Updated November 1, 2024 at 11:42 am ET

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris' “closing argument” rally on the White House Ellipse Tuesday night seemed designed to portray the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by screaming banners FREEDOMThe Democratic candidate gave her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6th when he addressed the crowd that then stormed the Capitol.

“Look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office…”

Isolated shouts You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my subsequent conversations with Harris supporters, their confidence seemed authentic. To someone I spoke to, everyone believed he was on the verge of victory – that Harris would defeat the “would-be dictator” once and for all, bring America back from the brink, and the world's oldest democracy from the descent into fascism would preserve.

Then I would ask a question they found daunting: What if she doesn't?

This question has been bothering me for months. We find ourselves in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential elections in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they will win — and that the consequences will loom if they do cannot create because America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: They want to win anyway, declare the election rigged and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether through legal challenges or unconstitutional ones Machinations or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work. as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The AtlanticNone of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states are partisan election deniers. Still, this frontal assault on the validity of the election poses a continuing threat.

If Harris loses, her coalition's response would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; Unlike Trump, she is committed to accepting the result. But as the election approaches and panic over Trump's authoritarian impulses peaks in some circles, I fear that prophecies of democratic collapse following Trump's reelection may prove self-fulfilling. What happens to America when Harris voters fully internalize the idea that democracy is on the ballot and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump's surprise victory sparked a wave of small voices.D democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, record-breaking donations to the ACLU and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions to newspapers committed to holding the new government accountable soared; Books about fighting tyranny became bestsellers. The energy was not limited to the liberal “resistance movement.” Conservative expats founded their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, warnings at the time of impending autocracy in America “helped to foment a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high voter turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. For many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden's victory represented a triumphant climax in the Trump-era narrative. And if the president, who served only one term and was impeached twice, had simply walked into a Mar-a-Lago Returning from exile, the story might have ended with a proper civic moral: a rising authoritarian defeated in the most American way possible – at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn't end there. And the fact that Trump is poised to return to the Oval Office four years later has caused some dissonance in liberal America. In his third election campaign, Trump has made his illiberal plans clearer than ever before. He has talked about using the Justice Department as a weapon against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists and revoking the broadcast licenses of television stations whose coverage he doesn't like.

Democrats have tried to warn voters about the threat these measures would pose to democracy — sometimes ramping up the rhetoric to alert Americans to the danger. But the message appears to have had an unfortunate dual effect: It deeply distressed voters already predisposed to believe it, while it largely failed to resonate with the undecided and politically disinterested. Last week, The New York Times reported a memo distributed by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters would not be moved by messages focused on the former president's authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that convincing,” the email said. Compared to 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote or that it is the most important election of their lives.

But for a certain part of Harris's base, the fight against autocracy remains top of mind. And if, like me, you spend too much time following the discourse online, you might get the impression that for many, Election Day will be the defining moment in the fight for American democracy. Some liberals are even planning to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden's son Hunter recently told us Politico He feared that Trump's re-election would mean “the loss of our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “may mean the end of America as we knew it.”

I have heard similar sentiments from my most concerned Harris voter friends and family members. And I wondered whether another Trump victory would awaken in them the same spirit of activism after 2016 or drive them into fatalism and withdrawal.

In her speech Tuesday night, Harris was careful not to indulge too much in the doom and gloom of an endangered democracy. But she took aim at her opponent's illiberalism. She said Trump was “seeking unchecked power” and warned that if elected he would move into the Oval Office with a “list of enemies.” She alluded to the country's birth in rebellion against a “petty tyrant” and described Americans who have fought for centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not fight, sacrifice and give their lives just to see us give up our basic freedoms just to see us submit to the will of another little tyrant,” Harris said jubilantly.

In my conversations after the speech, with Beyoncé's “Freedom” still blaring from the speakers, many supporters were teary-eyed and high on adrenaline, understandably reluctant to talk about what they would do next week if their candidate lost. But they politely gave in to me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mother from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, let out a throaty sound agghh when I asked her the question. “Democracy is absolutely at stake,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I'm scared. I’m scared if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought fear would lead to disillusionment or activism, she paused to think about it. “I think,” she said, “everyone will go back into battle to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke to another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She also called the prospect of Trump's re-election “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” if he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and then detailed the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her if she thought American democracy itself could be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This sentiment was shared by almost everyone I spoke to at the Ellipse that evening. Some of them told me about friends who were glued to cable news and scrolling doom on their phones and who might lean toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met — those who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies — didn't see Election Day as a single defining moment. They seemed to know that no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week and the week after. Its survival depends in part on not linking its fate to the outcome of a single election.

Before I left the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me that she rejects what she sees as exaggerated rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—Demoswhat “people” means and Kratiawhich means “rule”. The power of the people will not disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “this spirit,” it will be difficult to kill it.

This article originally stated that the Harris rally was on Wednesday; it was on Tuesday.