This article is part of The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Register here to receive stories like this in your inbox.

Raphael Warnock arrived on Detroit’s Avenue of Fashion in his SUV, wearing blue jeans and a low-key olive vest, ready to make his speech to a mostly black audience. Georgia’s Democratic senator is among a group of prominent advocates for Kamala Harris who works tirelessly to attract black male voters who she fears could cost her the election — not so much by supporting Donald Trump, but by not bothering to vote at all.

“We can’t afford to stay at home. That’s the real threat,” Warnock said in a window hastily transformed into a field office for Democrats. “There is no such thing as not voting. If you do anything other than vote for Kamala Harris, then you’re moving this man closer to the White House, and we can’t afford to have him back there.

Warnock’s words were similar to his message earlier in the day at a magnet school with a student body that is three-quarters black and counts Diana Ross among its alumni. This is the same warning he is issuing daily until election day in key states, on radio, television, HBCUs homecoming games, everywhere, in fact, in the hopes that the outcome isn’t dictated by a lack of enthusiasm from low-propensity voters, particularly black men.

“I don’t believe a lot of black men will vote for Donald Trump. I don’t believe it,” Warnock told the crowd at an inner-city high school. “We are not a monolith like everyone else. There will be some; there always have been.

Low-propensity voters— those who are registered but are far from guaranteed to show up on Election Day — have become the ultimate prize for Democrats at this late hour. Harris’ advisers are making a strategic bet that her die-hard supporters have already cashed in their votes as early as possible when possible and that most of those inclined to support Trump are unconvincing. Instead, the focus in the final push was on low-probability voters knocking on their doors, with digital ads aimed at specific demographics and incessant phone calls. On Saturday alone, Harris’ campaign said volunteers in Pennsylvania were knocking on 2,000 doors every minute.

Team Harris has made no attempt to hide its aggressive efforts to increase voter turnout, particularly among black men. And this effort is particularly strong in key cities in the very, very white area. Blue wall the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, all of which appear poised to be narrowly decided. Special efforts were made in markets like Detroit, Philadelphia and Milwaukee. Black voters are the backbone of the Democratic Party, but efforts to secure their support have, frankly, fallen flat. languishes when democrats thought they were blocked with President Joe Biden running for a second term. Once Harris took over the ticket in July, the team she inherited and then expanded set about making up lost ground.

In 2020, Biden dominated the Blue Wall states among Black voters, winning 92% each of Black voters. Michigan, WisconsinAnd Pennsylvania. But they only make up between 6% and 12% of the total electorate, meaning a few thousand black voters staying home may actually mean the whole game for Democrats. To keep these states, Harris needs participation and discipline.

In the southern states concerned, it is more urgent; about 30% of the electorate in Georgia is expected to be black and 25% in North Carolina. Neither state is a must-win, but they are part of the seven-state constellation that makes up the most realistic battlefield map. And in the last presidential race, Biden mustered 88% of Black voters to win Georgia in 2020, but the 92% he won in North Carolina proved insufficient.

For his part, Harris has little plays hard to get: she published a program of opportunities for black men and flooded the media and black personalities. Assistants organized events like a Black Men Huddle, Black Men For Harris, a barbershop tour called Cuts and Conversations, and targeted canvases under the brands Step, Stomp, and Stroll. Musical artists like Beyoncé, Usher, John Legend, Lizzo and Cardi B have all joined Harris events last month. Oprah, Stevie Wonder and Magic Johnson were also in attendance. Actress Kerry Washington practically lives on the campaign trail these days, and the Congressional Black Caucus has been a traveling tour for the campaign.

Oh, and a certain former president named Barack Obama and a First Lady Appointee Michelle came out of on the sidelines in a major way.

It’s one of the most transparent and targeted efforts in recent years to reach these potential voters, and it still risks failing. Black men “are not in our pocket,” Harris told the National Association of Black Journalists in September. Trump’s strategists, of course, understand this and have been surgical in their campaign for the vote of young men in all racial groups. This sets in motion one of the most unexpected subplots of the 2024 campaign.

“What you see is Kamala Harris recognizing – and to her credit – that you can’t take anyone for granted,” Warnock told me in a parking lot after one of many pep talks in Detroit. “She knows she has to fight to win the votes of black men, white women, white men and every other constituency. And she fights to achieve it.

Celebrity and identity politics can certainly play an important role in voter registration and mobilizing low-propensity voters, but ultimately there was a product beyond the packaging. Harris certainly isn’t short on substance, but the energy radiating from her campaign at in-person events often isn’t felt by those consuming that content in clips and sound bytes. His rally in Houston late last month rivaled any recent sporting or musical event in my mind, invoking memories from Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech in Denver. (Beyoncé’s presentation didn’t hurt, either.) But from the outside, such moments can be drowned out by the daily buffet of Trump’s outrageous pomposity.

Yet the messages to these voters have sometimes been a little disjointed. Many in Democratic circles have questioned the wisdom of Barack Obama to call Black men for being lukewarm towards Harris out of latent sexism. (“Part of that makes me think that, well, you just don’t feel for the idea of ​​having a woman as president, and you come up with other alternatives and other reasons for it,” Obama told Pittsburgh.)

Sitting a day before Election Day, Harris has a solid base in the polls. The final NBC News poll shows 87 to 9 percent. divide among black voters, an explosion for sure. But then it’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton was 89 to 8 percent. lead among black voters in 2016 as well.

“If she doesn’t win, it will be because of racism. It’s that simple,” says Keith Williams, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus and former Wayne County commissioner. “She’s running against a convicted felon who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and it’s still close. There is only one way to explain this.

Retired engineer John Watkins, who took a minute out of his Friday to hear Warnock and collect the panels from the Harris yard, had a slightly different opinion. “People don’t take Trump seriously here,” said the 67-year-old Detroit resident. “Half the country simply won’t vote for a black woman. We must remember this reality and work twice as hard.

Democrats remain nervous about black male votes, but are less worried than they were around Labor Day. An NAACP poll released last week, black men under 50 were returning to the Democratic Party; Support for Trump fell from 27% to 21% from the previous month. Meanwhile, support for Harris rose from 51% to 59%, still a challenge in a voting bloc that every Democrat needs to run tallies.

Overall, among all black voters, Harris has about 73 percent support in the NAACP poll, also up about 10 points from the previous month. For comparison, Biden received votes from about 90% of Black voters in 2020, and Obama won about 95% of those ballots during his two campaigns.

“It’s better, but not good,” says one veteran strategist encouraging his friends outside the Harris campaign. “We’re out of the Biden danger zone, but it will still depend on what our aunts say in church last weekend. »

So as Warnock – like so many other Harris allies in the final days of the campaign – repeats his pitch to every group of potential voters he can find, he is rooted as much in aspiration as in pragmatism.

“You won’t see waves of black men voting for Donald Trump,” Warnock insisted. “The real threat we face, the real thing we have to deal with, is apathy.”

It is precisely for this reason that Harris’ team spent the final weeks of the campaign in overdrive and will remain there until the last polls close in just a few hours. They’re not looking for die-hard partisans, they’re looking for indifferent Americans who may not even know that Election Day has finally arrived.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Subscribe to the DC Brief newsletter.