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To understand modern politics, including the Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigns, distinguishing between two qualities—charisma and charm—is vital. They are different kinds of political magnetism. And thanks to the sociologist Julia Sonnevend, I’ll never conflate them again.In her book Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, she defines charisma as the German sociologist Max Weber did––a quality by which an individual “is set apart from ordinary men.” Possessing it does not make a leader morally better or worse. Think of Charles de Gaulle, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill—larger-than-life figures who communicated through exceptional rhetorical performances. Their charisma required distance from the audience.Charm requires proximity. It is the “everyday magic spell politicians cast,” Sonnevend writes. To succeed in today’s media environment, “political leaders must appear as accessible, authentic, and relatable,” she argues, catering to a desire for familiarity—not a faraway figure embodying the nation but a person with whom we’d like to grab a beer.That doesn’t mean charisma is a relic of the past. When Barack Obama gave formal orations in large stadiums where he stood in front of staged classical pillars, he was aiming for charismatic performances. But Obama was trying to charm us when he filled out NCAA brackets and shot hoops. Trump renting out Madison Square Garden this weekend appears to be an attempt at a charismatic event. But his preparation of fries at McDonald’s was intended to charm. [Read: The power of oddball charm]“Charm is a defining feature of contemporary politics, not just in the United States but internationally,” Sonnevend told me recently at an event in New York City hosted by the intellectual community Interintellect. “If you analyze politics without considering it, you are missing a core component,” she insisted. “There’s a stronger focus on personality than before. We have to understand how it operates.”To clarify how her ideas can help us understand the United States—and the distinct relationships that Trump, Harris, J. D. Vance, and Tim Walz have with charisma and charm—I visited Sonnevend at the New School, where she is an associate professor. What follows is a condensed, edited version of our conversation, where I learned that charm works partly because almost all of us want to be seduced.Conor Friedersdorf: Trump always wears a suit and tie. He rose to fame as a billionaire CEO behind a boardroom table. He loves hosting huge rallies. Kamala Harris isn’t as good at big arena speeches. She has tried to avoid traditional interviews. But people in small groups and more informal settings seem to find her likable and relatable.Is Election 2024 charisma versus charm?Julia Sonnevend: Harris in many ways is a great example for the charm category if you think of the dancing videos, the cooking videos. There was a viral tweet where someone suggested that instead of formal interviews, she should go on the Food [Network] and cook—all the people urging her: “Maybe you actually shouldn’t do that traditional appearance.” “Maybe these intimate settings offer a better chance for success.” “Show the power of charm and the value of everyday interactions.” Still, in debates, wearing formal dress and a flag pin, she is attempting charisma.Trump is a more complex case. He has a strong charismatic component. If I think of the assassination attempt––how he realized, This is the moment in which I’m going to generate that iconic photograph with the raised fist. He had the composure to create that kind of moment, which is a more charismatic situation. You don’t feel like you would do it. It is not ordinary.Some of my students argue that Trump has no charming component. But when he is telling personal stories or saying “You guys are the same as me” in a Bronx barber shop or wearing the red baseball cap––you know, that’s not a regular kind of accessory with the super-formal business suits––then there are elements that are forms of charm. Most politicians try a mix of charisma and charm, even if they lean closer to one or the other.Friedersdorf: Why do voters care about charm more than they once did?Sonnevend: One reason is the changing media environment. It has become increasingly possible to give almost continuous access to politicians—or that’s the illusion. Think of our phones, these totemic objects we all carry—the intimacy of sitting in bed with the screen close to your face, watching a politician record a video or a livestream of themselves with their own phone. That’s different from sitting in the living room, watching a TV set where a leader is on a stage.In everyday life, there are so many moments when we are not fully ourselves, when we feel awkward during a meeting or an interview or a date. Yet in our politics, we want a steady performance of authenticity from leaders, without it being too polished or fine-tuned a performance. We know that attempts at charm are highly constructed. But if it works, you don’t feel like it’s a performance. Everyday settings become normal sites of politics, like Jacinda Ardern, then–prime minister of New Zealand, at home in a gray hoodie, recording a video announcing, I just had a conversation with President-elect Joe Biden.Friedersdorf: What about when attempts at charm fail?Sonnevend: The chance of failure rises with every attempt. And the feeling the audience has when it fails is often cringe. The fine line between successful performances of charm and cringe is interesting. These attempts at proximity aim to make you feel, Okay, that’s actually him; he’s authentic; I’ve gotten to know him. But in some cases you feel that there’s an attempt to deceive or manipulate, or that the person shares too much. Charming people excel at making you feel you’ve gotten to know them while maintaining boundaries and avoiding cringe.[Read: Trump is speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini ]Friedersdorf: So an example of cringe would be that J. D. Vance trip to the doughnut shop, where his interactions with staff seemed awkward and stilted rather than natural?Sonnevend: Yes. Vance is not charming. He is better in the charismatic setting of the formal debate. Tim Walz is the opposite. He is better at charm.Friedersdorf: As a young woman, my grandmother would go to movie premieres in Hollywood to see 1950s movie stars on the red carpet. In her older years, she would scoff dismissively at shows like Access Hollywood and tell me, “I feel sorry for your generation. The stars don’t shine anymore.” She felt, to borrow Us Weekly’s tagline, that the stars were “just like us,” and that was a bad thing. In catering to our desire for exposure, do politicians lose something, and that fuels our contempt for them?Sonnevend: There is a sort of magic that we are losing. If you introduce viewers to your private life, you lose the magic of distance that is core to charisma, this stardust you can never touch. There is a difference between being a godlike character and the illusion of a guy you can have a beer with. The sheer amount of access makes it less exciting. Think about the Royal Family and how difficult it becomes to have all these fans who start to know too much, then the inevitable controversy about what people think of those particular details.Still, you get another form of magic with charm.Friedersdorf: What’s an example of someone who lost a bit of the magic that comes from distance while gaining a bit of the personal magnetism that comes from familiarity?Sonnevend: I saw Princess Diana as a kind of icon when I was growing up in Communist Hungary, with barely any commercial products available. She was, to me, the first example … of this distant character who was magical, a princess.But what I remember discussing with my mother for hours and hours were Princess Diana’s marital troubles and how to solve them. I had access to this very mundane form of unhappiness that she displayed in maybe a performative way. We felt we knew her deep-rooted unhappiness and her marriage despite living in circumstances so different from hers.Friedersdorf: Perhaps there is no stable sweet spot. As humans, do we always crave more intimacy when confronted with mystery, and more mystery when confronted with intimacy?Sonnevend: We may see cyclical processes in politics where a country has a charming, charismatic leader for a while until they get fed up, want change, and choose a more bureaucratic process for a while.Sometimes we are deceived by charming people––abusers, fraudsters, charming psychopaths, sociopaths. A long list of people have this quality, and authoritarian leaders can have it. So I’m not saying celebrate every aspect of it. There is a dark side to charm.At the same time, I think we all want to be seduced. Charm is enormously important in everyday life, whether we accept it or not. It matters very much whether your kid has a charming teacher. It matters to the New School that we have a charming president. It matters in fundraising but also in the everyday mood and feel of the university, because charming people shape organizations. Charm is not in itself good or bad. And I really try to go against what I see as the hypocrisy of saying I don’t want to have anything to do with seduction.[Read: Trump has turned over a new leaf]Friedersdorf: So you would say that, even in politics, charm’s importance is less a choice than a fact to deal with?Sonnevend: I think we are trained, particularly on the left, to be critical of performance. And I feel we should be more honest in acknowledging that performance is crucial to politics. It doesn’t mean it’s the only factor––that policy or other factors don’t matter. But it is a defining feature.You have fragmented, disillusioned audiences that are bored by politics and often don’t even follow it, because we think it’s too much. If you have a charming character who can bring a bit of seduction and magic to our lives, that can reinvigorate and energize politics. And there is a risk and that dark side to charm. I don’t think we should adopt an easy answer, that charm is a magical process we all need or a disaster to fear. We should recognize its presence in social life and reflect on it as it arises, trying our best to understand it.

SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk speaks at a town hall on October 20, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Musk awarded an attendee $1 million during the event. | Michael Swensen/Getty Images It’s not an overstatement to say that Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is former President Donald Trump’s biggest fanboy — and patron — in the 2024 election.  He’s literally, and comically, leaping at Trump’s side at rallies. He’s tweeting (including, frequently, dog whistles and misinformation). And to the dismay of some, he has let Trump tweet, too.  In the spring, Musk launched a political action committee, simply called America, lined up other high-profile rich guys from his Rolodex, and then threw an additional $75 million of his own money into the pot. According to filings with the Federal Election Commission, America PAC has spent more than $100 million on getting Trump re-elected, sending hundreds of canvassers out to talk to voters one-on-one in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  And of course, this week, Musk pledged to give away a million dollars a day until the election to registered swing-state voters who signed his PAC’s petition, only to reportedly receive a letter from the Department of Justice warning that the contest could be in violation of federal voting law.    As Musk’s politics move ever rightward — or at least, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp writes, toward “a specific type of edgelord bigotry that drifts frequently into debunked conspiracy theories” — it’s worth asking what he wants to get out of the whole deal. An appointment to some unnamed new “government efficiency” commission? Untold power over the agencies that seek to regulate his companies? Or, improbably, a tax break? What does loyalty to Trump net him — or anyone else courting the former president’s favor — in the end? I spoke with Vox senior reporter Whizy Kim, who has been reporting on Musk, his fans, lawsuits, and even his text messages since the months leading to his 2022 purchase of Twitter, to try to understand where Elon Musk the man, the media mogul, and the politically ambitious demagogue intersect. What does Musk really want? And if he gets it, what will it mean for the rest of us? (Our conversation has been condensed for length and lightly edited.) Lavanya Ramanathan: When you look back on the moment Elon Musk bought Twitter, and now consider it in the current context of how he’s now trying to invest heavily in politics, do you see parallels there? Whizy Kim: I don’t think it is at all an accident that Elon Musk decided to buy Twitter, and then slowly became more politically vocal. He has a huge megaphone now. He’s the owner of a site that a lot of people still use, especially for stuff that’s related to the news. So I do think that there is a direct connection between him first talking about how Twitter should be this public “town square” where everyone can have their beliefs heard, where free speech is respected, to today, where he has reinstated a lot of banned accounts, including Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other incendiary figures. There’s also much more right-wing content that you see on the site if you visit X today compared to a few years ago. There’s been a big transformation in the way Americans perceive Elon Musk since then. Besides the fact that the value of Twitter has tanked and the number of users has declined, you’ve written about his fanboys, the people that really looked up him — predominantly young men. Is he still really influential with this set?   In the past, he was definitely seen as more of a liberal hero. Not that he was always supporting Democratic candidates and politicians, but he was a guy who had popularized electric vehicles. When I talked to his former fans for a piece, a lot of them talked about how they were drawn to his passion for climate change and the environment. He cared about the future of humanity. And they saw him as very much like a mythic heroic figure, kind of a Tony Stark. They admired how much he seemed to be in service of civilization, not just with Tesla, but even with SpaceX, and wanting to further humanity’s mission beyond Earth. And then the more he talked on Twitter, especially about his political views, they realized he could be very volatile. He could really lash out at anyone who criticized him. Several people told me that doesn’t seem befitting of a CEO of several major companies, acting childishly and immaturely in reaction to someone maybe making a good point. I hear a lot of similarities between him and Donald Trump there. What do these two men have in common?  Personality-wise, and just in terms of their worldview, what I really noticed from the X conversation that they had in August was that they both come from a place of feeling personally aggrieved. Trump at many points talked about how his opponents had engaged unfairly against him, all of these criminal court cases against him, these trials, because they don’t want him to win the election. They’ve both frequently been critics of the media. Elon Musk has also talked about how legacy media is really biased and doesn’t platform the truth. They could sort of look at each other and say, “Yeah, you get me. We’ve both been unfairly attacked.” And what is their end game here? What does Elon Musk stand to gain from an association with Trump, and now a financial stake in Trump’s victory? Under the Biden administration, Elon Musk felt that a lot of these regulatory agencies are staffed with people who are keeping a close eye over corporate misbehavior. His companies have been investigated or fined by different government agencies, whether it’s the Labor Board, OSHA, the SEC, or the Department of Transportation, and Elon Musk sees this as unfair. Even if he acknowledges that his companies didn’t follow safety regulations, he’ll be like, well, those safety measures are stupid, anyway. I think I know best. I run my company. I am an expert in these fields. The government is just clunky and slowing us down.  One of the things that he proposed during the Trump interview was some sort of government efficiency commission. And Trump was kind of like, oh, yeah, that’s a good idea … and maybe you can help run it. Essentially, that kind of commission would slash the budgets of a lot of regulatory agencies.  Trump and Musk are sort of framing that as creating a government that’s more sensible and efficient about the budget, but really, it could also potentially serve as a way to flush the budgets of agencies that have been coming after his companies. If he has Trump’s ear, you know, he could say, “Well, maybe if you want to appoint a new person to the Labor Board, it should be someone more friendly to businesses, rather than to workers.” That’s a potential kind of alliance that they could form. We know that billionaires, that Silicon Valley, are oftentimes more secretive about their involvement in politics. What Elon Musk has been doing is really shining a light on big business billionaire donors and the way they operate in the political sphere, so it’s easier to see. Where does this end for Musk, if Trump wins, or if Trump doesn’t win?   I do think that he will continue to be more politically vocal, because he’s opened up a can of worms. It’s harder to go back when there’s a long record of him coming out for a Trump crowd, officially endorsing him, and all of that.   Elon Musk is the evolution of what started from Peter Thiel. When Thiel first came out as this mega-conservative donor, people were like, wow, he’s so open and vocal in a world that tends to be more liberal. Now, we have Elon Musk, we have David Sacks, all these other Silicon Valley figures who are trying to elect Trump.  But obviously, one of the reasons why these wealthy, influential figures try to stay quiet is because they want to play both sides, right? Elon Musk has come out so vociferously as pro-Trump and criticizing Biden and criticizing Kamala Harris. If Kamala Harris wins, is there room for Elon to come back and say, “Hey, let’s still work together in some capacity?” That’s going to be a much harder road.

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A mural honoring women in Erie, Pennsylvania. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images A massive gender gap has been evident in poll after poll of this election — a significant trend that underscores the pivotal role women could play this November.  Most recently, a late October Quinnipiac survey of Michigan found 57 percent of women in the state back Vice President Kamala Harris, while 40 percent of men did the same. Conversely, 56 percent of men backed former President Donald Trump, while 37 percent of women did. That’s repeatedly been the case in national polls, too. For example, a recent poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found that Harris had a 16-point gap in the support that she saw from men and women.  “It’s the battle of the sexes, and it’s no game,” Quinnipiac pollster Tim Malloy said in a statement. “There is a glaring gap in Michigan and Wisconsin between the number of women supporting Harris and the number of men supporting Trump.” In Quinnipiac polls conducted in five of the seven key swing states throughout October, Harris had a significant lead among women, while Trump saw a comparable advantage among men in those same places. (Quinnipiac has not released October results for Nevada and Arizona.) !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r

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