Election Day 2024: Why both sides feel this is a tipping point for America

Lauren Markow lived through the Cold War and the turbulent 1960s, yet to her it feels like America is at a dangerous new tipping point.

She teared up thinking about it the other day as she sped past brilliant fall foliage headed west from St. Louis, away from the suburb where she grew up with a bomb shelter at home – and toward an election that looms ever larger in her thought. Not only because of what it means for her as a Democrat desperate to restore civility and worried that former President Donald Trump could be more unrestrained in a second term, but also because of the children in her life.

“If Trump gets elected and he does the things he says he wants to do, my 10-year-old friends will never know what this country really can be on better days,” she says. “This country was an exquisite and stunning idea.”

Meanwhile, seven hours to the northeast in Michigan, college sophomore Cole Sutherland has been feeling a sense of “doom” about the possibility of Vice President Kamala Harris winning this presidential election, the first in which he is old enough to vote. Among other concerns, he sees her and her allies as disregarding guardrails that the Founding Fathers carefully put in place.

“They wanted a place for the people, but they didn’t want direct democracy because that ends up being mob rule, in which one party gets crushed,” says Mr. Sutherland, adding that the founders instead envisioned a representative republic.

“I think that’s in one of the Federalist papers,” he adds. “Hang on, I have it. ... It’s in Federalist 10.” Within seconds he pulls up James Madison’s treatise on how to strike a balance between majority rule and minority rights, which he recently wrote a paper on for one of his classes at Hillsdale College, ranked third by The Princeton Review for “most conservative students.”

In Mr. Sutherland’s view, Democrats are misusing and weaponizing the term “democracy” under the guise of preserving it. Such rhetoric, he says, “represents a moving away from the American founding that is very dangerous for the country.” For example, he mentions the growing push to eliminate the Electoral College, and instead let the popular vote determine presidential elections.

Ms. Markow and Mr. Sutherland are multidimensional people, and shouldn’t be seen as simplistic proxies for Democrats and Republicans. But they are two of millions of Americans facing an election that, to many, feels existential.

It’s not uncommon for politicians to use such rhetoric in their campaigns. President Joe Biden, whose 2020 campaign focused on a message of unity, earlier this year called GOP nominee and former President Trump “the one existential threat.” And Trump ally Steve Bannon in June cast this election as coming down to “victory or death,” asking supporters, “Are you prepared to leave it all on the battlefield?”

But what is different this year is that nearly 2 in 3 Americans now feel as if the election will “make a great deal of difference” in their life – the highest level registered in NBC News polling over the past few decades, and triple the level in 1996.

Voters like Ms. Markow and Mr. Sutherland are making their decision against a backdrop of fear and division, heightened for many by news coverage that can focus on certain issues and perspectives to the exclusion of others. The proliferation of misinformation has further skewed perceptions. If people think the country will end as they know it if their side loses, that could cause worsening divides – or potentially lead to political violence.

With humanity on the brink of massive change due to the rise of artificial intelligence, Ms. Markow worries the United States is devolving into toxic political brinkmanship that is undercutting its leadership in the world. She is also concerned that it is eliminating the spaces in American society for the kind of collaborative thinking needed to find urgent solutions.

“I’ve been saying this for the past couple of years: Stop treating the country like a trophy at a sporting event,” says Ms. Markow. “Can we please agree that the country is very vulnerable, in a place of real danger, and we all need to be on the same side?”

Even as Ms. Markow and Mr. Sutherland represent opposite poles in Middle America, however, both say it’s important to look for common ground – including a shared love of country.

Key influences, from a housekeeper to COVID-19 “groupthink”

She’s a student of Tai Chi. He’s a devout Baptist.

Ms. Markow was raised in a wealthy Jewish family, with a father who worked long hours as a surgeon, a mother who often struggled with depression, and an African American housekeeper who significantly shaped her worldview.

Her housekeeper’s understated wisdom and lived experience – such as the time she had to stay in separate hotels on a family road trip – opened young Lauren’s eyes to new perspectives. She says her father’s racism and the sometimes toxic environment in her home also introduced her early to the challenge of navigating tense spaces.

“I would break tension and redirect things,” she says. “I learned how to listen respectfully and disagree respectfully.”

Ms. Markow has sought to practice such active listening throughout her adult life, including through an informal Lunch With a Liberal initiative she started in 2016 to hear out Trump supporters over a sandwich.

Her own experience is a lesson against simplistic labels: She’s a cultural Jew drawn to Buddhism; an abortion-rights proponent who urges some limits around terminating a pregnancy; a critic of war and of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but also of some pro-Palestinian protesters who don’t recognize the intolerance of Hamas toward people like her gay son.

Mr. Sutherland came of age during the pandemic, in which what he saw as groupthink led him to question the prevailing views in his left-leaning high school in Louisville, Kentucky. One example was people labeling the possibility that a lab leak sparked the initial COVID-19 outbreak as a “conspiracy theory,” without examining relevant evidence. He also came to distrust the mainstream media.

Through this period of self-examination, Mr. Sutherland went from someone who had mostly found himself in line with his school’s political atmosphere to someone who was kicked out of class for challenging a teacher’s position supporting abortion rights.

He started attending his Baptist church more regularly, during which his view of what it means to love your neighbor evolved from accepting everything people do to recognizing that sometimes it’s more loving to point people to a better way. He takes issue, however, with the “fire and brimstone” approach of many right-wing Evangelicals. The key, he says, is to “live your life in a way that honors and reflects Christ,” which he says can open people’s hearts.

He declined to take part in a school walkout over a statewide “Don’t say gay” bill, a label he describes as a “gross mischaracterization” of the legislation. Several students approached him privately and told him they didn’t feel comfortable doing the walkout either, but didn’t want to stand out. He sees the same problem in society as a whole.

“How badly have we failed if people are just participating in things to go along with the crowd?” he asks.

Concerns about democracy

Ms. Markow sees that happening in the GOP, and describes the Republican Party as having been taken hostage by Trumpism. She describes an “almost hypnotic sway,” causing people to identify with something they would normally oppose – and then being in denial about it. For example, top Republicans criticized Mr. Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, but then quickly backpedaled.

“It’s like national Stockholm syndrome,” she says.

Mr. Sutherland is not Mr. Trump’s biggest fan, though he plans to vote for him as a better alternative than Ms. Harris. But he sees Democrats’ characterization of Mr. Trump as a threat to democracy as a disingenuous way to marginalize the opposition and thwart robust debate – not just about the structure of American government, but about any issue.

One of his politics professors at Hillsdale calls this the “democratic incantation.”

“The word ‘democracy’ – it’s been made something sacred,” says Mr. Sutherland.

Ms. Harris and even some former Trump administration officials have criticized Mr. Trump as having autocratic impulses, and predict he would test constitutional limits on power far more in a second term than he did in a first term. They point to his refusal to say he would accept a defeat in 2024; his plans to gut the civil service, installing political appointees in positions meant to be held by nonpartisan experts; and his recent rally at Madison Square Garden that led critics to draw parallels with a pro-Nazi gathering in the same location in 1939.

But Mr. Sutherland takes issue with what he calls “‘Trump is literally Hitler’ rhetoric.” He says Ms. Harris is falsely demonizing virtually half the country as supporters of fascism.

That, he says, is “a huge threat to the country.”

One thing they agree on: the need for civility

Ms. Markow is concerned that a hardening of views is eroding the elasticity that enables democracy to survive times of tumult. A key part of this in her view is the decline in civility in the Trump era.

“No matter how much you agree with his policies, I feel like we’ve lowered the bar so far on civility that even a scorpion couldn’t limbo under it,” she says.

Mr. Sutherland also sees value in having respectful conversations with those who hold opposite views.

So we invited the two to speak over Zoom.

On Sunday afternoon, two days before the election, they talked through their fears for the country’s future – Mr. Sutherland in his dorm room following a busy week of midterms and Ms. Markow in her home office coming off a Tai Chi retreat.

They probed each other’s views on everything from abortion to immigration, pushing back at times. But they also agreed that the country needs to be preserved for the next generation. And they held out hope – in part because of citizens willing to have conversations like this – that it would be.

“It’ll be there after us; it was there before us,” said Mr. Sutherland, sporting a red Louisville sweatshirt.

After more than 75 minutes, they exchanged emails to continue the conversation. Before they logged off, Ms. Markow shared a parting quote.

“Given how scholarly you are about these things, I think you might appreciate this,” she told Mr. Sutherland.

Then she read him a line that President Abraham Lincoln, when asked if he had ever doubted that the Union would prevail in the Civil War, quoted and attributed to his secretary of state, William Seward: “‘There was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare.’”