No matter the outcome, Election Night this year is bittersweet for one particular group of former President Donald Trump’s supporters: The most dedicated of Trump superfans known as the Front Row Joes. There are about 1,500 of them from all across the country, and they got their start with Trump back in 2015 when no one in the establishment was taking him seriously. The Joes travel the country attending his political rallies in much the same way that groupies follow rock bands. In their matching baseball jerseys, they deploy military-level logistics and marathon endurance to stake their spots at the front of the line to see the man they adore.

But the events that have animated their lives for nine years may be coming to an end, regardless of the election’s outcome. If Trump wins, he won’t need rallies, and if he loses, there won’t be many reasons to have one.

A group of the Joes assembled at the Palm Beach County Convention Center Tuesday night for the Trump election watch party in the hopes that if this is the end of the road, at least they will be celebrating a victory. I spoke to some of them about how they felt about the prospects of the end of an era.

One Front Row Joe, Greg Reed, from New Port Richie, Florida, told me that he will be sorry to see this glorious road show make its last stop. “I’ve been preparing myself,” he told me. “It will sadden me for sure. But I’m hoping for tears of joy.” He had been standing in line outside the convention center since 11 a.m. until the doors opened at 4 p.m. But Reed was used to it. A veteran of 40 Trump rallies since 2015, he usually gets there about three days in advance and camps out in front of the venue—if it’s ok with the authorities. Otherwise, he said, “We sleep in our cars.”

Sharon Anderson and her friend Pam Lathrop were sitting at a table in the back with a group of Joes waiting for the night’s festivities to kick off. Anderson is from east Tennessee, and this was her 63^rd rally. For Lathrop, from North Port, Florida, this one is number 39.

The "Front Row Joes"—Trump's band of diehard rally-goers, who have attended many dozens of his events for nearly a decade—are at Palm Beach County Convention Center for Trump's election night party. @smencimer chatted to two members about what's next. pic.twitter.com/8Pe1QSpIVO

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 6, 2024

Being a Front Row Joe confers a certain kind of MAGA royalty, even though the sacrifices the Joes have made to show up for Trump have earned no special perks or insider status with the campaigns. As Reed’s experience shows, they still have to wait in line like everyone else. Anderson said she has shown up for rallies at least a week early sleeping on the sidewalk and showering at Planet Fitness. But that’s part of the appeal. It shows their commitment.

“My special perk is listening to his vision for this country,” Anderson told me.

“We’re happy to earn that front-row status,” Lathrop said. “We don’t do it for the notoriety.”

That said, they do enjoy getting a shout-out from the former president.“He will recognize us from the podium during the rally,” Anderson said. “That’s thrilling for us. Of course, anybody would want to be recognized by Donald J. Trump, so we’re very appreciative.”

What they will do if this is the last rally?” I asked. Lathrop was not discouraged. Even if Trump loses, she said, it won’t be the end. “He’ll have thank-you rallies!”

“But he’s not going to lose,” Anderson said. And if he does? Or he just decides that he’s too busy being president to hold rallies? “We’re gonna help make his dream for America come true,” Anderson replied. Lathrop said they were going to support the MAGA movement and other candidates.

I wondered whether they thought people would accept the results of the election should Trump lose. Would there be a replay of 2020? Neither woman was sure, and of course, they both thought the Democrats would behave worse if Harris were defeated. But they were feeling pretty good about Trump’s prospects, which they’d worked hard to boost.

“I’m gonna leave it in God’s hands,” Lothrop said

“But he’s not gonna lose.” Anderson said. “We spent too much time working for the win. Right now is no time to walk away from the field.”

Florida’s six-week abortion ban will remain the law of the land, as an abortion rights constitutional amendment failed Tuesday night.

With 91 percent of the vote tallied as of 9:20 p.m., support for Florida’s Amendment 4 hovered around 57 percent, according to Associated Press projections—shy of the 60 percent threshold required to pass. The amendment would have protected the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or until about 24 weeks’ gestation, and after viability if a medical provider determined that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.

The amendment’s failure isn’t just a loss to the political momentum following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022; it’s a major win for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wielded the power of his office to defeat the measure. “A bipartisan group of voters today sent a clear message to the Florida legislature,” a representative from Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign behind the amendment, said in a Tuesday night livestream. That message to lawmakers? “End the ban.”

DeSantis proclaimed victory within minutes of the final polls closing at 8 p.m. “Amendment 4 has failed,” he wrote in a post on X. More than a million more Floridians voted for Amendment 4 than voted for DeSantis in 2022.

Abortion rights supporters spent more in Florida—over $75 million—than in any other state with similar measures on the ballot. Despite popular support for abortion rights in the state, the ballot measure faced an uphill battle to victory, in more ways than one.

Most obviously, it needed to garner 60 percent support—more than the simple majorities that were needed to pass abortion protections in red states like Ohio, Kansas, and Kentucky. But DeSantis’ administration also challenged the measure in unprecedented ways, including by threatening television stations that ran pro-amendment advertisements, releasing a massive report weeks before the election accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom of “widespread election fraud,” and using a state agency website as a virtual billboard to oppose the amendment.

Since coming into effect in May, Florida’s six-week abortion ban has upended access to the procedure across the South. Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans, and Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans. The number of abortions in Florida plummeted by 30 percent in the first two months of the ban, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Amendment 4’s defeat marks the first failure of a state abortion rights amendment since Dobbs. Voters in seven states have passed abortion protections, and voters in nine other states have similar measures on their ballots.

In a victory for abortion rights advocates, New Yorkers just voted to enshrine extensive anti-discrimination protections into their state constitution—permanently insulating the rights of pregnant people, abortion seekers, and the LGBTQ community, among others, from changing political winds.

Proposal 1 is one of 10 ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights that went before voters on Tuesday. Going into Election Day, supporters of abortion rights had won every single ballot initiative to go before voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

With 33 percent of votes counted as of 9:50 p.m., Proposal 1 was winning with 72 percent of the vote Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press. But the ballot measure encountered and overcame steeper-than-expected opposition in the safe blue state. Opponents had mounted an openly transphobic campaign to block it, spreading misleading claims about the proposal’s effects on a range of Republican culture war issues, including trans youth health care, women’s sports, and noncitizen voting. In the final days of the race, conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein dropped $6.5 million into efforts to defeat the measure.

From the outset, Proposal 1 was designed to protect abortion rights. As Mother Jones reported last week:

New York’s Proposal 1 may not include the word “abortion,” but it would create first-in-the-nation protections for the rights of pregnant people.

The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop. 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop. 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.

Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop. 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.

The Yes on Prop. 1 campaign declared victory on Twitter on Tuesday night. “While the world waits for the national election results, tonight,” the campaign posted. “New York State lived up to our motto, ‘ever upward,’ and took an extraordinary step forward in our enduring work to build freedom for all.”

As Georgia vote counters page through the absentee and mail-in ballots, a few folks seated nearby who self-identify as “poll observers” are watching closely. A new election law in Georgia permitted anyone designated by an “independent candidate, nonpartisan candidate, a political party, or political body” to gain more access to voting centers and tabulation sites. Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump—who happens to be former President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law—and RNC Chair Michael Whatley embarked on a drive to recruit more than 200,000 poll watchers. As absentee and mail-in ballots began to be tallied this weekend, Whatley tweeted, “We have eyes in the room as votes are being counted.” 

Live from Fulton County, Georgia… meet the self-appointed "vote monitors" looking for fraud: pic.twitter.com/tAOA2hqdVt

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) November 6, 2024

Mother Jones editor and senior reporter Kiera Butler lives in Georgia and visited the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center, where she spoke with a few poll observers. She wondered why they were there, who they voted for, and what they thought about the 2020 election. Rodney Kelso, a Trump supporter from Chattahoochee Hills, wanted to observe and “make sure everything is fair and we have a smooth process.” Kelso believed the 2020 presidential election was riddled with problems and believes mail-in ballots made the US vulnerable to “more fraud and nefarious deeds.” Rodney’s wife, Debi, also a Trump supporter, who shares her husband’s suspicions about the 2020 election, signed on to observe the count in Fulton County because she wanted to see the process up close. 

As far as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol is concerned, both Rodney and Debi believe it was a farce. “It was a coup d’état,” said Rodney, “Our government was overthrown by foreign agents.” These were not Trump supporters storming the Capitol, they said. Debi believes the FBI was in on it. 

Accepting the results of the 2024 election for Debi will be no problem “if there’s no cheating and everything’s on the up and up,” she said. “Then the winners win, the losers lose, regardless of who it is.”

It started with Georgia: a handful of bomb threats sent to polling locations in heavily Democratic areas. Two polling sites in Union City outside Atlanta, where the population is nearly 90 percent Black, were temporarily shut down. Georgia officials, citing federal law enforcement, named Russia as the culprit, as the threats had come from that nation’s email domains.

As Election Day went on, the threats kept coming, causing polls to close and evacuate for short periods. It seems Russia was brazenly interfering on Trump’s behalf, as it has in the past—but more openly this time.

There have been dozens of bomb threats today in blue areas around Atlanta. In Fulton County, the police chief said law enforcement had responded to 32. Multiple precincts faced temporary closures. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election,” said Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

The threats targeted Democratic areas in other swing states as well. Several were sent to Arizona’s Navajo County, where many Native Americans vote. (Secretary of State Adrian Fontes also blamed Russia.) The critical “Blue Wall” states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania received threats too, as did Minnesota, Maine, and Ohio, according to various reports. “The FBI is aware of bomb threats to polling locations in several states, many of which appear to originate from Russian email domains,” the agency said in a statement. “None of the threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

If Russia is indeed the culprit, it means President Vladimir Putin feels sufficiently emboldened to help Donald Trump openly on Election Day by attempting to disenfranchise Democratic voters. This effort follows the recent disinformation of viral videos by a Russian-backed propaganda outfit. As Mother Jones has reported, evidence links a Moscow-backed disinformation unit to fake videos stoking fears of voter fraud in recent weeks. One of the videos purported to show recent Haitian immigrants voting for Kamala Harris in Georgia; in another, Haitian immigrants brag about voting in multiple precincts in the state. A third bogus video shows mail-in ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Putin would clearly prefer to have Trump in the White House. The former president has said he would broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, which would be a win for Russia, has questioned America’s membership in NATO, and is generally solicitous of Putin and other authoritarian leaders. Harris, on the other hand, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine and strengthening NATO.

In the wake of the bomb scares, the US intelligence community has warned that Putin’s goal is to sow chaos and distrust in the democratic process. They don’t expect Russian interference to go away just because Election Day is winding down. “If chaos is the point,” Chris Krebs, former director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the Washington Post, “the most opportune window to create mischief is the post-November 5th pre-certification period.”

The first state to ban abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade just became the first state to have a near-total abortion ban reversed by popular vote.

The people of Missouri voted on Tuesday to create a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about abortion, birth control, and health care during pregnancy—approving Amendment 3 by almost 54 percent of the vote as of 11:30 p.m. Central Time, according to the Associated Press.

Amendment 3 was part of a nationwide effort by reproductive rights groups to use ballot initiatives to restore abortion rights state by state after the Supreme Court wiped out the national right to abortion. On Election Day this year, 10 states voted on abortion rights ballot measures.

In deep-red Missouri, where the state government is controlled by avowed abortion foes, even getting this initiative before voters was a feat. Republican state officials repeatedly threw up barriers to the process of certifying the ballot language and gathering signatures, leading to a series of bitter legal battles that all, ultimately, were decided in favor of abortion rights advocates. As Mother Jones reported last week:

Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

The new constitutional amendment now sets up a legal challenge to Missouri’s abortion ban as well as to the constellation of restrictions that made getting an abortion almost impossible in the state even before the fall of Roe. As I wrote last year:

The reality is that, even before Dobbs, abortion access in Missouri was close to nil. The legislature had passed too many burdensome and medically unnecessary rules designed to be impossible for abortion clinics to comply with. In the years prior to Dobbs, the only clinic still offering abortions was a Planned Parenthood location in St. Louis, which performed about 100 abortions annually. “Many, many Missourians for years now have gone to Kansas or Illinois to access care, because the states had fewer restrictions,” explains Emily Wales, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which stopped offering abortions at its Missouri locations in 2018. 

In this environment, the success of the initiative shows the enduring power of abortion rights as a motivation for voters—and their enduring anger against deadly laws that curb pregnant people’s power to control their bodies and their futures.

Ohio voters defeated a major ballot initiative on Tuesday that would have ended partisan gerrymandering in the state and curbed the lopsided majorities Republicans hold in the state legislature and US House delegation. The measure, known as Issue 1, was voted down with 54 percent of the vote.

Republicans aggressively used their power to thwart a measure that seemingly had the support of a large majority of the state’s voters. Ohio voters passed two previous redistricting reform measures, in 2015 and 2018, with more than 70 percent of the vote each time.

But when it came time to put Issue 1 on the ballot, Ohio Republicans grossly misrepresented the intention of the measure, which would have created a citizens redistricting commission to draw new maps for the state legislature and US House after GOP legislative leaders gutted the previous redistricting initiatives. The summary of the ballot initiative adopted by the Ohio Ballot Board, which has a Republican majority, implied the measure would encourage partisan gerrymandering rather than curb it, claiming the initiative would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering” and “manipulate the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts to favor the two largest political parties in the state of Ohio.” 

The board’s chair, GOP Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who lost the GOP primary for US Senate in 2024, is a member of the GOP-dominated redistricting commission that repeatedly voted for the state’s gerrymandered maps that gave Republicans supermajorities in both chambers—67 percent of seats in the state House and 69 percent in the state Senate, despite Trump only getting 53 percent of the vote in 2020. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the gerrymandered state legislative and US House maps seven times, but Republicans like LaRose kept overriding the court’s opinions.

The group behind Issue 1, Citizens Not Politicians, which is led by former Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, immediately sued the ballot board, asking the Ohio Supreme Court to block the “biased, inaccurate, deceptive, and unconstitutional ballot language.”

But the Ohio Supreme Court, which gained a more conservative Republican majority after O’Connor’s retirement in 2022, largely approved the misleading language. That led to complaints from Ohio voters that they had been tricked into opposing a redistricting reform initiative that they actually supported.

As Bolts magazine reported:

When Songgu Kwon went to the polls earlier this month, he was eager to help Ohio adopt an independent redistricting commission. The comic book writer and illustrator, who lives near Athens, dislikes the process with which politicians have carved up Ohio into congressional and legislative districts that favor them, enabling Republicans to lock in large majorities. So he was pleased that voting rights groups had placed Issue 1, a proposal meant to create fairer maps, on the Ohio ballot this fall. 

“I’m in support of any measures that make the process more fair to reflect the will of the people, instead of letting the politicians decide how to gerrymander,” says Kwon.

In the voting booth, he reviewed the text in front of him. His ballot read that voting ‘yes’ would set up a panel “required to gerrymander the boundaries of state legislative and congressional districts,” and that it would “repeal constitutional protections against gerrymandering.” 

So Kwon voted ‘no’ on the measure—given what he’d just read, he thought, that had to be the way to signal support for independent redistricting. He’d gone in planning to vote ‘yes,’ but he was thrown off by this language he saw; he guessed that he must have been wrong or missed some recent development. “The language seemed really specific that if you vote ‘yes’, you’re for gerrymandering,” he now recalls in frustration. 

But when he left the polling station and compared notes with his wife, he quickly figured out that he’d made a mistake: He had just voted to preserve the status quo. To bring about the new independent process and remove redistricting from elected officials, as was his intention, he would have had to vote ‘yes.’

Those reports of confused voters were widespread. Eight in 10 Ohioans told pollsters they believed that it was important that “a candidate of one political party isn’t always guaranteed to win” when it comes to drawing legislative districts. But when the misleading GOP-crated ballot summary was read to voters, support dropped precipitously.

The result is a major defeat for democracy reform efforts nationwide. And it was also a sign of how Republicans were using their entrenched power to thwart direct democracy.

That happened in other states as well. In Florida, 57 percent of voters supported a measure to enshrine protections for reproductive rights in the state. But it became the first to fail to pass an abortion rights measure since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade because Florida requires a 60 percent supermajority to pass a ballot initiative and the state’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis campaigned heavily against it, even going so far to send his election fraud police to the homes of voters who signed a petition supporting abortion rights. That was a brazen abuse of power, but it was par for the course in the GOP’s bid to preserve minority rule.

Late Tuesday night, the Associated Press projected Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown—and with him, any sense that Ohio was still a swing state.

Brown, who served three terms, maintained an edge for most of his US Senate reelection bid against Moreno, a former luxury car dealership owner from Colombia. But in the end, a windfall of cash from national Republican groups boosted Moreno over the top. Just before midnight, Moreno lead Brown by 5 points.

It’s not surprising that a Republican would win a Senate seat in Ohio, but the fact that this particular Republican beat a well-liked incumbent suggests how much Ohio has changed in less than a decade.

As a Rust Belt state devastated by deindustrialization, automation, and in recent years, an epidemic of drug addiction, Ohio tends to gravitate toward candidates who are dutiful in their support for middle-class and working-class voters. But Moreno doesn’t have a pro-worker reputation: As we previously reported, he was found liable for withholding wages from employees and was sanctioned by a judge for disposing of documents relevant to that case. He additionally faced lawsuits from former employees who accused him of racial, gender, and age discrimination. More recently, he’s blocked voters from recording his events by using audio jammers.

Moreno also struggled to refine his message on reproductive rights, a topic 57 percent of Ohio voters said they supported in 2023 when they approved a ballot measure enshrining abortion access. “You know, the left has a lot of single issue voters,” Moreno said in a leaked video from a recent town hall. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else,'” Moreno mocked. “OK. It’s a little crazy, by the way, but—especially for women that are like past 50, I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.'”

But Moreno did have something Brown could never dream of—nor desire: an endorsement from Donald Trump. That endorsement was likely pivotal for Moreno, says Paul Beck, professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University. It gave him the edge against state Sen. Matt Dolan, a more traditional Republican who was Moreno’s biggest competition in the primary race. With no political experience and, until recently, not much name recognition, “he doesn’t really have a strong track record” otherwise, Beck says.

While Brown is a political progressive—supporting LGBTQ rights and reproductive freedoms—he has maintained a healthy distance from the rest of his party in recent months. He didn’t campaign with Harris. He stayed home this summer while fellow Democrats threw their celebratory, celebrity-filled nominating convention in Chicago. Brown also garnered the endorsement of the only Republican who ever defeated him in an election: former Ohio Gov. Bob Taft, who bested Brown as he sought reelection as Ohio’s secretary of state in 1990.

Known for sporting union-made suits and driving union-made cars, Brown’s 2024 campaign also attracted long-standing appreciation from prominent labor union leaders. The senator often wears a canary pin on his lapel to symbolize 20th-century coal miners who were subjected to dangerous working conditions before collective bargaining advanced job safety.

His populist persona and these contradictions are the same ones that helped Brown win the Senate seat three times in 2006, 2012, and 2018. It’s not that Brown has changed. It’s that Ohio has.

Ohio used to be a political microcosm of the country. Without fail, between 1964 and 2016, Ohio’s presidential pick was also the nation’s choice of president. The consistency inspired the phrase, “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation.”

In the early 2000s, the state’s population growth began lagging behind the rest of the country. Over time, Ohio became less educated, older, whiter—and, accordingly, redder. When Trump ran in 2016, his brash, America First persona appealed to Ohioans who felt they had been forgotten by elite politicians prioritizing globalism over their kitchen-table issues. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump won the state by more than 8 points. That trend has continued this cycle: As of 11:30 pm ET, Trump was nearly 12 points ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in Ohio.

In the end, Brown’s legislative history and broad coalition of blue-collar devotees couldn’t propel him to a fourth term. In today’s Ohio, only Trump’s support mattered.

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 vote count on Tuesday night says: maybe.

Despite Trump’s multiple offenses (criminal, political, and social), tens of millions voters—roughly half of the electorate—said they want more of him and desire this felonious, misogynistic, racist, and seemingly cognitively challenged wannabe-autocrat once again lead the nation. The contest was not officially decided by the end of Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris may triumph—but it will be a narrow victory without a resounding rejection of Trumpism. And there was a strong prospect that Trump could end up being the first fascist to win an American presidential election.

Facing a highly unconventional candidate whose main strategy was to whip up fear and anxiety, 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 convicted felon 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?

There has been 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 all 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, millions of Americans continued to cheer this along. Harris did not only campaign 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 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 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 has turned this into asymmetrical warfare. More than any other major presidential candidate in modern history, he has lied, he has insulted, he has appealed to the basest reflexes in people. He has 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 are profoundly different approaches to…well, to life. And in the 2024 election, Americans had to decide which camp they were in. Certainly, there were many issues beyond this monumental clash for voters to focus on: inflation, immigration, housing costs, trade, taxes, Ukraine, education, abortion, and so on. But ultimately, they 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 and values.

At this fork in the road—with vote-tallying still underway and the possibility of conflict and challenges in the air—Americans have not reached a clear decision on what sort of country the United States will be. And this inability to resolutely renounce Trump’s politics of hate—let alone empower it—is its own sort of judgment.

The Republican Party is on track to win control of the Senate, a significant victory that will allow the GOP to exercise power over judicial appointments and executive branch appointees.

If Trump retakes the White House, GOP Senate control will clear his path to make significant changes to the judiciary, including possibly appointing multiple Supreme Court justices. A GOP Senate is also likely to handily approve his Cabinet picks and other appointments, allowing Trump to place loyalist allies throughout the government.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins, a Republican Senate would block her judicial picks, possibly her Cabinet picks, and her legislative priorities.

The Senate map favored Republicans this cycle. While Democrats were more broadly on the defense, only three Republicans were in tight reelection races, and all three were in red states where the incumbent Republican was likely to win. Meanwhile, with the retirement of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, Republicans were destined a pickup in the GOP-voting state. His decision not to seek reelection almost guaranteed, at minimum, a tied Senate, and the GOP still had several prospects for picking up new seats.

Several vulnerable Democrats were running for reelection in swing states and red states, providing Republicans with many opportunities to pick up seats and secure a majority. In Ohio, incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown, a progressive and longtime union ally, lost his race to Bernie Moreno, who made millions running a car dealership empire with a history of worker exploitation. Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin ran against Eric Hovde, another millionaire whom she attacked for spending most of his time in California.

And while the overall map was difficult for Democrats, in the final months of the race, it became clear that Republican Sen. Deb Fischer, from the solidly red state of Nebraska, was in a surprisingly tight race against independent Dan Osborn.