presidential campaign essay

Are Americans more attracted to anger or hope? Don Watson reports from the US election trail

Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

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In 2016, Don Watson wrote a remarkable Quarterly Essay predicting the success of Trump, when political commentators were largely united in their belief that Hillary Clinton would win the election.

So it’s hardly surprising Watson was back in the United States this year to track Trump’s possible return to the White House. But politics can be a cruel game to follow, and he was clearly caught out by the rapid replacement of President Joe Biden by Kamala Harris – and a very different campaign.

It is too early to analyse the impact of the Trump/Harris debate, but there is little doubt that Harris handled herself impressively and established herself as a viable candidate. How many undecided voters will be put off by Trump’s bluster and boastfulness remains to be seen.

The first half of High Noon , Watson’s new Quarterly Essay on the US election, reads as if Trump’s re-election is inevitable. Watson had no illusions about Biden’s electability in 2024. Whether fairly or not, Biden was widely regarded as too old and unable to defend his record. That said, it is strange Watson has so little to say about Biden’s success four years ago, when he won back some of those voters who had opted for Trump.

Review: Quarterly Essay – High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink by Don Watson (Black Inc.)

Watson claims Bernie Sanders might have done better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 – but I’m not convinced. The Republicans would have consistently portrayed Sanders as a dangerous socialist, if not a communist – and for reasons Watson himself acknowledges, the dirt would probably have stuck. Against Sanders, Trump would have portrayed himself as the defender of American values in ways he could not four years later against Biden.

Appalled and enchanted by the US

Watson writes in the long tradition of outsiders who have traversed the US in search of understanding the complexities of the country.

At his best, as in his account of life in Detroit and nearby Kalamazoo, Michigan, he combines analysis with poetic prose, often drawing on passing conversations to illuminate perceptions of the world rarely shared by readers of the Quarterly Essays. A taxi driver in Queens echoes Trump’s diatribes against illegal immigrants: “I am very angry,” he tells Watson. “Americans are very angry.”

Rather like journalist Nick Bryant, author of The Forever War , Watson is simultaneously appalled and enchanted by the US.

Like Bryant, he is aware of growing inequality, persistent racism and the extent of its violence, even as he relishes the energy and inventiveness of so much of American life. Like me, Watson knows that entering the US recalls the moment in The Wizard of Oz where black and white suddenly transforms to colour.

He writes that Trump has turned politics into “the wildly adversarial and addictive world” of TV wrestling. We understand “wrestlers are real, but not real […] personifications of good and evil, courage and cowardice, patriotism and treachery”.

As Watson suggests, Trump has created “a fictional setting for his fictions” where “he can be as abusive and as untruthful as he likes” – and where “boasting, posturing and abusing” are expected.

One question dominates High Noon, as it did his earlier essay. Namely: what explains Trump’s ability to capture the Republican Party – and perhaps to become only the second president to be re-elected after losing the election following their first term?

Watson is good at explaining Trump’s ability to channel the discontent and anger of millions of Americans. But he fails to explain the almost total defeat of the Republican establishment, which has so jettisoned its own past that no senior member of any Republican administration before Trump could be found to speak at their convention.

Former vice president Dick Cheney (under George W. Bush) is among the establishment Republicans who’ve recently announced their support for Harris, hardly surprising as his daughter, Liz Cheney, lost her position in Congress due to her antipathy to Trump.

There is surprisingly little reflection on the culture wars, which have become central to Republican campaigns over the past decade. And no discussion of abortion or attacks on woke ideologies (gender, critical race theory), which have become staples of the MAGA language and help cement the white evangelical vote for Trump.

I wish Watson had spoken to more women, given the growing gender gap within American politics and the way Harris’ nomination has accelerated that. A recent poll shows Harris leading Trump by 13 points among women. Her success in a couple of key states, including Arizona and Nevada, may hinge on otherwise apolitical women turning out to vote on referenda to ban abortions.

Abortion is for Trump what Gaza is for Harris: an issue that arouses great passions that are impossible to reconcile among people they could normally take for granted. In Tuesday’s presidential debate, Trump equivocated on abortion , making unsubstantiated claims for postpartum terminations while claiming he’s “great for women and their reproductive rights”.

I suspect the last section of High Noon was written after Watson returned to Australia. His account of Harris’ nomination and the early stages of the 2024 campaign lack the firsthand immediacy of the earlier sections.

Capitalism trumps democracy

The overriding question Watson poses is: how can a country that believes itself to be a democracy, the leader of “the Free World”, possibly elect a demagogue like Trump?

In the end, it seems, capitalism trumps democracy. Watson quotes the right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel as saying he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. Harris consistently stresses that Trump’s tax proposals would further increase economic inequality within the US.

“An election,” writes Watson, “is democracy’s effort to outrun the anger and envy arising from its failure to honour the promise of a fair shake for everyone.” My hunch is that Harris understands this. The apoplectic columns in the Murdoch press claiming she is light on policy ignore the fact Clinton lost in 2016 despite an armoury of policies designed to attract working-class voters.

Trump is almost unique in winning (and then losing) by speaking of anger and decline. Harris is in the tradition of both Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama in proclaiming hope. (In choosing the title for his essay, did Watson remember that Reagan cited High Noon as his favourite film ?)

I wish Watson had held off finishing this essay long enough to see whether the Harris campaign’s instinctive sense of how to defeat Trump through positivity over anger, stressing his egoism against her desire to unify the country, pays off.

Why do we care so much?

Is Trump a fascist? Watson skirts around this question. He is correct, though, in pointing to Trump’s admiration for Hungarian authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban .

In today’s debate, Trump called Orban “one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man” and quoted him as saying “you need Trump back as president”. Trump further claimed China and North Korea are “afraid” of him.

Trump claims he can end the war in Ukraine, but gives no answer as to how he would do this. Neither Trump nor Harris have any obvious solution for the war in Gaza, although Trump claims she would be responsible for the destruction of Israel, again with no clear explanation for this.

The constant attempts by Trump’s supporters to interfere with what we would regard as the basic norms of free democratic elections – including, most dramatically, the attacks of January 6 – suggest a second Trump administration would sorely test those Australian politicians who like to speak of our shared values.

Watson reflects a much larger Australian obsession with the US, ranging from the AUKUS agreement to the extraordinarily high proportion of American speakers who turn up at our literary festivals.

But as Watson writes in his final paragraph: “You have your own life to lead. Why let yourself be lured into theirs?”

It’s a good question, but Watson has provided an answer for why we should pay attention to US politics. He writes: “Once the Democrats allow themselves to be defined by their opposition to Trump, the fight is as good as lost.”

Until Harris became the candidate, it seemed as if this was the only strategy the Democrats had to fall back upon. Her performance in the debate suggests Harris is both willing to attack Trump and to promise a rather different path forward, stressing the need for generational change.

Don Watson’s Quarterly Essay High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink (Black Inc.) is published Monday 16 September.

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2024 Election

It takes lots of money to win elections. here's what you need to know.

Ximena Bustillo

This photo illustration shows the mugshot of former President Donald Trump next to a website called Trump Save America JFC, a joint fundraising committee on behalf of Donald J. Trump for President 2024, which is selling merchandise bearing his mugshot. Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

This photo illustration shows the mugshot of former President Donald Trump next to a website called Trump Save America JFC, a joint fundraising committee on behalf of Donald J. Trump for President 2024, which is selling merchandise bearing his mugshot.

Television ads, logos, stickers, staplers and staffers. They are all needed to run political campaigns. And they all cost money.

Fundraising is one of the key components of political campaigns. Candidates spend a significant period of time talking to donors and mobilizing grassroots donations in order to keep their campaigns alive.

"Campaign finance matters," said Michael Kang, law professor at Northwestern University who specializes in campaign finance, among other matters. "It's the way that candidates fund their outreach and messaging to voters."

And the dollars add up. In the 2020 election, political spending topped $14 billion, according to OpenSecrets , doubling what was spent in the 2016 presidential election, making it the most expensive election cycle.

"We just see money in politics growing every year," said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at Campaign Legal Center. "There are new methods of technology, especially around the internet and digital platforms that campaigns want to be able to spend a lot of money on to reach voters and to micro-target people with their messages."

Media advertising accounts for a large part of spending, according to Kang. It's a race to the top.

"That's really what drives up the costs and the fact that everyone's pretty well funded and spends a lot of time fundraising," Kang said. "So you have to keep up with your opposition to get your message out."

A worker sets up signs at the Dallas County Fairgrounds for a rally with Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on Oct. 16 in Adel, Iowa. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

A worker sets up signs at the Dallas County Fairgrounds for a rally with Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump on Oct. 16 in Adel, Iowa.

Why raise money?

The advertisements that propel a candidate's message to voters on various media platforms take money to produce and to run.

"There's only so much you can do without paying for some sort of advertising, whether it's TV, radio, print, the internet. All of those things require money and they're very expensive," Kang explained.

But he said there are also plenty of other expenses that don't go to media outreach such as paying for pollsters, hiring campaign staff and printing yard signs and posters.

For the Republican contest there is added incentive from the Republican National Committee, which has set thresholds for a minimum number of unique donors as one of the metrics for qualifying for the debates. So, candidates for the 2024 election cycle have already gotten creative.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson barely qualified for the first GOP presidential debate. But he did, thanks to the help of college students, according to POLITICO .

Current GOP front-runner Donald Trump has used his recent legal troubles as a way to garner financial support, sending out emails and texts requesting donations following several indictments and court appearances. He is even selling merch with his own mug shot.

Conversely, Biden, who is the Democratic front-runner, has boasted high fundraising totals in the first two quarters compared to his GOP rivals, running a more traditional fundraising operation.

President Biden greets Democratic National Committee staff and volunteers after speaking at DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24. Drew Angerer/Getty Images hide caption

President Biden greets Democratic National Committee staff and volunteers after speaking at DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24.

What is the FEC?

The Federal Election Commission is the sole federal agency tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws.

There are six FEC commissioners and, according to law, no more than three can be from the same political party. Ideally, this makes decisions from the commission bipartisan because it takes four to make a decision.

The commissioners oversee who is spending money and how, ensuring political committees and candidates are filing accurate and complete reports which are later posted by the FEC, and they investigate allegations of illegal activity.

"But in practice, especially in recent years, that has been resulting in a lot of stalemates, a lot of split decisions, where the three Democratically appointed commissioners, three Republican-appointed commissioners disagree," Ports said, adding that a 3-3 split means no penalty is assessed to someone who is alleged to have broken the law. "And when that happens, the law doesn't get enforced."

It has also stalled the FEC's ability to issue guidance to those asking how to best follow the law, Ports said.

"A political committee or a campaign can come to the FEC and ask for what's called an advisory opinion where it basically will say, 'I want to do X thing. Is that OK?'" Ports said. The FEC writes an opinion saying yes or no and why. "But when there's a 3-to-3 split, the commission says there's nothing, there's no opinion rendered."

Commissioners have argued before lawmakers in Congress that despite the partisan divides, it has reached a consensus on 90% of enforcement matters since January 2021. But lawmakers during a hearing last month said that on higher level issues, such as enforcement allegations related to Trump, partisan splits persist.

Chair of the Federal Election Commission Dara Lindenbaum, center, listens during an Aug. 10 FEC public meeting on whether it should regulate the use of AI-generated political campaign advertisements. Stephanie Scarbrough/AP hide caption

Chair of the Federal Election Commission Dara Lindenbaum, center, listens during an Aug. 10 FEC public meeting on whether it should regulate the use of AI-generated political campaign advertisements.

Ins and outs of the law

Federal laws apply to those running for federal office. But each state has its own set of laws for those running in elections within each state.

These laws can govern contribution limits, or how much an entity looking to give can give.

They also govern the disclosure of the money, meaning candidates or advertisers have to report how much they have received and from who.

But one thing that does hold true across all jurisdictions: people can't be stopped from spending.

The Supreme Court in 2010 decided that political action committees are able to take unlimited contributions from donors, except foreign nationals and federal contractors. Widely known as the Citizens United decision, it also allowed corporations and nonprofits to spend money on political campaigns and explicitly back a candidate as long as they don't directly coordinate with candidates.

Ports and Kang say that this decision led to the rise of the use of political action committees.

What are PACs and super PACs?

A political action committee, or PAC, is organized for the purpose of raising and spending money to elect and defeat candidates. PACs tend to represent specific interests such as business, unions or ideologies.

"The basic difference is that super PACs engage only in independent expenditures. That is, they don't give money to candidates or to parties, and they don't coordinate with parties or candidates in how they use their money," Kang said. "That distinction allows them to raise money without contribution limits. And so that's what makes them super."

In 2022 there were 2,476 super PACs formed by a wide variety of interests. Together they raised over $2.7 billion and spent over $1.3 billion.

PACs, meanwhile, are subject to contribution limits and can coordinate with candidates. Often, presidential candidates will announce super PACs related to their individual ideology before announcing they are jumping into the race.

Three months out, the Iowa Caucus is Trump's to lose

New campaign fundraising numbers have been released for the 2024 presidential race, does money increase the chances of a win.

Fundraising is a contributor to a campaign's success, said Kang, but so are other issues like candidate quality.

"Usually if you're spending a lot of money, often the opponent is also spending a lot of money and they kind of cancel out," Kang said. "That's not to say that having money is not important or doesn't help you win, because if the opponent is spending a lot of money, you're better off spending a lot of money too."

For presidential elections, candidates have to meet deadlines for their reporting. During presidential election years, such as 2024, candidates will have to file each month. The first report of the year will include all of 2023 fundraising and it is due Jan. 31, 2024.

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At a glance: the election of 2020

Conventions, general election campaign, aftermath: trump’s refusal to concede and the insurrection at the capitol.

• Who is Kamala Harris?
• Who is Joe Biden?
• Why did Joe Biden withdraw from the 2024 presidential campaign?

United States presidential election of 2020

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United States presidential election of 2020 , American presidential election held on November 3, 2020, in the midst of the global coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic , in which Democrat Joe Biden , formerly the 47th vice president of the United States , defeated the incumbent president, Republican Donald Trump , to become the 46th U.S. president. Biden garnered more than 81 million votes to win the popular vote by more than seven million ballots and to triumph in the Electoral College by a count of 306 to 232. Refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory, Trump claimed without evidence that the election had been stolen from him through fraud and mounted unsuccessful legal challenges in several states that he had lost. Widespread acceptance of Trump’s prolonged baseless insistence that the election had been stolen ultimately led to the storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, the day that the Electoral College results were to be ceremoniously reported to a joint session of Congress . Identifying the provocative speech that Trump delivered to supporters before the insurrectionist mob invaded the Capitol as “inciting violence against the Government of the United States,” the House of Representatives subsequently impeached the lame duck president.

From the outset the norm-shattering presidency of Donald Trump (2017–21) was characterized by competing versions of reality, beginning with Trump’s claim that his inauguration crowd was the largest in history when photographic evidence clearly revealed that was not the case. Soon after presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway would introduce the notion of “alternative facts.” Over the next four years, as Trump branded a wide swath of the media “fake news” and sought to direct the national conversation with his Twitter account, civil political debate became rare and the hyper-partisan divide in the country arguably became wider and more inflamed than at any time since the Civil War . Meddling in the 2016 presidential election by Russia and suspicion that the Trump campaign had been a party to it resulted in a prolonged investigation by a special counsel , Robert Mueller , which found insufficient evidence to establish that “members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government” despite “numerous links” between the two. The Mueller Report also did not charge Trump with obstruction of justice in the matter but neither did it exonerate the president.

Before long Trump was at the center of another scandal. This time he was accused of having pressured the recently elected president of Ukraine to announce that an investigation would be mounted into a debunked allegation that Joe Biden, as U.S. vice president, had advocated for the dismissal of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to protect Biden’s son Hunter, who had served on the company’s board from 2014 to 2019. It also was alleged that Trump had put a hold on some $390 million in military aid for Ukraine to further pressure the Ukrainian president. Ultimately, accusations that Trump had abused his presidential power led to Trump’s impeachment, though he was not convicted in his trial by the Republican-controlled Senate. Trump’s focus on Biden had grown from the president’s perception that Biden would provide the most formidable opposition to his reelection if he were chosen as the Democratic Party ’s presidential candidate.

The campaign for the 2020 presidential election was profoundly altered by the realities of the global coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic , which had begun in December 2019 in China and spread rapidly across the world. By March 2020, after only a smattering of primaries had been held, the United States had gone into state-imposed lockdowns that dramatically curtailed public life in most of the country and resulted in an economic meltdown. In May the “new normal” way of American life brought about by the increasingly deadly pandemic was itself transformed by a prolonged period of nationwide street protests of racial injustice and police brutality against African Americans , as support for the Black Lives Matter movement swelled after the killing of a Black man, George Floyd , while in the custody of Minneapolis , Minnesota, police was captured in a bystander video that went viral.

Despite the sweeping upheaval of American life in 2020, the campaigns for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations proceeded, albeit in a unique fashion. As an incumbent who was immensely popular with his political base, Trump faced only token opposition for his party’s nomination. There was never any doubt that he would be the Republican standard bearer again. In many ways, he had started campaigning for reelection almost immediately after taking office. Many of his public appearances throughout his presidential tenure had the feeling of campaign rallies, at which Trump mostly preached to the converted and seldom sought to find accommodation with those who opposed him.

The especially crowded field of potential nominees on the Democratic side initially included Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, Rep. Eric Swalwell of California , Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii , former representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas , billionaire activist Tom Steyer , technology entrepreneur Andrew Yang, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York , Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado , former U.S. secretary of housing Julián Castro, author and spiritualist Marianne Williamson , and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio , as well as former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg , among others. That large field was gradually winnowed to a smaller group of candidates who had gained significant early support, including the former mayor of South Bend , Indiana , Pete Buttigieg , and Senators Kamala Harris (California), Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Cory Booker (New Jersey), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), and Bernie Sanders (Vermont), along with Biden.

While all the Democratic candidates agreed on the necessity of defeating Trump, they locked horns over issues such as health care (mainly on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act should be augmented with a public option or replaced by a single-payer plan) and climate change (notably on the viability of the Green New Deal championed by the party’s left). Biden, the initial front-runner, faltered badly in the early primary contests, and his underfunded campaign appeared to be unraveling until he received the influential endorsement of Black South Carolina Rep. James E. Clyburn , which catapulted Biden to a dramatic win on February 29 in the South Carolina primary, largely as a result of the support of African American voters. The next week, before “ Super Tuesday ” (March 3), Klobuchar and Buttigieg, Biden’s principal moderate rivals, suspended their candidacies and threw their support to the former vice president. On Super Tuesday Biden then notched victories in 10 primaries, and thereafter his capture of the nomination seemed a foregone conclusion, even as the pandemic altered the nature of campaigning and forced the delay of some primaries. Seeming to sense the necessity of rapidly uniting the party behind one candidate, Biden’s remaining rivals also suspended their candidacies. Although the party’s progressive wing continued to supply wide and impassioned support for Sanders, he too stepped aside for Biden—but not before securing policy concessions from Biden along with a significant role for his supporters in shaping the party’s platform.

The Democrats had been scheduled to hold their convention in mid-July in Milwaukee in the key battleground state of Wisconsin , but the same limitations on the number of people who could gather and the need for social distancing that had transformed political campaigning in 2020 as a result of the pandemic made the notion of a traditional convention risky and impractical. Instead, a small but symbolic group of Democrats gathered in Milwaukee on August 17–20 while the great preponderance of convention business was conducted virtually. Live and prerecorded speeches and presentations were slickly mounted, and each evening’s session was hosted by a different entertainment industry celebrity. Biden and his vice presidential running mate, Kamala Harris, capped the convention by celebrating their nomination in his hometown, Wilmington , Delaware , at an outdoor ceremony attended by supporters in automobiles.

Despite the pandemic, the Republican convention was still scheduled to be held as in-person event in Charlotte , North Carolina , in late August. However, when North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper, balked at allowing the event to be held at full scale without social distancing, the convention site was switched to Jacksonville , Florida . Ultimately, the move to Jacksonville was canceled, and the GOP mirrored the Democrats in opting to conduct the bulk of the convention virtually (August 24–27), with some events still held in Charlotte but others being broadcast from a variety of remote locations, including Fort McHenry in Baltimore . Trump flaunted tradition by accepting the nomination at a gathering on the South Lawn of the White House , raising ethical questions over the use of the presidential residence for strictly political purposes. The occasion, which culminated in a massive fireworks display, also was criticized in some corners for having brought together a large audience of people who sat in close proximity to each other, creating the potential for it to become a coronavirus “super-spreader” event.

For the general election, the moderate Biden tacked somewhat leftward in his approach to policy; however, the thrust of his campaign was an emphasis on what he characterized as Trump’s mishandling of the government’s response to the pandemic. Biden cast himself as someone who could empathically heal and unite a nation that had become further divided into angry partisan tribes—a division, he argued, that had been facilitated in no small measure by Trump’s attempts to seek political gain through division by stoking racial anxiety. Trump had hoped to run on his stewardship of the economy, which had generally been strong prior to the onset of the pandemic, but, faced with widespread criticism of his handling of the public health crisis, he struggled to find a focus for his own campaign and chose to adopt a combative law-and-order stance in his response to the Black Lives Matter protests. Although age 74 himself, Trump also tried to portray the then 77-year-old Biden as failing mentally. Moreover, he characterized Biden as both a longtime Washington insider of few accomplishments and as being beholden to a Democratic left hell-bent on imposing socialism on the country.

The day-to-day campaigns of the two candidates differed greatly. Initially Biden campaigned virtually. Later he met with small groups while practicing social distancing. Trump, on the other hand, relatively quickly returned to holding large rallies, often at airports, where many among the tightly packed crowds of supporters chose not to wear the masks that were the first line of defense against the coronavirus. In early October Trump was forced to quarantine for some 10 days after contracting COVID-19 (the disease caused by the coronavirus) himself and was treated for three days at Walter Reed hospital . Once back on the campaign trail, the president boasted about his recovery, downplayed the severity of COVID-19, and claimed falsely that the country was turning the corner on the pandemic when actually it was experiencing a new spike in cases and deaths nationwide.

Early on, Trump had refused to commit to accepting the results of the election were he not to win, and he sought to create doubt about the legitimacy of the mail-in voting that would play a major role in the election because of the pandemic. Democrats would vote by mail in much larger numbers than Republicans would, and Trump repeatedly made baseless claims that widespread fraud would result from mail-in balloting.

The death of liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg some seven weeks before the election also had a significant impact on the campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had refused to consider Pres. Barack Obama ’s nomination of Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court more than eight months before the 2016 presidential election to let voters weigh in, but this time around McConnell expedited consideration of Trump’s nominee to replace Ginsburg, conservative federal circuit court judge Amy Coney Barrett . Democrats argued that Republicans were being inconsistent and unprincipled, but they were unable to block the appointment of Barrett, who was confirmed by the Senate on October 26 by a 52–48 vote. She was the third Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump, and the shift of the high court farther right, along with the prolific number of federal district judges confirmed by the Senate on Trump’s watch, was very popular with conservative voters.

More than 159 million Americans cast ballots in the 2020 election, more than 100 million of them voting early, either in person or by mail. After having shown Biden to have a strong lead both nationally and in many battleground states, preference polling, as it had in the 2016 election, once again largely missed the boat. Because of the unprecedented level of early and mail-in voting, the media also struggled to evaluate the early results. In some cases pundits overvalued the initial counts of early voting, and in others they overestimated the impact of in-person voting on election day.

Biden had focused on holding the states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and taking back Wisconsin, Michigan , and Pennsylvania , “blue wall” states that had narrowly lifted Trump to victory in that election. For four days after election day, several states that would determine the outcome of the Electoral College vote were still counting ballots. When Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes were added to his victory column on November 7 (Wisconsin and Michigan having already tilted in his favor), Biden had the necessary 270 electoral votes to become president-elect.

Later it was confirmed that Biden also had “flipped” the traditionally reliably Republican states of Arizona and Georgia en route to a final victory in the Electoral College of 306 to 232. In winning the popular vote with more than 81 million votes, Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history. That Trump’s total of more than 74 million votes was the second highest count ever recorded indicated the passionate involvement of both sides of the electorate in the election.

While votes were still being counted, Trump falsely claimed victory and demanded a halt to the counting. He claimed that there had been widespread voting irregularities, but he provided no evidence for his accusations. Trump steadfastly refused to concede, but over the ensuing weeks dozens of legal challenges to the election results in states that Trump lost were almost universally summarily dismissed by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. Moreover, recounts in Wisconsin and Georgia confirmed Biden’s victory in those states. Nevertheless, Trump, with the (often tacit) support of most Republicans and echoed by the right-wing media, continued to baselessly claim that the election had been stolen. Further, he tried to persuade Republican officials in several states to reject the results in their states and to supplant Electoral College slates pledged to Biden with slates pledged to himself.

As the date of the joint session of Congress at which the Electoral College totals were to be ceremonially reported approached, about a dozen Republican senators and scores of Republican members of the House of Representatives indicated that they intended to challenge the Electoral College slates of several states lost by Trump. At the same time, Trump pleaded with his supporters to come to Washington to participate in a “Save America March.” Among those who responded to that call were members of right-wing extremist groups such as the Proud Boys , the Oath Keepers , and the Three Percenters . On January 6, 2021 , thousands of Trump supporters attending a rally near the White House heard the president repeat his false claims regarding the election and were exhorted by him to “fight much harder” against “bad people” before he dispatched them to the Capitol, saying

We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.

That swarm of demonstrators then joined others who were already encroaching on the Capitol. In short order they transformed into a violent insurrectionist mob that overwhelmed the underprepared Capitol Police who were unable to prevent them from storming the Capitol. Disrupting the joint session of Congress, the insurrectionists sent lawmakers scurrying for safety, and they pursued and battered police. As they roamed, defiled, and looted the seat of American government, some members of the mob posed for photos and boasted about their actions on social media (law enforcement would later use these images and posts to identify and arrest violators). Some brandished firearms; some displayed racist banners and flags, including the Confederate Battle Flag. The actions of some members of the mob appeared to have been carefully coordinated.

Order was finally restored about three hours after the rioters first entered the Capitol. The incident , quickly characterized as a coup attempt, ultimately resulted in the loss of five lives. Much of it unfolded on live television, shocking Americans and people around the world with the spectacle of treasonous turmoil in the symbolic home of democracy in a country that had long seen itself as a beacon of democratic stability and that had prided itself on its tradition of peaceful transfer of power.

Although Republicans joined Democrats in forcefully condemning the insurrection, later on January 6, more than 120 Republican House members and a handful of Republican senators still voted against accepting the certified slates of electors from Pennsylvania and Arizona. Their actions proved futile , and Biden and Harris were finally officially recognized as the president- and vice president-elect. Identifying Trump’s provocation of the mob as “inciting violence against the Government of the United States,” on January 13 the House of Representatives impeached the president. Ten Republicans and all of the House Democrats voted to make Trump the first president in U.S. history to be impeached twice. The Senate’s trial of him began in early February, following Biden’s inauguration, which took place in a capital that was protected by about 25,000 National Guard troops, on guard against further violence threatened by right-wing extremist groups in Washington and throughout the country. Still refusing to concede that he had lost the election, Trump, by his own choice, became the first outgoing president in some 150 years not to participate in his successor’s inauguration.

On February 13 seven Republican senators joined all the Senate Democrats in voting 57–43 to convict Trump; however, that tally was short of the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction . Notwithstanding an earlier 56–44 vote affirming the interpretation that it was constitutional for the Senate to try an impeached ex-president, the majority of Republican senators expressed the belief that trying Trump once he was out of office was beyond the Senate’s constitutional jurisdiction. Nonetheless, the verdict marked the most nonpartisan vote in history to convict an impeached U.S. president.

Biden assumed the presidency determined to unite the divided country and to “manage the hell out of” the federal response to the pandemic, which had claimed nearly 400,000 American lives by the time he took office. He had the advantage of a Congress in which both houses were now controlled by his party. Democrats had expected to expand their majority in the House but instead saw it shrink as they narrowly held on to control. Democratic hopes for retaking control of the Senate initially appeared to have been stymied, but, when the Democratic candidates won the January runoff elections for both of Georgia’s Senate seats, representation for each party in the upper chamber stood at 50 seats. Control of the Senate thus passed to the Democrats by virtue of the deciding vote held by the Democratic vice president, Harris, in her role as president of the Senate. Harris also made history in her own right. A woman of mixed ethnicity , she became the first woman, first Black American, and first person of South Asian descent to serve as U.S. vice president.

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Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America

Jump to a section:

• George Packer on the Democratic opposition
• Atul Gawande on Obamacare’s future Hilary Mantel on the unseen
• Peter Hessler on the rural vote
• Toni Morrison on whiteness
• Jane Mayer on climate-change denial
• Evan Osnos on the Schwarzenegger precedent
• Jeffrey Toobin on the Supreme Court
• Mary Karr on the language of bullying
• Jill Lepore on a fractured nation
• Gary Shteyngart on life in dystopia
• Nicholas Lemann on the Wall Street factor
• Larry Wilmore on the birtherism of a nation
• Jia Tolentino on the protests
• Mark Singer on Trump the actor
• Junot Díaz on Radical Resilience

A Democratic Opposition

Four decades ago, Watergate revealed the potential of the modern Presidency for abuse of power on a vast scale. It also showed that a strong democracy can overcome even the worst illness ravaging its body. When Richard Nixon used the instruments of government to destroy political opponents, hide financial misdoings, and deceive the public about the Vietnam War, he very nearly got away with it. What stopped his crime spree was democratic institutions: the press, which pursued the story from the original break-in all the way to the Oval Office; the courts, which exposed the extent of criminality and later ruled impartially against Nixon’s claims of executive privilege; and Congress, which held revelatory hearings, and whose House Judiciary Committee voted on a bipartisan basis to impeach the President. In crucial agencies of Nixon’s own Administration, including the F.B.I. (whose deputy director, Mark Felt, turned out to be Deep Throat, the Washington Post’s key source), officials fought the infection from inside. None of these institutions could have functioned without the vitalizing power of public opinion. Within months of reëlecting Nixon by the largest margin in history, Americans began to gather around the consensus that their President was a crook who had to go.

President Donald Trump should be given every chance to break his campaign promise to govern as an autocrat. But, until now, no one had ever won the office by pledging to ignore the rule of law and to jail his opponent. Trump has the temperament of a leader who doesn’t distinguish between his private desires and demons and the public interest. If he’s true to his word, he’ll ignore the Constitution, by imposing a religious test on immigrants and citizens alike. He’ll go after his critics in the press, with or without the benefit of libel law. He’ll force those below him in the chain of command to violate the code of military justice, by torturing terrorist suspects and killing their next of kin. He’ll turn federal prosecutors, agents, even judges if he can, into personal tools of grievance and revenge.

All the pieces are in place for the abuse of power, and it could happen quickly. There will be precious few checks on President Trump. His party, unlike Nixon’s, will control the legislative as well as the executive branch, along with two-thirds of governorships and statehouses. Trump’s advisers, such as Newt Gingrich, are already vowing to go after the federal employees’ union, and breaking it would give the President sweeping power to bend the bureaucracy to his will and whim. The Supreme Court will soon have a conservative majority. Although some federal courts will block flagrant violations of constitutional rights, Congress could try to impeach the most independent-minded judges, and Trump could replace them with loyalists.

But, beyond these partisan advantages, something deeper is working in Trump’s favor, something that he shrewdly read and exploited during the campaign. The democratic institutions that held Nixon to account have lost their strength since the nineteen-seventies—eroded from within by poor leaders and loss of nerve, undermined from without by popular distrust. Bipartisan congressional action on behalf of the public good sounds as quaint as antenna TV. The press is reviled, financially desperate, and undergoing a crisis of faith about the very efficacy of gathering facts. And public opinion? Strictly speaking, it no longer exists. “All right we are two nations,” John Dos Passos wrote, in his “U.S.A.” trilogy.

Among the institutions in decline are the political parties. This, too, was both intuited and accelerated by Trump. In succession, he crushed two party establishments and ended two dynasties. The Democratic Party claims half the country, but it’s hollowed out at the core. Hillary Clinton became the sixth Democratic Presidential candidate in the past seven elections to win the popular vote; yet during Barack Obama’s Presidency the Party lost both houses of Congress, fourteen governorships, and thirty state legislatures, comprising more than nine hundred seats. The Party’s leaders are all past the official retirement age, other than Obama, who has governed as the charismatic and enlightened head of an atrophying body. Did Democrats even notice? More than Republicans, they tend to turn out only when they’re inspired. The Party has allowed personality and demography to take the place of political organizing.

The immediate obstacle in Trump’s way will be New York’s Charles Schumer and his minority caucus of forty-eight senators. During Obama’s Presidency, Republican senators exploited ancient rules in order to put up massive resistance. Filibusters and holds became routine ways of taking budgets hostage and blocking appointments. Democratic senators can slow, though not stop, pieces of the Republican agenda if they find the nerve to behave like their nihilistic opponents, further damaging the institution for short-term gain. It would be ugly, but the alternative seems like a sucker’s game.

In the long run, the Democratic Party faces two choices. It can continue to collapse until it’s transformed into something new, like the nineteenth-century Whigs, forerunners of the Republican Party. Or it can rebuild itself from the ground up. Not every four years but continuously; not with celebrity endorsements but on school boards and town councils; not by creating more virtual echo chambers but by learning again how to talk and listen to other Americans, especially those who elected Trump because they felt ignored and left behind. President Trump is almost certain to betray them. The country will need an opposition capable of pointing that out.

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Health of the Nation

How dependent are our fundamental values—values such as decency, reason, and compassion—on the fellow we’ve elected President? Maybe less than we imagine. To be sure, the country voted for a leader who lives by the opposite code—it will be a long and dark winter—but the signs are that voters were not rejecting these values. They were rejecting élites, out of fear and fury that, when it came to them, these values had been abandoned.

Nearly seventy per cent of working-age Americans lack a bachelor’s degree. Many of them saw an establishment of politicians, professors, and corporations that has failed to offer, or even to seem very interested in, a vision of the modern world that provides them with a meaningful place of respect and worth.

I grew up in Ohio, in a small town in the poorest county in the state, and talked after the election to Jim Young, a longtime family friend there. He’d spent thirty-five years at a local animal-feed manufacturer, working his way up from a feed bagger to a truck driver and, in his fifties, a manager, making thirteen dollars an hour. Along the way, the company was sold to ever-larger corporations, until an executive told him that the company was letting the older staff go (along with their health-care and pension costs). Jim found odd jobs to keep him going until he could claim his Social Security benefits.

In the end, Jim said, he didn’t vote. Last year, his son, who was born with spina bifida, died, at the age of thirty-three, after his case was mismanaged in the local emergency room. Jim has a daughter in her forties, who works at Walmart and still lives at home, and another daughter trying to raise three kids on her husband’s income as a maintenance man at a local foundry and her work at an insurance company. Jim lives in a world that doesn’t seem to care whether he and his family make it or not. And he couldn’t see what Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or any other politician had to offer that would change that.

But he still believes in our American ideals, and his worry, like mine, is that those now in national power will further betray them. Repealing Obamacare, which has provided coverage to twenty-two million people, including Jim’s family members; cutting safety-net programs; downgrading hard-won advances in civil liberties and civil rights—these things will make the lives of those left out only meaner and harder.

To a large extent, though, institutions closer to home are what secure and sustain our values. This is the time to strengthen those institutions, to better include the seventy per cent who have been forsaken. Our institutions of fair-minded journalism, of science and scholarship, and of the arts matter more now than ever. In municipalities and state governments, people are eager to work on the hard problems—whether it’s making sure that people don’t lose their home if they get sick, or that wages are lifted, or that the reality of climate change is addressed. Years before Obamacare, Massachusetts passed a health-reform law that covers ninety-seven per cent of its residents, and leaders of both parties have affirmed that they will work to maintain those policies regardless of what a Trump Administration does. Other states will follow this kind of example.

Then, there are the institutions even closer to our daily lives. Our hospitals and schools didn’t suddenly have Reaganite values in the eighties, or Clintonian ones in the nineties. They have evolved their own ethics, in keeping with American ideals. That’s why we physicians have resisted suggestions that we refuse to treat undocumented immigrants who come into the E.R., say, or that we not talk to parents about the safety of guns in the home. The helping professions will stand by their norms. The same goes for the typical workplace. Lord knows, there are disastrous, exploitative employers, but Trump, with his behavior toward women and others, would be an H.R. nightmare; in most offices, he wouldn’t last a month as an employee. For many Americans, the workplace has helped narrow the gap between our professed values and our everyday actions. “Stronger together” could probably have been the slogan of your last work retreat. It’s how we succeed.

As the new Administration turns to governing, the mismatch between its proffered solutions and our aspirations and ideals must be made apparent. Take health care. Eliminating Obamacare isn’t going to stop the unnerving rise in families’ health-care costs; it will worsen it. There are only two ways to assure people that if they get cancer or diabetes (or pregnant) they can afford the care they need: a single-payer system or a heavily regulated private one, with the kind of mandates, exchanges, and subsidies that Obama signed into law. The governor of Kentucky, Matt Bevin, was elected last year on a promise to dismantle Obamacare—only to stall when he found out that doing so would harm many of those who elected him. Republicans have talked of creating high-risk insurance pools and loosening state regulations, but neither tactic would do much to help the people who have been left out, like Jim Young’s family. If the G.O.P. sticks to its “repeal and replace” pledge, it will probably end Obama’s exchanges and subsidies, and embrace large Medicaid grants to the states—laying the groundwork, ironically, for single-payer government coverage.

Yes, those with bad or erratic judgment will make bad or erratic choices. But it’s through the smaller-scale institutions of our daily lives that we can most effectively check the consequences of such choices. The test is whether the gap between what we preach and what we practice shrinks or expands for the nation as a whole. Our job will be to hold those in power to account for that result, including the future of the seventy per cent—the left out and the left behind. Decency, reason, and compassion require no less.

Bryant Park: A Memoir

The day before Election Day, the weather in New York was more like May than November. In hot sun, gloved ice-skaters, obedient to the calendar, meandered across the rink in Bryant Park, which showed itself ready for winter with displays of snowflakes and stars. It was a great afternoon to be an alien, ticket in your pocket, checked in already at J.F.K., and leaving the country before it could elect Donald Trump. Breakfast television had begged viewers to call the number onscreen to vote on whether Mrs. Clinton should be prosecuted as a criminal. Press 1 for yes, 2 for no. “Should Hillary get special treatment?” the voice-over asked. There was no option for jailing Trump.

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During his campaign, Trump threatened unspecified punishments for women who tried to abort a child. We watched him, in the second debate, prowling behind his opponent, back and forth with lowered head, belligerent and looming, while she moved within her legitimate space, returning to her lectern after each response: tightly smiling, trying to be reasonable, trying to be impervious. It was an indecent mimicry of what has happened at some point to almost every woman. She becomes aware of something brutal hovering, on the periphery of her vision: if she is alone in the street, what should she do? I willed Mrs. Clinton to turn and give a name to what we could all see. I willed Mrs. Clinton to raise an arm like a goddess, and point to the place her rival came from, and send him back there, into his own space, like a whimpering dog.

Not everything, of course, is apparent to the eye. The psyche has its hidden life and so do the streets. Midtown, the subway gratings puff out their hot breath, testament to a busy subterranean life; but you could not guess that millions of books are housed under Bryant Park, and that beneath the ground runs a system of train tracks, like toys for a studious giant. Activated by a scholar’s desire or whim, the volumes career on rails, in red wagons, toward the readers of the New York Public Library. Ignorant pedestrians jink and swerve, while below them the earth stirs. We are oblivious of information until we are ready for it. One day, we feel a resonance, from the soles of the feet to the cranium. Without mediation, without apology, we read ourselves, and know what we know.

There are some women who, the moment they have conceived a child, are aware of it—just as you sense if you’re being watched or followed. I have never had a child, but once in my life, a long time back and for a single day, I thought I was pregnant. I was twenty-three years old, three years a wife. I had no plans at that stage for a child. But my predictable cycle had gone askew, and one morning I felt as if some activity had commenced behind my ribs. It wasn’t breathing, or digestion, or the thudding of my heart.

I lived in the North of England then. My husband was a teacher, and it must have been half-term holiday, because we went into the city to meet a friend and spend the afternoon with his parents, who were visiting from rural Cornwall. They wondered why so many grand buildings were painted black, why even gravestones appeared to be streaked and smeared. That, we explained, was not paint—it was two centuries of working grime. They were startled, mortified by their ignorance. To them, heavy industry was something archaic, which you saw in a book. They didn’t know that its residue fluffed the lungs like Satan’s pillows, that it thickened walls and souped the air.

At lunchtime with my party of friends, I could not eat, or stay still, or find any way to be comfortable. I felt weak and light-headed. Heat swept over me, then chill. On our way home in early evening, we called on my mother-in-law, who was a nurse. I wonder if you might be expecting? she said. In the kitchen, my husband put his arms around me. We didn’t officially want a baby, but I saw that, at least for this moment, we did. None of us knew the next step. Were the drugstore tests reliable? Would it be better to go straight to the doctor? My mother-in-law said, I don’t know what the right way is, but I’ll find out first thing, as soon as I get into work.

But by the time I left her house the space of possibility that had opened inside me was filling with pain. Soon I was shaking. As the evening wore on, the pain expanded to fill every cavity in my body. Even my bones felt hollow, as if something were growing inside and pushing them out. In the small hours, I began to bleed. The episode was over. No test would ever be needed. I never had that particular set of feelings again, that distinctive physiological derangement. But women are full of potential. Thwart them one way and they will find another. What never left me was the feeling that something was knocking inside my chest, asking to be let out. A sensory error, I presumed. Only recently did I have the thought that it might have been a real pregnancy—an unviable, ectopic conception. Such a mistake of nature can result in a surgical emergency, even sudden death. It is possible I had a lucky escape, from a peril that was barely there.

A few days after this thought occurred, I had, not a dream, but a shadowy waking vision. It seemed to me that a bubble floated some three feet from my body, attached to me by an almost invisible thread. In the bubble was a tiny child, which asked my forgiveness. In its semi-life, lived for a single day, it had caused nothing, known nothing, created nothing other than pain; so it wanted me to pardon it, before it could drift away.

I do not cede the child any reality. Nor do I think it was an illusion. I recognize it as some species of truth, light as metaphor. It had not occurred to me that there was anything to forgive—that anything was ensouled that could grieve, that could endure through the years. But there was a hairline connection to that day in my early life, and at last I could cut the tie and it could sail free.

It was imagination, no doubt. Imagination is not to be scorned. Fragile, fallible, it goes on working in the world. Since I cut that thread, I have been more sure than ever that it is wrong to come between a woman and a child that may or may not elect to be born. Campaigners talk about “a woman’s right to choose,” as if she were picking a sweet from a box or a plum from a tree. It’s not that sort of choice. It’s often made for us. Something unrealized gives the slip to existence, before time can take a grip on it. Something we hoped for everts itself, turns back into the body, or disperses into the air. But, whatever happens, it happens in a private space. Let the woman choose, if the choice is hers. The state should not stalk her. The priest should seal his lips. The law should not interfere.

That whole week leading up to the election, it was warm enough to bask on garden chairs. The market at Grand Central displayed American plenitude: transparent caskets of juicy berries, plump with a dusky purple bloom; pyramids of sushi; sheets of aged steak, lolling in its blood. By the flitting light of the concourse, I checked out the destination boards of another life I could have lived. Twenty years ago, my husband worked for I.B.M. It was projected that we would move to its offices in White Plains. For a week or two, we imagined it, and then the plan disintegrated. In that life, I would have taken the train and arrived amid Grand Central’s sedate splendors, and walked about in my Manhattan shoes. Did the book stacks exist then? Surely I would have had foreknowledge, and felt the books stirring beneath Forty-second Street, down where the worms turn.

As the polls were closing, I was somewhere over the Atlantic. As we flew into the light, one of the air crew came with coffee and a bulletin, with a fallen face and news that shocked the rows around. They don’t think, she said, that Hillary can catch him now. I took off my watch to adjust it, unsure how many centuries to set it back. What would Donald Trump offer now? Salem witch trials? Public hangings? The lass who had prepared us for the news was gathering the blankets from the night’s vigil. Crinkling her brow, she said, “What I don’t comprehend is, who voted for him?”

No one we know—that’s the trouble. For decades, the nice and the good have been talking to each other, chitchat in every forum going, ignoring what stews beneath: envy, anger, lust. On both sides of the ocean, the bien-pensants put their fingers in their ears and smiled and bowed at one another, like nodding dogs or painted puppets. They thought we had outgrown the deadly sins. They thought we were rational sophisticates who could defer gratification. They thought they had a majority, and they screened out the roaring from the cages outside their gates, or, if they heard it, they thought they could silence it with, as it may be, a little quantitative easing, a package of special measures. Primal dreads have gone unacknowledged. It is not only the crude blustering of the Trump campaign that has poisoned public discourse but the liberals’ indulgence of the marginal and the whimsical, the habit of letting lies pass, of ignoring the living truth in favor of grovelling and meaningless apologies to the dead. So much has become unsayable, as if by not speaking of our grosser aspects we abolish them. It is a failure of the imagination. In this election as in any other, no candidate was shining white; politics is not a pursuit for angels. Yet it doesn’t seem much to ask—a world where a woman can live without jumping at shadows, without the crawling apprehension of something nasty constellating over her shoulder. Mr. Trump has promised a world where white men and rich men run the world their way, greed fuelled by undaunted ignorance. He must make good on his promises, for his supporters will soon be hungry. He, the ambulant id, must nurse his own offspring, and feel their teeth.

At Dublin airport by breakfast time, the sour jokes were flying over the plastic chairs: there’ll be plenty of work for Irishmen now—if you want a wall built, the Paddies have not lost the skills. I wanted to see a woman lead the great nation, so my own spine could be straighter this blustery sunny morning. I fear the ship of state is sinking, and we are thrashing in saltwater, snared in our own ropes and nets. Someone must strike out for the surface and clear air. It is possible to cut free from some entanglements, some error and painful beginnings, whether you are a soul or a whole nation.

The weekend before the election, we were in rural Ohio. The moon was a tender crescent, the nights frosty, and the dawns glowed with the crimson and violet of the fall. On Sunday morning, in a cloudless sky, a bird was drifting on the currents, circling. My husband said, “You know they have eagles in this part of the country?” We watched in silence as it cruised high above. “I don’t know if it is an eagle,” he said at last. “But I know that bird is bigger than you think.”

Four-Cornered Flyover

The day after Donald Trump’s victory, Susan Watson and Gail Jossi celebrated with glasses of red wine at the True Grit Café, in Ridgway, Colorado. Watson, the chair of the Ouray County Republican Central Committee, is a self-described “child of the sixties,” a retired travel agent, and a former supporter of the Democratic Party. Forty years ago, she voted for Jimmy Carter. Jossi also had a previous incarnation as a Democrat. In 1960, she volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s Presidential campaign. “I walked for Kennedy,” she said. “And then I walked for Goldwater.” These days, she’s a retired rancher, and until recently she was a prominent official of the Republican Party in Ouray County. “This is the first time in forty years that I haven’t been a precinct captain,” she said. “I’m fed up with the Republican Party.”

Initially, neither of the women had backed Trump. “I just didn’t care for him,” Jossi said. “I loved Dr. Carson.”

“I was a Scott Walker,” Watson said. “I thought a ticket with Walker and Fiorina would have been great.” Of Trump, she said, “He grew on me. He seemed to be getting more in tune with the people. The more these thousands and thousands of people showed up, the more he realized that this is real. This is not reality TV.”

Jossi didn’t begin to support Trump until September. “I couldn’t listen to his speeches,” she said. “His repetition. He’s not a politician. My mother and my husband have been big Trump supporters from the beginning, but I wasn’t.” Over time, though, the candidate’s rawness appealed to her, because she believed that he could shake up Washington. “After they’ve been in office, they become too slick,” she said. “I liked that unscripted aspect.”

Ouray is a rural county in southwestern Colorado, a state whose politics have become increasingly complex. On election maps, Colorado looks simple—a four-cornered flyover, perfectly squared off. But the state is composed of many elements: a long history of ranching and mining; a sudden influx of young, outdoors-oriented residents; a total population that is more than a fifth Hispanic. On Tuesday, Coloradans favored Hillary Clinton by a narrow majority, and they endorsed an amendment that will raise the minimum wage by more than forty per cent. They also chose to reject an amendment, promoted by Democratic legislators, that would have removed a provision in the state constitution that allows for slavery and the involuntary servitude of prisoners. If this seems contradictory—raising the minimum wage while protecting the possibility of slavery—it should be noted that the vote was even closer than Clinton versus Trump. In an exceedingly tight race, slavery won 50.6 per cent of the popular vote.

“The slavery thing was ridiculous,” Watson said.

“If it changes the constitution, then I vote no,” Jossi said.

“This is something that they do to get people to go out and vote,” Watson said. “That’s what they did with marijuana.”

“I voted for medical,” Jossi said. “Not recreational.”

“Not recreational,” Watson agreed.

Full disclosure: recreational. But during this election, while standing in a voting booth in the Ouray County Courthouse, at an elevation of seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-two feet, I experienced a sensation of vertigo that may have been shared by 50.6 per cent of my fellow-Coloradans. On a ballot full of odd and confusing measures, I couldn’t untangle the language of Amendment T: “Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning the removal of the exception to the prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude when used as punishment for persons duly convicted of a crime?” Does yes mean yes, or does yes mean no? The election of 2016 disturbs me in many ways, and one of them is that I honestly cannot remember whether I voted for or against slavery.

This election has given me a renewed appreciation for chaos, confusion, and the limitlessly internal world of the individual. Most analysis will shuffle voters into neat demographic groups, each of them with four corners, perfectly squared off. But there’s something static about these categories—female, rural, white—whereas a conversation with people like Watson and Jossi reveals just how much a person’s ideas can change during the course of decades or even weeks. For an unstable electorate, Trump was the perfect candidate, because he was also a moving target. It was possible for supporters to fixate on any specific message or characteristic while ignoring everything else. At rallies, when people chanted, “Build a wall!” and “Lock her up!,” these statements impressed me as real, tangible courses of action, endorsed by a faceless mob. But when I spoke with individual supporters the dynamic changed: the person had a face, while the proposed action seemed vague and symbolic.

“I think that was a metaphor,” Jossi said, when I asked about the border wall.

“It’s a metaphor for immigration laws being enforced,” Watson said.

Neither of the women, like most other Trump supporters I met, had any interest in the construction of an actual wall. I asked them about Clinton’s e-mail scandal. “I think she’ll be pardoned,” Watson said.

“I’m done with hearing about it,” Jossi said with a shrug. “I just want her gone.”

Trump’s descriptions and treatment of women didn’t seem to bother them. “I’m a strong enough woman,” Watson said. I often heard similar comments from female Trump supporters—in their eyes, it was a show of strength to ignore the candidate’s crudeness and transgressions, because only the weak would react with outrage.

It was hard to imagine a President entering office with less accountability. For supporters, this was central to his appeal—he owed nothing to the establishment. But he also owed nothing to the people who had voted for him. Supporters cherry-picked specific statements or qualities that appealed to them, but they didn’t attempt an assessment of the whole, because, given Trump’s lack of discipline, this was impossible. Does yes mean yes, or does yes mean no?

“Was Donald the right guy?” Watson asked. “I don’t know. But he was the alpha male on the stage with all the other candidates. He was not afraid to say the things that we were thinking.” She laughed and said, “I fought for the Equal Rights Amendment in the seventies. You have to evolve as a human being.”

Mourning for Whiteness

This is a serious project. All immigrants to the United States know (and knew) that if they want to become real, authentic Americans they must reduce their fealty to their native country and regard it as secondary, subordinate, in order to emphasize their whiteness. Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of “Americanness” is color.

Under slave laws, the necessity for color rankings was obvious, but in America today, post-civil-rights legislation, white people’s conviction of their natural superiority is being lost. Rapidly lost. There are “people of color” everywhere, threatening to erase this long-understood definition of America. And what then? Another black President? A predominantly black Senate? Three black Supreme Court Justices? The threat is frightening.

In order to limit the possibility of this untenable change, and restore whiteness to its former status as a marker of national identity, a number of white Americans are sacrificing themselves. They have begun to do things they clearly don’t really want to be doing , and, to do so, they are (1) abandoning their sense of human dignity and (2) risking the appearance of cowardice. Much as they may hate their behavior, and know full well how craven it is, they are willing to kill small children attending Sunday school and slaughter churchgoers who invite a white boy to pray. Embarrassing as the obvious display of cowardice must be, they are willing to set fire to churches, and to start firing in them while the members are at prayer. And, shameful as such demonstrations of weakness are, they are willing to shoot black children in the street.

To keep alive the perception of white superiority, these white Americans tuck their heads under cone-shaped hats and American flags and deny themselves the dignity of face-to-face confrontation, training their guns on the unarmed, the innocent, the scared, on subjects who are running away, exposing their unthreatening backs to bullets. Surely, shooting a fleeing man in the back hurts the presumption of white strength? The sad plight of grown white men, crouching beneath their (better) selves, to slaughter the innocent during traffic stops, to push black women’s faces into the dirt, to handcuff black children. Only the frightened would do that. Right?

These sacrifices, made by supposedly tough white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

It may be hard to feel pity for the men who are making these bizarre sacrifices in the name of white power and supremacy. Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause.

The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

The Dark-Money Cabinet

During the Presidential primaries, Donald Trump mocked his Republican rivals as “puppets” for flocking to a secretive fund-raising session sponsored by Charles and David Koch, the billionaire co-owners of the energy conglomerate Koch Industries. Affronted, the Koch brothers, whose political spending has made their name a shorthand for special-interest clout, withheld their financial support from Trump. But on Tuesday night David Koch was reportedly among the revellers at Trump’s victory party in a Hilton Hotel in New York.

Trump campaigned by attacking the big donors, corporate lobbyists, and political-action committees as “very corrupt.” In a tweet on October 18th, he promised, “I will Make Our Government Honest Again—believe me. But first I’m going to have to #DrainTheSwamp.” His DrainTheSwamp hashtag became a rallying cry for supporters intent on ridding Washington of corruption. But Ann Ravel, a Democratic member of the Federal Elections Commission who has championed reform of political money, says that “the alligators are multiplying.”

Many of Trump’s transition-team members are the corporate insiders he vowed to disempower. On Friday, Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, the new transition-team chair, announced that Marc Short, who until recently ran Freedom Partners, the Kochs’ political-donors group, would serve as a “senior adviser.” The influence of the Kochs and their allies is particularly clear in the areas of energy and the environment. The few remarks Trump made on these issues during the campaign reflected the fondest hopes of the oil, gas, and coal producers. He vowed to withdraw from the international climate treaty negotiated last year in Paris, remove regulations that curb carbon emissions, legalize oil drilling and mining on federal lands and in seas, approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and weaken the Environmental Protection Agency.

For policy and personnel advice regarding the Department of Energy, Trump is relying on Michael McKenna, the president of the lobbying firm MWR Strategies. McKenna’s clients include Koch Companies Public Sector, a division of Koch Industries. According to Politico, McKenna also has ties to the American Energy Alliance and its affiliate, the Institute for Energy Research. These nonprofit groups purport to be grassroots organizations, but they run ads advocating corporate-friendly energy policies, without disclosing their financial backers. In 2012, Freedom Partners gave $1.5 million to the American Energy Alliance.

Michael Catanzaro, a partner at the lobbying firm CGCN Group, is the head of Trump’s energy transition team, and has been mentioned as a possible energy czar. Among his clients are Koch Industries and Devon Energy Corporation, a gas-and-oil company that has made a fortune from vertical drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Another widely discussed candidate is Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the shale-oil company Continental Resources, who is a major contributor to the Kochs’ fund-raising network. Wenona Hauter, of Food and Water Watch, says that Hamm has “done all he can to subvert the existing rules and regulations.”

Myron Ebell, an outspoken climate-change skeptic, heads Trump’s transition team for the E.P.A. Ebell runs the energy-and-environmental program at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an anti-regulatory Washington think tank that hides its sources of financial support but has been funded by fossil-fuel companies, including Exxon-Mobil and Koch Industries. David Schnare, a self-described “free-market environmentalist” who has accused the E.P.A. of having “blood on its hands,” is a member of the E.P.A. working group. Schnare is the director of the Center for Energy and the Environment at the Thomas Jefferson Institute, part of a nationwide consortium of anti-government, pro-industry think tanks. He is also the general counsel at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which has received funding from coal companies. In 2011, Schnare started hounding the climate scientist Michael Mann, who had been a professor at the University of Virginia, by filing public-records requests demanding to see his unpublished research and his private e-mails. The legal wrangling tied up Mann’s work until 2014, when the Virginia Supreme Court ordered Schnare to desist. The Union of Concerned Scientists has described these actions against climate scientists as “harassment.”

Norman Eisen, who devised strict conflict-of-interest rules while acting as Obama’s ethics czar, says, “If you have people on the transition team with deep financial ties to the industries to be regulated, it raises questions about whether they are serving the public interest or their own interests.” He ruled out Obama transition-team members who would have had a conflict of interest in their assigned areas, or even the appearance of one. “We weren’t perfect,” he said. “But we tried to level the playing field because, let’s face it, in the Beltway nexus of corporations and dark money, lobbyists are the delivery mechanism for special-interest influence. ”

Questions to Trump’s transition team about its conflict-of-interest rules went unanswered, as did questions to the lobbyists and industry heads involved. But the composition of the group runs counter to a set of anti-lobbyist proposals that Trump released in October, to be enacted in his first hundred days. It called for a five-year ban on White House and congressional officials becoming lobbyists after they leave public office, and a lifetime ban on White House officials lobbying for a foreign government.

The tenth item on the list of proposals is the Clean Up Corruption in Washington Act, which would implement “new ethics reforms to Drain the Swamp and reduce the corrupting influence of special interests on our politics.” Trevor Potter, who served as the commissioner of the F.E.C. under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and is now the president of the Campaign Legal Center, described Trump’s ethics proposals as “quite interesting, and quite helpful.” He was puzzled, though, by the vagueness of the “Drain the Swamp” act. “It’s a complete black box so far,” Potter said.

Potter wondered if Trump’s lack of specificity reflected internal divisions. He noted that Don McGahn, who served as the Trump campaign’s attorney, is an opponent of almost all campaign-finance restrictions. “Many on the transition team are registered lobbyists who are deeply invested in the system Trump says he wants to change,” Potter said. “It looks like the lobbyists and special interests are already taking over.”

On Saying No

If the leader of a government issues an order that men and women below him cannot, in good conscience, enact, what are they to do?

In July, 2008, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, of California, who had stunned the political establishment by leveraging his celebrity and outsider status to reach disaffected voters, was in an embarrassing political predicament. The Governor had brandished a broom at rallies, promising to “sweep out the bureaucracy” and defeat “girlie men” lawmakers who stood in his way. Now the Democratic-led legislature was unable to agree on a budget. So Schwarzenegger adopted a radical tactic: he ordered the state to reduce the pay of nearly two hundred thousand state employees to the federal minimum wage, of $6.55 an hour, until the legislature met his demands.

The order reached the desk of a bureaucrat named John Chiang, a former tax-law specialist who was the state controller. In that job, Chiang, a forty-six-year-old Democrat, was responsible for issuing paychecks and monitoring cash flow. Born in New York, to immigrants from Taiwan, he had grown up in the Chicago suburbs, in one of the first Asian families in the neighborhood. It was an uneasy mix. On the Chiangs’ garage, people spray-painted “Go home, gook,” “Go home, Jap,”and “Go home, Chink.”

After studying finance, and earning a law degree from Georgetown, Chiang started his career at the Internal Revenue Service in Los Angeles. In 1999, his younger sister, Joyce, a lawyer for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington, went missing. Three months later, her remains were found on the banks of the Potomac. The death was ruled a homicide, but no one was charged. It altered her brother’s life. “I will return to dust,” he said later. “You just want to use this life to do some good.” In 2006, Chiang ran for controller, upset a Democratic favorite in the primary, and won.

When he received Schwarzenegger’s order to reduce the pay of state workers, Chiang was surprised. Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, the workers would receive their full salaries once a budget was approved. But California had enough cash in its accounts, and, in Chiang’s view, the Governor’s move could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moreover, he thought, it was cruel. It was the height of the financial crisis, and mortgage defaults were up more than a hundred per cent over the previous year.

“I wanted Governor Schwarzenegger to help lead California through this fiscal crisis,” Chiang told me last week. “Here’s a man who worked hard, he’s been blessed, but, more important, he’s been entrusted by the voters of California to lead in good and bad times. And to think that you take action that would endanger thousands of public servants just struck me as beyond the pale.”

Chiang refused to implement the Governor’s executive order. In a statement at the time, he said that the order was “nothing more than a poorly devised strategy to put pressure on the Legislature.” At a rally of state workers, Chiang called them “innocent victims of a political struggle.”

Schwarzenegger sued Chiang’s office. In court papers, Chiang replied that, even if he wanted to comply, he would need ten months to reconfigure the state’s computer system. As the case wound through the judicial system, Chiang became, to some, an unlikely hero. The Sacramento Bee , adapting the iconic image of a protester at Tiananmen Square, published a cartoon that depicted Chiang as a lone resister before a line of Hummers, with “Arnold” stencilled on the bumper of the lead vehicle. The Liberal O.C., a progressive blog, nicknamed him “the Controllernator.” Chiang’s resistance became a case study in how a bureaucracy stymies the requests of an executive who offends its professionalism and sense of mission. When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to take office, Harry Truman predicted, “Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

Professor Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago Law School, is the co-author of “The Executive Unbound,” a chronicle of the expanding power of the U.S. Presidency. Last week, after Donald Trump won the election, Posner told me that, with both houses of Congress in Republican control, the greatest obstacle to the President’s use of power would be not the separation of powers but, more likely, the isolated actions of individuals in government. “Sometimes they won’t actually do what the President tells them to do, or they drag their feet, or they’ll leak to the press to try to embarrass him,” Posner told me. “That’s pretty unusual, because when that happens the employees risk losing their job, or even going to jail if they leak confidential information.”

Because Chiang held an independently elected office, his latitude to resist was far greater than it is for most government employees. The consequences of resistance can be dire. In 1981, nearly thirteen thousand air-traffic controllers challenged the new President, Ronald Reagan, by staging an illegal strike. Reagan fired them and broke their union.

Schwarzenegger’s attempts to impose his will eventually foundered. As a candidate, he reached beyond usual Republicans by vowing to create “fantastic” jobs and by thrilling audiences, at his rallies, with a soundtrack that featured Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” (a song that Trump used at his rallies). But Schwarzenegger, who had never held public office, proved incapable of reorganizing government, defeating labor unions, capping state spending, or weakening teacher tenure. His relationship with the G.O.P. soured. In 2011, he left office with his public approval rating at near-historic lows. The lawsuit against Chiang remained officially unresolved until Schwarzenegger’s successor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit. (Chiang permitted himself a modest celebration: “I am pleased and thankful that Governor Brown saw this litigation as a frivolous waste of hard-earned tax dollars.”)

In 2015, Chiang became California’s Treasurer, and he will be a candidate for governor in 2018. When I asked him what lesson he takes from his refusal to obey the orders of the executive, he said, “I think, always, you look deep into your conscience and then you move from there. People have a sense of why they serve.” He added, “At times, we will prevail; at times, we will fail. But to stand and watch idly and do nothing—I think people will regret if things go along and they didn’t offer up their very best.”

The Highest Court

The Supreme Court operates in counterpoint to the rest of the government. The Justices do not initiate; they respond. Every major political issue of the day eventually winds up in their courtroom, and they either embrace or resist what’s happening in the rest of the world. When Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed the New Deal through Congress, the conservatives on the Court, for a time, fought him to a standstill. When the civil-rights movement gathered steam, the Justices gave first a hesitant and then a fuller endorsement of the cause. But resistance from the Justices never lasts too long. The truism that the Supreme Court follows the election returns happens to be true. Elections have consequences.

For the past eight years, the Court has been called upon to respond to President Obama’s agenda. In certain crucial ways, a majority of the Justices have upheld the work of the Administration, most notably in two cases that posed existential threats to the Affordable Care Act. In other cases, the Court has rebuked the President. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, the Court rejected the Administration’s view that the A.C.A. required closely held corporations to subsidize forms of birth control that the owners opposed on religious grounds. Over all, the Court has reflected the fierce partisan divisions in the country. Conservatives won many cases (striking down campaign-finance regulations and gutting the core of the Voting Rights Act), while liberals won others (expanding gay rights and reaffirming abortion rights). The Trump Presidency will shape the Justices’ work even before they decide a case. If Trump succeeds in overturning the Affordable Care Act, the Court’s two landmark endorsements of that law, in 2012 and 2015, will become nullities, like rave reviews of a closed restaurant.

George W. Bush, the previous Republican President, had to wait until his second term to make his first appointment to the Supreme Court. Trump will have a vacancy to fill as soon as he takes the oath of office. Antonin Scalia died in February, but Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, decreed that the seat would be held open, to be filled by the next President. The voters mostly ignored this brazen defiance of institutional norms, but its consequences, as McConnell intended, have been enormous. In an unusual move for a Presidential candidate, Trump released a list of twenty-one people whom he might consider as nominees. The list includes some curiosities, such as Mike Lee, the senator from Utah (who revealed, the morning after the election, that he had voted for the Independent Evan McMullin), and Margaret Ryan, who serves on the United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. But most are Republican appointees to the federal courts of appeal or state supreme courts, and all appear to be strongly conservative in outlook. If one is nominated and confirmed, the new Justice will probably vote much as Scalia did. McConnell’s blockade prevented the creation of the first liberal majority since the Nixon Administration. Instead, there will be a conservative majority of five Justices, with Anthony Kennedy occasionally and John Roberts rarely voting with the liberals.

Confirmation of any Trump nominee should be a mere formality. When Hillary Clinton appeared to be the likely winner, several Republican senators suggested that they would keep Scalia’s seat open throughout her term; eight Justices were enough for them. Democrats take a more genteel approach to judicial confirmations of nominees from the opposition party. At confirmation hearings, the senators from the Democratic minority will doubtless ask the nominee a series of questions about such issues as gay rights, Roe v. Wade, and the Citizens United case, regarding campaign finance. The nominee will answer with generalities and evasions. Trump’s party narrowly controls the Senate, but any Republican defections on a matter of this magnitude are unlikely. Democrats have never mounted a successful filibuster against a Republican Supreme Court nominee, and McConnell would probably abolish the practice if they even tried. So Trump will have his Justice in short order.

The new Court will then begin confronting the Trump agenda. Two issues are likely to stand out. In the period leading up to the 2016 election, Republican-dominated state legislatures passed a series of voter-suppression initiatives, including photo-identification requirements and limitations on early voting and absentee voting. (These efforts may have limited Democratic turnout in several battleground states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, and North Carolina.) Some lower federal courts, especially those with judges appointed by President Obama, began interpreting what was left of the Voting Rights Act as justification for curtailing these practices. A conservative majority on the Court would likely give the states a free hand, which would allow them to enact even greater restrictions.

The other area is immigration. Trump made the building of a wall along the Mexican border and the eviction of roughly eleven million undocumented immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign. He has not detailed how he plans to round up so many people, but he will surely tighten immigration enforcement; just as surely, the targets will turn to the courts for relief. Undocumented immigrants by definition enjoy fewer rights than citizens, and their fate is likely to become a defining issue for the new Court.

Looking farther ahead involves playing a high-stakes game of actuarial roulette. The Court’s senior liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, are eighty-three and seventy-eight, respectively; Kennedy is eighty. The chances for dramatic change on such issues as abortion rights and affirmative action hinge on their continued service. The one certainty about the Court is that it never stands in the way for long. In broad terms, it reflects the political tenor of its era. If Trump and the ideological tendency he represents remain ascendant, the Court will mirror those views, too, and probably sooner rather than later. Presidents shape Supreme Courts, not the other way around, and it is Donald Trump’s turn now.

Donald Trump, Poet

At the risk of sounding like a total candy-ass, I swear I have developed P.T.S.D. from the venom of this election. O.K., even before voting season began, I was wobbly enough to be seeing a shrink. But when I confessed to her, a month ago, that I was sleeping less and checking news outlets compulsively, like a rat pushing a bar down for a pellet, she said, “So are a hundred per cent of my patients.” Then she added, “So am I.” A friend’s cardiologist told her that patients had been flooding into his office or calling from emergency rooms with false reports of tachycardia.

Those of us who experienced trauma as children, often at the hands of bullies, felt old wounds open up just hearing Trump’s fierce idiom of outrage. All of us used to be kids. All of us were, at some point, silenced by someone bigger and louder saying, “Wrong, wrong,” but meaning “It’s not what you’re doing that’s wrong—it’s who you are that’s wrong.”

Language is key. Trump’s taunting “nyah-nyah”s are the idiom of threat and vengeance. For him, it’s not enough to ban abortion; women who have abortions should be punished. It’s not enough to defeat Hillary Clinton; we have to hate, jail, and possibly even kill her. Eric Trump responded to David Duke’s endorsement not by saying, “We don’t want his vote,” but with the line “The guy does deserve a bullet.”

This violent poetry has been gathering force on our airwaves for decades. It started with shock-jock radio and moved to Fox News. Then, there’s the ubiquitous browbeating by social media, which, I suspect, has contributed to the tripling of the suicide rate for adolescent girls in the past fifteen years.

It was only a matter of time before a hair-triggered guy took this vernacular to the national political stage. Nasty talk didn’t start with Trump, but it was the province of people we all viewed as idiots—schoolyard mobs, certain drunks in bars, guys hollering out of moving cars.

When a Presidential candidate mocks a disabled man or a Muslim family that has sacrificed a son for our country, the behavior is stamped with a big “O.K.” Some Trump supporters felt O.K. shoving and hitting protesters. At a Wisconsin football game, a fan wore an Obama mask and a noose.

If you ever doubted the power of poetry, ask yourself why, in any revolution, poets are often the first to be hauled out and shot—whether it’s Spanish Fascists murdering García Lorca or Stalin killing Mandelstam. We poets may be crybabies and sissies, but our pens can become nuclear weapons.

Like Trump, I trained early for the gutter brawl. I grew up in a huge state with an “X” in its middle, marking the place where the mouthy and the well-armed crisscross the boundaries of propriety like cattle rustlers. Littler than my cohort, I learned that a verbal bashing had a lingering power that a bloody nose could never compete with. When a boy named Bubba said, “Your mama’s a whore,” I shot back, “So what? Your nose is flat.”

The vicious language of this election has infected the whole country with enough anxiety and vitriol to launch a war. American lawn signs used to be low-key. You might see venomous slogans on bumper stickers, but not where anybody actually lived. In Florida this Halloween, one yard featured black effigies hanging in the trees above a Trump sign. Strange fruit indeed.

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton, there’s no question that she was the more circumspect candidate, and that’s partly why her detractors hated her. She was “politically correct.” By my yardstick, that means trying not to hurt people’s feelings (whether Bubba said something mean about your mother or not). And yet, among a huge portion of our population, this registers not as civility but as insincerity.

We Democrats have mostly tried to follow Clinton’s example, but I confess that, among friends, I’ve often enjoyed making ad-hominem attacks on Trump and his family in a way that—on reflection—shames me. And, certainly, the left has made use of that insidious “If/then” construction that Trump favors (i.e., “If I were President, you’d be in jail”). A putative friend once told me, “If you eat endangered fish, I won’t be friends with you anymore.” I replied, “If I cared more about a fish than a person, I’d examine my values.”

Today, I’m examining my values. As a Buddhist pal said to me on Election Night, “America has spoken.” Now it falls to us to listen with gracious and open hearts. This is not giving in or giving up. The hardest thing about democracy is the boring and irritating process of listening to people you don’t agree with, which is tolerable only when each side strives not to hurt the other’s feelings. To quote my colleague George Saunders, let today be National Attempt to Have an Affectionate / Tender Thought About Someone of the Opposing Political Persuasion Day. And (please, God) every day hereafter as well.

Wars Within

The beginning of an end is hard to see: the moment when a marriage started to fall apart, the half-sentence of heartless scorn, an unmendable cut; the hour when the first symptoms of a fatal illness set in, dizziness, a subtle blurring of vision, a certain hoarseness; the season when a species of sparrow, trying to fly north, falls, weakened by the heat; and the day when the people of a nation began to lose faith in their form of government. The election of Donald Trump, like all elections, is an ending, the ending of one Presidency and the beginning of another. But, unlike most elections, Trump’s election is something different: it ends an era of American idealism, a high-mindedness of rhetoric, if not always of action, which has characterized most twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Presidencies, from F.D.R. to Eisenhower, from Reagan to Obama, from the New Deal order to the long era of civil rights.

The beginning of another, very different end lies quite far back in American history. “The fate of the greatest of all modern Republics trembles in the balance,” Frederick Douglass said, in a speech he gave in Philadelphia, in 1862, titled “The Reasons for Our Troubles.” Born into slavery, Douglass had escaped in 1838. What astonished him, as the Civil War raged, was how blind Americans were to its origins. “To what cause may we trace our present sad and deplorable condition?” he asked. Americans of Douglass’s day blamed the election of Abraham Lincoln, abolitionists, and Southern politicians for the division of the nation. Douglass blamed slavery: “We have sought to bind the chains of slavery on the limbs of the black man, without thinking that at last we should find the other end of that hateful chain about our own necks.”

The rupture in the American republic, the division of the American people whose outcome is the election of Donald Trump, cannot be attributed to Donald Trump. Nor can it be attributed to James Comey and the F.B.I. or to the white men who voted in very high numbers for Trump or to the majority of white women who did, too, unexpectedly, or to the African-American and Latino voters who did not give Hillary Clinton the edge they gave Barack Obama. It can’t be attributed to the Republican Party’s unwillingness to disavow Trump or to the Democratic Party’s willingness to promote Clinton or to a media that has careened into a state of chaos. There are many reasons for our troubles. But the deepest reason is inequality: the forms of political, cultural, and economic polarization that have been widening, not narrowing, for decades. Inequality, like slavery, is a chain that binds at both ends.

Trump’s election does not mark the end of an era of civil peace: no state has seceded, or will. But, if the nation is not at arms, it is at war with itself and with its ideals. In Douglass’s day, the war that was fought over the meaning of the words “liberty” and “equality” claimed the lives of three-quarters of a million Americans. But it ended slavery. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, in January, 1863, Douglass was in Boston with “an immense assembly,” largely of black abolitionists. “We were waiting and listening as for a bolt from the sky, which should rend the fetters of four millions of slaves,” Douglass recalled. The crowd sang the hymn “Blow Ye the Trumpet, Blow”: “Ye mournful souls, be glad.”

Many Americans, having lost faith in a government that has failed to address widening inequality, and in the policymakers and academics and journalists who have barely noticed it, see Trump as their deliverer. They cast their votes with purpose. A lot of Trump voters I met during this election season compared Trump to Lincoln: an emancipator. What Trump can and cannot deliver, by way of policy, remains to be seen; my own doubts are grave. Meanwhile, though, he has added weight to the burden that we, each of us, carry on our backs, the burden of old hatreds. Frederick Douglass, a man of Lincoln’s time and, decidedly, not of our own, tried to lift those burdens with the strength of his ideals.

Douglass had been fighting for women’s rights since Seneca Falls, in 1848, and he fought for female suffrage. He expected women to lead the nation by speaking for themselves, declaring, “I believe no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself.” Many Americans of Douglass’s day believed that they saw, in equal rights for black men and even for women, the beginning of the end of the American experiment. “It is thought by many, and said by some, that this Republic has already seen its best days; that the historian may now write the story of its decline and fall,” Douglass said, in a speech called “Composite Nation,” in 1869. To those who predicted doom, Douglass repeated what he had said when the war was just beginning: “The real trouble with us was never our system or form of Government, or the principles underlying it; but the peculiar composition of our people, the relations existing between them and the compromising spirit which controlled the ruling power of the country.” For Douglass, the aftermath of the fight to end slavery was a lesson about the persistence of inequality: it had already begun to take a new form, in proposals to deny constitutional protections to Chinese immigrants. Hatred of the Chinese, especially by those who wanted to exploit their labor, was, Douglass argued, new wine in old bottles, slavery by another name. And he condemned it: “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man.”

Douglass had his blind spots. Everyone does. Mine drive me crazy—just knowing they’re there does. Trump was elected because he got something right, about the suffering of Americans, and about the arrogance of politicians, of academics, and of the press. What he got wrong can be proved only by the forces of humility, of clarity, and of honesty.

When does an ending begin? Douglass saw that the end of a republic begins on the day when the heroism of the struggle for equality yields to the cowardice of resentment. That day has not come. It is thought by many, lately, and said by some, that the republic has seen its best days, and that it remains for the historian to chronicle the history of its decline and fall. I disagree. Sparrows may yet cross the sky.

When my parents lived in the Soviet Union, having a Jewish-looking “physiognomy,” as it was called, proved a daily liability. Standing in line for eggs or milk or ham, one could feel the gaze of the shopkeeper running down one’s nose, along with the implied suggestion “Why don’t you move to Israel already?”

Social media in the era of Trump is essentially Leningrad, 1979. Trump supporters on Twitter have often pointed out my Jewishness. “You look ethnic” was one of the kinder remarks, along with the usual litany of lampshade drawings, oven photos, the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate at Auschwitz, and other stock Holocaust tropes. It is impossible to know if the person pointing out your ethnicity and telling you to jump into an oven is an amateur troll in St. Petersburg, Florida, or a professional troll in St. Petersburg, Russia. What this election has proved is just how intertwined those two trolls may be.

“Russia will rise from her knees!” Those were the lyrics I heard outside a suburban train station in St. Petersburg half a decade ago. The song was coming out of an ancient tape player next to a bedraggled old woman selling sunflower* seeds out of a cup. She examined my physiognomy with a sneer. At the time, this seemed like just a typical Russian scene, the nation’s poorest citizens bristling at their humiliation after losing the Cold War, their ire concentrated on a familiar target, the country’s dwindling population of Jews. The surprise of 2016—post-Brexit, post-Trump—is just how ably the Russians weaponize those lyrics, tweak them to “Whites will rise from their knees!” and megaphone them into so many ready ears in Eastern and Western Europe and, eventually, onto our own shores. The graffito “Russia is for the Russians,” scribbled next to a synagogue, and the words “Vote Trump,” written on a torched black church in Mississippi, are separated by the cold waters of the Atlantic but united by an imaginary grievance—a vigil for better times that may never have existed.

I can understand these people. Growing up in nineteen-eighties Queens, my friends and I, as young Russian immigrants, unfamiliar with the language, our parents working menial jobs, looked down on blacks and Latinos, who were portrayed as threats by the Reagan Administration and its local proxies. The first politicized term I learned in America was “welfare queen,” even as my own grandmother collected food stamps and received regular shipments of orange government cheese. We hated minorities, even though the neighborhoods many of us lived in were devoid of them. I didn’t attend public school, because my parents had seen one black kid on the playground of the excellent school I was zoned for, and so sent me to a wretched parochial school instead. There was an apocryphal story going around our community about a poor Russian boy beaten so badly by a black public-school kid that his mother killed herself.

If Ronald Reagan was the distant protector of us endangered white kids, then Donald Trump was a local pasha. My buddies and I walked past his family’s becolumned mansion, in Jamaica Estates, with a sense of awe. Donald was a straight shooter, a magnate, a playboy, a marrier of Eastern European blondes, a conqueror of distant Manhattan. He was everything a teen-ager in Queens could dream of being. If we were ever blessed to meet him, we knew he would understand the racism in our hearts, and we his. Successful people like him made us secure in our own sense of whiteness.

Thirty years later, every Jew on Twitter who has received a Photoshopped version of herself or himself in a concentration-camp outfit followed by “#MAGA” knows how fleeting that sense of security can be. The idea that Jews should move to their “own” country, Israel, brings together racial purists from Nashville to Novosibirsk. The jump from Twitter racism to a black church set aflame on a warm Southern night is steady and predictable. Putin’s team has discovered that racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism bind people closer than any other experiences. These carefully calibrated messages travel from Cyrillic and English keyboards to Breitbart ears and Trump’s mouth, sometimes in the space of hours. The message is clear. People want to rise from their knees. Even those who weren’t kneeling in the first place.

My parents and grandparents never fully recovered from the strains of having lived in an authoritarian society. Daily compromise ground them down, even after they came to America. They left Russia, but Russia never left them. How do you read through a newspaper composed solely of lies? How do you walk into a store while being Jewish? How do you tell the truth to your children? How do you even know what the truth is? A few days ago, I visited a local public school. On a second-grade civics bulletin board I saw written in large letters: “Citizens have rights —things that you deserve; RESPONSIBILITIES —things you are expected to do; RULES —things you have to follow.” The message seemed to have come from a different era. What did those words have to do with America in 2016? I reflexively checked FiveThirtyEight on my phone. I thought, I grew up in a dystopia—will I have to die in one, too?

*An earlier version of this article misstated what kind of seeds the woman was selling.

Days of Rage

Less than a month after Barack Obama took office, Rick Santelli, of CNBC, announced from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, “We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party.” Santelli, a conservative showman, was complaining that day about the new Administration’s modest proposal to help struggling homeowners, whom predatory lenders had persuaded to take on unaffordable mortgages. Santelli is not a critic of Wall Street, but his rant reflected the wave of populist rage that began with the financial crisis of 2008. It set off revolutions within both parties, targeting just about anybody who seemed rich and powerful. In 2016, two utterly different and equally unlikely politicians ran for President, and succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations: first Bernie Sanders, then Donald Trump.

The economic crisis became obvious in September, 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed. Within days, it was evident that all the major American financial companies, and, by extension, all the major financial companies in the world, were faltering. To help avert the most devastating economic depression in history, the political system took a temporary break from its hyper-partisanship and paralysis. Barack Obama and John McCain interrupted their Presidential campaigns to fly to Washington for an emergency meeting with President George W. Bush. Congress authorized the government to spend as much as seven hundred billion dollars to stabilize the big banks. After Obama won the election, he made it clear that he would continue with this approach. Altogether, these fiscal interventions were more aggressive than any ever taken by the federal government, surpassing even those taken by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his Hundred Days.

The two parties shared the blame for the catastrophe. For decades after the New Deal, the government supervised the economic system, placing on it various restraints and controls. That role eroded in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when Republicans and Democrats reduced the constraints, allowing junk mortgages and the exotic financial products based on them to proliferate. By the start of the twenty-first century, Wall Street was donating heavily to Democrats, too. In 2008, Obama received more contributions from the financial sector than McCain, and the trend was resumed and magnified this year, with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Democrats happened to be in power when the economy bottomed out, in June, 2009; by then, millions of Americans had seen their life savings vanish. The system had failed, and when people think of the system they think of the party in charge.

In the end, financial institutions got trillions of dollars’ worth of help to stay afloat, far more than the government spent on economic stimulus, unemployment benefits, or mortgage relief. The cities where finance is headquartered, especially New York and San Francisco, recovered quickly, while the suffering in great swaths of the rest of the country continued. Bankers got bonuses; their neighborhood theatres and restaurants were full. The size and influence of the half-dozen or so largest financial institutions grew substantially, and almost no one who led them was visibly punished. This past March, the National Archives released documents that had been under seal, in which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission made a series of “referrals” of cases to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. The most famous name on the list was Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and Citigroup executive.

The main government body responsible for dealing with the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board—removed from direct democracy and run rather mysteriously by academic economists—made an ideal target for populist rage. Fed policies benefitted the rich more than others: low interest rates were paired with “quantitative easing,” in which the Fed purchased the kinds of financial instruments that most people don’t have, like mortgage-backed securities and long-term bonds. Hedge-fund managers who played the rising markets with borrowed funds did well; people on salaries who saved a little money every month and put it in interest-bearing accounts did poorly. By 2010, the Tea Party had become a national movement, and dozens of its adherents were elected to Congress. The left generated a protest movement, too, with Occupy Wall Street, which revolted against the mainstream of the Democratic Party and led to the emergence of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren as major Party figures.

Astonishingly, the main political beneficiary of all this energy was Donald Trump, a plutocrat with a long history of taking on too much debt, stiffing his business partners, and not paying taxes. But, while most of his primary opponents ran on more familiar limited-government themes, and Hillary Clinton was fending off the attack from Sanders, Trump figured out that a Republican could run against Wall Street. He made unsubstantiated, sweeping, and brutally effective attacks on Clinton for having “done nothing” for thirty years about the economic troubles of middle-class and poor Americans.

Trump is almost certain to enact policies that will exacerbate those difficulties. He will undo as much as he can of efforts like the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, which returned some regulation to the financial system. He will cut taxes in ways that will increase inequality, and restrict trade in ways that will decrease prosperity. He will not reappoint Janet Yellen, the most unemployment-obsessed Federal Reserve chair in American history—after having subjected her to a barely veiled anti-Semitic attack, in a campaign ad that called her a tool of “global special interests.” It is yet another tragic consequence of the financial crisis that it has brought to power the politician most likely to create the next one.

The Birther of a Nation

“We are about to begin our descent into Los Angeles” is the opening line of “The Graduate.” It is heard in the background, as the camera lingers on the face of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), lost in uncomfortable reflection. The line sets the tone for the lurid tale that is about to unspool. I thought of this foreshadowing sixteen months ago, on the day that Donald J. Trump announced his bid for the Presidency. The sight of him riding a gold escalator down into the belly of Trump Tower to announce his good news made one thing clear to me: he was ready to begin his descent to the Presidency.

For a long time, it seemed like a joke. How could this six-time-bankrupt billionaire-slash-reality-TV star expect to be taken seriously? His opening move—labelling Mexican immigrants rapists—immediately lost the left, and his demotion of John McCain, a former P.O.W., from hero to loser looked as if it would cost him the establishment right. But, after tussling with Megyn Kelly at the first G.O.P. debate, and suggesting that she had blood coming out of her “wherever,” he accomplished the unthinkable: he lost Fox News. How did this mango Mussolini expect to win the White House? Who was left to vote for him? Apparently, half the country.

Shortly after that first debate, I joked in the writers’ room of my now defunct television program, “The Nightly Show,” that Trump could win. I was immediately shouted down and told, in very funny terms, that I was out of my mind. But I was half serious when I made that prediction: a part of me was deeply uneasy with the type of energy that surrounded the Trump insurgency. It was the same energy I’d felt around the “birther” movement a few years earlier—a concerted attempt to delegitimize the first black President. It was then that my colleagues and I decided to title our coverage of the election “Blacklash 2016, the Unblackening.”

A little more than a hundred years ago, D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was screened at Woodrow Wilson’s White House. The film gave a distorted but sensational view of the Reconstruction South, where white heroes, in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, put uppity black villains back in their places. It was the Klan’s job to rescue white women from the black devils who were trying to rape them and create a mongrel race. The reality, of course, is that mixed-race Americans were largely the result of the cream being poured into the coffee, as it were, and not the other way around. But this lie—the myth of the black sexual predator—was powerful, both onscreen and off. It provoked a resurgence of the K.K.K., and reportedly led President Wilson to say that Griffith’s film was “like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” For African-Americans, Wilson’s comment was not only an official delegitimization but, arguably, the worst movie review ever.

When Donald Trump expended so much effort not only criticizing President Obama but attempting to un-Americanize him, he was drawing a direct line from that horrible legacy to himself. During the election, I’d hear the campaigners chanting, “Take our country back,” or “Make America great again,” and I wondered who they thought had stolen their country. Well, the chief suspect lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It appears that Obama’s biggest mistake was P.W.B., Presidenting While Black.

I’m shocked by what happened last week, but not surprised. I don’t mean to suggest that every person who voted for Trump is a racist. But there’s no denying that his message appealed to the lesser angels of the American psyche. Questioning Obama’s birthright, threatening to ban Muslims, painting entire immigrant groups as felons to be feared—these are not policy positions. They are incendiary words and images meant to ignite a movement. My hope is that, right now, our country is more ready to come together than to be driven farther apart. But if making America great again means restoring a history that’s been written with lightning, buckle up—because we’re going to be on a collision course with very loud thunder.

On the Streets

I’m twenty-seven, and in some ways my life has been consonant with the experience of women throughout history. The first time someone tried to grab me by the pussy, I was in middle school, and the next half-dozen times it likewise wasn’t by choice. But in most respects I have luxuriated in unprecedented choice and freedom. I was the child of immigrants in a conservative Southern state, yet I had birth control and a credit card and an uncontested right to education. Ambition and carelessness both came naturally to me. Even as a girl, I knew that I was uncommonly lucky, which is what encouraged me, when I was eleven, to write off pussy-grabbing as a pathetic, confusing cultural vestige. It would die out eventually, I thought, because women would be recognized as equals. Men who groped you—particularly the ones who did it on a whim, out of aggressive boredom—would be shamed into the mausoleum, shoved into a corner next to coat hangers and coverture.

Then, on Tuesday, nearly fifty per cent of the American voters put Donald Trump into the Oval Office.* We picked a President whose ex-wife once testified that he ripped out her hair and raped her, a man who’s been accused of sexual assault and misconduct by almost two dozen women, a man whose own words corroborate his accusers’ claims. Trump bragged, on the “Access Hollywood” videotape, about committing sexual assault—one of many hideous offenses that he instinctively believed would make him appear powerful. And, for millions of Americans, it seems, they did.

The night after the election, my girlfriends and I joined a protest that had been announced, earlier that day, on Facebook, and which brought thousands of people to Union Square, in Manhattan. The crowd was young and colorful, restless and expectant. A gentle rain wilted signs that said “Not the End” and “We Will Look Out for Each Other”; two men in front of me waved a rainbow banner and a blacked-out American flag. An organizer with a bullhorn rebuked the Democratic Party, prompting wolf whistles and applause. My girlfriends and I hugged one another, our eyes smeared and swollen. We hadn’t thought that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was specifically focussed on women, but we experienced her loss as a woman-specific disaster. The men in our lives seemed to feel the stab of it somewhat less.

The rain intensified as we marched from Union Square to Trump Tower. We high-fived cabdrivers and whooped at the office workers who opened their windows to cheer. “Our body, our choice!” the women around us chanted, and men echoed, “Her body, her choice!” We traded flowers and cigarettes, yelled “Pussy grabs back.” But fifty-three per cent of white women voted for a white-supremacist sexual predator; selfishness, in so many circumstances, begets the same consequences as hate. A sign floated above the crowd, flashing red, white, and blue in the reflection of police lights: “Why Don’t Sexual Assault Victims Come Forward? Because Sometimes We Make Their Attackers the Leader of the Free World.”

I had been foolishly sure that the “Access Hollywood” tape would sink Trump’s chances. After its release, I asked my friends how many times someone had forcibly grabbed them. “Twenty,” a woman who grew up taking the subway in New York City said. “Five to ten?” another friend replied, adding, earnestly, “So not that much.” We were fortunate, I thought; we could talk about assault clearly and casually. We could trust that these men were losers. We were wrong.

I’m part of the generation that has forced a mainstream reckoning with the misuse of other people’s bodies; we are the victims and the dissidents of police brutality and sexual assault. During the Obama Administration, in no small part because of the respect that the First Couple instilled for women and people of color, I had begun to feel, thrillingly, like a person. My freedom no longer seemed a miraculous historical accident; it was my birthright.

But my freedom was always conditional, and perhaps never very important to anyone but me. I’m afraid that the empathy and respect that I have always had to display to survive as a woman of color will never be required from men or from whites. I understand, now, that I mistook a decrease in active interference for progress toward a world in which my personhood was seen as inextricable from everyone else’s.

On the march from Union Square, a woman with corn-silk hair under a baseball cap told me that she felt abandoned by the men in her family, who had voted for Trump, and had teased her for having what they saw as special interests. “I’m afraid that a man will hurt me in public, and everyone around will think it’s O.K.,” she said. I heard a friend shouting my name and I turned in her direction. “I’m here,” I said. “I can’t lose you,” she said, pulling me into the group. We were farther from being the equals of men, or even of one another, than we had imagined. But we’d been shown the distance. We kept walking uptown.

*An earlier version of this article misstated the portion of the American electorate that voted for Donald Trump.

In Character

In the campaign’s final days, even as members of Donald Trump’s inner circle had begun to acknowledge privately that he faced almost certain defeat, one of his advisers had the good sense to deprive him of his cell phone. The first, fatefully ill-advised letter from F.B.I. Director James Comey had dropped a week earlier, palpably complicating Hillary Clinton’s otherwise inevitable-seeming triumph. If, for once, Trump could be restrained from further Twitter self-immolation, who knew?

The day after Clinton’s concession speech, the President-elect had his phone back. Thursday morning, he met with President Obama at the White House and afterward described the experience in language that, uncharacteristically, approached humility. It didn’t last. Around dinnertime, he tweeted a familiar whine: “Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”

A shock but not a surprise; no previous evidence suggested that Trump was familiar with the phrase “right of the people peaceably to assemble.” (Nine hours later, when a more conciliatory tweet issued forth—“Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country”—one sensed that the phone had been repossessed.)

After my first face-to-face encounter with Trump—twenty years ago, in his Trump Tower office—I returned to my own and told a colleague, “This guy’s a performance artist.” At the time, I innocently assumed that I would eventually glimpse a human self inclined to the occasional genuine emotion. Trump was then fifty. It had been two decades since he shifted the focus of the family real-estate business from middle-class housing in Queens to “classy” luxury Manhattan high-rises. His persona—inseparable from all that he intended the “ TRUMP ” brand to signify—was fully, immutably intact.

To one degree or another, in our encounters with others we all inhabit a persona that masks our most intimate reflections, doubts, and feelings. Beyond Trump’s extraordinary talent as a salesman, his singular dubious achievement has been to remain fully in character at all times. He has deliberately chosen to exist only as a persona, never as a person.

The essential Trumpian conundrum: he seems the most legible of men, yet, for all the fine work of his many biographers, none has figured out what truly goes on inside his head. When Trump tells a lie—to paraphrase William Maxwell, he tends to “lie with every breath he draws”—it never feels premeditated. The lie is a reflex. And no persona, no matter how artfully devised, can stifle a reflex.

Among the grave uncertainties our country now faces, we can only wonder what becomes of “Donald Trump” once President Trump takes the oath of office. I asked a number of highly regarded actors and acting teachers what to expect from a leader with such a thoroughly calculated persona.

Richard Feldman (Juilliard): “My hunch—and it can only be a hunch—is that the persona is a complete creation, complete unto itself and almost without volition. What makes Trump so powerful is that he believes his own story. When he says that those women made up those stories of sexual assault, what makes him feel authentic is that some part of him believes that.

“My dismay is that millions of people don’t get that, no matter how deep their dissatisfactions, they were still willing to vote for someone who’s clearly a hollow person. Can you be deeply hollow? I don’t know what’s there. I wonder if ever, at three o’clock in the morning, he faces himself or is afraid. I don’t know how deeply he believes in what he’s created.”

Mark Wing-Davey (New York University): “The persona he’s chosen is a megalomaniacal persona with soft edges, because he wants to inspire confidence in the person with whom he’s doing the deal. Unfortunately, there’s a massive credibility gap between someone who believes himself to be this magnificent negotiator and someone who is carrying the hopes and dreams of the whole country. Empathy is a crucial ingredient to being an actor. Trump lacks the ability to produce empathy in the audience.”

Austin Pendleton (HB Studio): “With a really great actor, it always comes down to a feeling of spontaneity, that what they’re giving out is what happens to them in the moment . Trump has that—the freshness of a really fine actor-artist. The reason his positions are all over the map is because he lives in the moment. That’s electric to people, far more important than whatever it is he actually says. Because if people were really paying attention to what he says he would never, ever have been elected.”

Mercedes Ruehl (HB Studio): “ ‘Persona’ comes from Latin, and it means mask. When one acts, one tries to access the real self within the character. Trump is remaining at the level of persona. In the footage of that meeting with Obama, I saw what I felt was humility. Can he drop the persona and act out of his self? I hope he can; his self is the only thing that can save his Presidency. But he would have to be like St. Paul, cut down on the road to Damascus—the greedy tax collector, and God says ‘Follow me,’ and he does.”

Radical Hope

Querida Q.:

I hope that you are feeling, if not precisely better, then at least not so demoralized. On Wednesday, after he won, you reached out to me, seeking advice, solidarity. You wrote, My two little sisters called me weeping this morning. I had nothing to give them. I felt bereft. What now ? Keep telling the truth from an ever-shrinking corner ? Give up ?

I answered immediately, because you are my hermana, because it hurt me to hear you in such distress. I offered some consoling words, but the truth was I didn’t know what to say. To you, to my godchildren, who all year had been having nightmares that their parents would be deported, to myself.

I thought about your e-mail all day, Q., and I thought about you during my evening class. My students looked rocked. A few spoke about how frightened and betrayed they felt. Two of them wept. No easy task to take in the fact that half the voters—neighbors, friends, family—were willing to elect, to the nation’s highest office, a toxic misogynist, a racial demagogue who wants to make America great by destroying the civil-rights gains of the past fifty years.

What now ? you asked. And that was my students’ question, too. What now ? I answered them as poorly as I answered you, I fear. And so I sit here now in the middle of the night, in an attempt to try again.

So what now? Well, first and foremost, we need to feel. We need to connect courageously with the rejection, the fear, the vulnerability that Trump’s victory has inflicted on us, without turning away or numbing ourselves or lapsing into cynicism. We need to bear witness to what we have lost: our safety, our sense of belonging, our vision of our country. We need to mourn all these injuries fully, so that they do not drag us into despair, so repair will be possible.

And while we’re doing the hard, necessary work of mourning, we should avail ourselves of the old formations that have seen us through darkness. We organize. We form solidarities. And, yes: we fight. To be heard. To be safe. To be free.

For those of us who have been in the fight, the prospect of more fighting, after so cruel a setback, will seem impossible. At moments like these, it is easy for even a matatana to feel that she can’t go on. But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

But all the fighting in the world will not help us if we do not also hope. What I’m trying to cultivate is not blind optimism but what the philosopher Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. “What makes this hope radical ,” Lear writes, “is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.” Radical hope is not so much something you have but something you practice; it demands flexibility, openness, and what Lear describes as “imaginative excellence.” Radical hope is our best weapon against despair, even when despair seems justifiable; it makes the survival of the end of your world possible. Only radical hope could have imagined people like us into existence. And I believe that it will help us create a better, more loving future.

I could say more, but I’ve already imposed enough, Q.: Time to face this hard new world, to return to the great shining work of our people. Darkness, after all, is breaking, a new day has come.

About  Search

Campaign Documents

September 04, 2024.

Remarks by the Vice President at a Campaign Event in North Hampton, New Hampshire

Kamala Harris

September 02, 2024

Remarks by the Vice President at a Campaign Event in Detroit, Michigan

Remarks with the Vice President at a Campaign Event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Joseph R. Biden

August 29, 2024

Remarks by the Vice President at a Volunteer Appreciation Event in Savannah, Georgia

Remarks by the Vice President at a Campaign Event in Savannah, Georgia

August 28, 2024

Remarks by the Vice President and Governor Tim Walz at a Marching Band Practice in Hinesville, Georgia

August 22, 2024

Address Accepting the Democratic Presidential Nomination in Chicago, Illinois

August 21, 2024

Address Accepting the Vice Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois

August 20, 2024

Remarks by the Vice President at a Campaign Event in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

August 19, 2024

Remarks by the Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois

Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks as Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris listens as they attend a presidential debate hosted by ABC in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S., September 10, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

US presidential debate highlights: Harris riled Trump on abortion, economy and foreign policy

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Live Page editor. A text and video journalist based in London, Stephen is a former Reuters bureau chief in Jerusalem. He was previously a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and The Times of London. He reported from the Balkans, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, New York and the UK. He is co-author of the book 'Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement’.

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The Electoral College Explained

A national popular vote would help ensure that every vote counts equally, making American democracy more representative.

• Electoral College Reform

In the United States, the presidency is decided not by the national popular vote but by the Electoral College — an outdated and convoluted system that sometimes yields results contrary to the choice of the majority of American voters. On five occasions, including in two of the last six elections, candidates have won the Electoral College, and thus the presidency, despite losing the nationwide popular vote. 

The Electoral College has racist origins — when established, it applied the three-fifths clause, which gave a long-term electoral advantage to slave states in the South — and continues to dilute the political power of voters of color. It incentivizes presidential campaigns to focus on a relatively small number of “swing states.” Together, these dynamics have spurred debate about the system’s democratic legitimacy.

To make the United States a more representative democracy, reformers are pushing for the presidency to be decided instead by the national popular vote, which would help ensure that every voter counts equally.

What is the Electoral College and how does it work?

The Electoral College is a group of intermediaries designated by the Constitution to select the president and vice president of the United States. Each of the 50 states is allocated presidential electors  equal to the number of its representatives and senators . The ratification of the 23rd Amendment in 1961 allowed citizens in the District of Columbia to participate in presidential elections as well; they have consistently had three electors.

In total, the Electoral College comprises  538 members . A presidential candidate must win a majority of the electoral votes cast to win — at least 270 if all 538 electors vote.

The Constitution grants state legislatures the power to decide how to appoint their electors. Initially, a number of state legislatures directly  selected their electors , but during the 19th century they transitioned to the popular vote, which is now used by  all 50 states . In other words, each awards its electoral votes to the presidential candidate chosen by the state’s voters.

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia use a winner-take-all system, awarding all of their electoral votes to the popular vote winner in the state. Maine and Nebraska award one electoral vote to the popular vote winner in each of their congressional districts and their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner. Under this system, those two states sometimes split their electoral votes among candidates.

In the months leading up to the general election, the political parties in each state typically nominate their own slates of would-be electors. The state’s popular vote determines which party’s slates will be made electors. Members of the Electoral College  meet and vote in their respective states  on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December after Election Day. Then, on January 6, a joint session of Congress meets at the Capitol to count the electoral votes and declare the outcome of the election, paving the way for the presidential inauguration on January 20.

How was the Electoral College established?

The Constitutional Convention in 1787 settled on the Electoral College as a compromise between delegates who thought Congress should select the president and others who favored a direct nationwide popular vote. Instead, state legislatures were entrusted with appointing electors.

Article II  of the Constitution, which established the executive branch of the federal government, outlined the framers’ plan for the electing the president and vice president. Under this plan, each elector cast two votes for president; the candidate who received the most votes became the president, with the second-place finisher becoming vice president — which led to administrations in which political opponents served in those roles. The process was overhauled in 1804 with the ratification of the  12th Amendment , which required electors to cast votes separately for president and vice president. 

How did slavery shape the Electoral College?

At the time of the Constitutional Convention, the northern states and southern states had  roughly equal populations . However, nonvoting enslaved people made up about one-third of the southern states’ population. As a result, delegates from the South objected to a direct popular vote in presidential elections, which would have given their states less electoral representation.

The debate contributed to the convention’s eventual decision to establish the Electoral College, which applied the  three-fifths compromise  that had already been devised for apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. Three out of five enslaved people were counted as part of a state’s total population, though they were nonetheless prohibited from voting.

Wilfred U. Codrington III, an assistant professor of law at Brooklyn Law School and a Brennan Center fellow,  writes  that the South’s electoral advantage contributed to an “almost uninterrupted trend” of presidential election wins by southern slaveholders and their northern sympathizers throughout the first half of the 19th century. After the Civil War, in 1876, a contested Electoral College outcome was settled by a compromise in which the House awarded Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency with the understanding that he would withdraw military forces from the Southern states. This led to the end of Reconstruction and paved the way for racial segregation under Jim Crow laws.

Today, Codrington argues, the Electoral College continues to dilute the political power of Black voters: “Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. … Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged.”

What are faithless electors?  

Ever since the 19th century reforms, states have expected their electors to honor the will of the voters. In other words, electors are now pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state. However, the Constitution does not require them to do so, which allows for scenarios in which “faithless electors” have voted against the popular vote winner in their states. As of 2016, there have been  90 faithless electoral votes  cast out of 23,507 in total across all presidential elections. The 2016 election saw a record-breaking  seven faithless electors , including three who voted for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was not a presidential candidate at the time.  

Currently, 33 states and the District of Columbia  require their presidential electors  to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged. Only 5 states, however, impose a penalty on faithless electors, and only 14 states provide for faithless electors to be removed or for their votes to be canceled. In July 2020, the Supreme Court  unanimously upheld  existing state laws that punish or remove faithless electors.

What happens if no candidate wins a majority of Electoral College votes?

If no ticket wins a majority of Electoral College votes, the presidential election is  sent to the House of Representatives  for a runoff. Unlike typical House practice, however, each state only gets one vote, decided by the party that controls the state’s House delegation. Meanwhile, the vice-presidential race is decided in the Senate, where each member has one vote. This scenario  has not transpired since 1836 , when the Senate was tasked with selecting the vice president after no candidate received a majority of electoral votes.

Are Electoral College votes distributed equally between states?

Each state is allocated a number of electoral votes based on the total size of its congressional delegation. This benefits smaller states, which have at least three electoral votes — including two electoral votes tied to their two Senate seats, which are guaranteed even if they have a small population and thus a small House delegation. Based on population trends, those disparities will likely increase as the most populous states are expected to account for an even greater share of the U.S. population in the decades ahead. 

What did the 2020 election reveal about the Electoral College?

In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump and his allies fueled an effort to overturn the results of the election, spreading repeated lies about widespread voter fraud. This included attempts by a number of state legislatures to nullify some of their states’ votes, which often targeted jurisdictions with large numbers of Black voters. Additionally, during the certification process for the election, some members of Congress also objected to the Electoral College results, attempting to throw out electors from certain states. While these efforts ultimately failed, they revealed yet another vulnerability of the election system that stems from the Electoral College.

The  Electoral Count Reform Act , enacted in 2023, addresses these problems. Among other things, it clarifies which state officials have the power to appoint electors, and it bars any changes to that process after Election Day, preventing state legislatures from setting aside results they do not like. The new law also raises the threshold for consideration of objections to electoral votes. It is now one-fifth of each chamber instead of one senator and one representative.  Click here for more on the changes made by the Electoral Count Reform Act.

What are ways to reform the Electoral College to make presidential elections more democratic?

Abolishing the Electoral College outright would require a constitutional amendment. As a workaround, scholars and activist groups have rallied behind the  National Popular Vote Interstate Compact  (NPV), an effort that started after the 2000 election. Under it, participating states would  commit to awarding their electoral votes  to the winner of the national popular vote.

In other words, the NPV would formally retain the Electoral College but render it moot, ensuring that the winner of the national popular vote also wins the presidency. If enacted, the NPV would incentivize presidential candidates to expand their campaign efforts nationwide, rather than focus only on a small number of swing states.

For the NPV to take effect, it must first be adopted by states that control at least 270 electoral votes. In 2007, Maryland became the first state to enact the compact. As of 2019, a total of 19 states and Washington, DC, which collectively account for 196 electoral votes, have joined.

The public has consistently supported a nationwide popular vote. A 2020 poll by Pew Research Center, for example, found that  58 percent of adults  prefer a system in which the presidential candidate who receives the most votes nationwide wins the presidency.

Related Resources

How Electoral Votes Are Counted for the Presidential Election

The Electoral Count Reform Act addresses vulnerabilities exposed by the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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Informed citizens are democracy’s best defense

The Miracle and Tragedy of the 2020 U.S. Election

Nathaniel persily, charles stewart iii.

Select your citation format:

The 2020 election was both a miracle and a tragedy. In the midst of a pandemic posing unprecedented challenges, local and state administrators pulled off a safe, secure, and professional election. This article discusses metrics of success in the adaptations that took place—record-high turnout, widespread voter satisfaction, a doubling of mail voting without a concomitant increase in problems often associated with absentee ballots, and the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of new poll workers. However, a competing narrative of a “stolen election” led to a historically deep chasm between partisans in their trust of the election process and outcome.

T he 2020 U.S. election was both a miracle and a tragedy. It was a miracle in that election administrators, facing unprecedented challenges from a pandemic, were able to pull off a safe, secure, and professional election in which a record number of Americans turned out to vote. It was also a tragedy, though, because, despite these heroic efforts, lies about vote fraud and the performance of the system have cemented a perception among tens of millions of Americans that the election was “rigged.” This manufactured distrust has deeply damaged our democracy; the path to repairing it is not at all clear.

The Capitol Insurrection of 6 January 2021 will forever constitute the image of the 2020 election and the distrust that accompanied it. Despite the heroism and success we detail below, more than a hundred members of Congress voted to question and overturn the results in one or more states.

About the Authors

Nathaniel Persily is James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School.

View all work by Nathaniel Persily

Charles Stewart III is Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

View all work by Charles Stewart III

The enduring images of the 2020 election should have been very different. During the primary elections early in the year, the picture looked bleak, as poll-worker and polling-place shortages caused long lines of frustrated voters to risk their lives, while thousands of absentee ballots were rejected in places that had little experience with large-scale voting by mail. In the general election, however, an army of new poll workers, wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) and often administering the voting behind Lucite barriers, staffed polling places. Absentee voting  [End Page 159]  also set records, as rates of canceled mail ballots were dramatically lower than before the pandemic.

How did the country pull off a successful election under pandemic circumstances? What changes to the election infrastructure were necessary to accomplish this task? How can we reconcile this measurable success with convictions, strongly held by a sizeable share of the electorate, that the election was rigged? These are the questions this article seeks to answer.

Given the unfounded, partisan criticism that the election was “rigged” and “disastrous,” it is difficult in hindsight to reimagine what a true electoral disaster would have looked like and how close the United States came to experiencing one. The primary-season meltdowns in several states painted an ominous picture of institutional collapse threatening the general election. In several respects, the election system benefited from the timing of the pandemic, coming as it did in the middle of the presidential-primary season but hitting hardest just as Joseph Biden wrapped up the Democratic Party’s nomination. The baptism by fire in the primaries provided necessary lessons in how to solve pandemic-related problems so that both mail and polling-place voting could work properly come November.

The primary season began with few covid-related concerns, as Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada held their primaries and caucuses in late February. Super Tuesday (March 3) also came at the beginning of the pandemic, with California the only state of the fourteen holding primaries that day which had thus far recorded a case. Ohio, with its primary scheduled for March 17, became the first state to sound the alarm when the state’s public-health director ordered all polling places closed. The state then switched to almost all-mail balloting and extended the time to vote in the primary through April 28. 1  Most other states with March primaries then postponed their elections until May and June. By late March, governors throughout the country had issued stay-at-home orders. The presidential-nomination process escaped pandemic-related disaster by just a few weeks, as Biden’s nomination seemed by that point all but assured.

Wisconsin was one of the states that did not reschedule its primary, and it became the cautionary tale as to what to avoid when conducting elections during a pandemic. 2  On the ballot in that primary was an election for the state Supreme Court; partisan concerns replaced the flexible attitude toward postponement seen in other states. As the April 7 primary date approached and more than 2,500 covid cases were confirmed in the state, Governor Tony Evers ordered the election postponed. However, Republican legislative leaders successfully sued, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered the election to go ahead as scheduled. Only on April 6 did it become clear that the primary would be held the next day.

The last-minute wrangling among the governor, the legislature, and  [End Page 160]  the courts exacerbated the state’s lack of preparedness to run a primary during the pandemic. The state faced a shortage of seven-thousand poll workers. To replace them, the governor mobilized 2,400 members of the National Guard. The state closed only 15 percent of its planned polling places, but the largest cities cut back dramatically on the numbers of polling places they made available. Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city, went from 180 polling places to just five, while Kenosha County went from 22 to ten and Green Bay opened just a pair of polling places instead of the 31 it normally would have. Hardest hit were voters of color; their turnout rate lagged whites by more than twenty percentage points.

Absentee voting rescued the Wisconsin primary from complete disaster. 3  Nearly 60 percent of the 1.5 million voters who turned out cast their ballots absentee, compared to 3.6 percent in the 2016 primary. Total turnout declined from 2.1 million in 2016, when competitive primaries for both parties brought out both Democrats and Republicans. (Most of the dropoff in 2020 was concentrated among Republicans.) Rejection rates of absentee ballots decreased from 2016, as 13,614 ballots were rejected because of “insufficient certification” and another 7,085 were rejected because they were late or did not have a postmark. Rejection rates for African Americans were about twice that of whites, however, and rejections of first-time voters’ ballots were about a third higher than had been typical in previous elections.

The states with primaries scheduled for after April 7 heard the warning shot from Wisconsin loud and clear. Most shifted significantly toward mail balloting for the remainder of the primary season. As a result, absentee voting exploded in the primaries, but only in states that voted after March. Among states that voted in February and March, mail-ballot usage was virtually unchanged. 4

Beginning with Wisconsin’s April 7 primary and ending with Louisiana (July 11), every state saw a dramatic increase in mail-ballot usage—on average, 60 percentage points greater than 2016.  Figure 1  depicts the shift in the mode of voting in the primaries that took place once the pandemic hit.

With increasing rates of mail balloting in the primaries came increases in ballot rejections. A nationwide study conducted by NPR estimated more than 550,000 mail ballots were rejected during the primaries, as compared to 318,728 in the 2016 general election. 5  Given the dramatic rise in mail balloting, though, the share of rejected ballots even for the primary went down in many states. Georgia’s decline in mail-ballot rejections  [End Page 161]

was particularly notable, dropping from 17 percent in the 2016 primary to less than 1 percent in the 2020 primary. 6  Not every state experienced a drop, however. North Carolina—a state with relatively few mail ballots—saw its rate of mail-ballot rejections climb from 7 percent in the 2016 primary to 10 percent in the 2020 primary, mostly because of a dramatic increase in ballots that lacked a signature. 7

Just as Wisconsin provided the cautionary tale for polling-place voting, New York City’s June 23 primary demonstrated the problems that plagued mail balloting. A whopping 84,000 ballots, representing 21 percent of all those coming from the city, went uncounted. 8  Some ballots arrived late, while others were missing postmarks or the voter’s signature on the oath envelope. Ballot-design problems and poor coordination between local officials and the U.S. Postal Service seemed to underlie many of the rejections.

The primary period showed election administrators, policy makers, and the public that only an unprecedented effort could save the November election. New York highlighted problems with absentee voting, and illustrated what might happen if states with more traditional laws and practices did not change their ways, at least on an emergency, one-time  [End Page 162]  basis. Wisconsin provided an object lesson regarding the fragility of the in-person voting infrastructure, and a reminder that millions of people still preferred to vote in person even when doing so was dangerous. The nation’s election community had its work cut out for it in preparing for the fall.

Mobilizing to Cope with Covid

The shift to mail voting and healthy polling places in the general election did not just “happen.” States had to change their laws. Governors, health officials, and judges needed to impose emergency measures to deal with the pandemic.

Twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia enacted 79 different bills to expand voting access in 2020. 9  Some states, such as California, New Jersey, Vermont, and Nevada, mailed every voter a ballot for the first time. Twelve states mailed absentee-ballot applications to all voters, and eight expanded eligibility for mail voting (whether by designating covid concerns as a valid excuse or by removing excuse requirements altogether). Four states enacted new “notice-and-cure” processes so that voters could remedy mistakes related to mail balloting; four provided prepaid postage for all mail ballots; four extended ballot-receipt deadlines; and five moved to permit the preprocessing of mail ballots so that ballots would be ready for counting once polls closed.

With respect to polling places, states relaxed rules on who could become a poll worker, raised the pay of poll workers, and required that jurisdictions not reduce polling-place numbers below a certain minimum. Some of these changes were permanent, while others were designated emergency steps taken only to deal with the pandemic. Many states that did not willingly make these changes were forced to do so by courts as a result of litigation. 10

Along with policy makers and courts, civil society groups made an unprecedented effort to help local election administrators deal with the pandemic. The Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, which we led, was a small part of that effort. Other organizations, such as the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, the Center for Inclusive Democracy, the National Vote at Home Institute, Democracy Works, the Center for Civic Design, the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a multitude of state-based organizations worked with election officials to provide resources and technical assistance in support of mail voting and safe polling places.

A key achievement of this civil society mobilization was the recruitment of poll workers. Following the primaries, poll-worker shortages appeared to present a critical threat to the November election. In previous elections, roughly half the poll workers nationwide had been more  [End Page 163]  than 61 years old, putting them into a higher-risk group amid a pandemic.

A host of organizations representing students (Campus Compact and Students Learn Students Vote), lawyers (the Association of ProBono Counsel and the American Bar Association), physicians, and other groups mobilized to fill the need. None was more influential than PowerthePolls. org. Working with the database of election offices provided by  WorkElections.com  and a multitude of partners at the state level, Power the Polls initiated a national poll-worker recruitment program that signed up more than 600,000 volunteers. (To give some context, roughly a million people served as poll workers in the 2016 election.) Exactly how many of those who signed up ended up serving is not known, but poll-worker shortages did not appear to afflict any major jurisdiction in the November election.

Perhaps the most unprecedented outside effort to bolster the election infrastructure came in the form of philanthropic contributions to election offices. Through the CARES Act, Congress had appropriated $400 million for assistance to election jurisdictions. 11  In the end, private philanthropy contributed even more. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan alone contributed $400 million. 12  This money was administered through a CTCL grant program to more than 2,500 election jurisdictions. It paid for staffing, mail-voting equipment, drop boxes for ballots, PPE for poll workers, election security, polling-place rentals and sanitation, staffing and real-estate costs, poll-worker training, and a host of other things. By all accounts, these added funds were critical to the successful administration of the election. The same could be said for corporate in-kind donations, which included the arenas that National Basketball Association franchises lent for use as early-voting centers as well as other kinds of donations that were made through groups such as Business for America. 13

One final set of outside actors deserves mention: internet platforms. Google and Facebook were widely reviled in 2016 for being sources of foreign election interference through both advertising and organic content. While they continued in 2020 to serve as platforms on which domestic disinformation and propaganda prospered, they developed products to provide and amplify authoritative information from election officials. The Google Civic Information API, developed from the Voting Information Center run by Democracy Works in consultation with local election offices, powered numerous web portals that provided information on polling places, voter-registration procedures, ballot-dropbox locations, and much else. 14  Facebook’s Voting Information Center provided similar data, as well as information from third parties such as the Bipartisan Policy Center that could be deployed in users’ feeds to mute the impact of other, potentially less authoritative, stories on the voting process. 15  In addition, Facebook reports that the portal, which also produced top-of-feed reminders, assisted more than 4.5 million people in registering  [End Page 164]  to vote and more than a hundred-thousand people in signing up to serve as poll workers. 16

Success Against All Odds

The most basic measure of the success of an election is turnout. By this metric, the 2020 election was an unalloyed success by U.S. standards. Nearly 160 million votes were cast in 2020, up by more than 20 million from 2016. This amounted to two-thirds of the eligible electorate, six points higher than 2016 and the highest turnout rate since 1904. 17

Turnout as a percentage of the voting-eligible population increased in every state, although there was considerable variation. The most significant increases came in the West and along much of the Eastern Seaboard. The smallest increases—they were in the low single digits—occurred in the country’s midsection, where states went to the least trouble to increase access to the polls and where the presidential race was mostly uncompetitive.

What explains the turnout surges and where they occurred? Our own statistical analysis finds that heightened electoral competition in the battleground states and the availability of election-day registration (EDR) were important. The most competitive states (measured by the margin of victory) and states that instituted EDR after 2016 saw the biggest turnout increases that pass the standard criteria of statistical significance. 18  Mailing a ballot to all voters and adopting no-excuse absentee voting did not have statistically significant effects.

Turnout was not the whole story, of course. The main story, indeed, was the shift to mail balloting. Even if efforts to encourage more voting by mail played a modest role in boosting turnout, the shift to vote-by-mail was as much as anything an effort to protect public health in a high-intensity election. Mail balloting had already been increasing in importance over the past two decades, as 21 percent of voters cast votes by mail in 2016, up from 8 percent in 1996. But that figure doubled in 2020 as 46 percent of voters cast their ballots by mail. Election-day voting dropped by half, consequently, from 60 percent of voters in 2016 to 28 percent in 2020. 19

The national trend toward mail voting masks considerable variability in the degree of change across states and, in some cases, the exact mix of election-day, early in-person, and mail voting. This is illustrated in  Figure 2 , which uses a ternary plot to show the changing mix of voting modes from 2016 to 2020. This plot employs points to show the mix of voting modes used in each state, as reported by voters in the 2020 Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE). 20  Attached to each point is a line that indicates the distribution of modes in 2016. Election-day voting dominated in the states toward the top of the plot; states toward the lower right mostly voted in person before election day;  [End Page 165]

and mail balloting dominated in states toward the lower left.

The most common type of change was toward the southwest in the graph—that is, substituting election-day voting for mail ballots. In only eight states (Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas) did the increased share of in-person voters before election day exceed the increased share of mail voters.

Postelection responses to the SPAE describe the reasons behind the shift to mail balloting. Overall, 59 percent of respondents who stated that they were very worried about family members catching covid reported having voted by mail, compared to 28 percent who said they had no covid worries. This difference was visible within each party. Among Republicans, 42 percent who were very worried about covid voted by mail, while only 26 percent who had no covid worries at all said they had cast their ballots this way. Among Democrats, those figures were 62 and 35 percent.  [End Page 166]

A state’s legal regime dramatically affected its rate of absentee balloting. Voters in states with no-excuse absentee voting used mail ballots at a much higher rate (55 percent) than voters in other states (35 percent); voters in states that mailed ballots to all registered voters likewise voted by mail at double the rate of other states (81 percent versus 40 percent). The only policy that did not appear to affect usage rates was mailing an absentee-ballot application to all voters. 21  Our analysis of relevant statistics indicates that the biggest increases in mail-ballot usage from 2016 to 2020 came in states that mailed ballots to all registered voters and that also had largely Democratic electorates. 22

During the run-up to the November election, officials and commentators in the field expressed concern about whether voters who were new to mail voting would complete the vote-by-mail process successfully. In prior elections, voter mistakes and administrative problems had resulted in hundreds of thousands of mail ballots being turned down. 23  With the volume of mail ballots seemingly set to double or triple, there was heightened concern that voters using mail voting for the first time might be disenfranchised, and that controversies over mail-balloting problems would generate broader doubts about the election’s legitimacy. Efforts by election officials, civil society, and the courts addressed these concerns. In the end, voters followed directions and returned their ballots quickly.

Fears also arose over late-arriving ballots. All states have deadlines for the receipt of mail ballots. Most require ballots to be “in hand” by the time the polls close on election day. A few allow a ballot to arrive within a given period after election day so long as there is proof (usually in the form of a postmark) that it had been mailed by the date of the election. With millions of voters poised to cast their first-ever mail-in ballots, and in view of the Postal Service’s well-known struggles, many worried that large numbers of voters would have their ballots tossed simply because the mail was too slow in delivering them. In 2016, late arrival was the most common reason save one for the rejection of postal ballots. 24  Would the same happen in 2020?

It appears that it did not. Although comprehensive statistics have yet to be published, examination of absentee-ballot files from a few states reveals that a surprisingly small number of mail ballots arrived after November 3. Georgia, for instance, saw the number of ballots that arrived after that date (and which were therefore rejected) fall from 0.8 percent of ballots returned in 2016 to 0.2 percent in 2020. Consequently, although the number of mail ballots cast grew sixfold in the state, the number of ballots rejected for arriving too late grew only slightly (from 1,836 to 2,368). The numbers were similar in Wisconsin, despite the number of ballots cast by mail growing fifteenfold, from 91,000 to nearly 1.4 million.  [End Page 167]

In North Carolina, as part of a legal settlement, the deadline for the receipt of absentee ballots after election day was lengthened from the normal three-day period to nine days because of the pandemic. 25  In the course of the election, the number of mail ballots rose fivefold, from 198,035 in 2016 to 1,026,364 in 2020. Yet the number of ballots that arrived during the new nine-day grace period increased by only about five thousand (to 16,313). Indeed, the number of ballots that were rejected for arriving too late actually  declined  from 1,038 in 2016 to 797 in 2020. North Carolina was not unique: Data from the SPAE indicate that a greater percentage of mail voters reported returning their ballots more than a week before Election Day (73 percent) than had done so in the past two presidential elections (61 percent in each). Voters heeded the warnings and returned their ballots with enough time to spare.

Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that mail ballots were rejected at much lower rates in 2020 than in 2016. Final statistics from the 2020 election were not available at the time of this writing in March 2021. However, the website FiveThirtyEight has been able to gather data from 22 states plus the District of Columbia, and reports that rejection rates are down from the 2016 level in all but three of these jurisdictions. 26  The website Ballotpedia, relying on different data sources in some cases, reports rejection rates as dropping in fourteen of twenty states. 27

Direct analysis of the absentee-ballot files from the states that make them readily available tells a similar story. For instance, Wisconsin reported that only 0.2 percent of absentee ballots were rejected for any reason, compared to 1.8 percent in the April presidential primary and 2.3 percent in the 2016 presidential election. 28  The percentage rejected for “certification insufficient,” which includes a missing voter or witness signature or a missing witness address, was a miniscule 0.07 percent (1,434 ballots out of nearly two-million returned). In Georgia, the number of mail ballots that were cast grew sixfold in 2020, to 1.3 million. 29  But the overall number of rejected mail ballots declined from about 6,056 in 2016 (2.9 percent of all mail ballots returned) to 4,003 (0.3 percent). Of the state’s 2020 rejected mail ballots, 1,563 were for either missing or invalid signatures.

The Maintenance of In-Person Voting

Although the shift to voting by mail was the element of election administration that drew the most public attention, election officials were equally attentive to the challenges of maintaining polling places for both early voting and election day. Even with the big shift to mail balloting, maintaining polling places remained critical to the safe and effective conduct of the election. Some voters needed services that could only be provided in person, others distrusted the Postal Service, and still others heeded President Donald Trump’s calls to vote in person.  [End Page 168]  Many voters, including Democrats, still strongly desire to vote in person. 30

According to one report, the 2016 election had involved about a hundred-thousand polling places, nearly 21,000 of which were eliminated in 2020. 31  Half the eliminated polling places were in California alone, which mailed ballots to all registered voters. Most of the other states with the biggest drops in the number of polling places either mailed ballots to all registered voters (Nevada, New Jersey, and Vermont) or worked hard to divert voters to early voting at centers set up for that purpose (Kentucky and Maryland).

The type of facility in which people voted also changed in 2020. Between 2008 and 2016, the three most common sites for polling places had been schools (25 percent of in-person voters), churches (17 percent), and community centers (16 percent). In 2020, the top three were “other” government buildings (courthouses, municipal buildings, or city halls, but not schools, community centers, firehouses, or police stations) at 23 percent, community centers at 21 percent, and schools at 18 percent. In other words, in-person voting shifted to larger facilities over which local governments had greater control.

Although we cannot yet document precisely how well local officials maintained access to in-person voting, we can assess the experience of voters who cast ballots in person and judge indirectly how well the system performed. Here, as with mail voting, the conclusions are mostly positive, although things were far from perfect.

First, despite the net reduction of 21,000 polling places and the relocation of thousands more, in-person voters did not report greater difficulty finding their polling place in 2020. Second, among the other measures that the SPAE has followed over the years to assess the experience of in-person voters, 2020 was no different from past years. Third, in-person voters largely encountered polling places where they felt that safety measures were appropriately in place. 32

That said, other public-health measures were less often observed. Barely half of in-person respondents (56 percent) reported that they found voting booths spaced out to respect social distancing, while fewer than half reported finding protective barriers between themselves and poll workers or seeing voting booths cleaned between uses (47 and 42 percent of respondents, respectively).

The one measure on which voters reported having a worse experience than in 2016 was the time spent waiting to vote in person. This was not surprising given the demands of social distancing and the closure of many polling places during the pandemic. The benchmark that we use is the percentage of in-person voters who had to wait more than thirty minutes to vote (the standard suggested by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration in its 2014 report). 33

Wait times increased in 2020 up to levels not seen since 2008, the  [End Page 169]

election year with the longest wait times on record. Roughly one in five early voters waited more than a half-hour to vote, as did one in seven election-day voters. The racial gap in wait times had closed for election-day voting in 2016, but not for early voting. The same remained true in 2020, just at longer wait times. On election day 2016, the share of both white and African American voters who had needed to wait more than thirty minutes had been 8.5 percent. In 2020, those proportions rose to 14.3 and 15.6 percent, respectively. In 2020 early voting, the disparity was greater: More than a quarter (26.6 percent) of African American early voters needed to wait a half-hour or more to vote, while this was true for just over a fifth (20.5 percent) of white early voters. This gap of six percentage points was similar to the nine-point gap (18 percent versus 9.2 percent) that had been observed in 2016.

Perception versus Reality

The story told here of a historic and heroic administration of the 2020 election is based on the observed facts and data. A competing narrative of dysfunction and a “stolen election” emerged in the election’s  [End Page 170]

aftermath, propagated by President Trump and his supporters. Seeds of that narrative actually preceded the election, as Trump and his surrogates had primed the U.S. public, and more particularly his supporters, to expect fraud of historic proportions, which would be the cause of his defeat, if he lost. That lie then became weaponized on January 6, as the “Stop the Steal” movement descended on the Capitol for a deadly attempt at insurrection.

Partisan polarization concerning the fairness of a presidential election is not new, and to a large degree the basic patterns in 2020 mimicked what political scientists have found over the past two decades. In the case of 2020, roughly half of respondents to the Economist/YouGov series of polls between August and election day expressed “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence that their own votes would be counted accurately in the upcoming election, while between 30 and 40 percent expressed confidence that the election would be “held fairly” (with Democrats slightly more confident on both measures than Republicans).

After November 3, the overall measures of confidence remained roughly unchanged, but the degree of partisan polarization exploded. (See Figure 3.) Before the election, Democrats were 10.9 points more confident their votes would be counted accurately than Republicans; after  [End Page 171]

Election Day, this gap was 51.7 points. The gap in confidence that the presidential election was fair increased even more sharply, going from 15 points prior to November 3 to 72.6 points afterward.

As documented in earlier studies of voter confidence, the partisan split over assessing the election’s fairness can be attributed, to some extent, to the “winners-and-losers effect,” with the losing candidate’s supporters more likely to question the integrity of the process. 34  In comparison to recent elections, however, the 2020 gap is extreme. A study of changes in voter confidence from before to after election day in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections found that on average the gap between the parties increased 22 points on the question about confidence in one’s own vote being fairly counted, and 32 points on the question about confidence in the overall fairness of the election. 35  We find that the net changes in 2016 were similar—17 and 18 points, respectively. In 2020, by contrast, the net gaps in confidence and trust increased 41 points for one’s own vote and 58 points on the election’s fairness overall.

Although this yawning partisan gap in perceptions of the accuracy and fairness of the 2020 election may be historic, the degree of partisan mistrust that has opened up at the state and local levels is also new.  [End Page 172]

That mistrust will likely have more important near-term consequences, because of the preeminent role that states play in determining election policy. In the past, even when the two parties disagreed about the fairness of the national result, they were willing to acknowledge that local elections were conducted well, with only a small dose of loser’s effect thrown in. And, as recently as 2016, the two parties were virtually identical in how they judged state and local election administration.

Not so in 2020. The Republicans most distrustful of the accuracy of state election results live in states that Trump barely lost. In fact, the chasm in trust between Republicans in states where he barely lost and those in states where he barely won is vast—40 percentage points.

Data from the SPAE help to illustrate the point. Figure 4 plots the percentage of respondents from the two parties who were either very or somewhat confident that votes in their state were counted as intended against the percentage of the two-party vote received by Trump. The discontinuity right at the 50 percent mark in the Republican graph is stark. Among Republicans, simply living in a state that Trump barely won is worth approximately 40 points in confidence regarding whether state votes were counted properly, compared to living in a state that Trump barely lost.  [End Page 173]

Republicans report being especially distrustful of the state vote count where Trump lost by less than three percentage points. And Republicans feel even more dissatisfied in states with high use of mail ballots—such as California, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington—and much less dissatisfied in states with low mail-ballot usage (Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, and New Hampshire). 36  The gap among Democrats’ perceptions across different states was much smaller, and the usage of mail ballots had no influence on their attitudes toward the state vote count whether Trump won their state or lost it.

In almost every state, Democrats feel more confidence in the 2020 vote count than do Republicans, and by a wide margin. It is unsurprising, therefore, that immediately after the election news reports began to surface of efforts by Republican legislators to rein in forms of voting that Democrats seemed to favor. Across the country, state lawmakers from the Republican Party have put forward scores of bills to restrict mail balloting. The states with the most legislative activity are Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. 37

A Test Passed, a Future in the Balance

How the country interprets the 2020 election will, in many respects, shape the future of U.S. democracy. The electoral system confronted and passed its most severe test in recent memory. Any fair appraisal would focus on the heroism of election officials, civil society actors, and voters, who turned out in record numbers despite the threat of a pandemic. It would lead to renewed attention to the needs of election officials and the changing expectations of voters who increasingly seek flexibility in how they vote.

That legacy is far from guaranteed, however. The doubt cast on all aspects of the electoral process, from voting machines to ballot dropboxes to mail balloting, threatens Americans’ faith in the machinery of democracy and in those who dedicate their lives to administering it. On the receiving end of hate mail and death threats, large numbers of officials who administered the 2020 election are anticipating retirement, citing the political pressures of the job as a primary reason. 38  It remains to be seen who will replace these veterans, given the pressure, low pay, threats, and lack of support from political leaders.

One consequence of the election may be a leadership crisis in election administration, as exhausted and frustrated officials step down and state and local governments struggle to find replacements who are equally dedicated to tireless and fair implementation of election laws. An even worse future will be in store if the next generation of election officials who step forward do so out of a conviction that the 2020 election was fundamentally flawed.

For longtime observers of election administration and law, the 2020  [End Page 174]  election offers a number of obvious lessons that should demand immediate attention in state capitals and Washington, while the memory of the election is fresh. In particular, we stress the needs to fund election administration sufficiently, to clarify emergency legislation relating to elections, to cement ties between election officials and social-media outlets for communicating with voters, to enact comprehensive postelection-auditing programs, to develop workable observation procedures, and to acknowledge fully the critical role that the Postal Service plays in conducting elections. Other obvious issues that need attention include regularizing the use of drop-off locations for mail ballots, requiring greater use of the internet to track absentee ballots and manage mail-ballot transactions, establishing uniform standards for curing absentee-ballot defects, reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 to clarify the procedures for resolving disputes over Electoral College votes, and making election day a school holiday. 39

Instead, the motivating memory driving much election-administration lawmaking is amplified through a continued barrage of false claims about the election. As state legislatures convene and begin their work, efforts are mounting to restrict absentee voting—by instituting heightened identification requirements, by shortening the period during which such ballots can be requested, or by eliminating no-excuse absentee voting. By the end of March 2021, state legislatures had seen the filing of at least 3,914 bills dealing with election administration, more than half of them addressing absentee or mail voting. 40  While some of these bills are earnest attempts to adapt what was learned from the 2020 election to future mail-ballot policy, in most states these bills will likely provoke heated partisan debates in which grievances from the election will be relitigated. The overattention to mail voting to the neglect of the other pressing issues that arose during the election will result in a lost opportunity to improve the functioning of the election-administration system.

As the United States navigates its way forward, the stakes could not be higher. The 2020 election demonstrated how false claims about election fraud can lead to deadly results. At the same time, the election also demonstrated the resilience of U.S. voters and election administrators. The open question at this point is whether, when we look back on 2020, we will see it as a turning point in strengthening the mechanics of voting, or as the moment when a new generation of violent voter suppression began.

The authors would like to thank Zahavah Levine, Chelsey Davidson, Alexandra Taylor, Tom Westphal, Claire De Soi, and the entire team at the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project for their research assistance.

1.  For a list of primary-date changes see “2020 State Primary Election Dates,” National Conference of State Legislatures, 3 November 2020,  www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/2020-state-primary-election-dates.aspx .

2.  For a complete description of the Wisconsin primary, which is only summarized here, see Grace Scullion et al., “Wisconsin’s 2020 Primary in the Wake of COVID-19,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, 30 June 2020,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-06/Wisconsin%E2%80%99s%202020%20Primary%20in%20the%20Wake%20of%20COVID-19.pdf .

3.  See John Curiel and Angelo Dagonel, “Wisconsin Election Analysis,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, 6 August 2020,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/Wisconsin%20Election%20Analysis%20Version%202.pdf .

4.  The exceptions were California, which was already transitioning to a quasi–vote-by-mail system in most counties; Florida, which has a flexible vote-by-mail system that swung into play during its March 17 primary; and Michigan, where voters had in 2018 passed a referendum providing no-excuse absentee voting.

5.  Pam Fessler and Elena Moore, “More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected in 2020, Far Outpacing 2016,” Hawai’i Public Radio, 21 August 2020,  www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/more-550000-primary-absentee-ballots-rejected-2020-faroutpacing-2016#stream/0 .

6.  Kevin DeLuca, “Georgia Primary Election Analysis,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, 15 September 2020,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-10/georgia_election_analysis_memo.pdf .

7.  Blair Read, “North Carolina Election Analysis,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, 19 July 2020,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-08/North%20Carolina%20Memo%281%29.pdf .

8.  Carl Campanile, Nolan Hicks, and Bernadette Hogan, “Over 80,000 Mail-in Ballots Disqualified in NYC Primary Mess,”  New York Post , 5 August 2020.

9.  “Voting Laws Roundup 2020,” Brennan Center for Justice, 8 December 2020,  www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-2020-0 ; “Changes to Election Dates, Procedures, and Administration in Response to the Coronavirus (Covid-19) Pandemic, 2020,” Ballotpedia, 19 November 2020,  https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_to_election_dates,_procedures,_and_administration_in_response_to_the_coronavirus_(COVID-19)_pandemic,_2020 .

10.  Connor Clerkin et al., “Mail Voting Litigation During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project, 29 October 2020,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/Mail_Voting_Litigation.pdf .

11.  H.R. 748, CARES Act, Public Law 116-136.

12.  Nicholas Riccardi, “Mark Zuckerberg Donates $100M More to Help Election Offices,” Associated Press, 13 October 2020.

13.  “NBA Arenas and Facilities Being Used for 2020 Election,” NBA.com,  www.nba.com/nba-arenas-polling-place-voting-center-2020-election ; Alex Tausanovitch, Sarah Bonk, and Richard Eidlin, “17 Ways Companies Can Help Americans Vote Safely,” Center for American Progress, 9 September 2020,  www.americanprogress.org/issues/democracy/reports/2020/09/09/490167/17-ways-companies-can-help-americans-vote-safely .

14.  “Google Civic Information API,” Google,  https://developers.google.com/civic-information .

15.  “Voting Information Center,” Facebook,  www.facebook.com/votinginformation-center .

16.  “A Look at Facebook and U.S. 2020 Elections,” Facebook, December 2020,  https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/US-2020-Elections-Report.pdf .

17.  “Voter Turnout Data,” United States Elections Project,  www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout-data .

18. The findings discussed in this paragraph are based on multivariate regression analysis available from the authors upon request.

19.  Data on voting-mode usage from 1996 to 2016 come from various years of the U.S. Census Bureau’s  Voting and Registration Supplement . Statistics from 2020 were calculated from responses to the Survey of the Performance of American Elections (SPAE).

20.  Undertaken by MIT every presidential-election year since 2008, the SPAE is a post-election survey that is meant to gauge the experience of voters in the most recent presidential election. The survey is designed to allow comparisons across states. In 2020, the sample size was 10,800 respondents. In every state, at least two-hundred interviews took place.

21.  The rate of mail-ballot usage among voters in states that mailed an application to all registered voters was virtually identical (48.8 percent) to the rate among voters in states that did not (47.6 percent).

22.  The statistical analysis referenced here is available from the authors upon request.

23.  Charles H. Stewart III, “Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail,”  Harvard Data Science Review  2.4 (Fall 2020),  https://doi.org/10.1162/99608f92.6c591bd4 .

24.  “The Election Administration and Voting Survey: 2016 Comprehensive Report—A Report to the 115 th  Congress,” U.S. Election Assistance Commission,  www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2016_EAVS_Comprehensive_Report.pdf .

25.  This settlement was challenged by Republican legislative leaders, but a 5–3 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it. See Christopher Middleton, “North Carolina: 2020 Election Policies and Practices,” Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project,  https://healthyelections.org/sites/default/files/2020-11/northcarolina-110220.pdf .

26.  Nathaniel Rakich, “Why So Few Absentee Ballots Were Rejected in 2020,”  FiveThirtyEight , 17 February 2021,  https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-few-absentee-ballots-were-rejected-in-2020 .

27.  “Election Results, 2020: Analysis of Rejected Ballots,” Ballotpedia, 10 February 2021,  https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_rejected_ballots .

28.  “November 3, 2020 Election Data Report,” Wisconsin Elections Commission, 3 February 2021,  https://elections.wi.gov/sites/elections.wi.gov/files/2021-01/D.%20November%202020%20Election%20Data%20Report.pdf .

29.  Here we include ballots recorded as arriving after November 3, because the bulk of ballots rejected on account of signature problems are recorded as arriving after that date. This fact, and other details in the state absentee file, suggest that when recording these ballots, counties regularly entered the date on which they were rejected than the date on which they were received.

30.  In a poll that the Pew Research Center took in August, before any states had begun distributing mail ballots, 60 percent of Trump supporters and 23 percent of Biden supporters said that they intended to vote on election day. African Americans were the demographic group most likely to express a preference for voting early and in person. See “Views of the 2020 Campaign and Voting in November,” Pew Research Center, 13 August 2020,  www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/08/13/views-of-the-2020-campaign-and-voting-in-november .

31.  Cameron Joseph and Robert Arthur, “The U.S. Eliminated Nearly 21,000 Election Day Polling Locations for 2020,”  VICE News , 22 October 2020,  www.vice.com/en/article/pkdenn/the-us-eliminated-nearly-21000-election-day-polling-locations-for-2020 . The authors thank Cameron Joseph for sharing the data that formed the basis of this report.

32.  Charles Stewart III, “How We Voted in 2020: A First Look at the Survey of the Performance of American Elections,” MIT Election Data and Science Lab, 15 December 2020,  http://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2020-12/How-we-voted-in-2020-v01.pdf .

33.  “The American Voting Experience: Report and Recommendations of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration,” U.S. Presidential Commission on Election Administration, January 2014,  http://web.mit.edu/supportthevoter/www/files/2014/01/Amer-Voting-Exper-final-draft-01-09-14-508.pdf .

34.  Michael W. Sances and Charles Stewart III, “Partisanship and Confidence in the Vote Count: Evidence from U.S. National Elections Since 2000,”  Electoral Studies  40 (December 2015): 176–88; Betsy Sinclair, Stephen S. Smith, and Patrick D. Tucker, “‘It’s Largely a Rigged System’: Voter Confidence and the Winner Effect in 2016,”  Political Research Quarterly  71 (December 2018): 854–68.

35.  The method is this: First, calculate the gap in confidence (as expressed  before  the election) between supporters of the candidate who would go on to win and supporters of the candidate who would go on to lose. This is the preelection difference. Second, calculate the same gap after the election. This is the postelection difference. Third, calculate the difference-in-differences, which is simply the postelection difference minus the preelection difference. In 2020, for instance, the average preelection gap on the question about one’s own vote was 11 points (Democrats were more confident), while the average postelection gap was 52 points. The difference between the two was 41 points, which is the estimate reported in this paragraph. (All figures given in this note are rounded.)

36.  This point is confirmed by a simple multiple regression in which we add the percentage of ballots cast by mail to the lines fit in the two figures. Among Republicans in states that Trump lost, each percentage-point increase in the use of mail ballots decreased state-level confidence by 0.239 points; in states that Trump won, the corresponding coefficient is 0.002 points. The former effect is significant at  p  < 0.026; the latter as a  p -value of 0.967.

37.  “Voting Laws Roundup: February 2021,” Brennan Center for Justice, 8 February 2021,  www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-laws-roundup-february-2021 .

38.  Fredreka Schouten and Kelly Mena, “High-Profile Election Officials Leave Posts After a Tumultuous 2020,” CNN, 19 February 2021,  www.cnn.com/2021/02/19/politics/election-officials-lose-and-leave-jobs/index.html . See also Marie Albiges and Tom Lisi, “Pa. Election Officials Are Burnt out and Leaving Their Jobs After 2020 ‘Nightmare,'”  Philadelphia Inquirer , 21 December 2020,  www.inquirer.com/politics/election/spl/pennsylvania-election-2020-officials-retiring-nightmare-20201221.html .

39.  Nathaniel Persily and Charles Stewart III, “A 12-Step Rehabilitation Program for American Election Administration,”  Lawfare , 27 January 2021,  www.lawfareblog.com/12-step-rehabilitation-program-american-election-administration .

40.  National Conference of State Legislatures, State Elections Legislation Database,  www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/elections-legislation-database.aspx .

Image Credit: Trevor Bexon/Shutterstock.com

Further Reading

Volume 23, Issue 2

Discovering the “State-Nation”

• Ashutosh Varshney

A review of Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies by Alfred Stepan, Juan J. Linz, and Yogendra Yadav.

Volume 9, Issue 4

George Washington and the Founding of Democracy

• Seymour Martin Lipset

Read the full essay here .

Volume 12, Issue 2

Revisiting Florida 2000: Recommendations for Reform

• Richard G. Smolka

The biggest moments from Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's first — and maybe only — debate

• Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are debating for the first — and maybe only — time in Philadelphia.
• It's the highest-stakes moment of the presidential campaign yet.

Here are the biggest takeaways from the debate so far.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump met for their first debate on Tuesday night.

The high-stakes face-off, taking place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, may be the two candidates' only debate of the election — they have not yet agreed to meet for a second time.

Kamala Harris made a point to shake hands with Trump

For the first time since 2016, the two presidential candidates shook hands on the debate stage.

It was Harris who made the first move, crossing the stage toward Trump to greet him at the outside of the debate.

"Kamala Harris, good to debate with you," the vice president could be heard saying.

Harris often sneered at Trump as he spoke

Despite the Harris campaign's best efforts , each candidate's microphone remained muted while the other was speaking. But that doesn't mean that the Vice President didn't communicate with viewers as Trump spoke.

Harris could often be seen on the split-screen staring over toward Trump with a bewildered look, narrowing her eyes and shaking her head at times. When Trump dubbed her a Marxist, she even appeared to laugh, placing her hand on her chin.

That's a choice, given the performative aspects of a high-stakes presidential debate. Harris is betting that showing active disdain for Trump will play well with viewers.

Harris successfully baited Trump over his rallies

Roughly 25 minutes into the debate, Harris said something unusual: She urged viewers to attend one of Trump's rallies, noting that he often speaks of fictional characters while claiming that attendees often leave early. That visibly angered Trump.

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"People don't go to her rallies, there's no reason to go," Trump said, claiming that Harris pays people to attend her rallies. "People don't leave my rallies."

From that moment on, Trump's tone took a noticeable turn, with more frequent yelling and hyperbole.

Trump refused to say whether he would veto a national abortion ban

One of the most intense exchanges of the debate was over abortion, when Harris delivered intense remarks on the consequences of state-level abortion bans.

Trump insisted that he would not sign a national abortion ban, saying that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was sufficient. But when Trump was pressed on whether he would veto such a ban, he repeatedly declined to say, despite Sen. JD Vance declaring he would do so in a recent interview.

Trump blamed Democrats for the assassination attempt

During a heated exchange over Trump's legal cases, the former president went where hasn't quite gone before, seemingly blaming Democrats for Thomas Matthew Crooks ' attempt to assassinate him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

"I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me," Trump said.

Trump previously suggested as much as much at a rally in Atlanta."Remember the words they use: 'They are a threat to democracy,'" Trump said at the rally, according to the Washington Post. "I think I got shot because of that, okay?"

Harris attacked Trump over his election denialism

Democrats have long pointed to Trump's criticism of the 2020 election process to argue that his reelection would be a threat to democracy — a theme long that had repeatedly been pressed by President Joe Biden.

Harris took it a step forward and poked at Trump over his 2020 election loss as she sought to make the case that his conduct on January 6, 2021, was unworthy of a commander in chief.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let's be clear about that, and clearly he has had a very difficult time processing that," the vice president said. "But we cannot afford to have a President of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in the street and fair elections."

Harris made it clear to Trump that she's his opponent — and not Biden

Trump repeatedly invoked Biden during the debate, arguing that his onetime rival — who stepped aside as the presumptive nominee in July — was pushed out of the presidential race "like a dog."

The former president since Biden's withdrawal has said that the incumbent president was treated unfairly by Democrats and has frequently brought up the current commander-in-chief at his campaign rallies.

But on Tuesday night, Harris emphatically told Trump that she was his opponent — and not the retiring president.

"First of all it is important to remind the former president, you're not running against Joe Biden, you are running against me," she said.

Harris told Trump that Putin is "a dictator who would eat you for lunch"

During an exchange over the war in Ukraine, Trump insisted that he hoped to see the war ended via a "deal," declining to explicitly say that he wanted a Ukrainian victory.

"I want the war to stop," Trump said. "I want to save lives."

When it was Harris' turn, she went for the jugular as she argued that if Russian President Vladimir Putin were to succeed in his invasion of Ukraine, he would seek to invade Poland next. And she brought it back toward American politics.

"Why don't you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up, for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch?" Harris said.

Watch: Can Kamala Harris win over Democrats after Joe Biden drops out of 2024 presidential election?

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This November, Americans are casting their ballot amid turmoil and uncertainty: a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic; a summer of civil unrest and a racial reckoning; disinformation and conspiracy theories muddying the media landscape; an economy rebounding in spurts; record-shattering weather and climate disasters. 

Stanford research intersects with many of these issues that are troubling the nation and the world at large. From across the social and political sciences, humanities, science and medicine, scholars are applying their expertise to better understand how people, policy and democratic processes can come together to address them. 

As Stanford political scientist Condoleezza Rice recently pointed out , while democracy “is hard,” it inspires change in a way that aligns itself to human dignity.

“I think if each and every one of us recognizes that democracy is not a spectator sport and that you have to commit yourself to being willing to play your own role, then the aggregated roles will come to mean something,” added Rice, director of Stanford’s Hoover Institution , who spoke at a session of Democracy Matters: Challenges Facing Democracy in the U.S ., an ongoing webinar series that highlights challenges to democracy in the U.S. and around the world.

Here, Stanford scholars share what democracy and political change look like in the U.S. today, how to understand the attitudes of the American electorate, and the challenges posed to democratic processes, from the impact of the pandemic to political messaging.

Adapting policies that respond to today’s challenges

Through their research and studies, Stanford scholars have closely examined public policies and regulations related to issues that are being debated on the campaign trail – from how to deal with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic to the devastating consequences of wildfires, for example. As their research shows, these are complex problems that require coordinated responses.

For example, when it comes to implementing policy to mitigate the heightened risk of wildfires in the American West, Stanford Law Professor Deborah Sivas says that implementing change requires balancing incentives. 

“Unfortunately, we really don’t have the right combination of public and private incentives and regulations – carrots and sticks, if you will – in place. We are geared up to fight wildfires like we fight wars, with heavy machinery and manpower,” said Sivas , director of Stanford’s Environmental Law Clinic and the Environmental and Natural Resources Law and Policy Program.  

Similarly, dealing with the economic consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic will also demand a coordinated approach. “Minimizing the damage requires a similar combination of policies: better coordinating disease containment to minimize lost production, identifying critical links in production chains and ensuring that they don’t break and cause cascading failures of companies, and stepping in to fill the gap in lending caused by the growing credit freeze,” said Stanford economist Matthew Jackson .

Amid these extraordinary times of unprecedented global change, here is how Stanford scholarship might inform some of the problems facing the country and the challenges surrounding governance and policymaking today.

No matter who wins the 2020 election, governing will be difficult

Whoever wins the U.S. 2020 election will need to find ways to govern over a persisting political divide and get back to the art of politics, say Stanford scholars Bruce Cain and Hakeem Jefferson.

Cultivating civic engagement in a COVID-19 world

When the pandemic hit, StanfordVotes had to rapidly change its campaign to get out the student vote. Building a digitally-connected community has been a huge part of that shift.

Applying human-centered design to voting places

Stanford’s d.school has partnered with the Healthy Elections Project, a joint collaboration with scholars at Stanford and MIT, to help election officials address some of the unprecedented challenges the pandemic poses to November’s general election.

Examining effects, challenges of mail-in voting

Mail-in voting has come under partisan scrutiny, but according to Stanford research, it does not appear to benefit one political party over the other. However, challenges to mail-in and absentee voting remain as states and voters make a shift this November.

U.S. democracy facing historic crisis

A Stanford political scientist’s new book makes the case for major governmental reforms to save U.S. democracy.

Prior contested elections in U.S. offer cautionary tale

A willingness to concede and compromise has helped resolve past election disputes, but that option may not be available this year, Stanford historian Jonathan Gienapp says.

Potential for congressional action on climate change

The political landscape has changed, potentially opening a window for meaningful policies to combat global warming. Stanford experts discuss opportunities and prospects for change.

Democracy and prosperity require uncorrupted governments

We don’t have to choose between capitalism and socialism. What we need is a system in which corporations can thrive without distorting the economy – or democracy itself.

Coordinated response needed to fight coronavirus pandemic

Without coordination within and across countries, the novel coronavirus will endlessly reemerge, with devastating consequences for public health and the global economy, says Stanford scholar Matthew Jackson.

How pandemics catalyze social and economic change

Throughout recorded history, pandemics have been effective levelers of social and economic inequality – but that might not be the outcome this time around, says Stanford historian Walter Scheidel.

Living with fires: Mitigating risks with law and environmental policy

Stanford Law Professor Deborah Sivas discusses the effects of climate on fires in California and policy changes that might lessen their danger on residents.

Why politicians have incentives to let outdated policies linger

Real-world disruptions inevitably lead to “policy decay,” but corrections are hard to come by.

Is this the moment for universal basic income?

Stanford historian Jennifer Burns discusses how universal basic income could become a major discussion point in Washington, D.C., as policymakers respond to the economic blow of the coronavirus pandemic.

Stanford students carry on the legacy of suffragists, 100 years later

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in the United States, Stanford highlights some of the women students who are continuing the hard work of the suffragists who came before them.

Stanford faculty address complex challenges to U.S. democracy

In the run-up to the November election, Stanford faculty from across campus will come together for Democracy Matters , a forum to discuss current issues affecting U.S. democracy.

Understanding the American electorate and their attitudes

As millions of Americans prepare to cast their ballots in November’s election, some Stanford researchers have examined what inspires voters and why they might vote a certain way. 

According to research by Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden , for example, to understand how Americans vote, one needs to look at where they live. His research shows that ever since President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s, the Democratic Party has evolved to become an almost exclusively urban party. The geographic distribution of Democrats and Republicans has turned political campaigns into high-stakes battles in which the parties pit urban against rural interests, Rodden said .

Meanwhile, Sarah A. Soule at Stanford Graduate School of Business found that political protests have the power to influence the final outcome of an election. Her research revealed that on both sides of the political spectrum, protest mobilizes political engagement by raising awareness of an issue to voters and educating them about a particular problem. She and her colleague, Daniel Q. Gillion at the University of Pennsylvania, also found that protest can be a cue to incumbent challengers about when to enter a race.  

“Our work suggests that citizens filter the information provided by protest through their own ideological prisms and that they use this information to inform their voting in much the same way that individuals’ level of political engagement is shaped by their social context,” Soule and Gillion wrote . 

Here is what Rodden’s and Soule’s scholarship, as well as several others, reveal about what brings voters together and what sets them apart.

Party sorting to blame for political stalemate

Political gridlock in contemporary U.S. politics can be explained by the increased sorting of the Democratic and Republican parties, says Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina.

9 things to know about election polling data

Stanford political scientist David Brady discusses the lessons pollsters learned in the 2016 election and what to know about tracking election forecasts in 2020.

How the urban-rural divide shapes elections

The geographic divide, which pits Democratic voters living mostly in cities against Republicans in exurban and rural areas, has an impact on representation and policymaking, Stanford scholar Jonathan Rodden says.

Poll shows consensus for climate policy remains strong

A new study shows that Americans overwhelmingly want a reduction in global warming and support renewable energy development. But according to the data, Americans don’t realize how many people share their beliefs.

How toxic economic trends have impacted millennials

A new report by Stanford scholars lays out the problems U.S. millennials face as a result of decades-long rising inequality. Problems they experience include rising mortality rates and increased poverty among those without college degrees.

Political parties more polarized than voters

The nation is no more politically divided than it was in the 1970s, despite how things might appear in the news. Instead, the political parties have sorted into narrow groups.

How the Great Recession influenced today’s populist movements

Stanford political scientists explain why populist messages emerged in contemporary politics and how they spurred larger political movements.

Americans’ views on taxes are surprisingly complicated

A majority favors wealth tax, but not if it would hurt the economy or increase unemployment.

Why protesters could swing the midterm elections

A new study shows that both liberal and conservative protests have had a real impact on U.S. House elections.

How Trump won the unhappiness vote

New research shows our mental well-being drives our decisions at the ballot box.

Examining the impacts of technology, media and messaging

Concerns about the impact of fake news, disinformation and misinformation across social media platforms and in news outlets are more relevant now than ever before. Even after the findings emerged from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian government efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, questions linger about vulnerabilities in the democratic process and the influence of modern technology. 

“We know more than ever before about what happened in the 2016 election. Now we need to pivot to what needs to be done to prevent it in the future – from concrete legislative acts as well as steps that online platforms can take even without legislation,” said political scientist Michael McFaul . Joined by other scholars across Stanford, McFaul has been looking at various ways to protect the integrity of American elections. 

Meanwhile, others have examined the impacts technology, media and political messaging have on the democratic process. 

“Democracy cannot function without communication,” communication scholar Jon Krosnick said. “In order for voters to make informed choices among candidates, the voters must learn about the candidates’ policy positions, track records, personalities, past experience and much more.”

Here is what some of their scholarship reveals about the current media landscape and some of the challenges technology may pose to democratic processes.

Sleuthing for misinformation about voting

Ahead of the 2020 election, Stanford students investigate the spread of mis- and disinformation online as part of their work with the Election Integrity Partnership.

Strategies to secure American elections

Stanford scholars outline a detailed strategy for how to protect the integrity of American elections – including recommendations such as requiring a paper trail of every vote cast and publishing information about a campaign’s connections with foreign nationals.

Is search media biased?

In an audit of search media results for every candidate running for federal office in the 2018 U.S. election, Stanford scholars found no evidence of political bias for or against either party.

Journalism and democracy

In a complex news environment, Stanford professors urge voters to be careful consumers of political information and to think hard about where information comes from and how it reaches them.

High school students are unequipped to spot ‘fake news’

With the 2020 presidential election approaching, new research by Stanford education scholars finds that prospective young voters are poorly equipped to evaluate the sources of online content.

In political messages, values matter more than policy

When progressive candidates talk about how their policies are aligned with values commonly associated with conservative ideals – as opposed to liberal ones – they receive greater support from conservatives and moderates.

Stanford study examines fake news and the 2016 presidential election

Fabricated stories favoring Donald Trump were shared 30 million times, but the most widely circulated hoaxes were seen by only a small fraction of Americans.

Media consolidation means less local news, more right wing slant

A new study finds conglomerates are reshaping local TV news from the top down.

Historical parallels between the press and the president

Stanford communication scholar James Hamilton looks at how presidents – past and present – have navigated relationships with the White House press corps.

Why Republican politicians pay more than Democrats for TV ads

New research shows political advertising’s hidden costs.

Media Contacts

Melissa De Witte, Stanford News Service: (650) 723-6438,  [email protected]

Lesson Plan

Oct. 29, 2020, 3 p.m.

Five memorable presidential campaigns

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Presidential Essays

George Washington was born to Mary Ball and Augustine Washington on February 22, 1732. As the third son of a middling planter, George probably should have been relegated to a footnote in a history book. Instead, he became one of the greatest figures in American history.

A series of personal losses changed the course of George’s life. His father, Augustine, died when he was eleven years old, ending any hopes of higher education. Instead, Washington spent many of his formative years under the tutelage of Lawrence, his favorite older brother. He also learned the science of surveying and began a new career with the help of their neighbors, the wealthy and powerful Fairfax family. Lawrence’s death in 1752 again changed George’s plans. He leased Mount Vernon, a plantation in northern Virginia, from Lawrence’s widow and sought a military commission, just as Lawrence had done.

Washington served as the lieutenant colonel of the Virginia regiment and led several missions out west to the Ohio Valley. On his second mission west, he participated in the murder of French forces, including a reported ambassador. In retaliation, the French surrounded Washington’s forces at Fort Necessity and compelled an unequivocal surrender. Washington signed the articles of capitulation, not knowing that he was accepting full blame for an assassination. His mission marked the start of the Seven Years’ War.

Washington then joined General Edward Braddock’s official family as an aide-de-camp. In recognition of Washington’s extraordinary bravery during Braddock’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755, Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie appointed him as the commander of the Virginia Regiment. He served with distinction until the end of 1758.

In early 1759, George entered a new chapter in his life when he married Martha Custis, a wealthy widow, and won election to the Virginia House of Burgesses. George and Martha moved to Mount Vernon and embarked on an extensive expansion and renovation of the estate. Their life with her children from her previous marriage, John Parke Custis and Martha Parke Custis, was loving and warm.

Washington’s position in the House of Burgesses took on additional importance as relations between the colonies and Great Britain deteriorated after the end of the Seven Years’ War. The British government had incurred enormous debts fighting across the globe and faced high military costs defending the new territories in North America that it had received in the peace settlement. To defray these expenses, the British Parliament passed a series of new taxation measures on its colonies, which were still much lower than those paid by citizens in England. But many colonists protested that they had already contributed once to the war effort and should not be forced to pay again, especially since they had no input in the legislative process.

Washington supported the protest measures in the House of Burgesses, and in 1774, he accepted appointment as a Virginia delegate to the First Continental Congress, where he voted for non-importation measures, such as abstaining from purchasing British goods. The following year, he returned to the Second Continental Congress after British regulars and local militia forces clashed in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. He approved Congress’s decision to create an army in June 1775 and was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army.

For the next eight years, Washington led the army, only leaving headquarters to respond to Congress’s summons. He lost more battles than he won and at times had to hold the army together with sheer will, but ultimately emerged victorious in 1783 when the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War.

Washington’s success as a commander derived from three factors. First, he never challenged civilian authority. The new nation deeply distrusted military power, and his intentional self-subordination kept him in command. Second, the soldiers and officers adored him. The soldiers’ devotion to their commander was so apparent that some congressmen rued that it was not the Continental Army, it was George Washington’s army. Finally, Washington understood that if the army survived, so too would the cause for independence. He did not have to beat the British Army, he just had to avoid complete destruction.

At the end of the war, Washington returned his commission to the Confederation Congress and resumed life as a private citizen in Virginia. In an age of dictators and despots, his voluntarily surrender of power rippled around the globe and solidified his legend. Unsurprisingly, when the state leaders began discussing government reform a few years later, they knew Washington’s participation was essential for success.

In 1786, the Virginia legislature nominated a slate of delegates to represent the state at the Constitutional Convention. Washington’s close friend, Governor Edmund Randolph, ensured that George’s name was included. In May 1787, Washington set out for Philadelphia, where he served as the president of the convention. Once the convention agreed to a draft constitution, he then worked behind the scenes to ensure ratification. Washington believed the new constitution would resolve many of the problems that had plagued the Confederation Congress, but he also knew that if the states ratified the constitution, he would once again be dragged back into public service.

On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth and requisite state to ratify the new Constitution of the United States, forcing each state to schedule elections for the new federal offices. Unsurprisingly, Washington was unanimously elected as the first president. He took the oath of office on April 30, 1789.

As the first president, Washington literally crafted the office from scratch, which was an accomplishment that cannot be overstated because every decision was an opportunity for failure. Instead, Washington set a model for restraint, prestige in office, and public service. As president, Washington also oversaw the establishment of the financial system, the restoration of the nation’s credit, the expansion of US territory (often at the expense of Native Americans), the negotiation of economic treaties with European empires, and the defense of executive authority over diplomatic and domestic affairs.

Washington set countless precedents, including the creation of the cabinet, executive privilege, state of the union addresses, and his retirement after two terms. On September 19, 1796, Washington published his Farewell Address announcing his retirement in a Philadelphia newspaper. He warned Americans to come together and reject partisan or foreign attempts to divide them, admonitions that retain their significance into the twenty-first century. He then willingly surrendered power once more.

When Washington left office, his contemporaries referred to him the father of the country. No other person could have held the Continental Army together for eight years, granted legitimacy to the Constitution Convention, or served as the first president. It is impossible to imagine the creation of the United States without him.

Yet, Washington’s life also embodies the complicated founding that shapes our society today. He owned hundreds of enslaved people and benefitted from their forced labor from the moment he was born to the day he died. His wealth, produced by slavery, made possible his decades of public service. Washington’s financial success, and that of the new nation, also depended on the violent seizure of extensive territory from Native American nations along the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi River. Washington’s life and service as the first president represents the irony contained in the nation’s founding. The United States was forged on the idea that “all men are created equal,” yet depended on the subjugation and exploitation of women and people of color.

On February 22, 1732, Mary Ball Washington gave birth to the first of her six children, a boy named George. George’s father, Augustine, had been married once before and had three older children from his previous marriage. Over the next several years, the large family moved a few times, before settling at Ferry Farm on the banks of the Rappahannock River near Fredericksburg, Virginia.

When George was eleven, his life changed radically. His father died, and George’s older brothers inherited most of Augustine’s estate, including Little Hunting Creek Plantation, which later became Mount Vernon. George inherited one of the smaller estates and ten enslaved individuals who worked the farm.

Without a large inheritance, George relied on his family and connections to make his way in the world. Unlike his older brothers, he did not have the opportunity to study at a university. He spent his teenage years learning how to manage a plantation from his mother and mastering the science of surveying with the assistance of his neighbor, Colonel William Fairfax.

In 1751, George accompanied his favorite older brother, Lawrence, on a trip to Barbados. While in the Caribbean, George came down with smallpox. He survived and left the island with lifelong immunity, but the disease probably left him unable to father children and with a firsthand conviction about the dangers of the disease.

The trip to Barbados was also formative for Washington’s future. He toured the military structures on the island and was increasingly interested in a military career. Initially, George wanted to join the British Navy, and Lawrence promised to help secure him a position. Mary, George’s mother, had strong reservations about the physical abuse her son might receive in the navy and the limited possibilities for advancement. She was probably right, as life in the navy was often brutal and short-lived.

With his dreams of naval glory dashed, Washington looked west.

Early Career

By George’s seventeenth birthday, he received his first official commission to survey Culpeper County. He had learned the skills under the supervision of Colonel William Fairfax, his neighbor and one of the leading figures in Virginia. Just a few years later, Washington had completed almost 200 surveys of more than 60,000 acres.

In 1752, George’s older brother Lawrence died, and Washington appeared to lose interest in surveying as a profession and pursued a military career instead. In October 1753, he offered his services to Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia, who planned to send an emissary to meet with the French in the Ohio Valley. The governor accepted Washington’s offer, and he headed west. Over the next few months, Washington became convinced that the French were planning a large military force to attack the British. Eager to warn Dinwiddie, George left the protection of the expedition and made his way on foot with one guide for company. After nearly drowning, freezing, and starving, he arrived in Williamsburg on January 16, 1754.

For his daring service, Washington was promoted to lieutenant colonel and ordered to raise men for an upcoming mission to drive the French out of the Ohio Valley. On his way to the Monongahela River, Washington encountered a French scouting party and determined that they had to be stopped before they revealed his location. He met up with Tanacharison, a local Native American chief, and they made their way to a French camp at Jumonville Glen. According to Washington’s later retelling of the events, when Washington intended to accept the French surrender, the Native American forces attacked and scalped many French soldiers. During the attack, the French commander, Sieur de Jumonville, was killed.

After the attack, Washington hastily built a small defensive enclosure he named Fort Necessity. On July 3, 1754, French forces surrounded the fort, and by the end of the day, Washington asked for terms of surrender. The French allowed the British forces to leave the fort in return for admitting to the assassination of Jumonville, an official ambassador. The terms were written in French, which Washington could not read. Washington never accepted this explanation, insisting that the French forces were spies and that the terms were unclear. The attack marked the start of the Seven Years’ War.

After the debacle at Jumonville, Washington joined Brigadier General Edward Braddock’s official family as an aide-de-camp. He accompanied Braddock on his march out west to capture the French Fort Duquesne (now Pittsburgh). French and Native American forces attacked the British line, killing most of the British officers and inflicting horrific casualties during the Battle of Monongahela. Washington won acclaim and promotion for his courage under fire and his efforts to manage an unruly retreat. For the next several years, he served as commander of the Virginia colonial forces before returning his commission at the end of 1758.

Mount Vernon

After leaving the military, Washington had a new position, a new fiancé, and a new home that demanded his attention. He won election to the Virginia House of Burgesses and took his seat in February 1759—one month after his wedding to the wealthy widow Martha Custis. The marriage was advantageous for George’s prospects, but also appears to have developed into a love match, or an amiable partnership at the very least. They wrote and spoke of each other with affection and desired each other’s company.

After their wedding, George and Martha resided at his plantation, Mount Vernon, which he had inherited when Lawrence’s widow died in 1761. Washington had grand plans for his new endeavors as a plantation owner. Over the previous several years, he had purchased dozens of enslaved individuals, and Martha brought 84 of the 300 enslaved laborers she owned to Mount Vernon, which added more manpower for the house and fields. Washington planned to expand the land and the house and revolutionize the farming practices. He began by purchasing lands surrounding the original 3,000 acres of the Mount Vernon estate, starting in 1757. By the time of his death, he owned nearly 8,000 acres.

Washington also quadrupled the size of the original house, from a one-and-a-half story, four-room house, to a 11,000-square-foot mansion, and he updated all the finishings and furnishings. Martha’s wealth funded the improvements, and she likely contributed to the décor and design decisions.

As Washington expanded his home to reflect his elite status, he also reformed his farm’s operations. He was one of the earliest plantation owners to recognize that tobacco damaged the soil. Spurred on by the falling prices, Washington ordered his enslaved laborers to switch over to grains, and he experimented with the latest techniques of fertilization and crop rotation methods.

Although Washington employed overseers to monitor the daily work of the enslaved workers in the field, he also assumed an active role in plantation supervision. He demanded regular reports of worker productivity and rode a large loop on horseback every day to check on the far corners of his estate.

Revolutionary War

Despite the Washingtons’ wealth, they found themselves in debt to British merchants due to the mercantilist system which governed the British Empire. The British government forced colonies to buy from and sell to British merchants, and the distance across the Atlantic Ocean exacerbated the inequalities within the system. For example, Washington sent his tobacco to a British merchant, who offered a low price. But by then, the tobacco was already in port, and Washington had no leverage. Similarly, he ordered fine goods like clothes, shoes, and jewelry from retailers in London, who supplied the goods and the bill. Again, Washington was forced to accept their prices. Washington was very sensitive about his status and honor and chafed at his inferior economic position.

These tensions boiled over when the British Parliament passed a series of taxation measures to pay down the debt accrued during the Seven Years’ War. From the British perspective, they had spent a fortune defending the colonies from the French. They believed that the colonists should contribute to these expenses. Additionally, colonists’ taxes were quite low—a fraction of what citizens in England paid.

But many colonists saw the taxes as confirmation that Britons viewed them as second-class citizens. The colonists had contributed to their own defense during the Seven Years’ War, and now Parliament demanded they contribute yet again.

Washington was not known for his oratory skills, but he encouraged the House of Burgesses to resist the taxation measures, and he personally abstained from purchasing British goods as part of a non-importation agreement. Colonists in Massachusetts went one step further. On December 16, 1773, a group of colonists boarded ships carrying East India Tea and dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbor. In retaliation, the British Parliament passed the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts. The acts closed the port of Boston and revoked self-government in Massachusetts until the colony paid restitution for the damaged tea.

These extreme measures appeared to punish the entire colony for the actions of a few unruly rebels, and they reminded the colonies that they were subjected to the whims of the British government. To formulate a unified response, the colonies agreed to send representatives to a Continental Congress. As one of the first delegates from Virginia, Washington agreed to form a Continental Association to manage communication between the colonies about the economic boycott of British goods. The delegates also crafted a petition to the king, imploring him to repeal the Intolerable Acts.

While the colonists waited for a response from the king, which never arrived, events in New England once against accelerated the conflict. In April 1775, British soldiers and local patriot militia clashed in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts. The war had officially begun.

Commander-in-Chief

On June 14, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army. The next day, Thomas Johnson of Maryland nominated Washington as the first Commander-in-Chief. The delegates supported Washington’s nomination because he was one of the most experienced military commanders in the colonies. But his loyalty was also unquestioned, as he was born in North America and had never served in the British Army. Plus, he was a Virginian. Cooperation and unity among the colonies were required if they were going to win the war. Virginians were from the largest state and more likely to support the cause and the army if one of their own was at the helm.

Although Washington accepted the commission with the expected humility, he also welcomed the command. His choice to wear a uniform to the convention was no accident. After accepting the position, he wrote to Martha, “I could not think of departing from [Philadelphia] without dropping you a line; especially as I do not know whether it may be in my power to write again… I retain an unalterable affection for you, which neither time or distance can change.” He then made his way to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to meet the troops already fighting the war against the British.

Washington was sorely disappointed by the army that greeted him upon his arrival at headquarters. The troops were disorganized, the conditions unsanitary, discipline was in short supply, and the officers were squabbling amongst themselves over their titles. His first course of action was to enforce some semblance of order on the amateur army.

He then turned his attention to the stalemate in Boston. The Americans forces had settled in defensive positions on the hills surrounding Boston, while the British forces were holed up in Boston. Washington sent Henry Knox, one of his favorite generals, to retrieve recently captured artillery from Fort Ticonderoga. Once Knox completed the mission, Washington ordered his forces to install the artillery overlooking the Boston Harbor—in secret, in the dead of night. General Thomas Gage, the British commander, abandoned Boston once he discovered his navy was in the line of fire.

The American victory at Boston validated the cause for independence and proved the Battles of Lexington and Concord were not a fluke. But by the end of 1776, American spirits were suffering. Washington planned one last-ditch effort to boost morale. Many of his troops’ enlistments were about to expire, and nearly half of his army would disappear on January 1. Additionally, Washington knew the fledgling nation needed an emotional victory before the army entered winter camp.

Under the cover of night on Christmas, Washington and the ragged American forces crossed the Delaware River, attacking and defeating the British troops in Trenton, New Jersey. A few days later, General Charles Cornwallis counterattacked, but Washington escaped and marched on British reinforcements at Princeton. With the element of surprise, the Continental Army won back-to-back victories. Although the battles did not alter the course of the war, they offered powerful encouragement to a disheartened people.

Although Washington won important battles, such as Boston, Trenton, and Princeton, he lost more. The British forced him to abandon forts, artillery, and eventually New York City during the summer of 1776. The following year, the British sailed south and captured Philadelphia, forcing Congress to flee west. After enjoying the comforts and entertainment the city had to offer, the British Army abandoned Philadelphia. As they marched back to New York in 1778, Washington attacked the rear of the British line and was defeated at the Battle of Monmouth.

Without the benefit of a navy, Washington could not have held New York City or Philadelphia indefinitely, but strategic errors exacerbated his losses. In New York, he divided his forces and failed to properly reconnoiter the terrain. In Philadelphia and at the Battle of Monmouth, he devised battle plans too complicated for his army to execute.

Despite the mounting losses, the army survived, thanks to Washington’s other leadership strengths. He might not have been a great tactician, but he was a brilliant manager. From the beginning of Washington’s command, he understood his own limitations and surrounded himself with talented subordinates who brought expertise and experience that supplemented his own. He then cultivated good relationships and an esprit de corps among his troops.

Washington remained with the army for the duration of the war and never moved into comfortable winter quarters until his troops had their lodgings established. He refused a salary for the duration of the war and lobbied Congress for the army’s salary and pensions. The troops adored Washington for his commitment to them. Washington also cultivated a family atmosphere every winter. At his insistence, Martha and many of the officers’ wives joined them at winter quarters, where they hosted holiday balls and riding parties to foster a personal connection.

Foreign allies proved to be a critical part of the officer corps. Foreign officers, like Baron von Steuben, offered their expertise on drilling and helped whip the Continental Army into a sophisticated fighting force, while the Marquis de Lafayette brought much-needed funds and served as a diplomatic link to France.

Lafayette’s effective lobbying helped bring the French into the war, which made the conflict an international one and forced British forces to defend the mainland, as well as their holdings in the far east and the Caribbean. No longer could they direct their undivided attention toward their wayward North American colonies.

Washington also showed a willingness to evolve—how he thought about the army, his tactics, and his strategy. From almost the very beginning, Washington struggled to feed, clothe, and arm his forces, let alone find enough men to serve. To meet the demand, many northern states encouraged the enlistment of free and enslaved Black Americans, and many offered freedom in return for service for the duration of the war. Concerns about slave uprisings stymied similar measures in the South, but even southern states allowed free Black Americans to serve toward the end of the war. Black Americans also played an oversized role in the first American Navy, including 150 Black men in Virginia alone.

Initially, Washington opposed enlisting Black men as soldiers. But the shortage of soldiers forced him to reconsider this position, and the valor of Black troops challenged many of Washington’s ideas about race. Prior to the war, Washington showed little compunction about buying and selling enslaved individuals. But as the war progressed, he began to consider the injustices of slavery and the possibility of free Black Americans. After the war, he committed to keeping families together on his plantation and refused to buy or sell additional individuals. This evolution would continue over the course of his presidency and his retirement.

Washington also showed flexibility when it came to the direction of the war. By 1780, the war in the North had settled into a stalemate, and King George III and his ministers believed that the southern population remained loyal to the crown and hoped that Loyalist militias would flock to support a British attack. From December 1778 to the fall of 1781, the British Navy captured Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, laid waste to ports along the Virginia coast, and invaded deep into the Virginia countryside.

Victory at Yorktown

Washington sent his best general, Nathanael Greene, to conduct a guerilla-style campaign against General Charles Cornwallis in the South. While Cornwallis won many of the skirmishes, Greene extracted a heavy cost and forced Cornwallis to retreat from North Carolina to Virginia to recoup his losses. Cornwallis made camp on the tip of a peninsula, near Yorktown, and waited for the British Navy to arrive with supplies and troops from General Henry Clinton in New York.

While Washington proposed recapturing New York City, the French commanders had other ideas. The French army commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, reported to Washington, but in name only. Washington needed the French Navy, led by the Comte de Grasse, to launch a successful attack on a British position. Both de Grasse and Rochambeau preferred to take on the British in the Chesapeake Bay.

While the combined Franco-American forces marched south, the French fleet sailed from the Caribbean and drove the British Navy from the Chesapeake Bay. The French naval victory at the Battle of the Chesapeake closed off Cornwallis’s means of escape and the ability to supply his forces by water. On September 14, Washington arrived in Williamsburg, Virginia. Over the next several weeks, the French and American artilleries bombarded the British position, while the armies dug trenches closer and closer to the British lines. Finally, on October 17, a white handkerchief of surrender flew over the British wall.

After the overwhelming victory at Yorktown, Washington returned with his army to New York, where they set up headquarters just out of reach of the British, who were still holed up in the city. Although the fighting in North America had mostly stopped, Washington remained on guard against British trickery. He also worked to keep boredom at bay amongst the troops, as a restless and bored army could prove dangerous.

Washington’s concerns came to fruition in early 1783, when a group of officers conspired to challenge the Confederation Congress, an event which became known as the Newburgh Conspiracy. Most soldiers, both infantry troops and officers, were owed months, if not years, of back pay. They worried that Congress might attempt to disband the army without paying its debts when the war came to an end. Washington rushed to defuse the tensions by convening a gathering, where he delivered an address and shared a letter of support from Congress. To read the text, he pulled out his glasses and said to his men, “Gentleman, you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.” This theatrical tug on the soldiers’ heartstrings diffused any plot to overthrow the civilian government.

Six months later, American diplomats signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War and securing independence for the colonies from Great Britain. In December 1783, Washington traveled to Annapolis, Maryland, and returned his commission to Congress. In the age of dictators, military despots, and monarchs, his voluntary surrender of power was extraordinary.

The American victory in the war was the product of three critical factors. First, Washington quickly grasped that if the army survived, so too would the cause for independence. Second, the American colonies were too large and dispersed to invade and subdue, especially because Britain wanted to wage a war for hearts and minds, but they could not retain good relations with the colonists and suppress a rebellion through force. Finally, French participation forced Britain to wage a war on several fronts, stretching its supply chains across the globe.

The United States declared itself independent in July 1776, but the Treaty of Paris transformed that imagined independence into a reality. Congress had incurred considerable debt equipping and feeding the army, purchasing ammunition, and waging war. Now that the fighting was complete, that debt was due. The coffers were empty however, and the economy was in shambles.

European empires and Native American nations lingered in the wings, eager to take advantage of US weakness. Spain denied American ships access to the Mississippi River, which farmers depended on to transport their goods for sale. British forces encouraged Native American nations to defend their homelands from white encroachment and supplied funds and arms for these attacks.

Westerners demanded Congress address their security and economic needs, which placed Congress in a bit of a bind. People in the eastern regions did not share the same concerns, and they refused to pay for an army to defend the western border when settlers were responsible for instigating conflict with Native American nations. They also preferred Congress focus on negotiating treaties that would open Caribbean and European ports to Americans merchants, rather than the Mississippi River. As tensions between different regions increased, European empires encouraged troublemakers to consider seceding from the new country and returning to their protection.

Congress had no ability to address any of these rising tensions because it had no money to pay its existing debts, fund an army to protect western settlements, or pay for diplomacy. The Articles of Confederation did not authorize Congress to collect taxes. Congress could approve requisitions, basically requests, but it had no enforcement power, making the requests optional. By the mid-1780s, the states ignored the requisitions and focused on paying down their own debts instead.

Washington had long foreseen that congressional limitations would be a problem. As he prepared to return his commission in 1783, he wrote a circular to the governors of the states urging them to adopt the requisite reforms to empower Congress to govern. The states did not heed his warning. Even if some states favored reform, it was not an option. Amending the Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent—which states refused to give.

Shays' Rebellion

In 1786, Congress’s impotency came to a head when a group of farmers, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, shut down the courts in western Massachusetts to prevent the seizure of local farms for overdue tax bills. The Massachusetts government pleaded with Congress to send troops to quell the rebellion, but Congress had no funds to pay for troops and left Massachusetts to its own devices.

The government’s inaction horrified Washington who wrote to his friend Henry Knox, “If government shrinks, or is unable to enforce its laws; fresh manœuvres will be displayed by the insurgents— anarchy & confusion must prevail.”

The revolt was crushed after wealthy Boston merchants raised a private army, but the event convinced many Americans that serious reform was needed. Accordingly, Congress sent out invitations for a convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787.

Constitutional Convention

Many leaders understood that Washington’s participation was essential to the convention’s success, and the Virginia state legislature agreed and included his name on the slate of delegates. With much reluctance, Washington departed Mount Vernon on May 9. Official quorum for the convention was reached on May 25, and the delegates elected Washington as president of the Constitutional Convention. As president, Washington attended every single session.

Several debates dominated the discussions at the Convention: the proper balance of federal power versus state power; the balance between executive versus legislative power; the balance between big versus little states; and the role of slavery in all the previous equations.

After rebelling against a king, Americans had been reluctant to create another strong centralized power. However, the Articles of Confederation had demonstrated that a weak federal government would not work either. To address these dueling motivations, the delegates agreed to give key powers to the federal government—like raising funds, organizing a national army, dictating foreign policy, and enforcing the laws—but then also included a specific clause that reserved the remaining powers to the states.

Although Congress agreed on this compromise, many “anti-Federalists,” or those opposed to stronger federal power, still worried about the potential for federal overreach. This criticism later threatened to derail ratification. In response, Madison helped pass the first ten amendments to the Constitution in 1789, known as the Bill of Rights, which guaranteed personal liberties against federal encroachment.

The second debate focused on how authority would be delegated in a strong federal government. The war experience had convinced many that Congress was too inefficient to make many decisions quickly, but a strong single executive resembled a monarchy. The delegates compromised by giving both branches important powers, as well as the ability to check each other through vetoes and impeachment.

The delegates then turned their attention to apportioning power in Congress among the states. Small states, like Delaware and Vermont, worried larger states, like Virginia and New York, would bully them. On the other hand, bigger states wanted their larger populations to provide more voting power. After months of debates, the delegates agreed to base House of Representative apportionment on population, which would give more power to larger states, but each state would receive equal representation in the Senate.

Complicating all these debates was the ever-present specter of slavery. Southerners demanded the enslaved populations in their states count toward the population numbers. While many of the northern states had larger populations and more influence in 1787, the expanding enslaved population in the South threatened to dominate the House of Representatives in the future. Yet, northerners worried if they did not compromise, southern delegates would leave the convention, ending all hope of reform. They compromised and agreed to count enslaved individuals as 3/5 of a white individual for the purpose of representation in Congress.

Even if they had wished to, the delegates could not ignore slavery. Many of the delegates brought enslaved servants to Philadelphia to prepare food, mend clothing, care for their horses, and run errands. Additionally, a large population of free and enslaved Black Americans lived and worked in Philadelphia. Even in a northern city such as Philadelphia, slavery was entwined with every aspect of life.

While the final product was not everything Washington had hoped, he wrote to his friends that he “sincerely believe[d] it is the best that could be obtained at this time.” Washington’s contributions to the convention were twofold: his presence lent the convention credibility and his support helped secure ratification of the proposed Constitution.

On September 17, the convention wrapped its proceedings and submitted the Constitution to Congress for its consideration. Washington penned a cover letter expressing his support and included his signature as an effective endorsement of the project. After returning to Mount Vernon, Washington continued his efforts. He sent copies of the Constitution to his network urging their support. When he read articles or pamphlets that argued in favor of ratification, he forwarded them to editors and encouraged their publication.

The proposed Constitution provided for a single elected executive. Everyone knew if the states ratified the Constitution, then Washington would be the first president. Americans had trusted him with enormous authority once before and believed they could do so again.

The 1788 Election

In 1788, there were no political parties or campaigns like we think of today. The only real issue was whether candidates were Federalists, meaning they had supported the Constitution, or anti-Federalists, who had opposed ratification or demanded amendments.

Between December 15 and January 10, 1789, each state cast their ballots for electors, who voted for candidates based on their personal reputations. Sixty-nine votes were cast for president; they were unanimous for George Washington.

The vice-presidential vote split between John Adams (34), John Jay (9), Robert Harrison (6), and John Rutledge (6). George Clinton was the only anti-Federalist candidate to receive votes (3).

On April 14, Washington received official confirmation from Congress that he had been elected the first President of the United States. While unsurprised at the outcome, Washington approached his inauguration with dread. He wrote to Henry Knox that he felt like a “culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”

Washington suspected that every choice he made as president would establish precedent for his successors. Because the Confederation had failed, the new federal government was the nation’s second chance, and Washington knew most nations did not get a second chance. He genuinely believed one mistake might cause the country to crumble.

Washington’s primary goal was to establish the presidency on firm footing, cultivate respect from citizens and observers abroad, and execute the laws with firmness. Mostly, he wanted the nation to survive.

The 1792 Election

Four years later, President Washington planned to retire and return home to Mount Vernon. But all his closest advisors, including Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, convinced him that the country still needed his leadership to survive. Reluctantly, he agreed to stand for election one more time.

Washington played no role in the campaign in accordance with political culture at the time. Even without his participation, he was elected unanimously once again with 132 electoral votes—the only president to be elected unanimously, twice.

No one dared run against Washington, his stature was still unparalleled, but the contest over the vice presidency was much more vigorous than four years prior. At stake was the direction and expansive nature of federal power. One faction had organized behind Hamilton and supported his financial legislation, which created a national bank and granted Congress extensive fiscal powers. The other faction, loosely led by Jefferson and Madison, opposed this vision of federal authority.

The Hamilton faction, still known as the Federalists, cast 77 votes for John Adams. Jefferson and Madison’s faction, which later became known as the Democratic-Republicans or Jeffersonian Republicans, cast 50 votes for George Clinton, 4 votes for Jefferson, and 1 vote for Aaron Burr.

The challenges Washington faced during his second term made the burdens of his first term seem like child’s play. He maintained neutrality between increasingly belligerent European empires, as well as between increasing hostile domestic political factions. He defended executive authority and crushed the first domestic rebellion on his watch. When the question of a third term arose in 1796, Washington refused.

On April 30, 1789, Washington took the oath of office in New York City, the country’s capital until it moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1790. Right away, his biggest challenge was fleshing out the president’s daily activities and interactions. Article II of the Constitution says little about how the president should carry out the hefty responsibilities entrusted to the office.

The president would need assistance managing his duties, but the delegates to the Constitutional Convention rejected several proposals to create a cabinet. Instead, they created the Senate to serve as a council on foreign policy and empowered the president to request written advice from the department secretaries.

Washington witnessed the Convention debates and understood the delegates’ expectations. Accordingly, he planned his first visit to the Senate to consult on foreign policy about a treaty with Native American nations in August 1789. The senators proved unwilling to provide immediate feedback and requested that the president return the following week for their recommendation. Furious, Washington concluded the Senate could not provide the instantaneous advice diplomacy required.

Instead, Washington requested written advice from his department secretaries. He surrounded himself with talented advisors, then sought out their knowledge to make informed decisions—demonstrating his awareness of his own limitations. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph were intelligent, well-respected, and skilled. For example, Washington had only left the United States once as a teenager when he traveled to Barbados, and he had limited proficiency with foreign languages. Jefferson had served as a minister at the principle European courts and spoke French, the language of eighteenth-century diplomacy. Similarly, Washington did not have advanced training or higher education. Randolph had held almost every legal position in Virginia and successfully represented powerful clients, including Washington, as a private attorney. Washington depended on Jefferson’s firsthand foreign policy insights and Randolph’s legal expertise when grappling with complicated diplomatic and constitutional questions.

The secretaries represented different cultural, economic, and regional interests. Americans felt little loyalty toward the new federal government, but by choosing secretaries that pulled from different parts of the nation, Washington began to build tenuous emotional ties between the people and the government. While we might not think of Washington’s administration as particularly diverse, his contemporaries did, and they appreciated that cabinet deliberations included their perspective.

Washington quickly discovered that written correspondence was too cumbersome to manage the challenging issues on his plate. By January 1790, Washington was inviting the secretaries to one-on-one consultations. Then on November 26, 1791, he convened the first cabinet meeting to discuss the state of the economic and diplomatic relationships between the United States and France, Great Britain, and Spain.

In addition to creating the cabinet, Washington was also singularly responsible for the formation of the first Supreme Court of the United States. Washington appointed eleven justices during his two terms in office and carefully selected individuals to represent almost all the original thirteen states. He also appointed jurists who had supported the ratification of the Constitution and interpreted the document as a grant of extensive executive authority. While the early Supreme Court experienced regular turnover, Washington’s nominees ensured that the early Court was dedicated to preserving federal authority.

Financial Considerations

Washington’s relations with Congress shifted as he increasingly turned to his cabinet for support. Early in his presidency, Washington had regularly consulted with James Madison and other leaders in Congress. As his agenda took shape, factions in Congress lined up in support or opposition.

The financial powers of the federal government sparked the most disagreement. The new Constitution empowered Congress to raise taxes and pass legislation that managed the national economy. Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton had a three-part plan to restore the economy and make full use of those powers. First, the federal government would assume the states’ debts remaining from the war to ensure they were paid in full. Madison and Jefferson, leaders of a growing opposition faction, opposed this measure as unfair to states, like Virginia, which had already paid most of its debts.

Next, Hamilton planned to repay all bonds at face value. During the war, Congress had issued bonds to many veterans and investors. As confidence in Congress’s ability to repay the bonds plummeted, many bond holders sold them to speculators at a fraction of the original price. Hamilton insisted that the current holders of the bonds be paid in full, meaning many speculators (often wealthy northerners) stood to make a fortune. Again, Madison and Jefferson opposed Hamilton’s plan, arguing that the original bond holders deserved the money, not speculators.

Finally, Hamilton proposed the creation of a national bank that would provide ready credit to the government. The Madison-Jefferson faction opposed the creation of the bank on the grounds that it went beyond the powers the Constitution granted to Congress.

While Hamilton was pushing for the passage of these three bills, Congress was also debating the future location of the nation’s capital. Hamilton negotiated a compromise: Madison would arrange the votes for assumption of the states’ debts and full payment of securities, while Hamilton swung support behind Madison’s preferred location for the new capital on the banks of the Potomac River.

Congress also passed the legislation to create the national bank, over significant opposition from inside Washington’s cabinet. Jefferson objected to the cabinet and wrote an opinion outlining his position. Hamilton replied with a 13,000-word opinion that convinced Washington to sign the legislation on February 25, 1791, creating the First National Bank.

Relations with Native Americans

Whereas Congress passed legislation to craft a new financial system, Washington and the executive branch managed military affairs. Almost immediately tensions between Native Americans and settlers in the Northwest demanded the president’s attention. In 1789, Arthur St. Clair, governor of the Northwest Territories, negotiated the Treaty of Fort Harmar, which forced Native American tribes off their homelands.

Washington did not believe in racial equality between whites and Native Americans, but he also placed them higher on a racial hierarchy than Black Americans. He advocated for protected Native American lands, contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Fort Harmar, largely to avoid conflict between land-hungry settlers and Native American nations. Nonetheless, when violence broke out, President Washington enforced the terms of the treaty. In 1791, St. Clair led 1,400 men into the Ohio wilderness, where Native Americans mowed them down in a surprise attack in November.

When news of St. Clair’s defeat in the Battle of the Wabash reached Philadelphia, Congress increased the size of the army and Washington named Major General Anthony Wayne the new commander. In the summer of 1794, Wayne and his forces defeated the Native American confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. The Shawnee, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, Iroquois, Sauk, and Fox peoples moved west, while white settlers rushed to seize their lands.

The Whiskey Rebellion

Other military matters closer to home also demanded Washington’s attention. In 1791, Congress had passed an excise tax on whiskey distilleries. Western farmers hated the tax, as they distilled their excess grain into alcohol, which could be bartered or shipped to eastern ports for sale. They launched protests almost as soon as the tax went into effect. In July 1794, the protests turned violent when a group of rebels, led by Major James McFarlane, a Revolutionary War veteran, clashed with troops at the home of John Neville, the local tax collector. Shots were fired, and men on both sides were killed, before rebels set fire to Neville’s house.

When news of the skirmish reached Washington, he convened the cabinet to determine how to proceed. The cabinet agreed the crisis required presidential action, rather than leaving it for the states or Congress to manage. At Secretary of State Randolph’s encouragement, Washington sent a peace delegation to meet with the rebels before employing force, to demonstrate that he had exhausted all diplomatic options.

In August 1794, the peace commission sent word back to the president that their mission had failed. Washington summoned the militias of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey and rode out on October 1 to meet them. He inspected the troops, then turned around and returned to Philadelphia. The militias marched west to subdue the rebellion under the command of General “Light Horse” Harry Lee and Alexander Hamilton. They arrested hundreds of insurgents, but most charges were dismissed due to lack of evidence. Before retiring, Washington issued pardons for the convicted rebels. Once he had enforced the government’s constitutional right to collect taxes, he could afford to be merciful.

Slavery did not play a role in Washington’s domestic policy. The Constitution prohibited the eradication of the international slave trade before 1808, and emancipation legislation was largely a matter of state legislation. Although slavery was not on the cabinet’s agenda, it was a part of daily life. Every time the secretaries arrived for a cabinet meeting or official event, enslaved workers took their coats, offered beverages, and prepared meals. Enslaved groomsmen tended to the horses and carriages that carried officials to Congress Hall. And enslaved sailors manned the ships in port that delivered the linens and fine goods that adorned elite homes in Philadelphia.

Farewell Address

In 1792, Washington planned to leave the presidency and asked James Madison to draft a farewell address. However, Washington changed his mind after his closest advisors convinced him that the country still needed his leadership to survive. Reluctantly, he agreed to stand for election one more time and to serve one more term.

In early 1796, President Washington revealed to colleagues that he would not seek another term, and this time would not be persuaded otherwise. He tasked Hamilton with writing a new farewell address, and he shared Madison’s original draft. By 1796, Jefferson had retired as secretary of state and joined Madison at the head of the new Democratic-Republican Party. Washington worried that they might criticize his Farewell Address, so he instructed Hamilton to use a few paragraphs from Madison’s original address as a preventative measure.

Washington’s address warned against the pernicious influence of political parties. He admonished Americans not to allow their political differences to drive a wedge between them. He reminded them that they had more in common with each other than differences. Washington issued a similar warning about avoiding emotional ties to foreign nations. Americans should not allow their affection or antagonism toward foreign nations to overpower their bonds with one another. Finally, Washington encouraged the American people to defend the sanctity of the Constitution as the best protection of their liberties and freedom.

On September 19, 1796, he published the address in Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser , a neutral newspaper that would reach the maximum number of citizens. A few Democratic-Republicans grumbled about Washington’s comments on political parties, but the public response was overwhelmingly popular. Most Americans lauded the address and Washington’s decision to relinquish power, and mourned the loss of his leadership.

Washington’s foreign policy focused on protecting the independence of the new nation and avoiding expensive and deadly wars. During Washington’s first term, European powers sought every opportunity to undermine American sovereignty. British forces provided ammunition and funds for Native American nations to attack western towns. Spanish imperial forces denied critical trade access to the Mississippi River, and settlements in Florida welcomed enslaved people who escaped from the southern colonies.

The French Revolution

While those challenges tested Washington’s patience, they were nothing compared to the threat posed by the French Revolution and the subsequent war between France and Great Britain. In 1789, King Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General (the French version of the legislature). Over the next few years, the assembly passed constitutional reforms before forming the French Republic in September 1792.

Initially, Americans cheered the French Revolution as the natural successor to the American version, especially since many revolutionaries, such as the Marquis de Lafayette, had played important roles in both revolutions. However, the French Revolution devolved into anarchy and violence, culminating in the execution of the king and queen in 1793. Following the royal executions, a more radical regime assumed power under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, known as the Reign of Terror for its regular executions of suspected spies and traitors. By July 1794, when Robespierre was deposed, at least 16,000 people had been executed, most by the infamous guillotine. 

The violence of the French Revolution horrified many Americans. Federalists, like Washington and Hamilton, distrusted the radicalism of the French Revolution and feared the anarchy would spread to North American shores. Democratic-Republicans, like Jefferson, opposed the violence but remained more loyal to the French. Both sides demonstrated their preferences through clothing—the Federalists wore black cockades on their hats or pinned to their dresses, while the Democratic-Republicans adopted the blue, red, and white cockade.

These conflicting loyalties clashed in February 1793, when the Revolutionary regime in France declared war on Great Britain. Soon the conflict threatened to engulf the United States. With the war looming, Washington convened his cabinet in April 1793 and asked for the secretaries’ advice on how to remain neutral. The secretaries unanimously agreed the nation must avoid war but disagreed on how best to enforce that neutrality. Hamilton advocated for a strict neutrality, which would favor the British, while Jefferson preferred a looser neutrality, which would benefit the French.

The arrival of the new French minister to the United States complicated their attempts to keep the nation, and its citizens, out of the conflict. The French minister, Citizen Edmond Charles Genêt, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1793 and disregarded Washington’s proclamation of neutrality. He traveled to Philadelphia and used its port to arm and outfit a fleet of French privateers, which were private ships sailing and attacking British ships under a French license. Genêt also ignored Jefferson’s repeated warnings to cease his activities. In August 1793, Washington and the cabinet requested Genêt’s recall from France—the first time the United States had requested the recall of a foreign minister.

In April 1793, Washington and the cabinet also crafted a series of rules of neutrality, which prohibited the arming of privateers and naval ships of belligerent nations and permitted the commerce of private vessels not intended for warfare. When Congress convened later that fall, they codified those rules into law, which governed periods of neutrality until the Civil War. By accepting the neutrality rules, Congress essentially approved of Washington’s handling of the crisis and ceded authority over foreign policy to the executive branch.

Relations with Britain

While Washington and the cabinet were fighting to keep relations with France neutral, tensions with Britain accelerated. The Anglo-American relationship had never fully recovered after the end of the Revolution, and three sticking points threatened to devolve into a new conflict. First, once the colonies left the British empire, they lost trading privileges in British ports. American merchants insisted on free and neutral trade policy and demanded access to ports, especially in the Caribbean.

The second point of contention were the unfulfilled terms of the Treaty of Paris (1783). The treaty dictated that the British would turn over military forts in the Ohio Valley and pay restitution to southern slave owners for the enslaved individuals who had escaped on British ships. Americans would repay their prewar debts they owed to British merchants. Yet by 1794, the forts remained in British hands, southern slave owners remained uncompensated, and British merchant debts remained unpaid. From their base in the western forts, British officials provided aid and munitions to Native American nations to attack US borders.

The third point of contention was the British seizure of ships sailing back and forth between the United States and France. Americans insisted the ships were neutral, whereas the British insisted the ships were carrying war materials and aiding the French in their ongoing war.

In 1794, Washington sent Chief Justice John Jay to London to negotiate a diplomatic solution. Jay signed a new treaty on November 19, 1794 and sent it back to the United States for ratification. In June 1795, the Senate ratified the treaty in an emergency session, and Washington applied his signature in August. The treaty created commissions to adjudicate prewar debts owed to British merchants, opened British ports to limited American trade, and required British forces to withdraw from western forts on American territory.

Jay had entered the negotiations with almost zero leverage, so the concessions he extracted from the British were remarkable. But many southerners believed their interests had not been as well represented as those of northerners. Additionally, many Democratic-Republicans believed that the treaty violated the spirit of neutrality and the Franco-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1778). After months of contentious debates, in May 1796, the House of Representatives finally agreed to raise the funds to fulfill American obligations.

Simultaneously, Thomas Pinckney negotiated another, much more popular treaty with Spain. The resulting agreement, known as the Treaty of San Lorenzo or Pinckney’s Treaty, resolved territorial disputes between the United States and Spain, granted American ships the right to sail and trade on the Mississippi River, and gave Americans the right to deposit goods for sale in the port of New Orleans (which was under Spanish control). This treaty was especially popular with farmers out west who depended on the waterways to send their goods to market, rather than over the mountains, which was much more expensive and impassible during winter.

On March 15, 1797, Washington returned to Mount Vernon, eager to expand his economic enterprise, complete the renovations of the mansion, and maintain some semblance of privacy from the thousands of visitors who passed through his home.

As an elite southern gentleman, Washington took eighteenth-century expectations of hospitality seriously. Americans were fascinated by Washington, and pilgrimaging to Mount Vernon became a popular pastime. In 1798 alone, the Washingtons hosted as many as 677 guests. The guests were treated to breakfast or dinner; prepared and served by the enslaved cooks and servants employed in the house. Enslaved stable hands tended their horses and carriages, and enslaved housemaids washed and mended their clothes, made their beds, and kept fires lit in the bedrooms.

Washington welcomed every excuse to escape the curious stares of visitors. He woke early and spent several hours reading and writing in his private study before breakfast at 7 AM. He then conducted his daily inspections of his estate on horseback, before returning for dinner at 3 PM.

Washington also sought opportunities to diversify his economic investments. During his presidency, Washington improved the technology at his grist mill and increased the quantity of grain he could process for his neighbors, in return for a portion of the profit. He employed enslaved workers making barrels to store the grain and sailing ships to port with the finished product. After his retirement, Washington built a distillery that created whiskey from rye, corn, and barley. At the time of his death, it was one of the largest, most productive distilleries in the nation.

Washington undertook these projects because he wanted to make money, but also because he wanted to employ the growing enslaved population at Mount Vernon. Grains required less labor than tobacco, often leaving workers unemployed during down seasons. Furthermore, as enslaved families had children, the population continued to grow.

With these challenges in mind, Washington wrote out the terms of his will in 1799. He left most of his estate to Martha, forgave debts owed him by extended family, granted land and stocks for the creation of educational institutions, and bequeathed his papers and books to his nephew, Supreme Court Justice Bushrod Washington. The most famous provision of the will immediately freed William Lee, Washington’s enslaved valet from the war, and arranged to emancipate the 122 enslaved individuals he owned after Martha’s death. Of the more than 300 enslaved people at Mount Vernon when Washington died, about half of them were owned by the estate of Martha’s first husband, and neither she nor George had the legal right to free them; Martha’s heirs inherited them after her death. The will also provided financial support and education for those too young or old to work, and explicitly prohibited the sale or transportation of any workers outside of Virginia.

On December 12, 1799, Washington left the house for his daily ride. On his way back, a wet snow began to fall, but he sat down to dinner without changing, as he did not want to keep guests waiting. The next night, Washington woke Martha and said he was having trouble breathing. Over the next several hours, doctors bled Washington four times, applied several blister treatments to his throat and legs, and administered an emetic and an enema. None of the treatments worked and increased his suffering.

Washington died between 10 and 11 PM on December 14. Over the next several weeks, he was celebrated and mourned with great fanfare at ceremonies and mock funerals across the country.

Life in the President’s House in Philadelphia was chaotic. Around thirty people lived in the building: George and Martha; their grandchildren, Eleanor “Nelly” Parke Custis and George Washington “Wash” Parke Custis; Tobias Lear, who served as Washington’s unofficial chief of staff; Washington’s private secretaries; and at least ten free and enslaved servants who cleaned, cooked, cared for the linens, tended the horses, and ran errands.

The Washingtons also regularly welcomed guests. On Tuesdays, George hosted levees in the state dining room, which were formal gatherings open to any white man with a good suit. On Thursdays, George and Martha hosted state dinners for Supreme Court justices, foreign dignitaries, congressmen, and elite local families. On Fridays, Martha hosted drawing rooms, where men and women socialized and drank lemonade. On New Year’s Day and July 4, they opened their doors, and thousands of citizens crammed in the hallways, drank punch, and enjoyed the music played by the bands marching by outside. Although leisure time was in relatively short supply, the family attended the theater, visited the circus, explored Revolutionary War ruins, and enjoyed carriage rides.

Martha was an essential partner in all private and public endeavors. As hostess, she prepared the menus and oversaw the preparation of the meals by Hercules, the enslaved chef. She cultivated a welcoming environment and fostered lively conversation. Martha also conscientiously presented herself as the ideal mother and grandmother: modest, generous, hospitable, and dedicated to raising virtuous republican citizens for the future of the nation. While modern first ladies often embrace their own social and education causes, Martha Washington’s model as an official hostess has had a lasting effect on the role of first lady to this day.

Every single event required extensive cleaning, preparation, and service by the white and Black staff. Washington received a $25,000 annual salary, an enormous sum for the time, but the salary was expected to cover housing, food, entertaining, travel, fuel, and labor costs. The Washingtons were able to host lavishly because they benefited from the unpaid labor of enslaved workers—which proved to be more complicated to retain than anticipated. Shortly after the federal government moved to Philadelphia, Attorney General Edmund Randolph warned the president that Pennsylvania law would automatically free any enslaved individuals after six months of continuous residence. George and Martha conspired to rotate all enslaved individuals from Philadelphia to Virginia and back again to reset the clock and prevent their manumission.

Two of the enslaved workers took their fate into their own hands. In May 1796, while the Washingtons were enjoying supper, Ona Judge, Martha’s lady’s maid, slipped out of the house and boarded a ship in the bustling Philadelphia port. She escaped to New Hampshire, where she married, had children, and died a free woman in 1848. The following February, on Washington’s birthday, Hercules disappeared into the darkness and made his way to New York City, where he changed his name and eluded recapture. Martha was particularly insistent that George pursue and recapture Ona and Hercules. These efforts failed, and neither returned to bondage.

From the moment Washington announced his retirement, the American people have remembered him as one of the greatest presidents in the nation’s history. The name of the Capitol City, the Washington Monument, his inclusion on Mount Rushmore, and his regular place near the top of presidential polls attests to the strength of his legacy. Indeed, generations of Americans have used Washington’s uniquely popular memory for their own political purposes. Most notably, after the Civil War, northerners and southerners valorized Washington and the founding era as a shared history they could both celebrate.

There is much to honor in Washington’s legacy. He was the only person who could have held the office in 1789. He was the most famous American, the only one with enough of a national platform to represent the entire country and overwhelmingly trusted by the populous. Americans knew they could trust him to wield immense power because he had already done so once during the Revolution and willingly gave it up.

The trust and confidence Washington inspired made possible the creation of the presidency and helped establish the executive branch. Once in office, he cultivated respect for the presidency, regularly exhibited restraint in the face of political provocations, and attempted to serve as a president for all citizens (which admittedly meant white men). He was always mindful of the principles of republican virtue, namely self-sacrifice, decorum, self-improvement, and leadership. Our modern notions that the president should be held to higher standards and the office carries a certain level of respect and prestige began with Washington’s careful creation of the position.

Washington also left an inveterate imprint on the political process, especially through his formation of the cabinet. Every president since Washington has worked with a cabinet, and each president crafts their own decision-making process. They select their closest advisors and determine how they will obtain advice from those individuals. Presidents might choose to consult friends, family members, former colleagues, department secretaries, or congressmen, and the American people and Congress have very little oversight over those relationships. Some presidents, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, flourish with the flexibility; others, including James Madison and John F. Kennedy, find their administrations undermined by domineering advisors or cabinets. That legacy is a direct result of Washington’s cabinet.

Washington’s decision to step away from power, again, solidified his legacy and had a powerful impact on the future of the presidency. All his successors, until Franklin D. Roosevelt, willingly followed his example of retiring after two terms, and the 22 nd Amendment made sure that no future president can serve more than two terms. More importantly, Washington recognized the structural importance of leaving office willingly. He knew that Americans needed to learn how to elect, transition, and inaugurate a new president. That process was fraught with potential missteps, and Washington concluded that it would go more smoothly if it was planned, rather than haphazardly done after an unexpected death. Washington understood how much of the political process is based on norm and custom, and that those had to start with his example.

For all these achievements, and there are many, recently Washington’s legacy lost a bit of its sparkle as Americans grapple with his personal failures. Of the many political choices in his long career, Washington’s decisions in retirement were perhaps his worst. In 1798, Congress created the Provisional Army as the Quasi-War with France accelerated. President John Adams asked Washington to come out of retirement one more time to lead the army.

Washington reluctantly agreed but extracted two promises. First, he wanted to stay at Mount Vernon until a French invasion. Second, Washington insisted on naming his subordinate officers who would manage the army in his absence. When Adams reluctantly caved, Washington named Alexander Hamilton as his deputy. Hamilton and Adams hated each other, and Washington knew it. By forcing these concessions, Washington undermined the presidency and civilian authority over the army. As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, Washington had studiously upheld Congress’s authority. His failure to make the same choice in his retirement is often overlooked but should be viewed with considerable criticism.

However, Washington’s ownership of enslaved humans is by far the most challenging part of his legacy. To be sure, Washington’s ideas about slavery and the potential for Black emancipation evolved over his lifetime. He did free the enslaved people he owned in his will, which is much more than most people in his generation. This commitment required decades-long planning to leave his estate unencumbered by debt which could only be reduced through the sale of enslaved individuals. And he did so in the face of resistance from other Virginians, including his wife. When the terms of Washington’s will were published, the emancipation of his enslaved community sent ripples through the country. He had issued a forceful statement about the morality of slavery from the grave.

Yet, Washington clearly benefitted from exploiting enslaved people. And by the end of his life, he knew the institution was wrong and could have done more to end it. Washington pursued enslaved people who escaped when he could have left them to their freedom. He could have freed the enslaved people he owned during his lifetime but elected to enjoy the fruits of their labor until his last days. He also chose not to deprive Martha of that care either, which is why the enslaved people he owned were not to be freed until her death.

On a public scale, Washington could have made the terms of his will public before his death or spoken against slavery while he was alive. His words would have had an enormous impact—which is perhaps why he remained silent. Washington worried that if he forced the issue, southern states would secede from the Union. There will be no way to know if he was right or if these concerns were correct. But much of Washington’s lifestyle and personal wealth were dependent on slavery, and that must be considered a part of his legacy.

Before becoming President in 1797, John Adams built his reputation as a blunt-speaking man of independent mind. A fervent patriot and brilliant intellectual, Adams served as a delegate from Massachusetts to the Continental Congress between 1774 and 1777, as a diplomat in Europe from 1778 to 1788, and as vice president during the Washington administration.

Federalists versus Democratic-Republicans

The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, supported a strong central government that favored industry, landowners, banking interests, merchants, and close ties with England. Opposed to them were the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson, who advocated limited powers for the federal government. Adams's Federalist leanings and high visibility as vice president positioned him as the leading contender for President in 1796.

In the early days of the American electoral process, the candidate receiving the second-largest vote in the electoral college became vice president. This is how Thomas Jefferson, who opposed Adams in the election, came to serve as Adams's vice president in 1797. Adams won the election principally because he identified himself with Washington's administration and because he was able to win two electoral ballots from normally secure Jeffersonian states. In 1800, Adams faced a much tougher battle for reelection, as the differences between the Federalists and the Republicans intensified—by that time, the terms "Democratic-Republican" and "Republican" were used interchangeably.

The Adams presidency was characterized by continuing crises in foreign policy, which dramatically affected affairs at home. Suspicious of the French Revolution and its potential for terror and anarchy, Adams opposed close ties with France. Relations between America and France deteriorated to the brink of war, allowing Adams to justify his signing of the extremely controversial Alien and Sedition Acts. Drafted by Federalist lawmakers, these four laws were largely aimed at immigrants, who tended to become Republicans. Furious over Adams's foreign policy and his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts, Republicans responded with the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which challenged the legitimacy of federal authority over the states.

Republicans were equally incensed by the heavy taxation necessary for Adams's military buildup; farmers in Pennsylvania staged Fries's Rebellion in protest. At the same time, Adams faced disunity in his own party due to conflict with Hamilton over the undeclared naval war with France. This rivalry with Hamilton and the Federalist Party cost Adams the 1800 election. He lost to Thomas Jefferson, who was backed by the united and far more organized Republicans.

A Personal Life Filled with Politics

John Adams sacrificed his family life for his political one, spending much of his time separated from his wife, Abigail Adams, and their children. John Quincy Adams, Adams's son, grew up to become the sixth President of the United States. Interestingly, he joined the opposition party, the Democratic-Republicans.

Often lonely and miserable, Abigail viewed her suffering as a patriotic sacrifice but was distraught that her husband was away during the birth of their children and the loss of their unborn baby in 1777. After his term as President, John Adams lived a quiet life with Abigail on the family farm in Quincy, Massachusetts. There, Adams wrote prolifically for the next twenty-six years, including a fascinating correspondence with his political adversary and friend, Thomas Jefferson. Interestingly, both men died on Independence Day in 1826.

Although Abigail Adams saw herself as first and foremost her husband's wife and helpmate, she was a gifted intellectual in her own right, leaving behind nearly 2,000 letters containing some of the most profoundly compelling commentary on the society and politics of her time. A firm advocate of patriotic motherhood, Abigail believed that women best served the Republic in their roles as educated and independently thinking wives and mothers. Although she did not openly advocate voting rights for women, she did fight for their legal right to divorce and to own property.

The American Political Landscape

Indeed, property was a requirement for political participation during Adams's time, and he fought to keep it that way, feeling that the "rich, the well-born, and the able" should represent the nation. But the western migration into frontier America—Kentucky and Tennessee were admitted to the Union in 1792 and 1796, respectively—weakened the property requirement for voting in the West. Everywhere except on the frontier, however, wealthy merchants and slave owners dominated office holding, and financial and kinship ties were crucial to political advancement.

Historians have difficulty assessing Adams's presidency. Adams was able to avoid war with France, arguing against Hamilton that war should be a last resort to diplomacy. In this argument, the President won the nation the respect of its most powerful adversaries. Although Adams was fiercely criticized for signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, he never advocated their passage nor personally implemented them, and he pardoned the instigators of Fries's Rebellion. Seen in this light, Adams's legacy is one of reason, virtuous leadership, compassion, and a cautious but vigorous foreign policy. At the same time, Adams's stubborn independence left him politically isolated. He alienated his own cabinet, and his elite republicanism stood in stark contrast to the more egalitarian Jeffersonian democracy that was poised to assume power in the new century.

Born into a comfortable, but not wealthy, Massachusetts farming family on October 30, 1735, John Adams grew up in the tidy little world of New England village life. His father, a deacon in the Congregational Church, earned a living as a farmer and shoemaker in Braintree, roughly fifteen miles south of Boston. As a healthy young boy, John loved the outdoors, frequently skipping school to hunt and fish. He said later that he would have preferred a life as a farmer, but his father insisted that he receive a formal education. His father hoped that he might become a clergyman. John attended a dame school, a local school taught by a female teacher that was designed to teach the rudimentary skills of reading and writing, followed by a Latin school, a preparatory school for those who planned to attend college. He eventually excelled at his studies and entered Harvard College at age fifteen. He graduated in 1755. Young John, who had no interest in a ministerial career, taught in a Latin school in Worcester, Massachusetts, to earn the tuition fees to study law, and from 1756 to 1758, he studied law with a prominent local lawyer in Worcester.

Legal and Publishing Career

Adams launched his legal career in Boston in 1758. He faced several years of struggle in establishing his practice. He had only one client his first year and did not win his initial case before a jury until almost three years after opening his office. Thereafter, his practice grew. Once his practice started to flourish, he began to court Abigail Smith, the daughter of a Congregational minister in nearby Weymouth. They were married in 1764. Five children followed in the next eight years, although one, Susanna, died in infancy. By 1770, Adams was a highly successful lawyer with perhaps the largest caseload of any attorney in Boston, and he was chosen to defend the British soldiers who were charged in the Boston Massacre in March 1770. Through his able defense, none of the accused soldiers were sent to jail. During these years, he lived alternately in Boston and Quincy, an outgrowth of Braintree, where he had been reared. As success came, Adams wrote extensively, publishing numerous essays in Boston newspapers on social, legal, and political issues.

When the colonial protest against parliamentary policies erupted against the Stamp Act in 1765, Adams was initially reluctant to play a prominent role in the popular movement. With a young and growing family, he feared for his legal practice. In addition, he distrusted many of the radical leaders, including his cousin Samuel Adams. He not only believed the imperial leaders in London had simply blundered but also suspected that the colonial radicals had a hidden agenda, including American independence. Nevertheless, under pressure to act, he did assist the popular movement, writing anonymous newspaper essays and helping to churn out propaganda pieces. In time, as Britain continued its attempts to tax the colonies and to strip them of their autonomy, Adams gradually grew convinced that the radicals had been correct, and he became an open foe of ministerial policy.

In 1774, Adams went to Philadelphia as one of the four delegates from Massachusetts to the First Continental Congress. He was reelected to the Second Continental Congress, which convened in May 1775, just a few days after war with the mother country had erupted at Lexington and Concord. When Congress created the Continental army in June 1775, Adams nominated George Washington of Virginia to be its commander. Adams soon emerged as the leader of the faction in Congress that pushed to declare independence. In June 1776, Congress appointed Adams, together with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, among others, to prepare the Declaration of Independence. Adams served on more committees than any other congressman—ninety in all, of which he chaired twenty. He was the head of the Board of War and Ordinance, the congressional committee that oversaw the operations of the Continental army. He was also an important member of the committee that prepared the Model Treaty, which guided the envoys that Congress sent to France to secure foreign trade and military assistance.

Early in 1778, after nearly four years service in Congress, Adams was sent to France to help secure French aid. Subsequently, he was sent to The Hague to obtain a much needed loan and to open commerce. In 1781, together with Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens, Adams was part of the commission of American diplomats that negotiated the Treaty of Paris, the pact that brought an end to the War of Independence. Adams returned home once during the war, a brief sojourn from July until November 1779, during which time he helped draft the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

Adams remained in Europe following the war. From 1784 to 1785, he served on a diplomatic mission whose goal was to arrange treaties of commerce with several European nations. In 1785, he became the first United States minister to England. During 1784, he had been joined by his wife, whom he had not seen for five years. She was accompanied to Europe by the Adams's daughter, "Nabby." Their sons, Charles, Thomas Boylston, and John Quincy, spent these years in the United States completing their schooling.

By the end of the American Revolution, John Adams had earned a solid reputation as a patriot who had served his country at considerable personal sacrifice. He was known as a brilliant and blunt-spoken man of independent mind. He additionally acquired a reputation for the essays he published during the 1770s and 1780s. His "Thoughts on Government" (1776) argued that the various functions of government—executive, judiciary, and legislative—must be separated in order to prevent tyranny. His Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787) presented his thinking that the greatest dangers to any polity came from unbridled democracy and an unrestrained aristocracy capable of becoming an oligarchy. The antidote to these dangers was a strong executive. He spoke of this powerful executive as the "father and protector" of the nation and its ordinary citizens, for this person was the sole official with the independence to act in a disinterested manner. In 1790, he expanded on this theme in a series of essays for a Philadelphia newspaper that were ultimately known as "Discourses on Davila." Many contemporaries mistakenly believed that they advocated a hereditary monarchy for the United States.

Adams returned home from London in 1788 after a ten-year absence. He came back largely to secure an office in the new national government that had been created by the Constitution drafted by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 and ratified the following summer. Knowing that George Washington would be the first President, Adams sought the vice presidency. He was elected to that position in 1789, receiving the second largest number of votes after Washington, who won the vote of every member of the electoral college. Adams was reelected vice president in 1792.

Heated conflict broke out early among Washington's cabinet members over the shape the new nation would take, as well as over divisive foreign policy issues. By late 1792, formal political parties had come into being. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, supported a strong central government that favored industry, banking interests, merchants, and close ties with England. Opposed to them were the Democratic-Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson. Supported by landowners and much of the South, the Democratic-Republicans advocated limited powers for the federal government, personal liberty, and support for France. Adams was a Federalist.

The Campaign and Election of 1796:

Throughout Washington's presidency, Vice President Adams regarded himself as the heir apparent. Indeed, that alone explains his willingness to endure eight years in the vice presidency, an office devoid of power. When Washington, in his Farewell Address, published in September 1796, announced his intention to retire, the nation faced its first contested presidential election. The Federalist members of Congress caucused and nominated Adams and Thomas Pinckney, a South Carolinian who had soldiered and served President Washington as a diplomat, as their choices for President. The Democratic-Republicans in Congress likewise met and named Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr of New York, who had served in the Continental army and as a United States senator early in Washington's presidency, as their choices. Each party named two presidential candidates, for under the original Constitution, each member of the electoral college was to cast two ballots for President. The winner of the presidential election was the individual who received the largest number of votes, if it constituted a majority of the votes cast. The person receiving the second largest number of votes, whether or not it was a majority, was to be the vice president. In the event that no candidate received a majority of votes, or that two candidates tied with a majority of votes, the House of Representatives was to decide the election, with each state, regardless of size, having a single vote.

When the contest began in full force in the late summer of 1796, only Aaron Burr, out of the four candidates, waged an active campaign. Supporters of the four candidates, however, campaigned vigorously. The Federalist press labeled Jefferson a Francophile, questioned his courage during the War of Independence, and charged that he was an atheist. Adams was portrayed as a monarchist and an Anglophile who was secretly bent on establishing a family dynasty by having his son succeed him as President.

Adams also had trouble in his own camp. Rumors swirled that his chief rival for leadership among the Federalists, Alexander Hamilton, secretly favored Pinckney, as he would be more malleable than Adams. Many believed that Hamilton sought to have some Federalist electors withhold their votes from Adams so that Pinckney would outpoll him.

In the end, Adams won by a three-vote margin. Although virtually all of Adams's votes came from northern electors (while virtually all of Jefferson's were from southern electors), Adams won largely because of the votes of two southern electors. A Virginia elector, from a county with a strong tradition of opposition to planter aristocrats, voted for Adams, as did an elector from a commercial district in coastal North Carolina. Jefferson received the second largest number of votes, making him the vice president. Thus, the nation would have a President from one party and a vice president from the other party.

Seven states permitted popular voting in this election. In the remaining nine states, the state legislatures elected the members of the electoral college. Thus, popular opinion is difficult to fathom in this vote, although Adams appears to have received some support in recognition of his long and sacrificial service during the American Revolution. The northern states also thought their time had come to have a President, as a Virginian had held the office during the new nation's first eight years. In addition, the vocal support for Jefferson by the French minister to the United States probably swung some electoral ballots to Adams.

It fell to John Adams, the vice president and presiding officer of the Senate, to count the ballots cast by the electoral college delegates. When he finished his count, he announced that "John Adams" had been elected to succeed George Washington. The final electoral college tally was 71 votes for Adams to 68 for Jefferson.

The Campaign and Election of 1800 Adams faced a difficult reelection campaign in 1800. The Federalist Party was deeply split over his foreign policy. Many had opposed his decision to send envoys to Paris in 1799, some because they feared it would result in national humiliation for the United States and others because they hoped to maintain the Quasi-War crisis for partisan ends. Furthermore, early in 1800, Adams fired two members of his cabinet, Timothy Pickering, the secretary of state, and James McHenry, the secretary of war, for their failure to support his foreign policy. Their discharge alienated numerous Federalists. In addition to the fissures within his party, the differences between the Federalists and the Republicans had become white-hot. Jeffersonians were furious over the creation of a standing army, the new taxes, and the Alien and Sedition Acts. As in 1796, the Federalist members of Congress caucused in the spring of 1800 and nominated Adams and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, an officer in the Continental army, a member of the Constitutional Convention, and a part of the diplomatic commission that Adams sent to France in 1797. The Federalists did not designate a choice for the presidency but asked their presidential electors to cast their two votes for Adams and Pinckney. The Democratic-Republicans meanwhile nominated Jefferson and Burr, their candidates in the previous presidential election, but designated Jefferson as their choice for President. In the campaign that followed, the Federalists depicted Jefferson as a godless nonbeliever and a radical revolutionary; he was often called a Jacobin, after the most radical faction in France during the French Revolution. His election, it was charged, would bring about a reign of terror in the nation. The Republicans cast Adams as a monarchist and the Federalist Party as an enemy of republicanism, including the greater egalitarianism promised by the American Revolution. The level of personal attack by both parties knew no bounds. At one point, Adams was accused of plotting to have his son marry one of the daughters of King George III and thus establish a dynasty to unite Britain and the United States. The plot had been stopped, according to the story, only by the intervention of George Washington, who had dressed in his old Revolutionary War uniform to confront Adams with sword in hand. Jefferson, meanwhile, was accused of vivisection and of conducting bizarre ritualistic rites at Monticello, his home in Virginia. One of Adams's greatest foes in this election was Alexander Hamilton, a member of his own party. In October, Hamilton published a pamphlet in which he argued that Adams should not be reelected. He charged that the President was emotionally unstable, given to impulsive and irrational decisions, unable to coexist with his closest advisers, and generally unfit to be President. It is unlikely, however, that Hamilton's attack cost Adams any electoral votes. Failing in that endeavor, Hamilton schemed to elect Pinckney. He worked to persuade all the Federalist presidential electors from the North to vote for the party's two nominees, Adams and Pinckney, while he tried to convince some southern electors to withhold their vote for Adams. That would enable Pinckney to outpoll Adams. Hamilton's scheme failed, however. Not only did numerous New England Federalists, who were pro-Adams, withhold their second vote from Pinckney but the Federalist ticket was outpolled by their Democratic-Republican rivals. Pinckney finished fourth in the balloting, and Adams stood third in electoral votes, while Jefferson and Burr tied for first place with seventy-three votes each. The nation had divided once again along sectional lines. Eighty-six percent of Adams's votes were cast by northern electors; nearly three-fourths of Jefferson's votes were from the South. Party discipline was much improved over that of the election of 1796. In the 1796 election, nearly 40 percent of electors had refused to adhere to the recommendations of their party's caucus. In 1800, however, only one elector broke ranks—a New England Federalist elector withheld his second vote from Pinckney. Public opinion in 1800 is difficult to gauge. Only five states—down from seven in 1796—permitted the qualified voters to elect the members of the electoral college. State legislatures made the choice in the remaining eleven states. Moreover, several states abandoned the election of electors in districts and instituted a winner-take-all system. Virginia adopted the at-large format, enabling Jefferson to win all twenty-one votes from his home state; had the election been by district, Adams likely would have won up to nine votes. In addition, Adams was the first presidential candidate to be victimized by the infamous three-fifths compromise agreed to in the Constitutional Convention. That decision, which permitted the counting of 60 percent of the slave population for purposes of representation in the House and the electoral college, enhanced the clout of the South—Democratic-Republican territory—in this contest. Had no slaves been counted, Adams likely would have defeated Jefferson by a 63-61 margin. Ultimately, the election turned on the outcome in New York. The Democratic-Republican Party won control of the New York legislature in the May elections of that year, principally by winning every contested seat in New York City. Control of the assembly meant that Jefferson would receive all twelve electoral votes from New York, whereas Adams had won those votes in 1796. Jefferson's victory in 1800 also stemmed from the disunion of the Federalist Party and, more importantly, the superior party organization of the Democratic-Republicans, which enabled the party to capture both the presidency and Congress. The Democratic-Republicans started several new newspapers and created committees of correspondence to direct the distribution of campaign literature and plan meetings and rallies. Their victories were due to four years of party organizing, sophisticated political campaigning, and the shaping of a party machine that responded to the temper and mood of the electorate. With the election a tie, the decision was remitted to the House of Representatives, as specified by the Constitution. Every Democratic-Republican delegation in the House stood by Jefferson; however, some northern Federalists favored Burr, whom they found more palatable than their longtime nemesis from Virginia. After thirty-five ballots and five days of voting, the House was deadlocked. Each vote had ended with Jefferson receiving eight votes to Burr's six. The delegations from two states, Vermont and Maryland, were deadlocked and could not cast a ballot. Burr refused to step down even though it was understood that he had run as a vice presidential candidate in the general election. Throughout the long battle, Alexander Hamilton had urged the election of his old rival, Jefferson. He viscerally disliked Jefferson and objected to his democratic and egalitarian principles, but he feared and mistrusted Aaron Burr as an unprincipled opportunist. In the end, however, the outcome in the House appears to have hung on Federalist bargaining with both Jefferson and Burr. In return for their vote, Federalist House members sought a commitment from one or the other to preserve Hamilton's economic program, keep the enhanced Navy intact, and leave Federalist officeholders in their jobs. Burr appears to have refused to bargain. Jefferson, ever after, denied making such a bargain, although several Federalists claimed that he had agreed to their terms. The truth can never be known. What is clear is that on the thirty-sixth ballot, a sufficient number of Federalists broke from Burr and gave their votes to Jefferson. The final House vote was Jefferson with ten states and Burr with four states while two states (South Carolina and Delaware) abstained. With that, Jefferson became the third President of the United States. When Jefferson assumed office, his opponents stepped down peacefully. This return to domestic tranquility established a powerful precedent for the future. Although it is true that Adams tried to entrench Federalist power in the new administration by appointing Federalist judges in the last weeks of his term, this was viewed as acceptable politics by most observers, yet Jefferson's refusal to honor these last-minute "midnight appointments" led to the landmark Supreme Court case of Marbury v. Madison.

President Adams's style was largely to leave domestic matters to Congress and to control foreign policy himself. Not only did the Constitution vest the President with responsibility for foreign policy but perhaps no other American had as much diplomatic experience as Adams. As a result of his outlook, much of his domestic policy was intertwined with his foreign policy, for diplomatic issues often sparked a domestic reaction that consumed the President and the nation.

On the heels of the XYZ Affair (see Foreign Affairs section), there were many negative sentiments toward the French. Sensing this mood in the citizenry and identifying an opportunity to crush the pro-French Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, the Federalist-dominated Congress drafted and passed the Alien and Sedition Acts during the spring and summer of 1798. Adams signed the legislation into law. These acts were made up of four pieces of legislation that became the most bitterly contested domestic issue during the Adams presidency.

Supposedly created as a means of preventing the aiding and abetting of France within the United States and of obstructing American foreign policy, the laws in actuality had domestic political overtones. Three of the laws were aimed at immigrants, most of whom tended to vote for Democratic-Republican candidates. The Naturalization Act lengthened the residency period required for citizenship from five to fourteen years. The Alien Act, the only one of the four acts to pass with bipartisan support, allowed for the detention of enemy aliens in time of war without trial or counsel. The Alien Enemies Act empowered the President to deport aliens whom he deemed dangerous to the nation's security. The fourth law, the Sedition Act, outlawed conspiracy to prevent the enforcement of federal laws and punished subversive speech—with fines and imprisonment. There were fifteen indictments and ten convictions under the Sedition Act during the final year and a half of Adams's administration. No aliens were deported or arrested although hundreds of alien immigrants fled the country in 1798 and 1799.

To pay for the military measures it enacted during the XYZ crisis, the Federalist Congress enacted heavy new stamp and house taxes. Farmers in eastern Pennsylvania rioted and attacked federal tax collectors in an incident later referred to as Fries's Rebellion. They believed that the new taxes were designed to support a large standing army and navy, which they opposed. Several of their leaders were arrested and sentenced to death for treason. However, on the eve of the election of 1800, Adams pardoned all of the prisoners.

In response to the Federalists' draconian use of federal power, Democratic-Republicans Thomas Jefferson and James Madison secretly drafted a set of resolutions. These resolutions were introduced into the Kentucky and Virginia legislatures in the fall of 1798. Jefferson and Madison argued that since the Constitution was created by a compact among the states, the people, speaking through their state legislatures, had the authority to judge the legitimacy of federal actions. Hence, they pronounced the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void. (See the Campaign and Election of 1800 section for more on the political effects of these actions and reactions.)

Although no other states formally supported the resolutions, they rallied Democratic-Republican opinion in the nation. Most importantly, they placed the Jeffersonian Republicans within the revolutionary tradition of resistance to tyranny. The resolutions also raised the issue of states' rights and the constitutional question of how conflict between the two authorities would be resolved short of secession or war.

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The United States Presidential Election

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• Sharp Divisions on Vote Counts, as Biden Gets High Marks for His Post-Election Conduct
• 4. Voters’ reflections on the campaign

Table of Contents

• 1. Biden, Trump and the post-election period
• 2. Voters’ evaluations of the 2020 election process
• 3. The voting experience in 2020
• 5. Key post-election issues: The pandemic and the economy
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Reflecting on the 2020 presidential campaign, most voters find it was interesting rather than dull (64% vs. 34%), but also say it was too negative (76%) and not focused on important policy debates (72%).

Nearly two-thirds of voters (64%) say, in retrospect, they thought the campaign was interesting. This is a significant shift of opinion since August, when just 39% of registered voters said the campaign was interesting and most (59%) said they found the campaign dull.

Today, roughly three-quarters of voters (76%) say the campaign was too negative. In August, 61% of registered voters said they thought the campaign was too negative.

Only about a quarter of voters (27%) say the 2020 campaign was focused on important policy debates, little different than the share of registered voters who said this in August (25%).

Biden voters (72%) are more likely than Trump voters (56%) to say the campaign was interesting, though majorities in both groups now say this. In August, only about four-in-ten supporters of each candidate said the campaign was interesting.

Both Biden and Trump voters are also more likely to say the campaign was too negative than they were earlier in the year. More than seven-in-ten Biden (73%) and Trump voters (78%) say the campaign was too negative. About six-in-ten (59% and 62%, respectively) said this in August.

Just a third of Biden voters and an even smaller share of Trump voters (21%) say the 2020 campaign was focused on important policy debates. However, Biden voters are somewhat more likely to say this today than they were in August, while the share of Trump voters saying this is slightly lower than the share of his supporters who said this in August (25% now, 21% then).

Most were satisfied with the choice of candidates

Overall, 57% of voters say they were very or fairly satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates this year, while 43% say they were not too or not at all satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates.

Four years ago, just 44% said they were very or fairly satisfied with the choice of candidates. (Note: Post-election surveys from 1988-2016 were conducted by phone, while the latest survey was conducted online; there may be modest mode differences on this question.)

Among those who voted for Biden, nearly three-quarters (74%) say they were very or fairly satisfied with the choice of presidential candidates, compared with 39% of Trump voters who say they were satisfied.

Just over half of Biden voters said their vote was more ‘against Trump’ than ‘for Biden’

As was the case in surveys conducted before the election, Trump voters remain more likely than Biden voters to consider their vote more of a vote “for” their preferred candidate. About three-quarters of Trump voters (76%) say their choice was more a vote for Trump, while 24% say their choice was more a vote against Biden.

Biden voters are more divided. A narrow majority (54%) say their choice was more a vote against Trump, while 46% say their choice was more a vote for Biden.

This general pattern is consistent with previous presidential elections involving incumbent presidents, with supporters of the challenger more likely to say their choice is more a vote against the incumbent than supporters of the incumbent were to view their support as against the challenger.

Slightly larger majorities of Biden supporters in June (67%) and October (63%) said their choice was more a vote against Trump than say this in the post-election survey (54%).

The share of Trump voters saying their vote was more a vote of support for Trump than against Biden is little different than it was in preelection surveys.

More than eight-in-ten voters (84%) say they made up their mind about who they were going to vote for in the 2020 presidential election before September. By comparison, in the wake of the 2016 election, a smaller – though still substantial – majority of 2016 voters (67%) reported having made their mind up before September.

This year, just 5% of voters say they made up their mind about their vote in the last week before Election Day. In 2016, 13% said they had made their mind up in the last week.

Trump voters are slightly more likely than Biden voters to report having made up their mind about their vote in the last week before Election Day (6% vs. 4%).

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Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power Essay

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Introduction

The goal of persuasion, time period, works cited.

American politicians have used secrets of rhetoric since the first elections that took place over two centuries ago. All American presidents employed the strategies ancient philosophers developed and described, which helped many of them to achieve their goals and receive the public support (Budzynska-Daca & Botwina 39). Barack Obama is one of the politicians who effectively uses rhetorical tools, which contributes to his popularity among Americans or even worldwide. This paper includes a brief analysis of one of Obama’s election advertisements.

Sometimes candidates focus on the negative aspects of their opponents’ campaigns to win the race. In this ad, however, Obama uses an interesting approach. He tries to destroy the negative message his opponent is trying to create. Obama mentions ads taking his “words about small business out of context” and explains what he believes in (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). Thus, instead of the attempt to increase taxes, it is clear that the candidate wants to support the development of small business through investing in training and infrastructure. Obama achieves two goals as he shows his good intentions and reveals the true colors of his opponents who simply try to smear him.

To achieve his persuasive goal, Obama uses ethos. This rhetorical tool focuses on establishing the credibility of the speaker (Fletcher 43). In the ad, there is a caption that introduces a website where more information can be found. It is clear that the candidate is one of the leaders of the movement for the change supported by thousands of Americans (“Our Story”).

There is also a caption that reveals the source of funding. The ad was funded by Obama for America (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). This creates the credibility as the candidate’s good will is apparent. His fund and his team are responsible for the ad and have paid for it. It is clear that there are no other players who might affect the future President’s decisions.

The use of logos is also effective in this message. Logos are rhetorical tools that focus on reasoning (Wood 24). Obama uses such words as “of course” when talking about small business (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). This makes the message seem logical as it appears to be (and it is) a universal truth that business people are working hard to contribute to the American economy.

The candidate also uses the metaphor that he and his team will “stand behind” the American small business meaning that they will support its development (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). It is quite logical that the development of infrastructure and provision of the high-quality training is a way to help businesses develop. This reasoning makes the message strong.

The use of pathos is one of the strongest features of the message. The pathos focus on the development of a specific “bond” with the audience through appealing to particular values (Uhr 255). Obama appeals to small business owners as well as all the Americans in his message. The ad reveals the life of working Americans, and those watching it can easily associate themselves with the people featured.

The candidate also uses a particular language to create the bond. He stresses, “we are all in this together” (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). The candidate appeals to such values as hard work, cooperation and support of the US government in people’s endeavors. Obama stresses that the country has always supported hardworking people, which also appeals to Americans.

The images provided enhance the message of the candidate, his ethos, pathos, and logos. One of the most conspicuous signs is the value of taxes that help the small business (“2012 Obama vs. Romney”). The ad includes the images of the roads under construction, which is one of the areas funded by the government.

Obama stresses that the government contributes greatly to the development of businesses through creating the infrastructure and investing into technology, science, and education. The message is hidden, but it is easily perceived through the video. Americans understand that they need the government, and they have to pay (even quite high) taxes for the development.

Importantly, the ad focuses on things that were important at that period. People (especially owners of small businesses) were preoccupied with the ideas to increase taxes and increase the role of the government. President Obama advocated the idea of free healthcare, which was not supported by all Americans. At the same time, the ad shows that the candidate tried to make people understand the benefits of his position. Even now, it may seem hazardous that the taxes will increase. However, on second thoughts, the government can help businesses develop through investing in infrastructure, education and so on.

On balance, it is possible to note that the ad in question is a good illustration of the use of ethos, pathos, and logos. The message appeals to the target audience, and the speaker achieves his persuasive goal. The candidate addresses some criticism he has faced and manages to prove that his point is valid. Obama uses the rhetoric tools effectively with a focus on pathos. This strategy is quite important for a politician as it is vital to get the support of the public.

2012 Obama vs. Romney. 2012. Web.

Budzynska-Daca, Agnieszka, and Renata Botwina. “Rhetorical and Performative Analysis.” Persuasive Games in Political and Professional Dialogue . Ed. Răzvan Săftoiu, Maria-Ionela Neagu, and Stanca Măda. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. 39-55. Print.

Fletcher, Jennifer. Teaching Arguments: Rhetorical Comprehension, Critique, and Response. Portland: Stenhouse Publishers, 2015. Print.

Our Story. 2016. Web.

Uhr, John. “Rhetorical and Performative Analysis.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Leadership . Ed. R.A.W. Rhodes and Paul Hart. New York: OUP Oxford, 2014. 253-267. Print.

Wood, Julia T. Communication Mosaic: An Introduction to the Field of Communication. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2016. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2020, May 14). Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power. https://ivypanda.com/essays/presidential-campaign-barack-obamas-message-and-its-power/

"Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power." IvyPanda , 14 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/presidential-campaign-barack-obamas-message-and-its-power/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power'. 14 May.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/presidential-campaign-barack-obamas-message-and-its-power/.

1. IvyPanda . "Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/presidential-campaign-barack-obamas-message-and-its-power/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama’s Message and Its Power." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/presidential-campaign-barack-obamas-message-and-its-power/.