Polarization Is on Display

Vice President Kamala Harris has earned Virginia’s 13 Electoral College votes, though by a far slimmer margin than most polls had predicted, The Associated Press reports. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine also won reelection, beating out longshot challenger Hung Cao, a former U.S. Navy captain.

Cao, a Trump acolyte, was born in Vietnam and made anti-communism the centerpiece of his campaign. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Cao said that he was “basically the standard bearer” for Virginia’s Vietnamese American population, the country’s fifth-largest. But as I reported from the Washington, D.C., suburbs last week, the reality is more complex. The community skews Republican, but there is strong support for Democrats as well.

Kaine, who has served in the Senate since 2013, is a member of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. He gained national prominence as Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2016 election—and again over the weekend, when he appeared on Saturday Night Live (along with Harris and pop star Chappell Roan).

Read it here: In Virginia, a Vietnamese American Community Divided

Among the foreign observers at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s election watch party at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida is Brazilian lawmaker Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The younger Bolsonaro posted a photo with Donald Trump Jr. to X in which he praised the “good company.”

Jair Bolsonaro was banned from running for office until 2030 after a court ruled that he abused his presidential power. But his brand of far-right politics is still influential in Brazil—and it leans heavily on Trump for strategic cues. In objection to their loss in a presidential election months earlier, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Brazilian seat of government in January 2023.

Eduardo Bolsonaro traveled to the United States with a handful of other conservative Brazilian lawmakers who similarly used their social media profiles to boost Trump’s messaging.

The night appears to be heading down a familiar path for U.S. election watchers: a nail-biting tally of the votes in the final swing states, with former U.S. President Donald Trump in the lead. Neither candidate has pulled off an upset; instead, the race is so far trending along the lines of what the polls projected. Trump appears likely to win Georgia and North Carolina, where the news and polling analysis website 538 had him up by a point heading into Election Day. Vice President Kamala Harris would have to make up ground in the urban areas where the votes are still being counted in order to turn those states around.

If Trump wins those two key states, it is likely that the race will come down to the big three “blue wall” states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which helped deliver President Joe Biden to victory in 2020. Harris had a slight advantage in Wisconsin and Michigan in the final polls, whereas Pennsylvania was dead even.

The odds are looking increasingly tough for Harris—the infamous New York Times needle has swung to “likely” for Trump.

Pennsylvania. Georgia. Arizona. Michigan. Maine. The list of states in which dozens of polling locations have faced bomb threats on Election Day continues to grow.

Authorities at the federal, state, and local levels—including the FBI—have all stressed that none of the threats so far have been considered credible, and no bombs have been found at any location, but the threats nonetheless led to temporary suspensions of voting in several counties. Many of the affected polling places will now stay open later than usual so people can cast their ballots.

Several officials, including the secretaries of state of Arizona and Georgia, said they believed the bomb threats originated from Russia, though neither provided any evidence to back up that claim. The FBI also said bomb threats in several states “appear to originate from Russian email domains.”

Russia does have a long track record of attempting to interfere in U.S. elections, including this one. And it’s not the only time they have been accused of using bomb threats to interfere with the vote during an election—Germany made similar allegations during the ongoing Moldovan election on Monday.

But there isn’t a smoking gun just yet. One U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal that there hasn’t been a formal assessment of Russia’s involvement in the bomb threats.

By most accounts, this presidential election will be close. We don’t have the kinds of landslide elections we had in 1936, 1972, or 1984. Instead, we have elections that come down to a handful of swing states and slivers of the electorate within those states.

The landmark book Insecure Majorities by my colleague, Princeton University political scientist Frances Lee, explores this instability. She explains that before 1994, congressional majorities were quite stable: Democrats had controlled the House since 1954 and the Senate for most of the time (aside from 1981 to 1987). Since then, however, we have entered an era in which control flips back and forth, and the size of these majorities has shrunk.

When Democrats had large and stable majorities, they could afford to make compromises, and Republicans had to reach across the aisle if they wanted any influence. Once that ended, the incentives for partisanship intensified. The potential cost of compromise increased as concessions could flip seats in the next election. Partisan battles became endless.

Presidential campaigns are now driven by similar dynamics. As fault lines have calcified, it has become increasingly difficult to know which way the electoral winds will blow. Candidates must slug it out over very small parts of the electorate, and the stakes of each fight have become greater. The 2000 election ushered in this era, when the parties entered a bare-knuckles battle over the vote count in Florida.

Although the colors of some of the states have changed, including Florida, we have been living in the shadow of that contentious election ever since.

One of the biggest fears around this year’s U.S. presidential contest was how widespread and impactful political misinformation would be—particularly with artificial intelligence and its ability to generate realistic images, audio, and video on demand. So far, the impact has been muted; the handful of AI-generated videos that have gained traction have been quickly debunked (and mostly attributed to Russia) by U.S. intelligence and security agencies, and much of the AI content on social media has been what author and tech journalist Brian Merchant described in a post on X as “the worst and corniest propaganda you’ve ever seen.”

At the start of 2024, however, ahead of the dozens of national elections around the world that took place before Americans went to the polls, the impact of AI was a far more open and troubling question. In an article for our Winter 2024 issue, I dug into the implications of AI on election misinformation—including the causes for concern and the case for calm.

Read it here: What AI Will Do to Elections 

Democrat Sarah McBride was elected to represent Delaware’s sole seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, The Associated Press reports. Her victory is historic: McBride will be the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress.

McBride’s victory comes amid widespread anti-trans sentiment in the United States, particularly among Republicans. This year alone, 45 anti-trans bills have passed in 43 states, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker. Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have made anti-trans messaging central to their campaign.

McBride currently serves in Delaware’s state Senate and was previously the national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump has once again secured Florida, winning 30 electoral votes with a projected 56 percent of the vote, according to The Associated Press. Some 94 percent of the vote has been counted thus far.

Once considered a swing state, Florida has gone to Trump in three consecutive presidential elections. Despite his mass deportation plan, he remains popular among the state’s growing Venezuelan diaspora, who favor his economic policy and hard-line approach toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. According to CNN, initial exit polls indicate that 57 percent of Florida’s Latino votes went to Trump—with both Latino men (64 percent) and Latina women (51 percent) preferring the former president.

Although the state’s Senate race was deemed tight by some watchers, the Republican incumbent, Sen. Rick Scott, won some 55 percent of the vote, defeating former Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell by a 13 percent margin, with 93 percent of votes counted.

Read more: Venezuelan Americans Could Be Key Voting Bloc

As the election results trickle in, the Taiwanese are among the foreign audiences with the most at stake. Under a Kamala Harris presidency, U.S. support for Taiwan is expected to remain consistent. However, if Trump takes the Oval Office, he might shake up the relationship.

In recent months, Trump has suggested that he thinks Taiwan isn’t giving the United States enough in exchange for U.S. defense support. What a better deal might look like according to Trump isn’t clear, but experts previously told Foreign Policy that it might entail pushing Taiwan to increase the percentage of GDP it spends on its military—the same demand Trump has made of numerous U.S. allies. Another concern for Taiwan: Elon Musk, one of Trump’s top supporters this cycle, has suggested that Taiwan should be made into a special administrative zone of China, like Hong Kong.

A recent poll shows that Taiwanese people support Harris over Trump by a wide margin. Jason Hsu, a former Taiwanese legislator at-large and current fellow at the Hudson Institute, told Foreign Policy on Tuesday: “I don’t think we are nervous about a Trump second term, but we must ensure we handle it with practicality and clear-mindedness. We must understand Trump is transactional, and if he does a favor for us, he may ask for something bigger in return.”

Democratic Rep. Andy Kim of New Jersey will become the first Korean American in the Senate after winning his race against Republican Curtis Bashaw. Kim’s victory keeps the seat in Democratic hands after it was vacated by former Sen. Bob Menendez, who became embroiled in a corruption scandal this year. Kim, 42, will also be the third-youngest member of the Senate.

Kim is a former diplomat whose work with the State Department and the National Security Council has taken him to Iraq and Afghanistan. In Foreign Policy in 2021, he described his experience growing up as a second-generation Korean American. When “I see Asian Americans across this country declaring with one, proud voice that they belong,” he wrote, “that feels like an act of defiance against the hate and the violence we’ve endured.”

In a long interview with me on FP Live last year, just days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, he described how policymakers needed to reflect on lessons from 9/11 and the war on terrorism and “be very mindful about what comes next.”

Philadelphia officials have asserted that there is no evidence of election fraud in the city, sharply refuting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s earlier unfounded claims of “massive cheating” there. 

Trump refuses to acknowledge losing his 2020 reelection bid to current President Joe Biden and has long peddled unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The former U.S. leader has intensified those claims in recent weeks, fueling concerns that he may be laying the groundwork to contest a potential election loss. 

On Tuesday, Trump alleged in a post on Truth Social that there was “a lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia,” without offering any evidence. He added: “Law enforcement coming!!!” 

His claims were swiftly repudiated by Philadelphia officials. “There is no factual basis whatsoever within law enforcement to support this wild allegation,” Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner said in a statement on Tuesday, which noted that officials have “invited complaints and allegations of improprieties all day.”

“If Donald J. Trump has any facts to support his wild allegations, we want them now. Right now. We are not holding our breath,” Krasner added. 

Seth Bluestein, a Republican Party member and a city commissioner in Philadelphia, said that Trump’s claim was “yet another example of disinformation.”

“There is absolutely no truth to this allegation,” he wrote on X, adding that the city has been in regular contact with the Republican National Convention. “We have been responsive to every report of irregularities at the polls to ensure Philadelphians can vote safely and securely.”

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy has won reelection in Connecticut, beating Republican challenger Matthew Corey, a business owner and U.S. Navy veteran, The Associated Press reported.

Murphy is a leading progressive voice in U.S. foreign policy and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is also a semi-regular contributor to Foreign Policy. In his most recent piece, he reflected on a recent visit to Kenya, arguing that the United States should devote more resources to promoting good governance abroad.

“Poor governance creates a vicious circle of corruption, inefficiency, and underdevelopment,” Murphy wrote. “In Kenya and elsewhere, it has also provided fertile ground for predatory foreign actors such as Russia and China to bribe their way into contracts and influence.”

Read it here: Kenya’s Anti-Corruption Protests Are a Wake-Up Call for Washington

Millions of Americans are watching their television sets, refreshing their screens, and filling up their coffee cups in anticipation of a late night, all feeling tremendously anxious about the forthcoming election projections and results.

Why do Americans feel this degree of emotional intensity? The answers may seem obvious. Of course, the policy stakes of either outcome are high. Moreover, voters have extraordinarily strong partisan feelings in 2024—a level of animosity toward those who support opposing sides that goes well beyond policy preferences. Part of this sentiment stems from Donald Trump himself, one of the most divisive figures in modern American history.

But a large part of the tension revolves around an existential question: What is America’s character in 2024? In the final days of the campaign, Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offered fundamentally different views on what the country is about. In her closing argument, Harris embraced the values of democracy, pluralism, bipartisanship, and hope. In his, Trump chose fear, danger, rage, and reactionism.

Presidential elections certainly don’t define a nation. The United States is more complicated than that. Yet this election falls in the category of those that bring us closer to an answer. And for this reason, voters are watching with bated breath.

The first results are in. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has taken Indiana’s 11 Electoral College votes, Kentucky’s eight, and West Virginia’s four, according to The Associated Press, which called the races. All three states went to Trump in the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections and have historically leaned conservative.

Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris received Vermont’s three Electoral College votes, according to the AP. The northeastern state went blue in the past two presidential elections, to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.

The candidates need 270 Electoral College votes to declare victory. Most eyes are on Georgia and North Carolina, the first two key swing states of seven to close voting Tuesday night.

U.S. voters know that they are determining their own government in this election, but do they know that they might also decide Germany’s?

The so-called traffic light coalition, which includes Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats, the German Greens, and the business-friendly Free Democratic Party (FDP), has been in power for three years. For the last year, it has been hanging by a thread: The parties are bickering over pretty much everything, most recently over how to stimulate the economy after years of stagnation.

Whether the coalition manages to limp on will depend on whether there is an electoral advantage to be gained by preempting the regularly scheduled election next year. Germans are known for prizing stability, but recent polling seems to indicate that they simply want the current coalition put out of its misery.

Last week, FDP leader and Finance Minister Christian Lindner circulated a document that amounted to a request for divorce, seemingly calculating that Germans would reward the FDP for blowing up the government and forcing an early election.

But the election of Donald Trump in the United States could change that. Trump represents nothing if not the threat of instability for Germany, whether in the form of new tariffs on German cars or a cease-fire deal in Ukraine that leads to new waves of refugees.

The last thing Germans will want then is a government thrust into an unplanned election campaign, unable to act in a moment of crisis. A second Trump administration, in other words, could give Germany’s government a new lease on life.

In a Fox News interview last month, Donald Trump suggested that election chaos could be handled by the military, “if really necessary.” His remarks, which drew condemnation for politicizing the military, came amid the first presidential election with both post-all-volunteer force and post-9/11 veterans on the ticket: Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, served as a junior enlisted Marine, and Harris’s, Gov. Tim Walz, was a senior enlisted noncommissioned officer in the Army National Guard. “What should have been a positive—that both vice presidential candidates volunteered to serve in the country’s all-volunteer force at a time when most Americans did not—has instead become a potential negative, with partisans on both sides casting aspersions on their service,” Peter D. Feaver wrote in September.

Military leaders have played an outsized role in this campaign, with retired Marine Corps Gen. John Kelly recently calling Trump, his former boss, an “authoritarian,” and Mark Milley, a retired Army general who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Trump administration, telling journalist Bob Woodward for his new book that Trump is a “fascist to the core.” Milley’s comments have been used in Harris campaign advertising to suggest Trump is “not fit” to serve as commander in chief.

Despite these unusual interjections from top brass, military veterans remain a Republican-leaning group, a recent Pew Research Center survey shows. About 60 percent of registered voters who say they have served in the military or military reserves favor Trump. Six percent of the population overall has served in the military, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, down from 18 percent in 1980.

Read it here: Stop Politicizing the Military

Irrespective of who wins this election, there is some good news from the hustings for all of us: U.S. democracy seems to be working.

Although there have been some problems with equipment and a few unsubstantiated bomb threats against polling places, the voting process has been relatively smooth thus far. Poll workers have been able to do their job safely, long lines have been moving, and ballots are being processed. From early accounts, rates of participation are high, as was early voting. And thankfully, despite the toxic rhetoric stemming from former President Donald Trump, there have been no major incidents of violence reported.

It’s a good reminder that despite what happened after the 2020 election, the before and during of the process worked well. Even in a polarizing pandemic, election officials throughout the country put into place systems that allowed Americans to vote by mail and through drop boxes while figuring out how to move citizens through polling places safely on Election Day. Turnout rates were high—almost 160 million, a sizable boost of more than 20 million from the 2016 election. None of this was easy. Some even called it a “miracle.”

No matter who comes out on top, there will be bitter tensions in the electorate, and the postelection period will remain fraught with danger. Yet, assuming the current patterns hold, it is worth celebrating what state and local law enforcement, poll workers, election officials, and most importantly voters themselves have accomplished within a deeply divided map. Americans are exercising their hard-earned right to vote, and the infrastructure supporting this right has held firm.

On Tuesday, The Associated Press published an Election Day story from the southern Indian village of Thulasendrapuram—the birthplace of Vice President Kamala Harris’s maternal grandfather. Residents there revere her and hope that she becomes the next U.S. president.

But this is just one of many views that Indians hold of Harris. Her Indian ancestry may provoke warmth and respect in her grandfather’s hometown, but other Indians perceive that she has held back from embracing her Indian roots, at least publicly.

Though Harris has spoken about that background, including in her speech at the Democratic National Convention and while feting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a State Department luncheon last year, she hasn’t visited India often in recent years. (She has reportedly never been to Thulasendrapuram.)

Some Indians fear that as president, Harris would, like many Democrats, focus unwelcome attention on India’s internal affairs, including its human rights record. Others see her as a strong backer of the U.S.-India partnership who can build on two decades of growth in bilateral ties and fast-growing spaces for cooperation to take the relationship to new heights.

Elon Musk will head to Mar-a-Lago, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Florida country club, to watch the election results with the Republican candidate on Tuesday evening, according to the New York Times. (Vice President Kamala Harris, meanwhile, will be in Washingon, D.C., watching the election results at Howard University, her alma mater.)

Musk has marshaled his considerable resources toward boosting Trump in the weeks and months leading up to the election, donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaign, appearing with him at rallies, and unleashing a flood of often false or misleading political posts on X, the social media platform Musk purchased in 2022 for $44 billion.

The latest of those came on Monday, when Musk shared posts claiming that Google’s search engine produced “where to vote” results for Harris but not for Trump. Google responded to Musk through its own X account, explaining that the discrepancy was because “Harris” is also the name of a county in Texas and that’s what the search results were producing. It had similar results for “Vance”—the last name of Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance—because Vance is also a county.

Musk, in a rare public acknowledgment of his mistake, reshared Google’s explanation with, “Thanks for the clarification.”

In an article published in Foreign Policy’s Fall 2024 issue, I quoted historians and political experts as suggesting that Donald Trump could transform the global system beyond recognition if he returns to the presidency.

The fear is that he’ll discard or ignore U.S. allies and pull out of NATO and possibly even the United Nations. As Joseph Ellis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian, argued, the “Again” in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement means a return to the past. In this case, Ellis said, it suggests “going back sometime before 1940,” when isolationism dominated U.S. policy.

But others argued that the forces of inertia—or the status quo ante—may prove stronger than people think. Kiron Skinner, the former head of policy planning under Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, noted that in his first term, Trump did not orchestrate “a pull away from the broad-based liberal international order.” In his second term, Skinner said, Trump would only seek to “right-size America’s role in the world” by demanding that U.S. allies step up more on defense.

Yes, Trump has altered the terms of the political debate more than any president since Ronald Reagan and, before him, Franklin D. Roosevelt. He has upended the postwar and post-Cold War consensus and transformed what Americans talk about, whether international economics, trade, alliances, or immigration.

But other than swearing by tariffs, he still lacks a coherent vision or program. Thus, it is also possible that when he passes from the scene, the 78-year-old Trump could eventually be seen as more of a historical blip than a world-altering figure. “Betting on inertia in U.S. foreign policy is a very good bet,” said Stephen Wertheim, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “It’s really, really hard to change U.S. foreign policy in a big way.”

Read it here: Is 2024 Really the Most Important Election in History?

The United States votes Tuesday—but we may not know the outcome for days to come. A critical part of this process will be the “calling” of results by different media outlets, chief among them being The Associated Press. It’s a system that doesn’t exist in most of the democratic world, where electoral authorities declare results once votes are fully counted.

There’s no legal role for the media to call U.S. elections. Like so many aspects of American political life, it’s an improvised measure that acts as a partial solution to a lasting problem—in this case, the size and disunity of the country. It was only in 1845, for instance, that the country passed a law to establish a single uniform election day; before that, states picked any date between November and December.

The AP began calling presidential elections in 1848, around the widespread adoption of the telegraph, and added other elections over time. The organization forecasts the vote of the Electoral College, which officially selects the U.S. president.

The AP’s call is a partial fix to the slowness of the U.S. count. In more average-sized countries, such as the United Kingdom or France, authorities return results within a few hours of polls closing. In India, with roughly four times as many voters as the United States, six weeks of voting produces results that are counted and finalized in a single day, which occurs a few days after polls close.

But in the United States, offices from the president to local school boards can be on the same ballot. Adding all that up takes a long time—not to mention the fact that every state has a different set of counting standards.

The gradual accumulation of results, rather than a single announcement, can create uncertainty and vulnerabilities. Look no further than the “Brooks Brothers riot” of 2000 or former President Donald Trump’s call to “stop the count” in 2020.

Vice President Kamala Harris has focused her economic plan on building what she calls an “Opportunity Economy,” but in many ways, it’s a continuation of the current administration’s strategy. Bidenomics is rooted in a belief that the best way to grow the economy is from the middle out and the bottom up. But it has also been a sweeping foray into industrial policy and protectionism, with the administration prioritizing domestic manufacturing and bringing jobs back home. 

Heather Boushey, an economic advisor to President Joe Biden, launched a spirited defense of the strategy in an interview on FP Live last year. “The United States took a historic step that the world had long asked us to take—to build a clean energy economy,” Boushey said, addressing criticism of provisions in the CHIPS and Science Act that encourage protectionism. “We did it in a way that worked for us politically.”

But economists warn that industrial policy could spark a subsidies race and that protectionism can backfire. Is Bidenomics trying to do too much by tying investments in semiconductor fabrication plants to, for example, the building of day care facilities? “We’re encouraging businesses to follow best-in-class practices,” Boushey countered.

And the United States isn’t looking to stop trade with China. “We are looking to de-risk that relationship,” she said. “But as we think about our trade policies, we have to think about what that means for American workers and American communities.”

Read an edited transcript of the conversation here: Is Bidenomics Trying to Do Too Much?

More than two years after Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion rights are now on the ballot in 10 U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, and South Dakota. 

In all of those states but one—Nebraska—voters are considering legislation aimed at defending or boosting abortion access. In Nebraska, where there is currently a 12-week abortion ban, it’s a bit more complicated. Residents of the state are weighing two dueling proposals: one that would enshrine the state’s ongoing ban into the state constitution, with certain exceptions, and another that would allow abortions to the point of “fetal viability”—thereby authorizing abortion into the second trimester. 

Abortion access has been the top issue this election for women under the age of 30, according to a recent survey by KFF, a health policy research nonprofit. 

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, seven states have voted on reproductive rights: California, Montana, Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Vermont. In all seven cases, measures aimed at boosting abortion access passed while more restrictive legislation was blocked.

At a rally on Monday in Raleigh, North Carolina, former U.S. President Donald Trump vowed, if elected, to impose tariffs of between 25 and 100 percent on Mexico until it curbed migration at the U.S. southern border. Later that day in Pittsburgh, Trump said he would impose a 25 percent tariff on Mexico to crack down on fentanyl trafficking and would do the “same thing to China,” which he accuses of exporting fentanyl to Mexico.

Mexico is the United States’ biggest trade partner, and imposing the tariffs Trump proposes would likely undermine the trade deal that the Republican nominee negotiated with Mexico and Canada while in office—and invite retaliation.

China, which ranks third in trade with the United States, has cooperated with the United States on fentanyl issues in recent months. But this does not seem to have swayed Trump, who has promised a significant escalation of tariffs against the country as part of a broader bipartisan embrace of protectionism.

Efforts by some Republican-led states to block federal election monitors from polling stations failed on Tuesday.

The U.S. Justice Department announced last Friday that it would oversee voting compliance in 86 jurisdictions across 27 states, including counties in Missouri and Texas. Such practices have been in place for nearly 60 years. However, Missouri officials contended that these efforts would “displace state election authorities,” and Texas’s attorney general argued that “Texas law alone determines who can monitor voting in Texas.” Both states filed requests for court orders that would bar the monitors.

A federal judge denied Missouri’s request. Monitors will remain at the St. Louis polling station, which the Justice Department chose to oversee after the site reached a settlement in 2021 over concerns about barriers hindering people with disabilities from voting. Authorities in Texas withdrew their motion on Tuesday after the Justice Department ensured that its monitors would follow local laws and remain outside polling locations.

Florida also told the Justice Department that it would not allow federal monitors. Rather than filing a temporary restraining order, though, state officials said they would send their own watchers to the four department-designated locations to ensure that there is no interference.

Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party nominee, has encouraged his supporters to watch for alleged fraud at polling stations.

“Keep your eyes open because these people want to cheat, and they do cheat,” he said on Saturday, referring to Democratic voters. At least one chapter of the Proud Boys—an extremist group that helped lead the deadly U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021—has said that its members will fight for a Trump victory if the results do not go their way. And far-right organizations have urged poll-watchers to be ready to dispute the final tallies in  Democratic-leaning areas, according to the New York Times.

Midway through Election Day, several signs point to the possibility of record voter turnout levels in the United States. While a comprehensive national picture is yet to emerge, more than 85.9 million Americans cast their ballots before Nov. 5, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab—with the key swing states of Georgia and North Carolina setting early voting records. 

More than 158 million Americans voted in the 2020 presidential election, constituting 67 percent of eligible voters and setting a new turnout record at the time despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the improvements made to early and absentee voting access during the pandemic could be contributing to higher turnout this time around, and it remains unclear which party and candidate—Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris or Republican nominee former President Donald Trump—will get a greater boost from the trend. 

Already on Election Day, we’ve seen Russian bomb threats against polling places in the U.S. state of Georgia and elsewhere and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatically reshaping his cabinet. But experts warn that such activities could be just beginning as America’s gaze is focused inward over the next several months. Colin P. Clarke, an expert on terrorism who has written extensively for Foreign Policy, noted just that in a post on X on Tuesday:

“Look for U.S. adversaries and allies alike to make moves between now and January that Washington would typically chafe at. We’re entering a period of uncertainty that some actors will see as an opportunity to push the envelope without generating near-term backlash or blowback.”

He was talking about the Israeli cabinet reshuffle, but he could have been talking about almost anything else. North Korea tested its latest intercontinental ballistic missile last week and did another test, this time of short-range missiles, on Tuesday. Its next major provocation will probably come next year, though it has already deployed combat troops to the Russian front, widening a war that only seems to widen from one side.

China is harassing islands in the South China Sea at an alarming level. Iran could yet respond to Israel’s latest attack. Russia has made the Baltic Sea a playground for surveillance and sabotage; some reports have even suggested that Moscow tried to plant bombs on U.S.-bound airliners.  

We don’t know yet who will be in the Oval Office taking the call at 3 a.m. after Inauguration Day. But the phone will certainly be very, very busy until then.

Whoever wins the U.S. presidential election, the foundation of U.S. policy toward China will remain intense strategic competition. But if Donald Trump wins, one major question looms: Who will his top China hands be? The answer matters because Republican China hawks have different views about the nature of U.S.-China competition and how existential it will be.

One camp believes that Trump should look to the Cold War as a playbook for a more confrontational approach to Beijing, while other potential Trump advisors, such as former senior defense official Elbridge Colby, believe that the United States should instead opt for a more modest approach focusing on maintaining a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

Read my deep dive on this internal debate here: How Does the U.S.-China ‘Cold War’ End?

Even as former President Donald Trump spews misinformation and remains extraordinarily light on policy detail—other than his plans for severe tariffs—it is Vice President Kamala Harris who has been under constant scrutiny for not being forthcoming enough about her policy agenda.

The double standard has not only resulted in a striking asymmetry of campaign coverage, but it has often downplayed one of the policy issues that is most likely to pave a potential path to victory: reproductive rights, a crucial component of women’s health care. Harris has been crystal clear on this issue. She opposes the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and has pledged, if elected, to sign legislation restoring a woman’s right to an abortion and other elements of reproductive rights.

Abortion has been a galvanizing issue among women voters over the past two years. In the 2022 midterm elections, support for reproductive rights helped stymie the predicted red wave; since then, it provided crucial momentum for Harris’s candidacy. Whereas President Joe Biden struggled to even speak about abortion during the first debate, Harris has a long history of supporting reproductive rights and has been totally transparent about where she stands.

Though her opponent has tried to fog the issue under the guise of state’s rights, voters don’t have much trouble understanding what the Trump abortion bans, as Democrats call them, have been all about. If Harris delivers a victory address in the coming hours or days, it will likely be her clear-eyed vision about this policy issue at the heart of her win.

A man arrested at the visitor center of the U.S. Capitol complex on Tuesday was found to be carrying a torch, flare gun, and “smelled like fuel,” the U.S. Capitol Police said in a brief statement on Tuesday. The man, who was not named, had been stopped during security screening at the visitor center, the agency said, noting that investigations are ongoing. The visitor center has been closed for tours for the remainder of the day. 

As fears of political violence surrounding the election remain high, read FP’s package on how countries on four different continents addressed similar circumstances and what lessons they offer for the United States.

Fake bomb threats to polling locations across several U.S. states on Tuesday are likely the work of Russia, according to the FBI, which said in a statement that many of the threats “appear to originate from Russian email domains.” It added that “none of those threats have been determined to be credible thus far.”

The FBI’s announcement followed a similar statement by Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who told reporters that state officials had identified Russia as the source of bomb threats that shut down two polling locations just outside of Atlanta. 

The FBI also warned of broader misinformation that it did not immediately attribute to a specific actor, saying in an earlier Tuesday statement that the bureau’s name and insignia were used to promote false election narratives in two instances, including a fabricated news clip depicting a fake terrorist warning. “The fabricated news clip reports falsely that the FBI purportedly stated that Americans should ‘vote remotely’ due to a high terror threat at polling stations,” the FBI said. “Additionally, a fabricated video containing a fabricated FBI press release alleges that the management of five prisons in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona rigged inmate voting and colluded with a political party.” 

Agencies are encouraging voters to seek out accurate voting information from their local election offices and to report any suspected criminal activity via phone or online using 1-800-CALL-FBI, tips.fbi.gov, 1-844-Say-CISA, cisa.gov/report, or emailing [email protected].

As tens of millions of Americans head to the polls on Tuesday, U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump used crude, misogynistic language to attack former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at his final campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

Pelosi is “evil, sick, crazy,” he said, before reaching for another word that, he said, began with “bi—.” “It starts with a B, but I won’t say it,” Trump said, adding, “I want to say it!” Some rally attendees yelled back: “Bitch!”

This is not the first time that Trump and his campaign have harnessed sexist insults to attack female opponents. At Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, one speaker likened Harris to a prostitute, declaring that she “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” At another rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, when an attendee yelled that Harris “worked on the corner,” Trump laughed and said, “This place is amazing.” “Just remember,” he added, “it’s other people saying it. It’s not me.”

Yet that kind of language could also complicate Team Trump’s bid to broaden its appeal with female voters, as I’ve reported for Foreign Policy. Nationally, women tend to lean Democratic and have higher voter turnout than men. Nikki Haley, a former Republican presidential candidate who backs Trump, has warned that the former president’s macho messaging may not land with female voters. 

“This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going,” she told Fox News. “Women will vote. They care about how they’re being talked to. And they care about the issues.”

One area where former U.S. President Donald Trump raises red flags among foreign-policy experts? His leadership of the military.

In a preelection survey of international relations scholars in the United States conducted by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy Project (TRIP) at William & Mary in October, the experts overwhelmingly expressed more confidence in Vice President Kamala Harris as commander in chief than in Trump.

Even among self-identified Republicans, 41 percent said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” in Trump’s ability to lead the military. The overall results contrasted with a September Economist/YouGov poll, which showed that the U.S. public sees little difference between the candidates on the issue.

How confident are you in each candidate’s ability to be an effective commander in chief of the nation’s military?

Source: TRIP Snap Poll; percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding. 

(Foreign Policy has long worked with TRIP, which surveys IR scholars in the United States about pertinent policy issues. Check out the 2020 preelection survey.)

On the Ones and Tooze podcast, I discuss the world’s top news from an economic perspective with my erudite and voluble co-host: FP columnist Adam Tooze. That means that over the past year, we’ve discussed the U.S. presidential election repeatedly.

Taken together, our conversations trace the contours of the race—from questions about U.S. President Joe Biden’s fitness for reelection to former President Donald Trump’s conviction on charges of business fraud to the sudden rise of Vice President Kamala Harris—from an unorthodox economic slant.

Here’s a look back at a few of those discussions, with some choice Tooze quotes.

What America’s Gerontocracy Means for Its Economy

“Across the board, on average, there are simply racks and racks and racks and racks of medical papers demonstrating that with age, there is both deterioration of mental function and an enormous increase in the risk of the onset of serious neurological ailments and diseases.”

How Trump’s Conservative Populism Divides CEOs

“Many of the tariff proposals that the Trumpians are making are not just in violation of the World Trade Organization but much more significantly, they’re in violation of the trade arrangement with Mexico and Canada … which is overwhelmingly America’s most important trade relation.”

How a Harris Administration Would Steer the Economy

“I think Harris belongs on the mainstream, relatively pro-business, pro-Silicon Valley side of the administration at this point. And I do think that’s a generational thing. She comes into prominence at precisely the moment before the euphoria around tech has really broken.”

This week’s China Brief examines the view from Beijing as the United States votes. China is paying attention to the U.S. presidential election—but it is not heavily invested. So far, Beijing has maintained a carefully neutral position.

Although Chinese social media has a pro-Donald Trump bent, the Chinese political leadership has shown no particular favoritism toward him or Vice President Kamala Harris—or even signs of being more worried about one possibility than the other. (In general, Chinese media tends to downplay U.S. elections, portraying them as chaotic or farcical events.)

There is also little sign of serious Chinese attempts to interfere with the presidential election. Chinese hackers have tapped phones from both campaigns and targeted several dozen other individuals working on security issues, but that is routine information-gathering. Actual interference efforts have concentrated on state and local races, targeting candidates who are outspoken about China.

Respected Chinese experts on U.S. politics—at least those who retain a platform under Xi Jinping—share a (reasonable) conviction that hawkishness is one of the few remaining bipartisan issues in Washington and that little will change in U.S.-China relations whoever wins. 

Read it here: As the U.S. Votes, China Is Watching

Immigration is one of U.S. voters’ top concerns, particularly among Republicans. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has vowed to conduct mass deportations of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and has spread incendiary rhetoric about Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Palestinians, and other nonwhite communities.

However, under President Joe Biden, the United States has restricted immigration to a near-unprecedented extent. Vice President Kamala Harris became the face of this effort in 2021.

The Biden administration kept in place many Trump-era policies, including Title 42—the measure that restricted migrants’ rights to claim asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the White House replaced Title 42 with new barriers to asylum, and in June, Biden issued a proclamation limiting it even further. Both moves prompted numerous lawsuits.

Writing in Foreign Policy in July, Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations offered historical perspective: “Today’s U.S. immigration debate—with politicians on both sides of the aisle promoting restrictive policies and contesting who should be allowed into the country—mirrors that of a century ago, when President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Act of 1924,” she wrote.

The 1920s were a period of nativist fervor. But Coolidge’s 1924 policy would ultimately “backfire by dampening U.S. economic growth,” Roy wrote. Immigration is the backbone of the U.S. economy, according to numerous independent analyses.

“Now, 100 years later,” Roy warned, “Washington seems poised to make the same mistake.”

Read it here: America Is Stuck in a Century-Old Immigration Debate

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election thrust Russian disinformation and influence campaigns into the public consciousness, the scale of the online threat from U.S. adversaries, such as Russia and Iran, has significantly increased. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are taking no chances, releasing information almost in real time that calls out fake social media posts and videos from those adversaries. 

The latest warning, in a now-customary joint statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, came on Monday night—less than 24 hours before polls close on Tuesday. According to the three agencies, Russian threat actors created and spread an article falsely claiming that U.S. officials would perpetrate election fraud through cyberattacks and ballot stuffing in swing states, as well as a video containing a fake interview claiming election fraud in the battleground state of Arizona through the changing of voter rolls to favor U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. 

This is the fifth such warning that the agencies have issued in the last three months, including evidence that Iran has targeted the campaign of former U.S. President Donald Trump. According to the recent statement, the intelligence community “expects these activities will intensify through Election Day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states.”

Officials in the U.S. state of Georgia have warned of likely Russian interference in the U.S. election—even as the country of Georgia struggles with Russian interference in its own recent vote.

To be sure, things are worse in Georgia, Russia’s unfortunate neighbor, than in Georgia, Florida’s unfortunate neighbor. But Russian interference isn’t the only way it can be hard to tell the two Georgias apart. Both, for example, have also produced men sometimes called history’s greatest monsters.

A quick game—can you tell which Georgia is which in the following headlines?

“Georgia has introduced dangerous new restrictions to abortion access.”

“Abortion bans have delayed emergency medical care. In Georgia, experts say this mother’s death was preventable.”

“Georgia: Police must be held accountable for use of excessive force against protesters.”

“Georgia victims of police brutality tell the U.N. their story.”

“Anxiety runs deep in Georgia as voters worry about heated rhetoric spurring violence.”

“Violence mars voting in Georgia’s pivotal election.”

These similarities matter. The Achilles’s heel of U.S. efforts to promote democracy and human rights abroad has always been America’s failures to deliver them domestically. During the Cold War, when Washington was protesting that Georgia was a “captive nation” and a police state, millions of Black Americans in Georgia lived under a de facto police state themselves.

The stock Soviet reply to human rights criticisms from Washington was: “And you are lynching Negroes.” That line was self-serving hypocrisy, but it was also true. Many Americans linked the civil rights struggle at home to the call for freedom abroad; others, such as Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge, compared the federal enforcement of civil rights to Soviet oppression.

Today, if the United States once more sees attempts to overturn the election in Georgia, Washington will have a hard time calling for fair elections in Georgia.

Most elections tend to be referendums on incumbent leaders. Since U.S. President Joe Biden is no longer running for a second term, Vice President Kamala Harris assumes some—but not all—of his mantel as the incumbent. Her opponents have blamed her for problems with immigration and the economy; she has tried to underscore that she represents a new generation of leadership while also taking credit for some of the Biden administration’s accomplishments.

One way of considering this election is whether it is a referendum on the Biden (and Harris) administration or a vote against the alternative. If voters see it as the former, Harris will likely lose because Biden’s approval ratings are historically low. But if voters see it as the latter, former President Donald Trump will struggle to win.

Trump is hardly a change candidate. He secured the nomination that lead to his first term in 2016; he is now 78 years old. Given his age and the ongoing court cases against him, this is likely his final run. A Trump loss may also herald a fundamental rethinking of what the Republican Party stands for. It’s unlikely that Trump will disappear, but another defeat will make it difficult for him or his surrogates to have a reasonable claim on the future. A Trump loss could mean the end of Trumpism.

Much ink has been spilled on the question of whether Donald Trump is a fascist. This debate recently came to the fore after top Trump advisors said their former boss “falls into the general definition of fascist” and is “fascist to the core”—comments that Democrats have amplified. Meanwhile, notable scholars who rejected the label for Trump in past election cycles have changed their minds after Jan. 6, 2021.

FP columnist Howard W. French argues that Trump is indeed a fascist and that his campaign has flailed in its attempts to refute those claims. But, French writes, “The question before the entire nation now is whether any of this will matter in what is projected to be an extremely close election.”

Read it here: So, Is Trump Really a Fascist?

What might a second Trump White House foreign policy look like?

It can be difficult to find a signal in the noise of the former president’s often scattergun pronouncements. Elbridge Colby, a former U.S. Defense Department official who is often touted as someone who could have a significant role in a Republican White House, has long been arguing for the United States to focus more on Asia than Europe, more on China and less on Ukraine. “Why are we spending all this time dealing with Europe? Of course, I don’t want to abandon Europe, but I’m dealing with the reality that we’re facing. There simply are constraints.”

His views have gained currency among several Republican politicians, including Sen. J.D. Vance, the party’s vice presidential nominee.

“We don’t want to be completely transactional, but we want more transaction to reinstate some balance,” Colby said, speaking on FP Live—while making clear he doesn’t officially speak for the Trump-Vance ticket. “My view is alliances are so important that we actually expect people to do their part. My strategy is the one that will save NATO.”

Is there a Trump doctrine emerging? “Most of these doctrines are artificial. But there’s a general theme that I can ascertain in President Trump’s approach. I thought it was not a coincidence, and it was compelling, that the central term in the Republican platform was common sense. There’s a practicality: Is this in our interests? Does this make sense?”

Read an edited transcript of the conversation here: Decoding Trump’s Foreign Policy

There were Democrat, Republican, and presidential-themed cocktails. Traditional Romanian cabbage rolls next to mini-cheeseburgers with toothpick American flags. There were life-size cutouts of the two U.S. presidential candidates—Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump—with European Union, American, Romanian, and NATO flags behind them. 

A TV in the courtyard played Fox News, while a TV inside played CNN. Posters read “Election 2024” and “Your vote is your voice” alongside red, white, and blue symbols of elephants and donkeys to represent the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. The table centerpieces only had cutouts of elephants and stars, which I was told was not meant to be subliminal messaging—the donkey cutouts just didn’t arrive in time. 

The playlist included Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,” John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change.” 

Like every embassy in Washington, D.C., and every country around the world, Romania’s diplomatic outpost in the U.S. capital is waiting and watching to see whether Trump or Harris will prevail. But Monday night’s preelection cocktail party at Romanian Ambassador Andrei Muraru’s residence attempted to project calm, camaraderie, and even levity ahead of what is expected to be a tense and possibly chaotic few days after polls close on Tuesday. 

“Everyone in Romania knows who RFK Jr. is,” Muraru said to some laughter, seemingly referencing the former independent presidential candidate’s name-check of the country in his August campaign suspension speech. Muraru’s next joke referenced perhaps the most recognizable Romanian name to Americans: “Dracula has not made an appearance in this election.”

But the ambassador then quickly reminded the audience of the stake his country and others have in this election. “It’s Washington who sets the tone, and it’s Washington we look to as a model for leadership,” he said.  

The 2020 U.S. presidential election took four days to call and was plagued by lawsuits and conspiracy theories surrounding election integrity and the electoral process. Although many state election officials have taken action to make the process smoother in 2024, there are still concerns in some swing states where the election could be tight.

Counting mail-in and absentee ballots could delay official results and leave room for election misinformation to spiral, as it did among then-President Donald Trump and his allies in 2020. However, delayed results do not always indicate that there is something wrong in election proceedings. Other countries have longer periods of time between their election days and the release of official results as votes are counted and verified. See below how the U.S. 2020 election compares to those held elsewhere in the world in 2024:

Number of Days to Announce Results

Indonesia’s presidential election in February was officially called after 34 days—on the day of the deadline for announcing the official results. The winner, Prabowo Subianto, had claimed victory earlier with a clear lead. Though his rivals planned to file a legal complaint, the official announcement took as long as it did due to the laborious process of counting ballots. The same was true of the counting process in India this year, which occurred on just a single day a few days after voting ended.

In Venezuela, the results were delayed due to President Nicolás Maduro contesting tallies that indicated that he lost the election on July 28. The issue made its way to the Venezuelan Supreme Court, which declared him the winner after 25 days of upheaval over the results. Some countries, including the United States, have rejected Venezuela’s vote certification.

Sources: The Associated Press, Al Jazeera, CNN, the Guardian, and the Electoral Commission of South Africa

When you talk to European visitors in Washington these days, they tend to be in one of two moods. Some are in a state of high anxiety, believing that the future of NATO is on the ballot this year, even if American voters don’t necessarily know it. Others are in denial, arguing that regardless of who wins, little will change in the trans-Atlantic relationship.

I suspect that both are wrong. Indeed, it seems likely that a Harris victory may not be as redemptive as some in Europe hope when it comes to the future of U.S. security commitments. To put it another way, it seems likely that the U.S.-Europe relationship is headed in broadly the same direction regardless of who wins this presidential election: toward some level of conscious decoupling. The big question is when, how, and under what circumstances Europe takes up some of the defense burden as the United States moves to focus on China.

So for our European readers, why not take a break from worrying about election returns to consider instead, how the trans-Atlantic relationship could change under different administrations?

We published a paper at the Stimson Center in June using foresight methods to build three different scenarios for how and when the United States might retrench from Europe: a sudden, shock Trump move to pull the United States out of a “dormant NATO”; a slow, unplanned U.S. retrenchment from Europe, caused by a debt crisis and severe fiscal limitations; or a sudden U.S. pivot to Asia—perhaps due to war in Taiwan—prompting cross-European cooperation on defense, significant homegrown adaptation, and confirming Jean Monnet’s conjecture that the European Union is best “forged in crisis.”

Read the full report here.

If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the election, she will be the United States’ first female president. Globally, though, Washington is far behind on such representation at the top.

Foreign Policy surveyed the world’s top 50 countries by GDP. Just seven currently have a female head of state or government (excluding monarchies): three in Europe, two in South Asia, and two in Latin America. The United States—with no female leaders thus far—resides in the same company as China, Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, among others. In 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College—the closest Washington has come to having a woman in the Oval Office.

Countries That Have Had a Female Leader

Of the top 50 countries by GDP

However, 34 nations (or 68 percent) have already had at least one female leader, and 13 nations (26 percent) have had more than one. Mexico was the latest to join this club with the inauguration of Claudia Sheinbaum as president on Oct. 1.

Female Leadership in the World’s Wealthiest Countries

Of the top 50 countries by GDP

Female leaders haven’t always taken power democratically or supported gender equality. In July 1974, Argentina’s Isabel Perón became the world’s first female president when her husband, Juan Perón, died in office. The first elected female president was Iceland’s Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who took office in August 1980. (The first elected female leader was Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon, or modern-day Sri Lanka, in July 1960.)

And former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina achieved notoriety not because she was the world’s longest-serving female head of government but because her autocratic rule was marred with allegations of human rights violations, which led to her ouster in August.

Still, research has shown that countries with higher levels of female leadership have greater gender equality, with a 2023 report by the nonprofit Women Political Leaders finding that such countries pass more legislation furthering equality of economic opportunity across genders.

Sources: International Monetary Fund data; news reports compiled by FP staff

In July—before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee—Christopher Shell, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote a prescient article in Foreign Policy. He noted that Black Americans were becoming increasingly uneasy with the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel. Carnegie survey data showed that some two-thirds of Black Americans supported conditioning aid to Israel and calling for a cease-fire—a stance church leaders had taken as early as January.

Although Harris started to differentiate herself from Biden in a March speech in Selma, Alabama, the following months saw little daylight between her and the president—outraging Arab American Democrats, who weren’t even offered a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“The discontent emanating from the Black community about Gaza is not simple rabble-rousing about the nation’s most recent military entanglement. Rather, it stems from a long tradition of concerns about U.S. power in the world and its noxious effects on the Black community (from overrepresentation of Black people in the armed forces … [to] draining tax dollars for war that could have been better spent on pressing domestic needs),” Shell wrote.

I caught up with him this week, and he added: “Kamala Harris is currently polling better among Black voters compared to President Biden at the time he exited the race in July. However, this polling doesn’t match the high Black voter turnout seen in the 2020 presidential election. While several factors contribute to this dip in support for Harris … it’s hard to ignore the impact of U.S. warmaking under the Biden-Harris administration and the administration’s inconsistent stance on issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, which likely deflated enthusiasm for Harris among the influential Black voting bloc.”

Read it here: Will Democrats Take Black Voters Seriously on Foreign Policy?

It’s already Tuesday here on the other side of the world, but everyone is still holding their breath for Nov. 5. In our most recent print issue we asked thinkers from around the world if they had advice for Americans before this most consequential of elections.

I’ve been thinking in these last few hours before the polls open about Arancha González’s notion that the United States’ greatest asset globally is trust, as well as her plea for citizens to vote with the world in mind.

Martin Kimani’s words also seem especially relevant at this moment. “Some of my African friends have noted that the situation in the United States is beginning to resemble elections in their own countries,” Kimani wrote, “where fear looms due to the threat of violence, fueled by politicians weaponizing ethnic or religious identities.” The former Kenyan ambassador to the United Nations has thoughts on how to overcome this entrenched polarization, both at the ballot box and beyond.

Read the whole package here: Dear America

Congressional races could have significant bearing on the future of U.S. foreign policy. Republicans are expected to win the Senate, while both parties are locked in a close contest for control of the House of Representatives. Although both parties share common ground on aid to Israel and competition with China, the future of aid to Ukraine could be at stake with Republican victories in one or both chambers.

The Senate

Democrats are likely to lose the Senate and thus the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), too. Here’s what to know about the committee’s current members this cycle:

James Risch (R-Idaho): The SFRC’s ranking member isn’t up for reelection until 2026; he is likely to lead the committee if Republicans win.
Ben Cardin (D-Maryland): Cardin, the committee’s current chair, is retiring this year. If Democrats win the Senate, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire) is expected to succeed Cardin and become the committee’s first woman leader.

Four members are in tight races, and the results could lead to new openings on the committee:

Jon Tester (D-Montana): Polling behind Tim Sheehy by 5.3 percent
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio): Polling behind Bernie Moreno by 0.4 percent
Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada): Polling ahead of Sam Brown by 5.6 percent
Ted Cruz (R-Texas): Polling ahead of Colin Allred by 3.4 percent

The House

Texas Rep. Michael McCaul and New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, chair and ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively, are both expected to win their races.

On the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Michigan Rep. John Moolenaar and Illinois Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi—chairman and ranking member, respectively—are likely to win reelection. House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that if Republicans win the House, then next year he will renew the committee, which is set to expire at the end of this year. Members of Congress have expressed mixed feelings about the committee’s continuation.

As the candidates made their last-minute pitches in the waning days of the U.S. presidential election, a few key voter blocs have come into clearer view. Foreign-policy issues could sway their decisions. Our Postcards From the Wedge series has reported on these trends in swing states and contentious races. Check out the latest entries below.

Puerto Rican voters: Comments at a Trump rally added insult to injury for a key voting bloc in battleground states, Ed Morales writes.

Venezuelan Americans in Florida: The growing diaspora is most concerned with the economy and U.S. policy toward Maduro’s regime, FP’s Anusha Rathi writes.

Vietnamese Americans in Virginia: A longshot Republican challenger to Sen. Tim Kaine appeals to his community’s fears about communism, FP’s Allison Meakem reports.

Lebanese Americans in Michigan: Israel’s campaign in southern Lebanon fuels anger and indifference in Dearborn, Abdelhalim Abdelrahman writes.

Read the rest of the series here.

Ahead of Election Day in the United States, security preparations are underway as the specter of political violence looms. As my colleague Amy Mackinnon reported, nonscalable fences have gone up around Washington, and office buildings near the White House have been boarded up. Across the United States, election offices have ramped up security in the past four years.

These measures can be seen in part as a response to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and the assassination attempts against former U.S. President Donald Trump this year. But Nick Bryant, the BBC’s former correspondent in Washington and New York, believes that we should look back further to understand the deep polarization—and normalization of violence—in the United States.

As Bryant wrote in July, “Political violence is a core part of the U.S. story, although much of this history has often been buried and concealed.” Drawing from his recent book, The Forever War, he argued that Jan. 6 was the culmination of a centuries-long belief in the legitimacy of political violence.

Read it here: America’s Democracy Was Never That Healthy

No matter who wins the presidential election on Nov. 5—U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris or former U.S. President Donald Trump—it’s highly likely that it will mark the consolidation of a new political order for the United States that’s embraced by both political parties.

That’s one conclusion we can draw from an early postmortem on the transformative presidency of Harris’ outgoing boss, Joe Biden—whose agenda she mostly supports—and by analyzing Trump’s lasting influence.

Both one-term presidencies dramatically changed the Democratic and Republican parties. Rhetorically, Biden and Harris have sought to differentiate themselves and the Democrats from Trump, but they have also adapted large parts of his populist program. No matter who becomes president, U.S. doctrine will entail a blend of neo-protectionism (in which both parties embrace industrial policy and tariffs are accepted as a trade tool, if to differing degrees) and quasi-isolationism (wherein the United States stays involved with allies abroad but without large-scale deployments of U.S. troops).

As historian Gary Gerstle documented in his 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Trump’s presidency administered the final blow to the neoliberal (that is, free trade) consensus of the post-Cold War period. The new international economic order—based on still-open but curtailed trade and increasingly “home-shored” supply chains—represents an identifiable successor to the neoliberal era of untrammeled globalization. This new “made in America” ethos has become orthodoxy for both political parties.

In geopolitics, Biden’s rapid 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan—which was built on Trump’s negotiated deal with the Taliban and capped two disastrous decades of U.S. deployments abroad—has also marked a new and likely enduring posture for Washington abroad. The United States will stay engaged overseas, but with extreme caution, as several senior Trump advisors, as well as Harris’s senior national security advisors, have all counseled.

Public statements from top officials in Mexico and Brazil in recent days show how the two governments are preparing for the potential victory of former U.S. President Donald Trump in the election on Nov. 5.

Mexico ranked at the top of a “Trump Risk Index,” which was released by the Economist in July. In just one policy area, Trump’s threats to crack down on imports of products made by Chinese firms in Mexico stand to hurt trade with the country.

Mexico’s economy secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, was unusually open about the issue last month, saying that amid U.S.-China economic tensions, Mexico aimed to “mobilize all legitimate interests in favor of North America.” Separately, Mexico’s deputy trade minister told the Wall Street Journal that Mexico aims to reduce its dependence on imports from China.

Although Trump has not made similarly explicit threats toward Brazil, his track record of pressuring Latin American countries to limit ties to Beijing might have been behind a top Brazilian foreign-policy advisor’s comments last week that Brazil will pass on China’s invitation to join the Belt and Road Initiative.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has stayed demure about the election, saying Monday that she will wait for the results before commenting. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was not as diplomatic. He told a French TV station last week that he was “rooting for Kamala.” Lula’s political nemesis, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, posted a video on X endorsing Trump on Sunday.

The question on everyone’s mind today is whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win the U.S. election. Of the many ways to read the tea leaves, there is one old standby metric that suggests the likelihood of a Harris victory: the economy.

Recent polling has shown that Trump holds an advantage over Harris on this issue. However, if the old campaign adage “It’s the economy, stupid” still holds, these opinion surveys may be misleading.

Much of the polling attention on the economy has focused on Americans’ dissatisfaction with inflation, which under President Joe Biden topped 9 percent. Memories of inflation may still work against Harris, but they also contend with more positive news.

Besides the fact that inflation has fallen to roughly 2.4 percent nationally, wages have risen faster than prices in recent months, joblessness is at near-record lows, and consumer confidence is up. Even gasoline prices are way down from recent highs and relatively low by historical standards. Overall, the United States has enjoyed a substantially better post-COVID-19 recovery compared with other G-7 countries.

Skeptics looking for a more independent source for this potentially bullish analysis, though, should turn to the Wall Street Journal. Last week, it published an article full of statistics titled “The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy.”

None of this guarantees a Harris victory, but the state of the economy normally weighs heavily in presidential election outcomes, and by most metrics, the U.S. economy is humming along quite nicely.

The gap between Democrats and Republicans on U.S. foreign policy—once an area of relative bipartisan consensus—has widened over the years, especially as the Republican Party has evolved.

In a preelection survey of international relations scholars in the United States conducted by the Teaching, Research, and International Policy Project (TRIP) at William & Mary in October, experts anticipated stark differences in how Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump would carry out foreign policy if elected.

These contrasts were particularly striking on U.S. participation in international institutions, tariffs, and foreign aid. IR scholars estimated a 38 percent chance that Trump would take the United States out of NATO, for example.

(Foreign Policy has long worked with TRIP, which surveys IR scholars on pertinent policy issues. Check out the 2020 preelection survey.)

Source: TRIP snap poll

In September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon arrived at WBBM-TV studios in Chicago to participate in the first televised debate between two major U.S. presidential candidates. Physically exhausted from a taxing campaign schedule, Nixon was pale and worn out, but he turned down a makeup artist’s offer to freshen him up.

When the cameras started rolling, the combination of the hot studio lights and multiple layers of clothing—suit, shirt, and tie—made Nixon start to perspire. As beads of sweat formed on his face and his eyes darted back and forth to a clock just off camera, he looked shifty and nervous to 65 million viewers. By contrast, Kennedy, the challenger, appeared fresh-faced and confident. It’s still a matter of debate whether Nixon’s appearance that night cost him the election, but since then, politicians rarely leave things to chance.

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The possibility of a second Trump presidency has alarmed scientists and climate experts, especially as world leaders prepare to descend on Azerbaijan for this year’s international climate talks—known as COP29—which kick off in one week.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s first term saw him claim climate change was a “hoax” and dismantle key environmental protections. Under Trump, the United States also became the first and only country to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate agreement. (The United States rejoined in 2021, under the Biden administration.) 

Trump is expected to go even further in overhauling U.S. climate and environmental policy regulations if he is reelected. Trump 2.0 would “tear down and rebuild” the structure of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Mandy Gunasekara, who was the EPA chief of staff during Trump’s first term, told the New York Times. Trump would also pull Washington from the Paris treaty again, according to campaign spokespeople. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that a second U.S. withdrawal would result in a “crippled” agreement. 

Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy blueprint that is deeply connected to Trump’s team, despite his attempts to distance himself from it—offers additional clues into what a second Trump approach might look like. 

“The Biden administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” said Project 2025, which advocates cutting the EPA’s budget and removing scientific advisors who evaluate the agency’s work. “Under the next president, the Department of Energy should end the Biden administration’s unprovoked war on fossil fuels.”

Immigration has featured prominently in the 2024 U.S. election season. According to the latest New York Times-Siena College poll, 15 percent of likely voters said that immigration is the most important factor when it comes to deciding who they vote for. But what does the data tell us about the U.S. immigrant population itself?

Foreign-Born Population in the United States

The U.S. foreign-born population has steadily increased since the 1970s. In the last two decades, the U.S. immigrant population has grown by almost 50 percent; in 2022, immigrants made up approximately 14 percent of the total population. Though these figures include unauthorized migrants, as well as temporary migrants (such as asylum-seekers, refugees, and lawful permanent residents), who can’t vote yet, naturalized citizens now make up a record number of eligible voters in the United States.

As of 2022, 23.8 million naturalized citizens made up 10 percent of the U.S. electorate—with 30 percent of the cohort hailing from Mexico, India, and China alone, followed by the Philippines (6 percent) and Vietnam (4 percent). Other immigrant groups with relatively high naturalization rates include those from El Salvador, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.

Foreign-Born Eligible Voters in the United States

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau and Pew Research Center

An Oct. 28-31 Des Moines Register poll shows U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris with a slight lead over former U.S. President Donald Trump in Iowa, a state he won in 2016 and 2020. The trend was driven by a shift among independent women, who now support Harris by a 28-point margin.

Iowa enacted a six-week abortion ban in July, joining 20 other states that have restricted the procedure earlier than the Roe v. Wade viability standard since 2022. The poll shows that these policies could affect the outcome of the election on Nov. 5.

For Foreign Policy, international human rights lawyer Flynn Coleman argues that the pro-natalist agenda taken up by Trump and his allies recalls that of authoritarian societies past—chief among them fascist-led Italy 100 years ago.

Read it here: U.S. Republicans Are Embracing Mussolini’s Motherhood Agenda

Despite a sense of bipartisan agreement over a hawkish approach to China, Ryan Hass argues that there is actually a “wide divergence” in how Trump or Harris would navigate that relationship.

It’s not uncommon for billionaires to support political candidates—in fact, it’s a core feature of U.S. politics—but Elon Musk in the 2024 election cycle is still a bit of an outlier. The billionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter) has donated more than $100 million to Trump’s campaign through his recently formed America PAC, is handing out legally questionable daily $1 million rewards to Trump voters in swing states, and has appeared with Trump on the campaign trail on multiple occasions. 

But it is Musk’s $44 billion purchase of X, where he has nearly 203 million followers, that is causing the greatest concern. Musk has turned his own X account into a firehose of false and misleading election claims that have been viewed more than 2 billion times, according to a report on Tuesday by the British American nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. Multiple media analyses indicate that the platform as a whole now favors conservative—particularly pro-Trump—voices. 

Musk’s overseas business ties are also worrying some U.S. politicians. Tesla’s biggest factory is in Shanghai, and Starlink (the satellite internet operated by SpaceX) is a key player in Ukraine’s war effort against Russia, even as Musk has previously shared Russian government talking points for ending the war. 

“I’m enormously concerned about his ties to China,” one Democratic lawmaker told journalists in Washington last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Those ties were problematic even before Musk’s endorsement of Trump, the lawmaker added, but Musk’s behavior since then—particularly online—adds another layer of anxiety. “He’s got a right to support whoever he wants, but I think we should all be concerned that X has become ground zero for disinformation and misinformation.”

Some 50 million Americans think that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and around 30 million believe that a secret group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running the U.S. government. Given the uptake of these sorts of conspiracy theories, is it any wonder that political violence is supported by determined minorities on both the right and the left—and at disturbingly high and stable levels?

These findings come from surveys conducted by the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats. For Foreign Policy, Robert A. Pape, a political science professor and director of the project, tracks how political violence has become a normalized tool for Americans to achieve their political goals, pointing to multiple attempts to assassinate or severely harm leaders across the political spectrum in recent years.

Dangers to Democracy Tracker

Pape’s piece is part of a package on political violence that we published in the days leading up to the U.S. presidential election—examining both the causes and possible solutions to such violence once it starts. In addition to Pape’s startling snapshot of American attitudes, we look to experts in countries on four continents for ways out of embittered political polarization.

Read it here: Why Electoral Violence Starts—and How It Can End

Source: Chicago Project on Security and Threats; surveys fielded by NORC

A new poll of 29 countries by the Economist and GlobeScan finds that Kamala Harris is a more preferred candidate than Donald Trump by 12 percentage points, with a predictably strong showing for the Democratic nominee in Europe and rich countries such as Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Trump is more preferred in countries such as India, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Vietnam.

The polling matches some surprising findings from my recent FP Live series “America Votes: What It Means for the World.” (These videos are free for all to view.) In conversations with 10 regional experts, I found that Trump’s so-called transactional approach is more popular than we might imagine. Many countries in Africa and Asia are tired of being lectured about human rights and democracy. What they want is a world in which business deals matter more than self-professed values.

Click here to watch five free episodes of FP Live’s “America Votes” series, or listen to the free audio podcast.

South African policymakers are worried about a potential victory for former U.S. President Donald Trump. High tariffs and trade protectionism drove Trump’s first term, weakening South Africa’s currency, the rand.

The idea of removing South Africa from preferential trade benefits under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has often received bipartisan support because the country has restricted U.S. meat imports to protect local farmers.

Last year, calls grew louder for South Africa to be sanctioned after the U.S. ambassador to the country accused it of supplying weapons to Russia. That diplomatic spat led to the rand crashing, which fell again in July after investors worried that an assassination attempt against Trump would boost his approval ratings.

Meanwhile, South Africa’s newly established government of national unity—which includes the pro-Israel and business-friendly Democratic Alliance (DA)—might leave room for negotiations with a transactional Trump administration, though South African politicians remain wary. If Trump were to win the election, “I think it’s going to be bad news for South Africa’s trade access to the United States through [AGOA],” said former DA leader Tony Leon, on FP’s podcast Counterpoint.

Some observers perceive a link between Trumpism and South Africa’s far-right political history. Four of Trump’s prominent backers, including major donor Elon Musk, have roots in apartheid-era South Africa. “Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today,” Simon Kuper wrote in the Financial Times. Both Trump and Musk have had a shaky relationship with Pretoria since they shared conspiracy theories that white South African farmers were being killed.

In reality, U.S. policy toward South Africa hasn’t changed much in the past decade. However, Pretoria’s choice to allocate funds to its genocide case against Israel could fuel continued animosity between the two governments.

What will U.S. foreign policy look like under the next administration? The conventional wisdom is that a Kamala Harris administration would largely represent continuity of President Joe Biden’s policies, whereas former President Donald Trump’s famous unpredictability makes the future of a Trump 2.0 foreign policy more difficult to forecast.

In fact, the opposite may be true.

Trump has already served a full term, so we have years (four of them, to be exact) of experience with what that outcome might look like. Moreover, the short list of candidates for top national security posts in a Trump 2.0 administration (Mike Waltz, Robert O’Brien, Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton, Bill Hagerty, Richard Grenell, etc.) has been consistent for months.

On the other hand, the world doesn’t have the same experience with Harris on foreign policy. The vice president has few formal responsibilities, and her previous experience was as a state official and prosecutor, not in foreign- or defense-policy roles. Since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket in July, Harris has stuck to high-level talking points on major foreign-policy issues and hasn’t gone into much depth about a plan for winning or ending the war in Ukraine or countering Iran, for example.

Moreover, beyond speculation that her current national security advisor, Phil Gordon, would likely follow her to the White House, there hasn’t been the same informed and consistent reporting about who might occupy top cabinet posts in a Harris administration. Indeed, Harris herself might not even know yet.

Love him or hate him, the world knows what it is getting with Trump, while Harris is more of a blank slate.

During his first term in office, former U.S. President Donald Trump had a highly contentious relationship with the U.S. intelligence community. He publicly assailed their work, reportedly shared classified information with Russian officials, and was accused of politicizing intelligence for political gain.

Curious how the intelligence community is feeling about the prospect of a second Trump presidency, I reached out to James Clapper, who served as the director of National Intelligence for seven years during the Obama administration. 

“I think it’s fair to say there is a good bit of apprehension in the IC [intelligence community] about a potential second Trump term—starting with whom he would install in leadership positions, particularly at CIA, ODNI, and the FBI,” Clapper said in an email. 

“I would assess his general suspicion of the IC, and his disdain for what it does will be more prevalent than it was during the first term,” he added.

From the loss of the U.S. security umbrella under NATO to a trade war that could send its economy reeling, Europe has much to lose if former U.S. President Donald Trump returns to power. But these potential outcomes might be just the start of a downward spiral for the continent. In one of the most widely read essays among Foreign Policy subscribers this year, Hal Brands lays out how a Trump victory this week could return Europe to its conflict-ridden past. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Europe’s transformation into today’s peaceful EU can never be undone,” Brands writes.

Read it here: Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe

A victory for former U.S. President Donald Trump would have a similar impact on the Republican Party as Ronald Reagan’s landslide reelection victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.

Whereas the 1980 election had been about promise, vision, and ambition, by 1984, voters knew exactly who they were electing. The win legitimated Reagan’s vision of right-wing conservatism—a mix of supply-side economics, deregulation, social conservatism, and a muscular approach to foreign policy—as the future of the GOP.

In 2024, Republican voters are making a similar choice. Trump’s first term was revealing, and any remaining illusions that he will change are, by now, shattered. His conservatism entails the unchecked use of executive power deployed alongside blistering, toxic rhetoric and a hefty dose of election denialism. Policy-wise, he champions tariffs, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, stringent anti-immigration policies, and limited intervention overseas.

Trump has hidden nothing; most of his strategy and agenda is available for everyone to see in broad daylight. Those who vote for him this year are voting to entrench this vision for the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, and the GOP will certainly read a Trump victory as a clear verdict on the party’s path forward—and likely a mandate to do even more.

Without electoral incentive, the only force that can really move parties in an age of hyperpolarization, the MAGA Republican coalition will be here to stay.

Throughout his campaign, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has eschewed detail about the policies he would implement if he won reelection. Wars would be resolved or avoided altogether. Illegal immigration would be curtailed and millions of undocumented migrants repatriated. The production of oil, gas, and coal would spur rapid economic growth in the United States—a country already awash in hydrocarbon production—with no risk of inflation or worrisome consequences for global warming.

Trust me, Trump says on one topic after another. Whatever challenges rear their heads will be fixed and fixed fast, and things will be better than ever before.

Trump is unusually fond of the words “unbelievable” and “incredible,” which pepper his speech whenever he expounds about the glories to come under his leadership. Indeed, it’s hard to believe many of his promises would come to pass. But some policies in the works from Trump and his associates are believable, and late in the campaign, when a lot of news coverage has given over to “he said, she said” silliness, they deserve to be taken more seriously.

What we can expect with near certainty from Trump is a war on norms. This can be seen in the ways that his team is seeking to skirt official arrangements for an orderly transition. It can be seen in talk about a radical downsizing of the federal government, including much of the State Department. And it can be seen in Trump’s reported pledge to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr., someone with no expertise in health care who holds dangerous anti-vaccine views, vast sway over the country’s public health agencies.

All of these disturbing signs are about loosening checks on power—and given what little Trump has said about his true agenda for governing, they are alarming.

As the United States gears up for its high-stakes presidential election on Nov. 5, fears have escalated about the potential of technology to disrupt the vote. Concerns about social media and its role in spreading misinformation—spurred on by Washington’s adversaries—have been in the public conversation for a decade, but officials warn that interference efforts by China, Iran, and Russia have kicked into overdrive around the 2024 election.

One of the biggest fears is the impact of artificial intelligence, particularly large language models—such as OpenAI’s GPT-4—which can generate text, audio, and video on demand and threaten to turbocharge misinformation. While there has been no conclusive evidence that any of the dozens of elections held so far this year have been swayed by AI-generated misinformation, scientist and AI expert Gary Marcus says it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

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During a rally over the weekend in Greensboro, North Carolina, Republican nominee Donald Trump tried to rile up the crowd with one of his favorite attacks: claiming that his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, never actually worked at McDonald’s. A supporter screamed out, “She worked on a corner!” comparing Harris to a prostitute. Trump laughed and remarked, “This place is amazing,” before adding, “Just remember it’s other people saying it—it’s not me.” It was an odd moment for a candidate facing a significant gender gap that could very well cost him, and his party, the election.

The interaction was also a striking contrast to another tense moment of the 2008 campaign. By October, the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, was contending with the reactionary, anti-establishment forces that had been unleashed by his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. During a town hall in Lakeville, Minnesota, one of McCain’s supporters told him: “I can’t trust Obama. I have read about him, and he’s not, um, he’s an Arab.” In a moment of genuine frustration, the senator grabbed the microphone from her hand to say, “No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what the campaign’s all about.”

The “Lakeville Moment” and the “Greensboro Moment” capture just how much the Republican Party has transformed since the early 2000s. In 2024, there is no more pushback from up top. Indeed, very often the loudest voices in the crowd are just mimicking what they have seen on stage.

Since Donald Trump emerged as a political force, U.S. pollsters have struggled to explain the three-time Republican nominee’s enduring popularity. They underestimated him in 2016. Despite his eventual loss, they also underestimated the extent of his support in 2020.

With that history, polling organizations are taking extra care this year to make sure that they are taking into account Trump’s base—a group that may be less likely to answer their phone calls and more disillusioned by the system that polling organizations represent.

Along comes the oracle of Iowa. Over the weekend, J. Ann Selzer dropped her closely watched Des Moines Register poll showing Democratic nominee Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 percentage points in a state that was seen as a shoo-in for the former president. Selzer’s firm has correctly predicted results in Iowa in four of the last five presidential elections. If Selzer is right, her poll could also imply a similar swing toward Harris in Wisconsin or Michigan.

Speaking on MSNBC’s The Weekend, Selzer said her philosophy was “to allow our data to reveal to us what’s happening with the future electorate.” In the latest poll, her team wasn’t looking to the past, and it wasn’t putting its thumb on the scale to correct for past errors. They were just presenting the data as it was—and the data showed that women voters were likely reacting to the abortion ban that went into effect in Iowa in July.

We’ll find out if Selzer is right or wrong in the coming days. But the results will also go some way toward answering whether pollsters have gotten better at predicting how Americans think about Trump—or if this time they have overcorrected in predicting the extent of his support.