On Election day 2020 I was very blue. Even if I felt that Biden was going to win, which he of course did, I was amazed that it was going to be close. I was amazed that after four years of Trump our nation didn’t collectively recoil and lash back. I had hoped, naively, that 2016 was a blip and that the horrible stuff many of us thought we had settled for good in the second half of the 20th century would never come roaring back. The fascism. The racism and bigotry. The nativism and xenophobia. The sexism and misogyny. The homophobia and transphobia. The antisemitism and Islamophobia. The superstition, Luddism, and fascination with conspiracy theories.

Thanks to a lot of reading, listening, observing, and thinking, I’ve come to understand America better. I’ve come to understand that none of that bad stuff ever really went away. Rather, it just sunk a bit beneath the surface and was always going to reassert itself. That stuff has always been here. It will always be here. It is who we are as a nation. There is simply too much blood on our hands for us to ever clean it off and we don’t, as a nation, have the temperament to truly commune with and atone for our collective sins. Which means there will always be an incentive for many — for millions — to deny, to dig in, and to double down. Our country seems wired to self-destruct if it engages in meaningful self-reflection so we . . . don’t. We’d much prefer to err on the side of delusion.

But unlike the way I felt on Election Day 2020, on Election Day 2024 I have at least some amount of hope. It’s hope born of both immediate electoral circumstances and of that better understanding of what America is and what it is and is not capable of.

As far as the electoral circumstances go, I am more confident in Kamala Harris winning today than I was of Biden winning in 2020. The granular details of why that is are not important because I’m just one guy with an opinion, but I’m pretty convinced that a great many of the polls that have driven news coverage for the past year have over-compensated for Trump’s past hidden strength and have underestimated Harris’ current strength. There is copious reporting out there about how Trump’s campaign has been imploding in ways it never did in 2016 or 2020 and that it’ll cause him way more problems with the ground game than anyone is anticipating. I also think that the vibes and the momentum — two things which are unquantifiable but which always feel far more real in politics than they ever do in sports — strongly favor Harris. Above all else I feel like both the polls and the vibes/momentum-based news coverage have vastly underestimated just how righteously angry women are and just how powerful a message women voters are going to send to Donald Trump today. Assuming Harris wins — and as I sit here right now I think she will — that will be, without question, the story of the 2024 election by the time its history is properly written.

More broadly: I think the Donald Trump fever is finally breaking and I think that has consequences beyond this election.

Part of the reason all of the bad stuff I mentioned above was easy for some of us to overlook was that there really hadn’t been anyone of prominence who could leverage and weaponize it at scale the way Trump has done it. But despite constant coverage of every odious thing he says and promises, he’s experiencing vastly diminishing returns on his rhetoric these days than he used to get. His true believers will always believe and, as noted, there are a lot more of them than any of us feel comfortable with, but no one has really figured out how to replicate what he has done over the past nine years. No one in the Republican Party has been successful unless Donald Trump has allowed them to be. He has created no successor to his movement because he’s a narcissist and narcissists don’t think about things like that. Anyone who has even attempted to harness the ugliness which Trump has so effortlessly harnessed has failed pretty spectacularly. As the years have gone on I have come to believe that his rise and his appeal were something of a perfect storm born of his preexisting celebrity and persona as a successful rich man, his humor — and yes, he can be funny, we have to admit that — and his complete lack of conventional political discipline. Our country used to produce a lot of unconventional populists like Trump, but it’s been like 90 years since their heyday. No one really saw it coming and no one knew, until relatively recently, how to effectively combat it.

But now I believe that Trump is about to go down, hard I suspect, for a second time in a row. A lot of my more doom-oriented friends have told me they think he’ll be back in 2028 but that’s nonsense. He’ll be 82 then and his brains are already tapioca. This was his last rodeo and I strongly suspect he’s about to be bucked off. When he leaves the scene there will be no one to take his particular place. There will, instead, be a half dozen or more charmless political creatures who, like the feckless and almost pitiable J.D. Vance, think they can ride the Trump Tiger but who will be hopelessly out of their depth. And they’ll all be fighting each other to boot while whatever life and energy Trump has left in him in the next few years will be spent alternately blaming them for his defeat or disparaging them as not as good as he is. It’s not the sort of thing that will sustain a movement.

So I sit here this morning, my friends, with hope. It’s guarded hope to be sure — and if I’m wrong and Trump wins, my being wrong in a newsletter will be the least of our problems — but I have hope for the first time since I don’t know when. I think Harris is going to win. And I think that win will close the book on Donald Trump for good. While that will not end the fight against all of the ugliness which he stirred up and which revealed to most of us just how much history we’re still fighting in this godforsaken country, it will make it easier for a while and it will have taught us to be way more vigilant going forward.

And yes, we sure as hell will go forward. Because we are not going back.