After a campaign like no other, outcome of US election will be just as groundbreaking

As the sun rose on Tuesday, there was something reassuringly familiar about the rituals that election day in America would bring: long queues of voters, candidates casting their own ballots, TV experts tapping their electoral map touchscreens and a steady flow of results from safe blue states and red states.

But something is different this time.

The 2024 US presidential election has witnessed a late candidate switch, two lopsided debates, two assassination attempts, an intervention by the world’s richest man, euphoria reminiscent of Barack Obama and rhetoric evocative of Adolf Hitler. It is a campaign marked by both violence and joy.

Its outcome – effectively a coin flip that might or might not be known on Wednesday – will be equally groundbreaking. America might be about to elect Kamala Harris, the first female president in its 248-year history. Or it could hand the White House back to 78-year-old Donald Trump, the first former president with a criminal record as well as two impeachments.

Both sides are utterly convinced that their side must win, that defeat would represent the end of democracy, freedom and the American way of life. They are like two trains gathering speed as they hurtle towards each other and an inevitable crash. For nearly half the country the result will be devastating. They will have lost what veteran journalist Carl Bernstein once called a cold civil war.

That is in part because Trump has spent a decade sowing divisions of class and race. But this election has exposed a gender gulf two years after the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion. Democrats nominated a woman while Trump has embraced crude machismo and “bro” culture in a quest to find new voters.

Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, wrote: “It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.”

Consider this part three in the Trump trilogy. In 2016, he was a brazen newcomer thumbing his nose at the political and media establishment to the glee of supporters who felt the American dream had eluded them. In 2020, he was rebuked by an electorate weary of his chaos, narcissism and incompetent handling of a global pandemic.

When the history of the 2024 election is written, a single week in July will be at the heart of the narrative. On 13 July, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, 20-year-old Thomas Crooks took aim with a rifle and opened fire, injuring Trump’s ear and killing an attendee. A photo of Trump standing with blood streaked across his face as he raised his fist and shouted “Fight!” became the indelible image of his campaign.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

• When do polls close?

• Trump v Harris on key issues

• What’s at stake and what else to know

Two days later, the Republican national convention got under way with some attendees wearing ear bandages in solidarity. Speaker after speaker insisted that Trump had been spared by God, a sure sign that his work on this earth was not yet done. The nominee recounted the episode in a sombre opening to his convention address – but then blew it by recycling old grievances for more than an hour.

Democrats needed to reclaim the narrative. At the end of that week, on 21 July, they did. Joe Biden, 81, trailing in polls and reeling from a feeble debate performance, bowed to pressure from his party and announced that he was dropping out of the race. It was, said 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton, one of the most selfless acts of patriotism that she had ever seen.

Biden quickly endorsed Harris; the Clintons, the Obamas and the rest of the party followed suit. The vice-president parlayed “the politics of joy” and named a running mate, Governor Tim Walz, who branded their opponents “weird”. Now the Democratic national convention in Chicago felt like the happiest place on earth, brimming with relief, hope and fun; even the state-by-state roll call became a dance party.

The Trump campaign appeared wrongfooted, unable to frame Harris or find a disparaging nickname. Trump was going off the rails with a bizarre, false story that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Harris, a former courtroom prosecutor, pulverised him in their one and only debate in Philadelphia. With momentum on her side, she seemed to have found the long elusive antidote to Trumpism.

But there was a final twist and it was the most unexpected of all: the last two months of the campaign were oddly undramatic, even anticlimactic, as if the cosmic scriptwriters had peaked too soon. There were no more game changers as polls stabilised and equilibrium was restored. Harris was so disciplined that she avoided the kind of gaffe that animated past elections, although her struggles to distance herself from Biden gave Republicans some fodder.

Trump was so ill-disciplined that many Americans felt numb with indifference. There was no repeat of the 2016 Access Hollywood tape, in which he could be heard boasting about grabbing women’s genitalia, that led some Republicans to call for him to drop out. When he mused on film character Hannibal Lecter or the size of the late golfer Arnold Palmer’s genitalia, or a comedian at his New York rally insulted Puerto Rico, Republicans shrugged and moved on.

If there was an October surprise, perhaps it was tech entrepreneur Elon Musk giving away millions of dollars in a bid to help Trump in swing states, or the return of Hitler to the political stage. John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, told how the president expressed admiration for the Nazi’s generals. Gen Mark Milley, formerly at the top of the military top brass, characterised Trump as “fascist to the core”.

Harris, tempering the joy, endorsed this definition about a man who asserts that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and threatens to turn the US military against “the enemy from within”. It was time, she insisted, to “turn the page” on Trump’s chaos and division.

Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, says: “It’s a very stark choice in this election. It’s a choice between in many ways whether we abide by the constitution and the rule of law, whether we abide by a process of free and fair elections, whether we abide by the truth or whether we again make a choice to basically choose chaos over order.

“Trump will produce chaos. There’s not much doubt about it because that’s the way he operates. He operates by chaos because that’s how bullies get attention and he’s a bully. The question then becomes is the country, are other leaders going to allow him to do what violates the basic principles of our democracy? I just don’t think ultimately a bully like Trump will prevail.”

“Did the fascist win?” was not a question asked about any of the 59 presidential elections before this one. But as millions of people go to the polls on Tuesday, following millions more who have already voted, it is the question haunting America and the world.

Moe Vela, a former senior adviser to Joe Biden when he was vice-president, says: “Every democracy in the world has to be on pins and needles and biting their nails. Not that the US was better than anybody else but the world has kind of always looked at the US as the gold standard of democracies. That it is this close to collapse and this close to being taken away from us, there can’t be any any democracy in the world right now that isn’t concerned.”

If that fate is avoided and Harris becomes the 47th president, the world will express relief that the populist tide has again been beaten back. Trump will be seen as the aberration, not the norm. But within the US, deep wounds will remain. The defining hallmark of the Trump era has been division and divisiveness: female versus male, Black versus white, urban versus rural, Hollywood versus heartland, liberal versus conservative. This has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of social media.

The Pew Research Center found that Democrats and Republicans are becoming more likely to view members of the other party as unintelligent, lazy, immoral or dishonest. A survey by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) found that 84% of workers agree that the current political climate causes US citizens to see each other as enemies, and 78% said they had seen people treated poorly because of their perceived political affiliation.

Johnny Taylor, president and chief executive of the SHRM, says of the election: “We believe, at least if the polling data is right, that it’s going to be close so it is quite feasible that 49.9% of the population wakes up the next day pissed off that their candidate didn’t win and 50.1 are happy. It’s one thing if my sports team loses to the other team in the Super Bowl. This is so personal to people because of the topics. If it’s abortion, you think this is the end of the world if you lose.”

Harris has promised to work across the aisle and put a Republican in her cabinet. But there are many on the far right who will seethe with resentment at the prospect of a Black female president, just as they did when Barack Obama took the White House. Fox News and other conservative media will thrive on fuelling the hate. A fascism-curious society in which Donald Trump came so close to regaining power will need more than one election to heal itself.