If the polls turn out to be more or less right, then we will be in for yet another very tight presidential election. And even though close elections are likely to be less consequential in policy terms than landslides, they are in many ways harder to take.

The sense that things are on a knife’s edge misleads us into heightening our perception of the stakes. And political junkies (especially on the right) often approach close elections with a great deal of unfounded confidence in the outcome, so that if things don’t go their way they can fall into shock and disbelief — and of course also conspiracism. We saw this with many Democrats in 2016 and, in a more far-reaching and dangerous way, with many Republicans in 2020 — including the sitting president.

This conspiracism takes different forms in the more elitist and the more populist of our parties at any given time. The insider party, which at this point means the Democrats, will incline to argue if they lose that organized interlopers invaded the system and disrupted it. The outsider party, the Republicans, will incline to argue that the people in charge of the system and of other key institutions corrupted the outcome to their ends. But it’s worth seeing that both are pretty unlikely at any meaningful scale, neither has actually happened on any such scale in recent memory, and it’s only even possible to think this way because of how close the election is.

In fact, that very closeness should remind us that the question being put to voters is a serious one in the eyes of most Americans, so that neither outcome should be dismissed as so outlandish that it is only possible through fraud. And neither should drive us to the kind of bitterness and cynicism that would lead us to reject the motives of either party’s voters — whatever we might think of their candidates.

In the big public lectures he gave in the 1840s, Ralph Waldo Emerson was fond of recalling an anecdote that makes this point. I quote here from the text of an 1844 version:

I remember standing at the polls one day, when the anger of the political contest gave a certain grimness to the faces of the independent electors, and a good man at my side looking on the people, remarked, “I am satisfied that the largest part of these men, on either side, mean to vote right.” I suppose, considerate observers looking at the masses of men, in their blameless, and in their equivocal actions, will assent, that in spite of selfishness and frivolity, the general purpose in the great number of persons is fidelity. The reason why any one refuses his assent to your opinion, or his aid to your benevolent design, is in you: he refuses to accept you as a bringer of truth, because, though you think you have it, he feels that you have it not. You have not given him the authentic sign.

I don’t share Emerson’s casual utopianism about human nature, which finds some expression in the mood of this story. But I do think his general observation is useful for our time.

The very vast majority of the people voting for both candidates in this presidential election are making their choices seriously and in the public interest. They may not love the candidate they’re voting for, but under the circumstances they think that person should be president. They may be wrong, but they are not stupid, cynical, malevolent, or deluded.

That the election will probably be nearly tied is the reason why we can imagine fraud at the margins, but it is also why we should not dismiss either candidate as simply indefensible. Both have won the confidence of vast numbers of our fellow citizens, whom we should take seriously.

And if we end up with a particularly close election, we should also remember that such contests are ultimately as much a test of our commitment to the law as an inquiry into the preferences of the public. Those preferences are pretty much tied, and so don’t point in any clear direction for the country. So the question is whether — once the processes of voting, counting, reporting, adjudicating, and certifying are completed — our commitment to the law is broadly enough shared to make it possible for us to accept an outcome we don’t love.

That won’t be easy. But only if that commitment is shared can we be confident that an election with an outcome we don’t love will soon enough be followed by another that could end better. Maybe this is a little easier to see if you find both potential outcomes this year pretty much intolerable, as I do. But it is no less true if you intensely want one of these candidates to win.

The closeness of this negatively polarized election doesn’t mean that one of these candidates is about to take our country off a cliff. It means neither of them has the support of the country, and both parties have a lot of work to do. Surely that at least is something most Americans could agree with.