Molly Ball for WSJ:
The sun was shining. Bruce Springsteen was strumming an acoustic guitar. Yet beneath the peaceful surface, the stadium packed with thousands of Democrats practically thrummed with anxiety.
“I’m honestly legit kind of terrified,” said Rebekah Williams, a 46-year-old Atlanta resident wearing a T-shirt that read “pro science, pro choice, pro wrestling.” The thought of trying to get through the next couple of weeks until the election had her on edge, not to mention what might happen afterward. To get through it, she was counting on “a lot of marijuana.”
With little more than a week to go in what could be the closest presidential election in American history, the nation is on edge. Partisans on both sides are paralyzed with suspense and apprehension as they look to white-knuckle it through the coming days. The candidates have amped up their appeals to an apocalyptic degree as the campaigns frantically work to turn out the vote. As Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both campaigned in this crucial swing state, voters broadly said this election feels different than those that came before—less a regular democratic exercise than a national panic attack, a twilight clash that could end democracy for good.
“I can remember elections where it felt like things would be OK regardless of the outcome,” Phillip Appiah, a 50-year-old contractor from Stone Mountain, said as he waited in line for a food truck on the stadium turf. “That feeling is absent this time.”
The angst is widespread across the political spectrum. In a Wall Street Journal poll released last week, 87% of voters said they believe America will suffer permanent damage if their candidate loses. Among Harris’s voters, 57% said they would feel “frightened” if Trump is elected, while 47% of Trump voters said they would feel frightened if Harris wins; smaller percentages expected to feel the milder reactions of anger or disappointment. At least half of voters said they think violence is likely if either Trump or Harris wins, and 53% say America’s divisions will keep growing regardless of the election’s outcome.
The same poll found Trump narrowly ahead within the margin of error—essentially a tie, similar to the results of numerous other recent national and swing-state polls. Even the polling guru Nate Silver, who rose to fame on predicting the outcome of elections, says he can’t predict which way this one will go (though his “gut says Donald Trump”). It is anybody’s guess, as if the nation’s deep divisions had come to rest in a tense and unstable stalemate.