I spent my weekend driving around southeastern Pennsylvania in a rented minivan. And if the interviews I did there are any indication, there is one thing everyone in this divided nation can agree on: The uncertainty is getting to us.
In Lancaster County, Persida Himmele, a 58-year-old college professor, told me something that might resonate with a lot of you. It feels, she said, as if life is on hold through the election.
She hasn’t graded papers. She plans to teach her classes online rather than in person this week. She is urging everybody she knows — particularly friends and family who are Puerto Rican, as she is — not to vote for former President Donald Trump, and she has been knocking on doors in Latino neighborhoods, hoping to have those conversations with strangers, too.
She can hardly imagine what the country might look like after tomorrow, regardless of whether her preferred candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins.
“I think that even if she wins, we are going to see violence,” Himmele told me on Saturday at a canvassing launch in downtown Lancaster. She worries that a Trump victory could drive up racism and threaten the future of democracy.
The next morning, I attended Trump’s rally in Lititz, Pa., where Melissa Thomas, a 49-year-old Republican, made an even more ominous prediction. She told me that she thought Harris could not win without election fraud — and that it might be a precursor to a civil war.
“I will not take it gracefully, and I will not take it laying down,” Thomas, a resident of Lemoyne, Pa., said.
“I can see the capitol of Pennsylvania and Harrisburg from my front porch,” Thomas said, “and I will be there, and I will be letting my people know, my representatives, my congressmen, know that this isn’t going to fly.”
With one day to go before the election, the polls are practically tied. Voters on both sides of the aisle feel a deep sense of foreboding, as my colleagues Lisa Lerer and Katie Glueck wrote today. And everyone seems to feel as if they’re staring into an abyss.
Voters burned by years of polling misses don’t know what to make of narrowly divided polls, or whether to trust them at all. But I spoke to Harris supporters who deeply believe she will win, and Trump supporters who are just as sure about their candidate’s victory — especially because Trump has primed them to believe that the only way Harris can win is if she cheats, even though that is not true.
The real uncertainty I heard from voters was less about the result, and more about what comes next.
“We’re going to win, but I’m concerned about what’s going to happen afterwards, because there’s so much hatred for Trump,” Shirley Rust, a real estate agent from Lancaster County, told me before Trump’s rally in Lititz.
“I worry about what happens when we’re still counting the vote, and the other side doesn’t like what they’re seeing,” Leann Hart, 39, a data analyst and the vice chair of the Bensalem Democratic Organization, told me in Norristown, Pa., while she waited for the former first lady Michelle Obama to take the stage at a rally for Ms. Harris.
None of us know who will win the election. And we don’t know whether worrisome events in recent days, like arson attacks on ballot boxes, are aberrations or an indication of more instability to come.
But what we do know is this: People are voting, and the system so far has functioned largely as it should.
Tomorrow night, the polls will close. The nation’s election workers will do their jobs. Results will be reported. There could be a flurry of lawsuits, and it could be a while before we get any clarity, especially if it is close.
Over the past six months, I’ve tried to use this newsletter to help you understand an election that became even more of a roller coaster than any of us expected, to bring you to the states and the voters who will shape its final outcome and to help make sense of the moments where everything changed.
Now, voters are on the precipice of changing the country again, either electing the country’s first female president or returning to the White House a former president whom voters rejected after one term.
I’ll be back in your inboxes early tomorrow, with a primer on to how to make sense of the day. And in the days to come, I’ll be guiding you through the results and what it all means for the country.
Thank you for reading — and see you tomorrow.
the moment
Two photographs that stuck with our photographers
Over the past few months, we’ve spent some time with the images made by New York Times photographers on the campaign trail. Today, I asked Erin Schaff, the photographer assigned to cover Vice President Kamala Harris, and Doug Mills, the photographer assigned to cover former President Donald Trump, to each share one image that stuck with them from their months of coverage.
This was the vice president’s first campaign event with former President Barack Obama. In this photo, they are taking a quiet moment to speak before heading onstage. I am most interested in seeing who the candidate is when she or he is not performing for the public.
— Erin Schaff
So this picture here is of Donald Trump just about to exit what he calls “Trump Force One,” his private plane that he flies to campaign stops. He was just about to leave the aircraft and walk out to thousands of people waiting on the tarmac.
I was standing in the doorway, and all of a sudden the former president walked right through the aisle. I kind of lifted up the camera to make sure it was going to be OK. And he looked at me. He goes, “We’re good, Doug, go ahead.”
There is no question that Donald Trump knows when every camera’s around him. And that is one thing that is unique to him. He’s very much about the imagery and the entertainment part of it.
— Doug Mills
The candidates who want tight polls
Tight polls make candidates and voters on both sides of the aisle deeply anxious. But all year, some Senate candidates in key races have been trying to make the polls look tighter than they are. My colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick explains.
It’s happened in Arizona, where Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, faces Kari Lake, a Republican. Gallego’s social media accounts regularly blast out polls — apparently conducted by Republican-friendly firms or on behalf of Republican-aligned groups — that show him tied with or trailing Lake, even as independent polling averages show him leading.
It’s also happened in Nevada. In March, Senator Jacky Rosen’s X account promoted polling that showed her two points behind a hypothetical Republican opponent, even though nonpartisan polls showed her ahead. The poll Rosen tweeted included no information about who conducted it, the sample size or the margin of error, and it doesn’t appear to exist elsewhere online. Experts said it could be an internal poll that the campaign or an allied group conducted but never released.
Campaigns often selectively promote data to drive preferred narratives. But why cherry-pick polls that appear to show bad news for your candidate?
Experts said the posts, which the campaigns send out with pleas for donations, are a strategy to goose fund-raising by stoking their supporters’ fears of the other side winning. “A fund-raising email is meant to both freak you out and motivate you,” said Alyssa Cass, a partner at Slingshot Strategies, a political consulting firm. “When the house is on fire, Democrats give.”
Some Republicans have mirror-image goals. Lake’s social media accounts, for example, promoted outlier poll results this summer that showed her tied with Gallego.
“The internet, the rise of the small-dollar donor, the increasing competitiveness of elections — all push campaigns in a very foreseeable way to this type of tactic,” said David Byler of Noble Predictive Insights, a nonpartisan polling firm.
The Lake, Gallego and Rosen campaigns did not respond to requests for comment.
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