Time November 2/November 9, 2020though all the data seem to point to a Trump loss,
the pundits who were so certain four years ago now
have a haunted air. To count Trump out is to tempt
fate. And so we need this election not only to de-
cide who will occupy the White House for the next
four years but also to settle the great national argu-
ment that has consumed us since 2016. On Nov. 3
(or, hopefully, soon after), we will finally get an an-
swer to the question of what these past four discom-
bobulating years have meant—whether Trump was
what America wanted or some kind of exceedingly
consequential fluke. It is a decision not about what
policy proposals to pursue but about what reality we
collectively decide to inhabit.
One more defeat and they’re going to accept it.
Everyone dreams of a victory so total it will dis-
credit the opposition and drive them into exile. But
it will not be so easy to knit this torn-up country
back together, as the virus makes its winter surge
and the institutions of democracy teeter. “They can
get rid of Trump, but they can’t get rid of us,” Ray-
mond Tedesco, a 58-year-old in sunglasses and a
TRUmP 2020 hat, tells me in Ocala, where the med-
ics are hauling away audience members as they faint
from the heat and thousands of disposable masks are
piled unused by the metal detectors. “We ain’t going
nowhere. You can put that mental case Joe Biden in
office, we’re just going to get madder and louder.”
The people around him—a homeschool mom, a horse
trainer, an African-American would-be TikTok in-
fluencer who owns a local gym—nod in agreement.
“These people are all wonderful, nice people. I’m
not so nice,” Tedesco continues with a toothy grin.
“They want to come for me, they better bring some
body bags.” I ask what he does for a living, and he
says, “I make trouble.” One way or another, this elec-
tion will be over soon. And then who knows what
fresh trouble may start.
On my flight to Minnesota for another Trump
campaign rally, my seatmate gets into an argument
over masks with a flight attendant. When I get to the
rental-car counter, the otherwise normal- seeming
clerk has a sticker on his phone that says Q: TRUST
THe PLAN. 2020 is nothing if not on brand.
The corner of 38th and Chicago in Minneap-
olis is cool and still as the sun rises on a Septem-
ber morning. Jersey barriers keep traffic out of the
intersection, and the lit marquee of the boarded-
up Speedway gas station tells you where you are:
GeORGe FLOYD SQUARe. The protesters are gone
now, but the streets bear witness to the parox-
ysms of grief and rage Floyd’s killing unleashed.
YOU ARe NOW eNTeRiNG THe FRee STATe
OF GeORGe FLOYD, says a sign. ReSPeCT ONe
ANOTHeR. Two miles away, cranes are repairing the
looted Target store; across the street, the former
Third Precinct police station lies in ruins.
It’s four hours’ drive north to get to Trump’s rally
in Bemidji, through flat green farmland dotted with
pretty lakes and the occasional roadside political
sign. Nestled between reservations, the town is
“about one-third Native, one-third white and one-
third hippie,” a local tells me. One afternoon at
the beginning of June, a retired Lutheran pastor
named Melody Kirkpatrick set up a lawn chair and a
homemade social-justice poster by the side of a road
and began to knit. The “knitters for justice” have
met every day since; Kirkpatrick estimates about 75
people have joined her. “They think we’re here to
knit, and I say, ‘No, that’s just to keep from strangling
somebody,’ ” the cheerful, gray-haired 68-year-old
says with a laugh. Her face mask says STD—STOP
THe DONALD—DON’T LeT THe iNFeCTiON SPReAD.
In the hours before the President’s plane lands,
the Trump Shop, a converted trailer unaffiliated
with the campaign, is doing brisk business sell-
ing buttons, key chains, flags, socks, caps, glasses,
koozies, stickers, hoodies and the occasional face
mask. Tractors flying massive Trump flags cruise
up and down the town’s main artery, Paul Bun-
yan Drive. But Kirk patrick has plenty of company
too. Local Democrats and members of Indivisible
Bemidji line the route with homemade signs like
VOTe Him OUT BeFORe He KiLLS US ALL.
Rural Minnesota wasn’t always a hotbed of politi-
cal activity, but Trump’s victory was born in places
like this: the hollowed-out towns of the industrial
Midwest, where his pugnacious affect and broad-
sides against trade deals and immigration galvanized
legions of non-college-educated white people. Mich-
igan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania went Republican
for the first time in decades. Minnesota came within
1.5 percentage points of flipping too.
Since 2016, many have analyzed the revolution
after the fact. Trump has been hailed as the tribune of
a working-class realignment and scorned as the dem-
agogue of white-identity politics. Theorists like his
former adviser Steve Bannon envisioned a tectonic
electoral shift as a new politics of nationalism, iso-
lationism and protectionism supplanted the GOP’s
stale supply-side economic dogma.
But Trump engineered something else too: an
awakening on the other side. Shell-shocked liberals,
most of them women, poured into the streets and
formed local clubs from Oakland to Oklahoma
City. They rallied for many causes—racial justice,
health care, immigrant rights, women’s rights—but
the organizing principle was getting rid of Trump.
There was indeed a realignment, but the number
of working-class whites flocking to the GOP was
dwarfed by a massive swing of college- educated
white voters, suburbanites and women to the
Democrats. Add in a surge of young voters, voters
of color, independents and seniors, and Biden has
“created a coalition that’s completely unique in28