After hundreds of pompous rallies and many months of empty clichés, after the spending of billions of dollars between the two major campaigns and their political allies, after the public airwaves were filled with so many dark lies and slander , the very atmosphere of thought has become toxic, after the majority of citizens have been driven to hysterical fear that one or another outcome is sure to destroy our way of life, it is a strange custom of my compatriots to let the two candidates live after on election day, and one of them be President of the United States for four years.

The final polls reveals little about how the result will be achieved. For fun, we Americans use 51 simultaneous and separate elections to determine the presidency. Our best-funded public pollsters freely admit that they have been content to copy each other’s results at the state level over the past few weeks and refuse to release interesting outliers for fear of being surprised and losing their corporate clients. That means the vast majority of polls show the race within the margin of error. A dynamic that pollsters hadn’t collectively anticipated — say, projected turnout among single women or rural whites — could swing the election one way or the other.

( US election night guide: key moments for swing state results, how to follow the story, how it worksOpens in a new window )

What we can say is that the 2024 election will be between a man Americans know too well and a woman Americans would rather not know.

With an approval rate close to 50 percent, Donald Asset is more popular than ever. This is all the more remarkable given that a survey carried out this summer showed that one in three Democrats I wish an assassin’s bullet would have exploded his skull and killed him rather than just grazing his ear. In my experience, those who speak most about the need to preserve democracy are those who favor assassinations.

After a month during which Kamala Harris was pushed to the top of the list by her party elites, and in which she gave no substantive interviews, she was clearly in the lead. She then spent a month introducing herself to the public. It was his big mistake. So she fell backwards into a stalemate as the Americans concluded it was better not to speak.

The contrasts multiply from there. Trump has at times come across as too confident and too familiar. He trusts voters to know when he’s joking and his opponents who humorlessly pretend not to know when he’s joking. (“I won’t be a dictator except the first day. “) In recent weeks, Trump has campaigned as if he was anticipating a victory. He has expanded his events to Wisconsin and states that would normally be further away for him, like New Hampshire. Him and his running mate, J.D. Vancehave delved into new media by releasing comedy podcasts. Harris, on the other hand, is one of the most precarious candidates ever thrust into the spotlight. Without having won the nomination herself, she does not completely control her own campaign apparatus, part of which is lent to her by the team. Biden and the Obama team. She appears in highly controlled, highly scripted environments like Stephen Colbert’s series, and she focuses almost all of her time in Pennsylvania, thus narrowing her map.

( US elections: Harris and Trump seek vital advantage in home stretchOpens in a new window )

On the surface, the issues that motivate elections are the usual economic issues. Americans say they trust Trump more on the two biggest issues, the economy and immigration. However, if Harris wins, it will be because single women will have voted in a tsunami to reject Trump and to preserve or expand their rights to abortion.

But Republicans may have advantages on other cultural issues. One of Most viewed pro-Trump ads quotes Harris once suggestion it would use taxpayer money to perform gender reassignment surgery on illegal immigrants who are imprisoned for other crimes, if they identify as trans. “It’s for them. Donald Trump is for us,” he concludes.

There are already scenarios to watch out for in the results. The Trump era has gathered pace and initiated serious realignments in American politics. Despite the attempt to frame his appeal as primarily racist, the Republican Party under the populist Trump is more attractive to non-white voters, particularly black and Hispanic men, than it was under the good guy Mitt Romney affairs. If he wins, it could be due to the continued migration of working-class men to the Republican Party and the influx of voters from countries like Venezuela who deplore the left.

Harris’ candidacy, like Hillary Clinton’s before her, reflects the iron grip that educated professionals have over the Democratic Party. As a result, with the exception of the extractive industries and some major tech sector donors, corporate money now flows almost unhindered around the world. Democratic Party. Her strength and weakness are exactly the same thing, and that’s something she has no say in. In the era of populism, the anti-populist is the representative of all the institutions established in American life. Its political destiny is therefore linked to what the majority of Americans think about the performance of academia, big pharmaceutical companies, regulatory agencies, the Pentagon and even the media themselves.

( Trump and Harris make final appeals as US elections play outOpens in a new window )

This is the real driving force of this campaign and this era. The post-Cold War American political consensus had a subtly utopian vision. It posited that the freer movement of people, goods and capital across borders would bring the greatest good. This would soften and erase our irrational loyalty to our nations and religions. Harris believes that there is more prosperity and moral progress to be had from this model of elite-run democracy, in which questions of immigration and economic management are slowly removed from deliberations and moved into the realm of human rights. Trump, like so many populist leaders across Europe, represents a rebuke to this project. His candidacy has charged the Republican Party, for the foreseeable future, with the task of reaffirming the primacy of self-government in the democratic era. Politicians who have come to love prestige without the accountability of power or any credibility mechanism hate it. That fate thrust such an important project on a man like Trump is either a cosmic joke or divine judgment.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior editor at National Review and a William F Buckley Senior Fellow at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. He is the author of My Father Left Me Ireland