In the first days of November 1976, a young photographer named William Eggleston took a series of portraits of Plains, an obscure, off-grid town in rural Georgia that was home to presidential candidate Jimmy Carter. The collection was published in a book that became famous for its wasteland beauty and its haunting title: Election Eve.
The idea was to capture that small community in the hours when it sat suspended between a century of anonymity and its imminent status as the town that provided the United States with its first Deep South president since before the Civil War. The images are arresting and oblique: a Carter bumper sticker on a Chrysler is the only direct reference to the election. Only five original editions were published, one of which can be viewed in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, less than a 10-minute walk from the White House.
On the day after his election, Carter gave a victory speech in Plains in which he said: “The first task facing any new president is the unification after a close and hard-fought election. President Ford’s characteristically gracious statement today will make that job much easier for me.”
Not even the wildest imagination could foresee such magnanimity when – and if – the 2024 presidential election is decided next week. Jimmy Carter turned 100 years old on October 1st of this year. His birthday celebrations were the only uncomplicatedly joyous presidential moment in an American election year which has been less of a campaign than a national fever dream. Events which sound utterly surreal in the sober description of news presentation are commonplace. Just this week, for example, former president Donald Trump drove to a rally in Wisconsin in a garbage truck.
Tuesday night’s election offers the American electorate a clear choice. Both parties have arrived at this point through extraordinary means.
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The Democratic Party had undergone months of internal angst before edging the sitting president Joe Biden towards the bleak conclusion in his Rehoboth Beach house that he had no choice but to withdraw from a nomination that was flatlining. Kamala Harris, the replacement candidate has made a metamorphosis from underwhelming vice-president to symbol for a new, unified party message based on inclusiveness and opportunity for all strands of society.
The Republican Party has been reimagined in the voice and image of Donald Trump, who in the space of two years has gone from outcast to leader with no dissenting opposition.
In 2024, he destroyed all other candidates in the Republican primary (winning 98 out of 99 counties in the ice-storm of Iowa), quickly demanded and received the fealty of his humiliated opponents; was convicted of 34 felonies in his home city, New York; was ordered to pay $98 million to E Jean Carroll after a civil case on sexual assault charges; dealt with multiple legal cases in relation to election interference; miraculously survived a midsummer assassination attempt when a bullet grazed his ear, had another probable assassination attempt thwarted; cosplayed as a McDonald’s worker in a stunt which mocked Harris’s claim to work at the franchise and just last Sunday engaged in a triumphant return to New York with a mass rally at Madison Square Garden which drew alarmed reviews for the authoritarian and hate-filled messaging from keynote speakers and which served to magnify the idea of Donald Trump as a once-in-a-generation cult figure to his Republican support base.
Both sides are convinced a victory for the other represents the death knell for America. “We won’t have a country left,” is Trump’s mildest warning of a Harris victory. Mutual mistrust and loathing are absolute. Hundreds of millions spent on ground campaigning and ominous advertising have failed to establish any meaningful gap in voter sentiment: the polling reflects a suffocatingly close race, particularly in Pennsylvania, the ultimate battleground state, which both candidates desperately need if they are to reach the White House.
Everybody is in the dark. The national mood is anxious, exhausted and depthless in its conviction that the ideology of the other side must be vanquished.
“One of the things that has happened over the past 10 years, with the emergence of Trump, particularly, is that the language of the culture and the vocabulary of our politics, of the way we talk about America, has been poisoned by the rampant and now unapologetic racism and demonisation,” says Richard Slotkin, the writer and Olin professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan.
“And in America, all differences, in the end, are going to have a racial aspect to them. It is racial. It is ethnic in the sense that Trump’s version of America excludes those who may be white by appearance, but whose cultural background doesn’t match the nativist model.”
March of this year saw the publication of Slotkin’s acclaimed book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, which offers a vivid interpretation of the evolution of the United States through prevailing mythologies, from the Frontier to the Founding Fathers to the Civil War and Lost Cause, all of which have been told and retold, not just through historical record, but through literature and film and memory.
And in a year when figures such as Robert E Lee and Lincoln and George Washington swirl through the discourse along with the social media memes and the recent, unsettling intervention of Elon Musk, reborn as a giddy Maga enthusiast who has pumped $170 million into Trump’s campaign, those mythologies course through the torrential daily news cycle.
“These national mythologies refer us directly to the operations of the nation state, as opposed to something like the American dream, which both Harris and Trump invoke as an idealisation of the individual in the American context,” Slotkin says.
“My complaint about the left is that, for various reasons, it has not made the same use of history as the right has been able to do. Because its use of history is critical – and necessarily so. It’s a reformist movement. So, criticism is built into that. But there is also a failure to produce an alternate narrative. Or, in the current campaign, to produce only a list of policy positions – which are necessary – without also offering a story of how we got into the crisis we are in now – and how we get out of that crisis.
“The right has such a story. It’s: the vermin took over! And poisoned the country. The left has a story about how capitalism went haywire and the attempt to fix it didn’t quite work. But there was progress made under Biden and now there are further things to be done.”
In May, when the Irish-American writer Joseph O’Neill published his novel Godwin, he sounded the siren in a series of interviews whenever he was asked about the election. To him, the promise of an authoritarian regime under Trump could not have been more clearly advertised.
“I am actually more alarmed now,” he says. “Normally the idea is that the Republicans are so desperate, they can’t win. Therefore, they are going to go for election cheating and authoritarian manoeuvres. I feel now, particularly with the intervention of Musk, that they won’t tolerate a normal democratic measure of power. Even if they win the election. I think as a matter of ideology now, they have moved so far to the right and that Trump is much more authoritarian now than he was four years ago. Much more demented. And extreme.
“Trump is not a guy who wakes up thinking about housing policy. He will wake up every day with a focus on punishing his opponents. We are seeing a pre-emptive fawning and withdrawing from the fray by the oligarchs of the legacy media – the LA Times and Washington Post. And I have always felt there is a very strong impulse amongst the American oligarchy to accommodate one party rule – and the press as well.”
The Republican counterargument has always been that premonitions of an imminent autocratic regime are overstated and easily laughed off. As a counterpoint, prominent Republicans, from vice-presidential pick JD Vance to Eric and Donald Trump jnr have squarely placed the blame for the attempted assassination of Trump on the language used by his Democratic opponents.
Trump’s phrases, such as “the enemy within”, are always explained away lightly, as though everyone knows there is a gap between what Donald Trump says and what he intends to do – a contrary position for the putative leader of the free world.
When Trump was eviscerating would-be contenders in the winter primaries, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu stood as an outspoken Nikki Haley supporter and was subject to the former president’s caustic touch – “He’s terrible, this guy.” “Your governor sucks.”
After John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, last week said that he believes Trump “fits the definition of a fascist”, Sununu acknowledged that nobody liked to hear remarks like that, while setting out why he, and more than 75 million others, will nonetheless vote for him.
“People are willing to say I don’t like his style, that approach, but if we can get a Republican in Washington that says you come first as an individual, not big government, that states’ rights matter, that we are going to cut regulation out, handle the inflation: that is what America cares about. There’s nobody in America that likes to hear that conversation about a potential future president of the United States. But that’s how bad things are – how bad the Harris campaign has run things; how bad her message is and how bad the last three and a half years has been for a lot of Americans. They are willing to say: we will hold our nose, we will vote for Trump, we need that culture change and an administration that puts people in this country first.”
And when you roll through Trump’s list of long campaign speeches, he does, through a bleak vision of a country overrun by murderous immigrants and an international laughing stock, harken back to a lost idyll.
The Harris campaign accidentally stumbled on a slogan in the early days of her campaign: We’re Not Going Back. It’s a vow that stands in perfect opposition to the wish of many Republicans who are hoping that a Trump presidency can do just that: transport them back to a vanished America of a thriving industrial heartland and better cost of living standards and cheaper fuel at the gas station (average prices have, significantly, dipped from the June 2022 high of $5 per gallon to under $3 per gallon this week); back to the enshrinement of their prevailing values – anti-abortion; gun rights; churchgoing rituals; and rigorous border controls.
Anger is the media sentiment most commonly attributed to the Maga phenomenon. But that is stupidly reductive. Speak to many of the perfectly pleasant Republican voters who show up at Trump rallies and you soon detect a kind of yearning for a lost golden period to which they want to return.
“That’s exactly right,” says Slotkin. “The other thing worth mentioning is the way the Harris campaign condemns and decries violence and takes a critical stand on gun rights. To me, the guns issue is the conceptual issue at the core of what Maga is about. Because the gun rights movement says the constitution gives you the right to arm yourself and resist the government and to impose law where you feel there is no law. And that principle is at the core of Maga – and certainly of the January 6th uprising. And it has burgeoned in American cultures since the late 1980s. Guns were always important. But the numbers of guns and the expanded rules for carrying and using have really expanded since then.”
Joseph O’Neill believes that part of the problem is that, from day one, when Trump rode down the golden escalator as a political aspirant who would shatter all rules and decorum, the dominating media giants have been guilty of “normalising Trump” in a way, he says is “completely inappropriate”.
“We see it in the reaction to Biden’s slip of the tongue, which is dominating the news cycle today [Wednesday] while at the same time the insane things Trump has said, including threatening Michelle Obama and the tariff news, which has now been underlined by Musk, which is that the Republicans are gearing themselves to attack the economy and deliver an economic shock. These are huge stories. And I don’t think it is misguided. I feel that the postwar consensus that fascism was a bad thing doesn’t exist any more in the United States – and in parts of Europe as well.”
On a sublime Tuesday evening in Washington, Kamala Harris held a mass rally at the Ellipse in Washington. It drew well over 75,000 people to an area of the city often deserted by twilight. It was pitched as a national plea for unity. In the last days and hours, both she and Trump continue to set a furious travel pace to towns and cities in the key battleground states. Everything they have to say they have said a thousand times. But if they can just persuade one or five or 100 more Americans who may be disillusioned or disinterested, well ...
Meanwhile, Halloween night brought with it to Washington on Thursday record temperatures. Workers building the inauguration stand in front of the White House wore shorts and mopped their brows. The youngsters around the gilded streets of Dupont Circle walked the streets in costume through 83 degree heat. All year, extreme weather cycles issued stern warnings to North America – the brutal cold snap of last January; the southwest states intolerably, dangerously hot for months; parts of North Carolina and Florida destroyed by flash hurricanes and floods this autumn.
But climate change has scarcely been mentioned by anyone in this campaign, apart from the Green candidate Jill Stein. It’s as though the political class and the electorate does not have sufficient bandwidth to deal with the fact that, even as their clashing ideologies have become a tinderbox, the actual landscape – the awesome physical landscape of the United States of America – is also smouldering and crying for help. Say one thing for Americans, whether Republican or Democratic: they believe in the descriptive sentiment of Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land. They love it fiercely. And yet they are allowing it to burn up.
By the weekend, multiple legal challenges had been initiated on election interference, presaging election result disputes and possible civil unrest. Climate change requires a long-term thought process: right now, the American mindset is locked into getting through the next few weeks.
Richard Slotkin will soon turn 82: he has lived through a few campaigns. And he is trepidatious about this one.
“Whatever the outcome, we will still be balanced on the edge of a knife,” he says.
“For years to come. The poisonous beliefs that have been empowered under Trump and that have become ingrained under various forms of mass and social media ... I can’t see that going away. I can see it screaming from the darkness, but I can’t see it going away. And I don’t see a landslide for either side. The danger we are in: the American government is extremely powerful, but it is easy for it to be paralysed, to be blocked. So, this standoff between the two versions of America – angry exclusionary and tolerant pluralist – is just going to continue. And if Donald Trump gets power ... there you have someone who is willing to use extraordinary and authoritarian power to achieve his ends. And that will change the playing field, the political matrix in which the culture operates in profound ways; in ways that can’t be anticipated, I think.”
This is where America finds itself, then, on election eve.
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