This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.
With almost $2 billion in advertising in the rearview mirror, millions of doorbells rung, and a half-million early-vote ballots requested, it all may add up to a presidential campaign season that is leaving voters unmoored from reality.
It’s a disquieting notion, but one that hit me last week during a stop in a Detroit magnet school’s gym to hear the pitch being made by Vice President Kamala Harris’ allies to first-time voters and seasoned activists. And it came from one of the most clear-eyed political veterans in the game: Randi Weingarten, the longtime head of the almost-2-million-member American Federation of Teachers. Her assessment is far from aspirational but it might be the most instructive summation of a campaign season that, even this late in the cycle, seems as unsettled as ever.
“This is a trust election, not a truth election. This is about what people feel, how connected they are,” Weingarten said, sporting a blue AFT hoodie and sneakers that have traveled the country and back this cycle. “And so our job in the next few days, if you believe anything that I just said, is to go out and knock doors and connect with people and make sure people know, regardless of how we feel or what we think, we are not enemies of each other.”
A truth-optional election? It would hardly be the first time one of these has been fought in this country. But with each passing cycle, the debate over what’s true becomes less about smudging the lines in the coloring book than setting it entirely ablaze. Blatant lies about migrants hunting down dogs and cats in Ohio, non-citizens swaying the election results before they’re even counted, and Kamala Harris photoshopping her crowd sizes—it’s all just a sliver of the nonsense coming from Donald Trump and his enablers and perhaps a major reason he remains on relatively solid footing. So maybe—and it pains me to entertain this idea—Weingarten is saying aloud what Democrats have been largely unable to accept: flexing on the facts is not guaranteed to win at the ballot box. The emotional component may be what decides this, not the summary of any government report or the line graph in a think tank paper.
“It’s going to be a feeling election, not a fact election,” Weingarten tells me.
By many objective measures, the presidential race should not be as close as it is. The economy—generally the top issue for voters in polls—is clicking along without too much noise. Americans are opening their wallets and spending, creating a shortage for workers. Thirty-four states have posted record-low unemployment during President Joe Biden’s term, with Harris as his loyal understudy. Inflation is finally curbed, although still a source of worry for some skittish voters. But as TIME’s Alana Semuels smartly notes in a new piece, this is a big country and the spoils have never been evenly distributed. In that, Weingarten might be spotting what a lot of us had missed by thinking like a normie who looks at Column A and Column B and adds ‘em up.
It’s a mixed bag when it comes to the amorphous question of trust. Take the latest survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs. Trump has opened up a huge edge with voters who say they trust him over Harris on immigration. But she has the upperhand when it comes to questions about abortion, election integrity, climate change, taxes, and natural disasters. They essentially split on the economy and day-to-day costs, crime, and the Middle East. Trump has a slight leg-up on tariffs. (Few, surprisingly, are still talking about how he’s a convicted felon due to be sentenced in November.)
Phrased differently in the latest New York Times/ Siena College poll, Harris has a double-digit head start on Trump on whether voters find her “honest and trustworthy.” That survey of likely voters finds Harris is the more credible candidate by a 48%-37% margin. Look a little deeper, and you see partisanship alone is not a deciding factor. Harris wins that question with 9% support of Republicans and 45% of independents. Whereas 94% of Democrats side with their nominee on trustworthiness, just 75% of Republicans can do the same for theirs. That, right there, might be where Weingarten’s gut and all the opinion research find the sweet spot.
As the Detroit rally broke up and students headed back to their classrooms where Diana Ross, Lily Tomlin, and Della Reese studied years earlier, I caught Weingarten’s attention between selfies. (Yes, union presidents have groupies, too.) She left little room for hedging in our follow-up conversation; this was her 85th stop since Labor Day on the AFT bus tour to help Democrats up and down the ballot, and Weingarten had a pretty clear understanding of the universe of voters still in play.
“Think about what Trump and these extremists have done in terms of schooling,” she says, pointing to efforts in some states to ban books and erase history. “They are scared of a generation that is about critical thinking and problem solving, about resilience and relationships. They want the chaos.”
But as Weingarten moved to get back on the bus and head to other stops around Michigan over the next few days, she insisted Democrats could still turn the tables on Trump and his allies if the candidates could shift ever-so-slightly away from the high road and tap into not-so-latent skepticism about Trump’s capacity to lead the country without a constant stream of lies.
“Americans are good people. If people think about their hopes, not their fears, we win in a heartbeat,” she said. “But it is really the level of sowing fear and creating this demagoguery, it’s both scary, but it is a great opportunity.”
An opportunity that, with each passing day as more votes are banked, is not one that is long for Democrats unwilling to trade in their footnotes for full-on emotional plays. It’s why the specter of a second Trump term has recently become much more central to Democrats’ messaging and the feel-good, get-stuff-done agenda is much less urgent. Voters might not feel like they know Harris, but many will base their vote on whether they think they can trust her more than Trump.
Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.
