In late October, a slim and smiling Joe Biden, no longer the Democratic candidate but still the president, delivered a few pizzas to a few dozen phone bankers at a union hall in western Pennsylvania. It was exactly the kind of image that would once define the 2024 election campaign: Democrats saw Biden as a grandfatherly figure who had restored order and common purpose, while Republicans saw the wavering emblem of a frail and aging regime. The event at which Biden was supposed to dispel this impression, the first presidential debate, backfired spectacularly: He couldn't even present his arguments convincingly. At the other lectern, Donald Trump could hardly believe his luck and attacked. Over the next two weeks or so, an assassin's bullet grazed Trump's ear; The already weak Democratic polls plummeted; and at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, a new generation of young conservative delegates played cornhole and toasted JD Vance's selection for the GOP ticket and impending victory.

But instead of putting the election on a new track, these events merely broke its guardrails. The Democratic Party went against Biden, and Kamala Harris, sometimes derided as a lightweight, donned a Howard University sweatshirt, flipped through her impressive Rolodex and efficiently organized a desperate party behind her. Within weeks, Harris had the nomination, an anthem (Beyoncé's “Freedom”) and a motto – “We're not going back.” She chose Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate – the Liberals' feel-good choice – and hit the road , appearing at lively rallies across the country. At a donut shop in Georgia, Vance didn't think twice about ordering frosting or sprinkles for his employees. “Whatever makes sense,” he finally said. The polls tightened. The Trump campaign seemed a little directionless. Harris won the debate.

It was the second attack on Trump in mid-September that gave the race an existential significance. “There is now widespread concern around the world,” he said Just reported that “the November elections will not end well and that American democracy, once a beacon to the world, has frayed to the breaking point.” In both campaigns, advisers still said banal things – “Stick with the economy “ – but no one seemed to heed this advice. Instead, Republicans turned relentlessly to the immigration issue, manipulating the everyday struggles of immigrant life to look like the predation of an invading horde. Meanwhile, the Harris campaign held a rally with Beyoncé in Houston, highlighting the threat to reproductive rights, and a somber evening event at the Ellipse in Washington, DC, to commemorate January 6 and highlight Trump's fascism Word that their campaign only recently started using. On the eve of Election Day, the contest was still being measured by margins of error, by likely voters, by doors knocked and viewers reached, and by the errors of its candidates. But it was also understood by both sides as a kind of civilizational struggle. The contrast between the challenges of the election and the chaotic form in which it unfolded has given 2024 an air of surreality.

To excavate the characters and settings of the campaign is to depict a political environment in which only the most exaggerated and spooky version of events is vivid enough to hold the public's attention. The abbreviated 2024 campaign was seen through a lens fractured by partisanship and new media, in which three dimensions become two. In recent days, the campaign has been marked by comments from a Trump warmup comic who derided Puerto Rico as a “floating island of trash” and Elon Musk's promise to pay $1 million a day to a swing-state voter. who had signed his right to vote PACThe Philadelphia Pro-Constitution Petition, which the Philadelphia District Attorney has claimed amounts to an illegal lottery. Musk, who has spent more than a hundred million dollars supporting Trump's bid, said the effort was not intended to get people to “vote for anyone or register for anyone.” The types of campaigns that first brought Biden onto the national stage more than fifty years ago are long gone. We have now completely gone through the looking glass.

–Benjamin Wallace-Wells