How Is It This Close?

A little over a week ago, campaigning in Kalamazoo, Michigan, former First Lady Michelle Obama had a moment of reflection. “I gotta ask myself, why on earth is this race even close?” she asked. The crowd roared, but Obama wasn’t laughing. It’s a serious question, and it deserves serious consideration.

The most remarkable thing about the 2024 presidential election, which hasn’t lacked for surprises, is that roughly half the electorate still supports Donald Trump. The Republican’s tenure in the White House was a series of rolling disasters, and culminated with him attempting to steal an election after voters rejected him. And yet, polling suggests that Trump is virtually tied with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

In fact, that undersells how surprising the depth of his support is. Although he has dominated American politics for most of the past decade, he has never been especially popular. As the Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has written, the United States has thus far been home to a consistent anti-MAGA majority. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination by splitting the field, then won the Electoral College that November despite losing the popular vote. He lost decisively in 2020. In 2018, the GOP was trounced in the midterm elections. In the 2022 midterms, Trump was out of office but sought to make the elections about him, resulting in a notable GOP underperformance. Yet Trump stands a good chance of winning his largest share of the popular vote this year, in his third try—now, after Americans have had nearly a decade to familiarize themselves with his complete inadequacy—and could even capture a majority.

[Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Trump’s term was chaos wrapped in catastrophe, served over incompetence. He avoided any major wars and slashed taxes, but otherwise failed in many of his goals. He did not build a wall, nor did Mexico pay for it. He did not beat China in a trade war or revive American manufacturing. He did not disarm North Korea. His administration was hobbled by a series of scandals of his own creation, including one that got him impeached by the House. He oversaw a string of moral outrages: his callous handling of Hurricane María, the cruelty of family separation, his disinformation about COVID, and the distribution of aid to punish Democratic areas. At the end came his attempt to thwart the will of American voters, an assault on the tradition of peaceful transfer of power that dated back to the nation’s founding.

One common explanation for Trump’s popularity is that voters have amnesia about his time in office. This may be true, and it might be more understandable if Trump had spent his time since leaving office remaking his identity into something less divisive, as many Republicans urged him to do.

He hasn’t, though. Instead, he has amplified many of his most outrageous attributes. The past few years have seen the FBI turn up some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, where they had been stashed haphazardly (this, after his 2016 campaign criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, relentlessly for her handling of her email security). The former president has also been indicted on dozens of felony charges and convicted on 34 of them. In civil proceedings, he’s been found liable for raping the writer E. Jean Carroll (he denies this) and to have committed millions of dollars of business fraud.

His 2024 presidential campaign has been built around two main promises: a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and retribution against his political enemies. He’s said he wants to deploy the military against domestic enemies, a category that he has made clear begins with elected Democrats. As I wrote after his October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden, hate and fear are his message. The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, recently reported that Trump had complained that he wanted generals like Hitler’s, and an aide allegedly assaulted an employee at Arlington National Cemetery who tried to prevent Trump from using it for crass politicking. Every administration has a few disgruntled staffers; no other administration has ever seen so many former top staffers say that a president is a fascist, a liar, or unfit for the presidency.

Harris is running a very different campaign. In contrast to Trump’s bleak vision, she has spent most of her short campaign offering a cheerful, patriotic vision of the sort that has traditionally appealed to American voters. Harris has been criticized for offering insufficient detail about her plans and granting too few interviews, and more detail and more transparency are always better. But Trump is just as vague, if not more so, about his plans—his explanation for his plans on tariffs and child care, for example, are downright naive—and he has avoided or canceled several interviews with interlocutors not considered friendly.

Some of the important reasons the election is so close are structural and have little to do with Trump or Harris. Underlying characteristics of the election benefit the Republican nominee: Voters in the United States are unhappy about the direction of the country, and voters around the world have been punishing incumbents. Although Harris is not the president, she has struggled to figure out how much to distance herself from Joe Biden and the administration in which she serves as vice president. Americans are also sour on the economy, and although the U.S. has weathered the post-COVID world and global inflation better than any of its peers, saying that is no use if voters don’t feel and believe it.

[Read: The case for Kamala Harris]

Trump has also benefited from the media environment. A robust right-wing press has opted to become effectively a wing of the MAGA movement. Harris faces scrutiny from both the mainstream and conservative press, but he receives it only from the mainstream. Some parts of the mainstream press still seem perplexed by how to cover Trump. Moreover, Trump has benefited from a huge range of attention outside the traditional news media. Podcasts have become an important driver of support for him. So has X. Elon Musk bought the platform out of a supposed concern for political interference, and has spent the past few months turning it into a gusher of pro-Trump disinformation.

Harris has run the shortest presidential campaign in history, a product of Biden’s late exit from the race. Whether a longer run would have helped or hurt her is impossible to answer clearly, though some Democrats fret that she has not sufficiently introduced herself to the nation in that time. Puzzlingly, her campaign has spent much of the past couple of weeks attacking Trump rather than emphasizing the affirmative case for her—setting aside the message that had won her a small lead in the polls and taking up the one that had been a loser for Biden.

In most respects, Harris is a totally conventional Democratic nominee—to both her advantage and her disadvantage. One might imagine that, against a candidate as aberrant as Trump, this would be sufficient for a small lead. Indeed, that’s exactly the approach that Biden used to beat Trump four years ago. But if the polling is right (which it may not be, in either direction), then many voters have stuck with Trump or shifted toward him. For many others, the closeness of the race is just as baffling. “I don’t think it's going to be near as close as they’re saying,” Tony Capillary told me at an October 21 rally in Greenville, North Carolina. “This should be about 93 percent to 7 percent, is what it should be.” He’s sure that when the votes are in, Trump will win—by a lot.