Earlier this year I became an American citizen. My two small children held tiny American flags as they watched me take the oath of allegiance, renouncing my loyalty to foreign princes and potentates. “Mummy’s an American!” my toddler gleefully informed everyone he encountered for weeks. I was excited to finally be able to vote in the country where I have lived for the past six years. But as this election day has neared, that excitement has been replaced by low-level dread.
New security fencing has already gone up around the White House, the vice president’s residence and the US Capitol. Shops and office buildings are boarding up their windows along Pennsylvania Avenue, the central artery that runs through Washington DC, fearful of the potential for violence in the days ahead. When I talk to people I know about this election – Democrats and Republicans alike – it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to the pit-of-the-stomach anxiety over what will follow. They tell me that they are not sleeping; that they are filling up their cars with petrol, fearing that unrest could break out on the streets following the election; that they are haunted by scenes from the 2024 Alex Garland movie, Civil War. These are sensible, rational people who are not prone to hyperbole.
Yet this election marks the first time anyone can remember where the peaceful transfer of power cannot be assured. We are all now familiar with Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the result of the last election: how he claimed victory on election night while the votes were still being counted, how he pressured election officials to change the outcome, and when that failed, how a violent mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol to try to stop the certification of the results. Two weeks later, when Joe Biden was sworn in at the site of the insurrection on 20 January 2021, he declared, “Democracy has prevailed.” That assessment now seems premature.
Trump has been preparing his supporters for months, even years, to doubt the legitimacy of this election, unless of course he wins. “The only thing that can stop us is the cheating,” the 78-year-old former president told the crowd at an event in Arizona, a crucial swing state, on 31 October. “It’s the only thing that can stop us.” He has repeated this message across the country in recent weeks, refusing to commit to accepting the result if Kamala Harris wins. At a rally in Pennsylvania, arguably the most important battleground state, on 3 November, Trump said that he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after the 2020 election. He has already claimed that large-scale vote-rigging is underway. “We caught them CHEATING BIG in Pennsylvania. Must announce and PROSECUTE, NOW,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform last week. “Who would have ever thought that our Country is so CORRUPT?”
Prominent conservatives are amplifying these conspiracy theories and seeding the ground to challenge the result, claiming that non-citizens are being allowed to vote, despite the fact that there is no credible evidence this is taking place on any meaningful scale. JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president, claimed on the massively popular Joe Rogan podcast last week that Democrats were deliberately allowing undocumented immigrants into the country and making it easier for them to vote in an attempt to turn the country into a one-party state.
“They want to legalise them, they want to make it easier for them to participate in our elections, and that means fundamentally the end of American democracy,” Vance said in an interview that racked up more than 13 million views in the first 24 hours. “My view is that if Trump doesn’t win this election, it’s the last election we’re going to have,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, formerly Twitter, who has emerged as one Trump’s most high-profile surrogates, told the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in an interview in October. “They will legalise so many illegals that the next election there won’t be any swing states… we’ll be a single party country, just like California is a single party state.”
Ben Shapiro, a conservative podcast host with 7 million subscribers, has adopted a different tack, claiming that the last census was carried out incorrectly so that Florida and Texas, both states Republicans are expected to win, should have received more electoral college votes. Trump, he suggests, would have legal grounds to challenge the result if Harris wins the electoral college 270-268, which is a plausible outcome. Then there are the fake videos already circulating online, some of which have been generated by AI, purporting to show ballots being destroyed and non-citizens voting.
The idea that this election is rigged has taken hold on the right. Eighty-six per cent of Republicans said they were concerned about voter fraud in this election (compared to 33 per cent of Democrats), according to a Marist poll in October. Eighty-one per cent of Republicans were concerned that non-citizens would be able to vote (compared to 25 per cent of Democrats in the same poll). When I spoke to Trump supporters at a campaign rally in Salem, Virginia, on 2 November, I heard repeatedly that they would not trust the results of this election if Harris is declared the winner.
“If it’s legal, I think Trump will get it,” said 31-year-old Sharon Kisling, who was wearing a black plastic bin bag, like others at the rally, after Biden appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage” last week. “I don’t think Kamala Harris is in the books unless it’s rigged,” Kisling continued. “She’s tried before and she didn’t win, she didn’t even get three per cent, so if it didn’t happen in the past, why would it this time?”
“God help us,” said an 81-year-old woman named Sandra who declined to give her second name, when asked about the prospect of a Harris victory. “All we can do is pray to the lord to take care of us.” I asked her whether she would believe the result if Trump didn’t win. “No, and it would be real scary,” she replied. But if it went to the courts and they said the election was fair, would she have confidence then? “We don’t believe in courts either,” she said. “Because most of the courts are run by Democrats so they want it to go their way.”
Democrats have their own fears about what a victory for their other side would mean. In recent weeks, Trump’s longest serving chief of staff, John Kelly, has warned that the former president meets the definition of a fascist and “prefers the dictator approach to government”. Former senior officials who served under Trump fear he would deploy the US military against American citizens and use the courts to take revenge against his political enemies. A Supreme Court ruling earlier this year found that Trump would have broad immunity from prosecution if he returns to power, with liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor writing in a dissenting opinion that the court had effectively made the president “a king above the law”.
Beyond the grave warnings about the fate of the republic, the outcome of this election also has concrete implications for American woman. They have already lost the constitutional right to an abortion after the Supreme Court, which is now dominated by the conservative justices appointed by Trump during his first term, overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022. Around one in three women in the US now lives in a state where abortion is banned or more heavily restricted. Thirteen states have a total abortion ban. Many women, who are breaking heavily towards Harris in the closing weeks of the election, fear further restrictions will follow that limit their rights even further in a second Trump presidency.
“It’s about women’s rights” said Remmie Lockhart, a 36-year-old nurse practitioner from Texas, who had driven for 20 hours with her sister and two young nieces to attend Kamala Harris’s closing rally in Washington DC on 29 October. “I’m a healthcare practitioner. I have friends who are trying to leave the field because they can’t practise.”
“Everything is at stake,” Kristin Thompson, 34, told me after listening to Harris’s speech. “I’m truly terrified of what another Trump presidency would mean. Truly terrified.”
America has had close elections and contested results before, but there is no precedent in recent history for a candidate to declare in advance that the country should not trust the result unless he wins. Trump is already signalling that he is prepared to tear apart the country’s democracy rather than concede defeat. The more sanguine amongst the Democrats note that this time, he is not the sitting president and does not control the federal government. He cannot give orders to the US military. But it would be naïve to imagine that a Harris victory – historic though it would be – would not be followed by weeks, perhaps months of attempts to challenge the results by a man who understands that if he loses this election, he will not be able to halt the multiple court cases against him, and could end up in prison if he cannot retake the White House.
Victory for Trump, meanwhile, would be shattering for the tens of millions of Americans who will vote against his return to the presidency, fearing the consequences for women’s rights, the country’s democratic freedoms, and America’s place in the world. It will be galling for many, particularly women, to see close to half the country vote for a man who has been adjudicated to have committed sexual assault, and whose campaign has been mired in racism and misogyny.
When you become a US citizen, you are told that it is one of your most important duties to register and vote in the country’s elections and to help ensure “that America’s promise of freedom, democracy, and liberty is secured for generations to come”. Some will surely go to the polls today excited to vote for their preferred candidate. But many others, on either side, will go to vote against what they perceive to be a grave danger to the country, in an election where confidence in the outcome is as unknown as the result itself.
[See also: The spectre of American fascism]
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