An unexpected dynamic months in the making appears to have reared its head during the final stretch of the presidential race: former President Donald Trump has achieved, against all odds and in the face of relentlessly negative media coverage, genuine mainstream popularity.

The hard-to-quantify shift has baffled and frustrated Democrats who have spent years cultivating a social toxicity around supporting Trump. Some analysts blamed those efforts for polling misses in 2016 and 2020 that led to undercounts of Trump’s support, hypothesizing that many voters were reluctant to admit to pollsters that they planned to vote for Trump.