As the sun dipped below the horizon in this corner of northwest Florida, US president Donald Trump stepped off Air Force One and made his way to the stage just metres away.
To roars of approval from the thousands of fans who had waited for hours in the giant airport hangar, Trump returned to the role he perhaps likes best: campaigner.
For almost an hour, he returned to many of the campaign themes that helped propel him to the White House two years ago. Digressing at times from the prepared speech he read from screens, all the familiar lines were there.
The “radical Democrats” would “impose socialism on the state of Florida – welcome to Venezuela!” he said to cheers.
“If we’re going to have a great country we have to have a great, strong, powerful border,” he continued, prompting chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!”
Special mention was made of the media, as he urged the cameras to scan the crowd, eliciting angry boos and hisses from groups of supporters who briefly turned their focus away from the stage and began to taunt the press corps ensconced in the media pen.
Tomorrow, Americans will go to the polls in one of the most consequential midterms elections in decades. Trump, who has been criss-crossing the country in recent weeks, is hoping that his fiery brand of populism will help maintain the Republican’s majority in both houses of Congress. While Trump’s presidency is not on the ballot, this is undoubtedly a referendum on the 45th president of the United States. At stake is two competing versions of the US – one is the “America First” nationalism espoused by Trump; the other is a more pluralist notion of national identity based on the US’s historic values of inclusion and diversity.
Bellwether state
Nowhere is the battle more intense than in Florida. Once again, the country’s third-largest state is becoming a bellwether for the country at large.
The state’s Senate race is one of the tightest in the country, while six of Florida’s House of Representatives seats are in play.
Further, 39-year-old Andrew Gillum is vying to become the first African-American governor in a state with a painful history of slavery and segregation.
As in other parts of the country, early voting has beaten records in Florida. More than four million voters in this state will have already cast their votes before polls open tomorrow.
But Democrats, still nursing the wounds of 2016, are cautious about drawing conclusions from early voting patterns.
A Washington Post-NBC poll yesterday found that Democrats are likely to take control of the 435-seat House of Representatives, but that the Republican vote could be buoyed by President Trump's focus on immigration in recent days.
At stake also is the future of the Republican party, which has effectively been taken over by Trump since his election as president. Whether Trumpism is simply an aberration or the future shape of Republicanism will become clear tomorrow evening when Americans will have given their first full verdict on the Trump presidency.
