Just over a week ago, former First Lady Michelle Obama had a moment of reflection while campaigning in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “I have to ask myself, why on earth is this race even close?” she asked. The crowd roared, but Obama didn’t laugh. It’s a serious question and deserves serious consideration.

The most remarkable thing about the 2024 presidential election, which has not lacked surprises, is that about half of the electorate still supports Donald Trump. The Republican’s tenure in the White House was a series of sustained disasters, culminating in him attempting to steal an election after voters rejected him. And yet polls show Trump all but tied with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

In fact, this underlines how surprising the depth of his support is. Although he has dominated American politics for much of the past decade, he has never been particularly popular. As Democratic strategist Michael Podhorzer has written, the United States has thus far been home to a consistent anti-MAGA majority. Trump won the 2016 Republican nomination by splitting the field and then won the Electoral College in November despite losing the popular vote. He lost decisively in 2020. In 2018, the Republican Party was defeated in the midterm elections. During the 2022 midterm elections, Trump was absent, but he tried to make the election about him, resulting in a notable underperformance by the Republican Party. Still, Trump has a good chance of winning his largest share of the vote this year, in his third attempt – now, after Americans have had nearly a decade to get comfortable with his complete inadequacy – and even a majority to conquer.

Read: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals Hitler had’

Trump’s term was chaos wrapped in catastrophe, at the cost of incompetence. He avoided major wars and cut taxes, but otherwise failed in many of his goals. He didn’t build a wall and Mexico didn’t pay for it. He didn’t defeat China in a trade war or revive American industry. He did not disarm North Korea. His reign was hampered by a series of scandals of his own making, including one that got him impeached by the House of Representatives. He oversaw a series of moral outrages: his callous handling of Hurricane María, the cruelty of family separations, his COVID disinformation, and the distribution of aid to punish democratic areas. At the end came his attempt to thwart the will of the American voters, an attack on the tradition of peaceful transfer of power dating back to the country’s founding.

A common explanation for Trump’s popularity is that voters have amnesia about his time in office. This may be true, and it might be more understandable if Trump had spent his time since leaving office changing his identity to something less divisive, as many Republicans had urged him to do.

However, he didn’t do that. Instead, he has amplified many of his most outrageous qualities. In recent years, the FBI has seen some of the country’s most sensitive secrets surface on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, where they were haphazardly stashed (this after his 2016 campaign criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, ruthless for her handling of her email security). The former president has also been charged with dozens of crimes and convicted of 34 of them. In a civil suit, he was found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll (he denies this) and committing millions of dollars in corporate fraud.

His 2024 presidential campaign is built around two key promises: a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and retaliation against his political enemies. He says he wants to use the military against domestic enemies, a category he has made clear starts with elected Democrats. As I wrote after his October 27 rally at Madison Square Garden: hate and fear are his message. The Atlantic Ocean‘S Editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg recently reported that Trump had complained that he wanted generals like Hitler’s, and that an aide allegedly attacked an Arlington National Cemetery employee who tried to prevent Trump from using it for crude politics. Every government has a few disgruntled employees; No other administration has ever seen so many former top officials say a president is a fascist, a liar or unfit to be president.

Harris is running a very different campaign. In contrast to Trump’s bleak vision, she has spent most of her short campaign offering an upbeat, patriotic vision of the kind that has traditionally appealed to American voters. Harris has been criticized for not providing enough details about her plans and giving too few interviews, and more details and more transparency are always better. But Trump is just as vague, if not more so, about his plans – for example, his explanations for his plans on tariffs and child care are downright naive – and he has avoided or canceled several interviews with interlocutors who are not considered friendly .

Some of the big reasons the election is so close are structural and have little to do with Trump or Harris. The underlying features of the election benefit the Republican candidate: voters in the United States are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and voters around the world have punished incumbents. Even though Harris is not the president, she is struggling to figure out how much distance she can distance herself from Joe Biden and the administration in which she is vice president. Americans are also sour on the economy, and while the US has weathered the post-COVID world and global inflation better than any of its peers, there’s no point if voters don’t feel and believe it.

Read: The case for Kamala Harris

Trump has also benefited from the media climate. A robust right-wing press has chosen to essentially become a wing of the MAGA movement. Harris faces scrutiny from both the mainstream and conservative press, but he only gets it from the mainstream. Some parts of the mainstream press still seem bewildered about how to defeat Trump. Furthermore, Trump has benefited from a tremendous amount of attention outside the traditional news media. Podcasts have become an important mainstay for him. That includes X. Elon Musk bought the platform out of perceived concern about political interference, and has turned it into a flurry of pro-Trump disinformation in recent months.

Harris has run the shortest presidential campaign in history, a result of Biden’s late exit from the race. Whether a longer period would have helped or hurt her is impossible to answer clearly, although some Democrats worry that she did not sufficiently introduce herself to the country during that time. Curiously, her campaign has spent much of its time in recent weeks attacking Trump instead of emphasizing the positive case for her — brushing aside the message that had given her a narrow lead in the polls and message that had been a loser for Biden. .

In most respects, Harris is a completely conventional Democratic candidate – both for her benefit and for her detriment. You might imagine that, against a candidate as deviant as Trump, this would be enough for a slim lead. Indeed, that is exactly the approach Biden used to defeat Trump four years ago. But if the polls are right (which they may not be, either way), then many voters have stayed with Trump or moved toward him. For many others, the proximity of the race is just as baffling. “I don’t think it’s going to be as close as they say,” Tony Capillary told me at an Oct. 21 meeting in Greenville, North Carolina. “This should be about 93 to 7 percent, that’s what it should be.” He is certain that Trump will win by a large margin once the votes are in.