In a speech full of promises, untruths, insults and jokes that Donald Trump gave to a packed arena in Wisconsin six days before the presidential election, one line stood out: “November 5 will be the most important day in the history of our country.”

Hyperbole? No doubt, and exactly the kind the former president has used repeatedly in recent months as he plots a return to the White House from which Joe Biden ousted him four years ago. Did it sound true to its supporters? For many, the answer was yes.

‘We’re screwed. In plain English, we’re screwed,” 72-year-old retiree John Martin responded when asked what would happen if Trump lost at the polls on Tuesday. “We’re going to become a Third World country,” 55-year-old Mary Watermolen added as the couple left Trump’s speech in Green Bay on Wednesday evening.

Two days earlier, hundreds of miles away, Kamala Harris, Trump’s vice president and Democratic opponent, had used similar phrasing to describe the stakes of the election to hundreds of people who came to see her in a Michigan college town.

“I believe Donald Trump is an unserious man, but the consequences if he ever becomes president again are brutally serious, brutally serious,” she said in a city park in Ann Arbor. “There is so much at stake in this election, and this is not 2016 or 2020. We can all see that Donald Trump is even more unstable and unhinged, and now he wants unchecked power, and this time… there will be no one. there to stop him.”

They have little in common as people or politicians, but as they campaigned in swing states and elsewhere in the final week before the presidential election, both the vice president and former president came together with a unifying message to their supporters: America stands at a turning point. period, and if I lose, the country won’t be the same.

It was in Harris’ speech on Tuesday evening, delivered in the same park in Washington DC, from which Trump addressed his followers who would storm the Capitol on January 6. “These elections are more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or a country ruled by chaos and division,” she said.

And it was a common thread throughout the conversation Thursday night in suburban Phoenix, where Trump sat at a table with a fawning Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. “She’s as dumb as a rock, and you can’t have that,” he said of Harris. “We love our country too much. You can’t have it, it just took us four years. You can’t have more. A country can only have so much.”

It now seems certain that the sentiment will be on the minds of tens of millions of Americans who will vote on Tuesday. In previous elections, the world’s third-most populous country has chosen its next leader with its troops fighting abroad, its economy collapsed and most recently in the grip of a global pandemic. There are no external factors of comparable severity this year, and yet at campaign events in Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona this week, many Democratic and Republican voters expressed the belief to the Guardian that the country is on a precipice.

“It’s lies all the time, they tell what they want to hear,” 68-year-old retired steelworker Kevin Hinckley said of Trump as he left Harris’ rally in Ann Arbor. ‘He’s so mean, he’s a terrible person, quite terrible. I just hope he doesn’t make it. God forbid if he does.”

Much of this sentiment is fueled by Trump himself, who has maintained his position at the top of the Republican Party for more than a decade. Big promises and dire threats have been a hallmark of his campaign style since he entered politics in 2015, but this year voters will go to the polls knowing what it’s like to have him in the White House.

His four years as president ended when Biden defeated him and Trump spent weeks looking for ways to prevent the Democrat from entering the White House, culminating in his supporters’ violent and failed attempt on January 6 to stop Congress from to certify Biden’s victory.

Rather than backing away from his involvement in the riot, Trump has instead talked about forgiving those convicted of the attack, considered acting as a “dictator” on his first day back in office, and lately he took to referring to his political opponents as “the enemy from within,” against whom he could send the army.

Intellectuals with ties to Trump have written a right-wing blueprint to reshape the US government, called Project 2025. The former president denies having anything to do with it, but Harris says the plan could cause irreversible damage to US institutions inflict, if it is followed.

With the three Supreme Court justices he appointed having already backed a ruling that protects presidents from prosecution for official actions, while also rejecting the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade, Harris’ supporters believe Trump is the would send the country into unknown territory over the next four years. political territory, from which it may not emerge the same.

“I see that this is really crucial if we want to preserve democracy. I really see it as a kind of existential election in that sense,” said Jamie Taylor, 62, a retiree waiting to hear from Harris in Ann Arbor.

She feared that a second Trump administration would be “more fascist. So I think he will keep his promises to really undermine the civil service and use loyalists. I don’t know if he will do the mass deportations quite in the way he claims, but I think he will do some kind of mass deportations in a way that is quite damaging to families and probably to the economy of the country. I think he will continue to do things that… break the law.”

For his supporters, it’s the opposite: Trump is the only man who can fix what ails the country, from the immigrants coming in from Mexico to the consumer prices that have risen under Biden’s term. “Problem after problem, Kamala broke it and I will fix it,” he declared in Green Bay.

The day before, his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, warned in Saginaw, Michigan, that if Harris wins, manufacturing jobs would be taken from the state and go to China. Drug cartels could enter freely from Mexico and bring with them fentanyl, which they would disguise as candy, he said.

“I think it’s going to be the crash of 1929, and we, we’re thinking maybe… to leave the country. We don’t want to be here to see them go back to the chaos,” said Xavier Bartlett, a high school student who attended the speech at age 17 even though he was not yet old enough to vote.

“There’s going to be a civil war,” added 33-year-old fast-food worker Thomas Powell. If something like that were to happen, and he doubted it would, Bartlett said it would be because Trump’s supporters thought Tuesday’s election was rigged.

Standing on a busy road outside the recreation center where Vance spoke was Carol Kubczak, a volunteer with the campaign of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers.

Amid the honking of passing cars whose drivers saw the Trump signs she and others were carrying, Kubczak, 67, described how she broke with the Democratic party and voted for Trump in 2016, but kept her choice secret from her family. As a result, she can now barely talk to her sister.

“If God forbid (Harris) gets in, I really don’t believe there will be a free election anymore,” Kubczak said.

In the audience for Trump’s speech in Green Bay was Steve Wallace, a former professor turned community college administrator who believes no one he works with knows his political leanings. Dressed in a red Maga shirt, the 62-year-old said he had voted Republican for decades and that Trump’s policies fit neatly with his libertarian-leaning vision of how the government should be run.

He had already cast his vote to help Trump win Wisconsin, but did not share in the predictions of dire consequences if Harris were elected.

“I wouldn’t see much change. I think it would be more divisive,” he said, predicting that a Harris administration would be similar to that of Barack Obama, who many Wisconsin Republicans believe still holds sway in the Biden White House .

‘There will be brighter days, there will be darker days. It’s not the end of the world – it’s not,” he said. “This is a huge country with great opportunities.”