With election night looming, I’m an undecided voter: Should I cook heaps of comfort food, or take refuge under a pillow? Should I soothe my nerves with every palliative at hand, or steel myself for the storm with all brain cells on full alert?

In the meantime, however, I’m bedeviled by the question that you’re surely asking yourself as well:

Assuming that all the polls are correct, why the f**k is this presidential race is so close?

On the one hand, you’ve got a normal human being who wants to summon the better angels of our nature. On the other hand, you’ve got a convicted felon indicted insurrectionist adjudicated rapist adjudicated financial fraudster sociopathic narcissist pathological liar racist demagogue cognitively impaired imbecile who rants about whales, boats, batteries, birds, and windmills and who’s denounced by his own former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman as “fascist to the core” – basically, a Batman villain.

So how is it possible…I’ve come up with five overlapping reasons:

1. A cultural chasm separates the people who embrace the pluralistic 21st century America from the people who pine for the white patriarchal America of yesteryear. It’s a national identity crisis.

2. We’re plagued by two virulently persistent diseases, racism and misogyny. Anyone who thinks that Kamala Harris isn’t hampered by her race and gender is in deep denial. It’s oh so predictable that a qualified Black woman is apparently at 50-50 with an unqualified white man. The double standard is obvious; as analyst Van Jones said recently, “He gets to be lawless, she has to be flawless.”

3. A huge swath of Americans are so distrustful of our institutions that they’re juiced for authoritarianism, which means they’ll see this election is legit only if their “fascist to the core” authoritarian wins it. That’s how it works in Russia. That’s how it works in Hungary, where strong man Viktor Orban is rooting for a Trump win; earlier this week, he messaged Trump and said “Fingers crossed.”

4. There is no longer a consensus belief in factual reality. Roughly half the electorate is hooked on the lies and disinformation that proliferate online – with Russian trolls feeding the frenzy – and laps up the sewage that flows daily from Donald Trump’s mouth. (Yesterday in Arizona, he fantasized about Liz Cheney facing gunfire, “with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.” Presumably, half the country is fine with that sewage.)

5. The electorate is profoundly divided by gender and education. If only college-educated Americans were to vote, Harris would win in a landslide; if only the non-college Americans were to vote, Trump would win in a landslide. If only women were to vote, Harris wins; if only men were to vote, Trump wins.

It’s theoretically possible, of course, that the polls will be proven wrong, that late-breaking voters will opt for sanity and that Harris will summon our better angels by a decisive margin. But whatever happens, the existential struggle to define what America stands for will continue. The goal in this election is to summarily reject who we are at our worst and embrace who we can be at our best. In a just world, that would not be a close call.