Pennsylvania voters are anxious and wary — and resolved: ‘Our democracy is at stake.’

Standing in a long line outside a Bucks County rally for Vice President Kamala Harris recently, Nancy Culleton, a retired teacher, was feeling the weight of a presidential election whose stakes, as she put it, are “the entire basis of our democracy.”

“I heard someone put it like, we’re sleepwalking into fascism, and I feel that’s what’s going to happen, you know? If he gets in,” she said, referencing former President Donald Trump’s potential return to power.

In Lehigh County, ahead of a Trump campaign event, Darin Dotter, a Carbon County resident and GOP state committeeman, framed the election in equally existential terms.

“It’s about good vs. evil,” Dotter said, citing worries about how schools handle transgender issues and the impact of illegal immigration on American citizens.

“We work our backs and our butts off, for what?” he said. “To give it away.”

For months, the 2024 presidential election has been a referendum on the starkly different directions in which the country might go, with Pennsylvania being the likely decider. Sometime after polls close Tuesday, that direction will become clearer, as will the fears and hopes of millions of voters in a deeply divided Pennsylvania.

Voters often are asked which issues matter most to them, and those responses get ranked — the economy, immigration, reproductive rights. Beneath their words lies real unease, for the country, for themselves, their families, and the kind of future their hugely influential votes will launch.

“I just don’t want to look to the past,” 19-year-old Hirsch Desai said at Temple University’s Liacouras Center before Bruce Springsteen and former President Barack Obama rallied for Harris last week. “I like looking to the future and looking to see change. I think she’s gonna bring us forward.”

The sophomore at Temple, a film major whose parents emigrated from India, is casting his first presidential ballot this election. He said Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric bothers him even if it’s not directed at those in the country legally.

“I just don’t understand the hate.”

For Craig Schadt, the election comes down to the economy and jobs — including his own.

The 51-year-old electronics technician from Germansville, Lehigh County, lost his job during the Biden administration. He said his company cut back due to low sales, which Schadt blamed on inflation, rising prices, and the increased cost of living.

He’s a Republican planning to vote for Trump for a third time this year because, he says, the GOP can oversee an economic turnaround.

“The proof is what he did in his first years in office,” Schadt said last week at an event at a sporting club in Lehigh County where Donald Trump Jr. spoke to voters.

The economy has been the race’s single biggest issue, and one voters trust Trump to better handle. Trump’s victory in 2016 was fueled in part by former Democrats frustrated with the death of manufacturing and blue-collar jobs in places where industry had long left.

Schadt’s friend Mark Krause, 52, of Allentown, said he has also felt the effects of the post-pandemic economic turmoil.

“I work in construction. We can’t get jobs,” Krause said. “I think enough people in this country are done with Bidenomics.”

For Bob and Rita Schmidt, retirement finally came this year when they sold their manufacturing business. The Warminster couple are eager to spend time now with their five grandchildren but worry about Democratic tax and economic plans.

“I’ve worked at it for 40 years,” Bob Schmidt said. “We’re finally getting a payoff. It’s not massive, but it’s going to get us through our old age. If Harris gets in, we can kiss half of that goodbye.”

Harris has pledged not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year and made a closing pitch that her No. 1 focus would be on easing economic pain points for Americans.

“I’m not sure what more she could possibly say,” said Stacey Riley, 53, a Harris supporter, who sat in a pew at the Church of Christian Compassion in West Philadelphia in the balcony on a recent Sunday waiting for the vice president to appear. “I know she’s speaking my language when she talks middle class.”

Riley, an administrative assistant at Bryn Mawr College, also worries about what she described as the chaos of Trump’s leadership.

“For me, it’s a personal thing,” the Lansdowne resident said. “I lost my brother during COVID. I don’t want to go through that same cycle of fear with Trump as the president.”

Union worker Marissa Peterson drove more than an hour from Bridgeton, N.J., to canvass in Philadelphia because of her 9-year-old son.

Jermaine Peterson was born during the Trump administration and became an avid news watcher by the time he hit first grade. One day, after hearing a segment on Trump’s immigration plans, he came running in to ask his mother if they could work to support Harris.

Even at his young age, he had internalized that “everyone who doesn’t look like [Trump] is going to be removed,” Peterson, who is Latina, said. “That affects me and my family because we don’t look like him.”

Trump has dialed up dark language and promised mass deportations. He repeated false claims of Haitian immigrants eating pets, causing friction and inciting threats in some small towns. His often-incendiary focus on illegal immigration reverberated from county council meetings to Haitian solidarity rallies and campaign events, as immigrants and nonimmigrants expressed fears of the inflammatory rhetoric, and as Trump’s supporters rallied around the cause.

For Pennsylvania women backing Harris, reproductive rights are the No. 1 reason they cite for supporting her. Harris has far more support with women than does Trump, and Democrats are hoping the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade could be a major driver of votes.

“A lot of men can’t relate to that struggle,” said Taylor Killingsworth, 28, of Mechanicsburg. “And can’t relate to how that feels to have those freedoms stripped away.”

Emily Gale, an organizer for Harris with the group Supermajority, said Harris embodies some of the group’s principal values, chief among them: “Our bodies are respected.” She said her 9-year-old granddaughter came to her recently and asked why women couldn’t be presidents.

“That hit home to hear,” Gale said, “especially in this moment when all women’s freedoms are being threatened.”

Tyler Hoff, a Vietnam veteran from Newtown, said that as a gay man, he feels Trump could threaten LGBTQ rights given the focus on TV messaging about transgender issues.

Hoff, an independent, noted that Trump’s former chief of staff John Kelly warned that the former president would prefer to govern like a fascist.

“The threats have ramped up,” Hoff said. “The intimidation has ramped up. And so it’s a lot of the same, but at a level, that’s even more frightening.”

But Dave Ruddock, 83, another Vietnam veteran who saw Trump in Drexel Hill last week, dismissed Kelly’s warnings and past disparaging remarks that Trump has reportedly made about people who had served.

“That’s some of Trump’s personality,” Ruddock said. “Nobody’s perfect, but … those policies are going to make a big difference in the country.”

For Nancy and Brian Smith of Allentown, voting for Trump is about honoring veterans — including their late son.

Joshua Smith took his own life in 2012 after suffering a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. “He came home, but he never really came back to us,” Brian Smith said.

Smith said he was horrified by the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden. During an event with Donald Trump Jr. in Lehigh County last week, he wore an American flag-printed suit with his son’s picture and dog tags hanging around his neck.

He told a story about meeting Trump during a previous rally in Harrisburg.

“You know what the first thing he said to us was? Are we OK,” Brian Smith recalled. “He cares about Americans.”

Staff writers Michelle Myers, Gillian McGoldrick, and Fallon Roth contributed to this article.