Happy Tuesday! Today is Election Day. Any recommendations for how to pass the time before the results start to come in?

And don’t forget: We’ll be covering all the results and events of election night tonight on a very special three-hour edition of Dispatch Live, so be sure to tune in. This livestreamed discussion  is usually exclusively for Dispatch members—but we’re making this special episode available to all our readers, so feel free to invite your friends and family!

We’ve put together a stacked lineup for the night—including Megan McArdle, Stephanie Slade, David Frum, and Sharon McMahon. They’ll join your favorite Dispatchers to track the state-by-state updates, break down the results, and keep calm through the uncertainty. It’s a night you don’t want to miss. See you tonight at 10 p.m. ET!

• Former President Donald Trump’s rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, on Monday, the last day before voters go to the polls on Election Day, had not only a sense of urgency but also of sentimentality. It seemed at one point the Republican nominee reminisced about his time campaigning. “You know, this is our last time now for—forever,” Trump said. “Think how sad. We started this, right, we started it really as a family unit nine years ago. We’ve had the biggest rallies, the most spectacular rallies in the history of politics.” Trump’s voice sounded hoarse, and he seemed lower-energy than is typical during an event that featured multiple Pennsylvania congressmen, as well as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Trump ended his campaign with a late-night rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
• At the Reading rally, the Trump campaign played an ad titled “Together,” one of its last before Election Day. It features Trump, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Nicole Shanahan, Sen. J.D. Vance, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Elon Musk. “What will we do with this moment? How will we be remembered? Look at the opportunities before us,” Trump says in the ad. Amid the ad’s sound bites, “American Rock ‘n Roll” by Kid Rock plays, and clips of Trump rallies and memes flash across the screen.
• Kamala Harris concluded her White House bid Monday evening with an outdoor campaign rally before tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters hopeful today’s toss-up election breaks the vice president’s way. The stage was situated at the foot of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in front of the steps made famous in a memorable scene from the Academy Award winning film, Rocky. After three-plus hours of warm-up speeches and musical performances from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, DJ Cassidy, Fat Joe, Freeway and Just Blaze, Lady Gaga, Ricky Martin, The Roots, Jazmine Sullivan, and Oprah Winfrey—among others—Harris addressed the crowd beginning just after 11:30 p.m. ET. “Are we ready to vote? Are we ready to win?” the vice president asked a roaring crowd from behind bulletproof glass. The event capped off an Election Day-eve swing across Pennsylvania, with stops in Scranton, Allentown, Reading, Pittsburgh, and finally, Philadelphia. “Make no mistake; we will win,” said Harris, who did not mention Trump by name during her remarks.
• Podcaster Joe Rogan on Monday endorsed Trump as he posted an interview with X owner Elon Musk. “The great and powerful @elonmusk. If it wasn’t for him we’d be f—d,” Rogan said in a post on X with the full two-hours-plus interview. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast.”

FLINT, Michigan—Cody Lajewski and his wife, Emily Andrews, know on a personal level how evenly divided the American electorate is. Speaking to Dispatch Politics on Monday just before Sen. J.D. Vance’s final pre-election event in Michigan, the couple says they’ve both voted early for Republican nominee Donald Trump. 

But while Andrews’ parents and siblings are also Trump supporters, Lajewski admitted, more in sorrow than in anger, that his family members are all voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. “And our families are the same size,” he said, meaning the votes effectively cancel each other’s votes out. 

Lajewski, 26, and Andrews, 25, want the former president to win Michigan and the White House, but they know from experience that the election could go either way. And whatever the outcome, Lajewski said, he has hopes that after the election, more civic engagement and debate on a local level, including right here in his hometown of Flint, can flourish.

“Regardless on who wins, my goal is to bring back public discourse. I don’t care about who wins. Like, winning would be nice. Losing, I think, has drastic consequences,” he said. “The rest of the country is going to have their problems that they have to face. It’s my job as a husband and a father to protect my children, and I can’t do that across the country. I can only do that here.”

In different ways, the campaigns and candidates themselves have heightened the stakes of the race with their rhetoric. Trump regularly claims that electing Harris will “destroy” the country and allow it to be overrun by illegal immigrants. Harris, meanwhile, has said she thinks Trump is a fascist and that he seeks “unchecked power” in office. And while committed, professional partisans have spent the last days, weeks, and months portending doom if the other side wins, Dispatch Politics found plenty of regular voters across multiple battleground states who were relatively sanguine about how they would react to their preferred candidate losing.

“It’ll be, obviously, a little disappointing,” said Maia Fitch, a 28-year-old from Milwaukee who voted early for Harris and was attending the vice president’s rally in West Allis, Wisconsin, on Saturday. “But I’m hoping that it won’t be disappointing in the fact that, it’s like gloating for the Trump fans to rub it in our faces to make it worse. I hope that [Trump] does take it seriously and turns things around.”

“Hey, I’m not gonna be a sore loser,” said Jeff Evans, a 59-year-old teacher and coach after a Trump rally Monday in Reading, Pennsylvania. “I’m a coach, you know. You win some, you lose some, but I think, you know, I think Trump’s gonna win. I mean, if it is—if she does win, we got to do what we can.”

Still, feelings are strong and hot in the final days, and some voters seemed either unwilling to consider the idea of their candidate losing or greeted the idea with despair. Indeed, public polling that showed Harris and Trump deadlocked as Election Day dawned seemed to do little to prepare either Democrats or Republicans for a potential defeat.

“It’s not gonna happen,” said Cindi Kripplebauer, 51, who also attended Trump’s Reading rally. “I think President Trump was chosen by God to fight this fight for us, and I think he can win. I mean, if she does, we’re gonna have to deal with it. But I don’t think it’s in the cards.”

But if Harris does pull it out? “What would I do? I’ll cry. I will cry,” Kripplebauer said with a chuckle.

Melissa Heck, 34, from Grand Blanc, Michigan, said she will try not to get emotional if Trump wins this time.

“The first time he won, I cried for two days,” said Heck, who was at Harris’ Sunday rally in East Lansing. “Not straight, but I cried for two days. I don’t want to go back to that, but I’ll be very disappointed.”

Kim Glass, an attorney waiting to get into Harris’ Phoenix rally on Thursday, said she would be “sick” if Trump won. And a day earlier, outside Harris’ rally in Madison, Wisconsin, Lisa Bauer said she’d consider temporarily moving to another country.

And a few voters expressed concern for how others could react to the election results. “I honestly think no matter what way it goes, our country is not going to be at peace,” said Rebecca Borchardt, who was attending Trump’s rally in Milwaukee on Friday. “I think the media has done a very good job of dividing the country.”

Across town at Harris’ West Allis rally, Charles Marks, 67, said that the vice president’s supporters like himself “won’t incite violence” if Trump is victorious. Pam Baranowski chimed in to say she worried that Trump supporters won’t accept the results if Harris wins.

If anything, Republicans who spoke to Dispatch Politics seemed a little less willing to entertain the idea that Harris could win than Democrats were that Trump—who won one election and came close to winning a second in 2020—could win. A Trump supporter in Reading named Ray, who declined to give his last name, said the only way Harris could win “would be to cheat.”

But even in the highly charged atmosphere before an election, most voters greeted the hypothetical of their candidate falling short with a sense of hopeful resignation. 

“I would feel devastated but get on with my life, like I always have,” said Jean Jones outside of Trump’s Milwaukee rally. And Orlando Kennan, a Harris voter at her Phoenix rally, was downright positive about how he’ll take a Trump win.

“I’m American,” he said. “I’m going to support whatever president’s there.”

• Vice President Kamala Harris is in Washington, D.C., today for private meetings and briefings. The Democratic nominee could appear at her campaign’s election night event at Howard University, the historically black college in the nation’s capital that is her alma mater.
• Former President Donald Trump, and wife Melania Trump, are voting today in Palm Beach, Florida. This evening, the Republican nominee is hosting election night events in Florida, including one at Mar-a-Lago, his winter residence and private social club in Palm Beach, and another across town at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach.
• Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, and wife Gwen Walz, campaign for Harris in Pennsylvania, beginning in the morning in Harrisburg.

“In two days, we are going to take out the trash in Washington, D.C., and the trash’s name is Kamala Harris.”

—Sen. J.D. Vance at a rally in Atlanta, November 4, 2024