By LAURIE KELLMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Gary Kauffman says he does not scare easily. So when men waving President Donald Trump flags drive by his house in downtown Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, he stands on his front steps and waves a banner for Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

“Sometimes I yell at them. They yell back at me,” says Kauffman, 54.

Still, Kauffman is keeping a closer eye on who they are and what they’re carrying as Election Day approaches. Tension has been rising in his town, known best as hallowed ground of the Civil War’s bloodiest battle. Recently, it’s become a hot spot of angry confrontations between Trump supporters and liberal protesters. Kauffman has seen some of the Trump supporters carrying weapons.

“If there’s guns, I’m a bit more cautious,” he said on Monday.

Americans aren’t accustomed to worrying about violence or safety ahead of an election. It’s a luxury afforded by years of largely peaceful voting, a recent history of fairly orderly displays of democracy. But after months filled with disease, disruption and unrest, Americans are worried that Election Day could become a flashpoint.

With Election Day next week, voters can point to plenty of evidence behind the anxiety. More than 226,000 people have died of the coronavirus in the United States, and cases are spiking across the country. A summer of protests of racial injustice and sometimes violent confrontations has left many on edge. Gun sales have broken records. Trump has called on supporters to monitor voting and has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power or to explicitly condemn a white supremacist group.

There was the alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and another spate of violent protest this week over a police shooting of a Black man in Philadelphia.

“Human beings don’t do well with uncertainty, and there’s been a lot of uncertainty this year,” said Mara Suttmann-Lea, an assistant professor of government at Connecticut College conducting research on voting. ”Absolutely I’m seeing heightened levels of anxiety … and it’s a more general, existential anxiety — ‘What is the state of our democracy?’”

Those worries have shown up in polling. About 7 in 10 voters say they are anxious about the election, according to an AP-NORC poll this month. Biden supporters were more likely to say so than Trump supporters — 72% to 61%.

For some, the worries are a vague sense of looming trouble that could take many forms — conflict at a polling place, protest over the outcome, protest over no outcome, a conflagration that splits Americans over now-familiar divisions.

“You can feel it in the energy,” particularly on social media, says Cincinnati voter Josh Holsten Sr., 42. “There are just a lot of extra tensions that don’t necessarily need to be there.”

Holsten says he is voting for Trump but thinks neither the president nor Biden is doing enough to calm people down. The car salesman has even stocked up on food, water and bulletproof vests for his family — in case the election sparks something bad.

Law enforcement and election officials are preparing, too. FBI and local officials in several states have been conducting drills and setting up command centers to respond to election-related unrest.

Election officials are training poll workers on how to de-escalate conflict and ensuring they’re prepped on the rules about poll monitoring, voter intimidation and harassment.

“The procedures have always been there. We’ve just never had to use them,” said Ellen Sorensen, an elections judge in Naperville, Illinois, outside Chicago. “Perhaps this time we may. I don’t know.”

A group called Election Protection Arizona says it intends to train hundreds of people at the polls, including on de-escalation guidance in case of confrontations.

The Rev. Joan Van Becelaere, executive director of Unitarian Universalist Justice Ohio and part of an effort to keep the peace, said the virus has fueled fear and division between Trump supporters and others.

The groups, she said, are “extreme places of tension that we really don’t want to meet at these polls.”

Millions of Americans are voting despite the worries. More than 67 million people have already voted in the U.S., and more than 23 million of those cast their ballots in person.

A poll in August by the Pew Research Center suggests that more Americans see the stakes as higher than usual in the 2020 presidential election. Twenty years ago, just half of voters said it really mattered who won. As of August, 83% express this view.

For some, that sense of urgency, combined with fierce partisanship and anger, feels like a recipe for conflict.

“November’s going to be scary because both sides aren’t going to give,” said Bob Stanley, 66, a longtime Republican and Trump supporter from Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Stanley expressed a hope shared by Republicans and Democrats: “I hope it’s going to be an overwhelming majority, or there will be trouble.”

Another Johnstown resident, Fran Jacobs, a 76-year-old Biden supporter, expressed similar concerns about whether the result would be clear, whether people would be calm and whether the world would look at the U.S. as a functional democracy.

“I’ve never been frightened for the country. I always figured we’re gonna make it. We always pull something up. And I’m really frightened this time,” she said, looking to the sky. “It’s all in your hands, I know.”

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Associated Press writers Jill Colvin in Washington, Astrid Galvin in Phoenix and Julie Carr Smyth in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

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AP’s Advance Voting guide brings you the facts about voting early, by mail or absentee from each state: https://interactives.ap.org/advance-voting-2020/.

By THOMAS BEAUMONT

OSHKOSH, Wis. (AP) — Gabe Loiacono is the kind of voter President Donald Trump can ill afford to lose. He lives in a pivotal county of a swing state that is among a handful that will decide the presidency.

A college history professor who last cast a ballot for a Democrat more than 20 years ago, Loiacono is voting for Democrat Joe Biden because he thinks Trump has utterly failed in his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

“President Trump still does not seem to be taking the pandemic seriously enough. I wish he would,” said Loiacono. He said he never thought of Trump as “all bad” but added, “There is still too much wishful thinking and not enough clear guidance.”

And now the virus is getting worse in states that the Republican president needs the most, at the least opportune time. New infections are raging in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the upper Midwest. In Iowa, polls suggest Trump is in a toss-up race with Biden after carrying the state by 9.4 percentage points four years ago.

Trump’s pandemic response threatens his hold on Wisconsin, where he won by fewer than 23,000 votes in 2016, said Marquette University Law School poll director Charles Franklin.

“Approval of his handling of COVID is the next-strongest predictor of vote choice,” behind voters’ party affiliation and their overall approval of Trump’s performance as president, Franklin said. “And it’s not just a fluke of a single survey.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Sunday that among U.S. states, Wisconsin had the third highest rate of new cases for the previous seven days. Iowa was 10th.

Trump won Wisconsin’s heavily blue-collar Winnebago County, which includes Oshkosh, in 2016, after Democratic nominee Barack Obama had carried it in 2012. Today, Winnebago is among the top 10 counties where new Wisconsin COVID cases are being reported, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University and compiled by The Associated Press.

The trend is similar in Iowa. Blue-collar Dubuque County was among the state’s 10 counties with the fastest-growing number of cases per capita over the past two weeks. Trump won the county narrowly after Democrats had carried it since the 1950s.

In Wisconsin, where polling has shown Biden with a slight but consistent advantage, approval of Trump’s handling the pandemic dropped from 51% in March to 41% in October, according to a Marquette University Law School poll. That’s a noteworthy decline considering Trump’s overall approval has fluctuated little and remained in the mid-40s.

Iowans’ view of Trump’s handling of the pandemic is also more negative than positive, according to The Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll and Monmouth University polls.

The race in Iowa remains very close, though Monmouth poll director Patrick Murray said Trump’s poor rating in Iowa on handling the pandemic “suggests in the decision-making process, the coronavirus is top of mind and decisive.”

As Trump enters a frenzied final week of campaigning, he continues to hold mass rallies that often defy local public health rules. The campaign says supporters are merely exercising their First Amendment rights.

The president also continues to insist the country is “rounding the turn” on the virus, an assertion that has drawn rebukes from public health experts, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist. He also blames news media coverage of the outbreak.

“ALL THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA WANTS TO TALK ABOUT IS COVID, COVID, COVID,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “ON NOVEMBER 4th, YOU WON’T BE HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT IT ANYMORE. WE ARE ROUNDING THE TURN!!!”

During his debate with Biden last week, Trump insisted of the virus, despite the spike in cases: “It will go away. It’s going away.” The comments betrayed the seriousness Trump conveyed during recorded conversations with journalist Bob Woodward in February, when Trump said he “wanted to always play it down” to avoid creating a panic.

On Sunday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said on CNN: ” We’re not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigations.”

On Saturday night, the White House confirmed that Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, had tested positive for COVID-19, after the news of Short’s diagnosis dribbled out. The vice president has showed no signs of curbing his torrid campaign schedule.

Republican pollster Ed Goeas likened Meadows’ comments to “waving the white flag.”

“That’s how I read it,” Goeas said. “The only hope it seems is therapeutics will make it less of a killer and eventually the vaccine will be available to everyone. It looked to me like they were just trying to make their position sound like that was always their intent.”

COVID-19 cases also have risen over the past two weeks in Midwestern battlegrounds Michigan, Minnesota and Ohio, though not as sharply as in Wisconsin and Iowa, according to the Johns Hopkins data.

The pandemic is resonating because it touches all Americans personally and most of them economically, said Terry Madonna, director the Franklin and Marshall College Poll and veteran scholar of Pennsylvania politics.

“It’s ubiquitous,” Madonna said. “Maybe it’s not in your own family. But you know someone who had it. You can’t get away from it in the news and in your own life.”

And voters like Loiacono say they are holding the president to account.

“The job of government is to lead in times of crises,” said Loiacono, 44, masked and standing on his front porch in Oshkosh a few blocks from Lake Winnebago. “The president has admitted he talked much more positively about it because he saw his role as being a cheerleader. And I sort of understand that, but I think it was the wrong move.”

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AP’s Advance Voting guide brings you the facts about voting early, by mail or absentee from each state: https://interactives.ap.org/advance-voting-2020/.

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Corrects White House confirmed on Saturday, not Sunday, that Pence’s chief of staff had tested positive.