians, and politicians. In her speech accepting the party’s vice presidential nomination that year, Contois has written about how, by mentioning cooking Sunday dinner for her family to bolster claim to the nickname of Mamala, Harris sought to “cast herself as politically competent and suitably feminine in the eyes of voters… while also foregrounding her role as a mother and nurturer.”

Contois believes the quirky recipe details shared by Harris on the campaign trail—such as soaking greens in the bathtub—indicates genuineness and true passion, but also a savvy strategy. “It’s coming across as both truth, and a tactic that can help to construct that believably feminine side that people would expect and want to see in a woman,” Contois said.

Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack. As Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has spent time on the campaign trail alongside Trump, posted in September, “Kamala spends more time making cooking videos than she does speaking to the media.” Loomer also, in a tradition that traces at least as far back as stigmatizing Italian migrants’ use of garlic, made a smear out of Harris’ Indian heritage and cooking by posting she would make “the White House smell like curry.”

“The spice and the smell and the difference,” Contois says, “that’s a more than 100-year-old tactic … of how to other someone.” An extreme version was also used to target Haitian migrants by the Trump and Vance ticket, in their comments pushing the false notion the community was eating pet dogs and cats. “To eat the family pet—it’s this huge anthropological, cultural taboo,” Contois said. “That’s why the rumor could take root and do so much harm.”

Donald Trump found his own way to use a kitchen to reshape his public image in the campaign’s closing weeks, by making his stage-managed appearance behind a fryer and drive-thru window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. It was not only a reminder of his love for the company and fast food generally, but a salvo in his one-sided narrative battle about Harris’ actual experience working at a McDonald’s—one that contrasts with his own silver spoon-fed upbringing.

Harris’ cooking references have become a tool of attack.

Federal Elections Commission campaign spending data shows another clear Trump-Harris contrast related to McDonald’s. While his campaign has paid for food from the home of the Big Mac more than 150 times, there’s no record Harris’ has ordered even once. His team’s second most frequented food business is Dunkin’ Donuts, closely followed by Chick-fil-A, where he has spent over 10 times as much money as Harris. The Harris campaign, since it launched in July, has tended to go big on fast casual spots like Chipotle, where her campaign spent 15 times more than Trump’s, and Sweetgreen, where they spent three times as much as Trump.

Of course, to look beyond symbolism and such spending, the candidates have pushed policies that could affect what and how Americans eat. While Trump loves to blast the rise in cost of groceries, his plan to deport masses of immigrants has been predicted to cause an over 20 percent increase in the price of hand-picked crops while nearly doubling the price of milk. With those kind of stakes, it’s clear this year’s election has left voters with plenty to digest.

What changes if more people showed up to vote?

One answer emerges by comparing Minnesota and Tennessee—two states with vastly different voter turnout rates. Minnesota leads the nation, with nearly 80 percent of eligible voters participating in the 2020 election. With that, Minnesotans have elected leaders who have advanced a popular agenda: universal school meals, free public college tuition, paid family and medical leave, and the restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. According to polling, each of these proposals is broadly popular across the entire country.

By contrast, in Tennessee, voter turnout in 2020 was only 59 percent—enabling a very unpopular Republican supermajority to ignore calls for stricter gun control, despite widespread support. Instead, they’ve focused on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and enacting some of the country’s harshest abortion laws. Tennessee once had abortion protections, but a historically low-turnout election in 2014 paved the way for today’s restrictive policies.

In my new video, I run the numbers. Watch:

Free school meals. Childcare. Health care. The thing is, when voters show up, popular things happen. @garrison_hayes runs the numbers pic.twitter.com/whW7MLjj7l

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 3, 2024

The differences between Minnesota and Tennessee make it clear: Turnout has sweeping consequences. Go vote.

What changes if more people showed up to vote?

One answer emerges by comparing Minnesota and Tennessee—two states with vastly different voter turnout rates. Minnesota leads the nation, with nearly 80 percent of eligible voters participating in the 2020 election. With that, Minnesotans have elected leaders who have advanced a popular agenda: universal school meals, free public college tuition, paid family and medical leave, and the restoration of voting rights for formerly incarcerated people. According to polling, each of these proposals is broadly popular across the entire country.

By contrast, in Tennessee, voter turnout in 2020 was only 59 percent—enabling a very unpopular Republican supermajority to ignore calls for stricter gun control, despite widespread support. Instead, they’ve focused on banning diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and enacting some of the country’s harshest abortion laws. Tennessee once had abortion protections, but a historically low-turnout election in 2014 paved the way for today’s restrictive policies.

In my new video, I run the numbers. Watch:

Free school meals. Childcare. Health care. The thing is, when voters show up, popular things happen. @garrison_hayes runs the numbers pic.twitter.com/whW7MLjj7l

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 3, 2024

The differences between Minnesota and Tennessee make it clear: Turnout has sweeping consequences. Go vote.

The idea that women might vote differently from their husbands made Fox News star Jesse Watters’ brain melt live on air this week.

Referring to his current wife, Watters, with his trademark smirk, told his colleagues on The Five, “If I found out Emma was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair.” This, from a man who admitted to his employer in 2017 that he was in a relationship with a colleague 14 years his junior—something that reportedly led to his divorce from his first wife. “What else is she keeping from me?” Jesse mused, prompting guffaws from his fellow panelists.

Beyond hypocrisy, Mother Jones creator Kat Abughazaleh argues that Watters’ reaction reveals the fierce undercurrent of sexist resentment coursing through this year’s campaign, typified by Donald Trump, who just this week ominously vowed to protect women, “whether the women like it or not.”

It’s an issue that Democrats and their anti-Trump allies have been eager to highlight, including former congresswoman and top Harris campaigner Liz Cheney, who told CBS’ Face the Nation on Wednesday, “I think you’re going to have, frankly, a lot of men and women who will go into the voting booth and will vote their conscience, will vote for Vice President Harris.”

“They may not ever say anything publicly,” she added, “but the results will speak for themselves.”

Michelle Obama also seized on this dynamic. “Just remember that your vote is a private matter,” she told a Michigan rally last weekend.

Soon, that private decision could have very public ramifications—for the entire country.