Kamala harris

For most of American history, elections took a long time. Many of the gaps that still exist today between when counts begin, when certification happens, when electors meet and when the next winner is sworn in exist as a vestige of a past where lengthy travel and slow word of mouth meant people just did not know what had happened for quite some time. Election results happened at a distance. This created its own set of problems in the application of authority, but now we are dealing with something of a different nature: a demand for immediacy that throws patience aside and views every delay as suspicious. It’s one reason that we used to speak to each other in paragraphs, then in lines and phrases — now we can only manage memes.

Republicans and Democrats, who disagree so virulently on so much, at least agree on two things. Both say it is the most consequential election in US history. (They might want to check on 1860.) And both believe the other side’s triumph would be catastrophic. It would have dangerous consequences for decades, they say, and might be impossible to correct. They are half right, perhaps more, and what they are right about is scary. This election is the most consequential since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression. That election was consequential because it and the following one, in 1936, locked in the Democratic Party coalition that effectively governed the country for the next seventy-five years.

Grand Rapids, Michigan Former president Donald Trump appeared for what will be his last ever presidential campaign rally Monday night — or very early Tuesday morning, to be exact — for a crowd of about 12,000 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This was Trump’s third time appearing in Grand Rapids on election eve; he spoke to voters from the DeVos Place Convention Center in 2016 when he won the state, at Gerald R. Ford International Airport in 2020, and tonight at the Van Andel Arena. In 2020, Trump said cheekily about his return to the city, “We can be a little superstitious, right?”  Trump took the stage just after midnight to roars from the crowd as “God Bless the USA” played on the speakers.