The US election is on a knife edge. My trip to Georgia showed how easily it could end in tragedy | Oliver Laughland

A few weeks ago, I found myself standing in the white marble atrium of Georgia’s state capitol building, watching a scene that encapsulated much of the presidential race. To my right: a cluster of election conspiracy theorists who still believe Donald Trump won in 2020. To my left, a group of voting rights campaigners, singing an old spiritual popularised during the civil rights era.

They were here to observe last-minute efforts by hard-right officials to alter the way in which votes will be counted next month. The measures, many say, will sow doubt in this crucial swing state, creating chaos that is likely to favour Trump.

A man wearing a Trump T-shirt had weaved his way into the voting rights group – most of whom were Black – and was grinning with satisfied amusement. Others started hanging pro-Trump flags behind them as police officers intervened. The conspiracy theorists – mostly white – pointed and laughed.

“Isn’t it a bit disrespectful?” I asked the giggling Trump supporter to my right.

“I don’t think you get to tell me what you think is disrespectful,” she said with contempt, while chewing gum. “ I determine what I want to do.”

In a building dotted with relics of the past – from a plaque honouring the Confederate lieutenant William Ambrose Wright to a bronze statue of Martin Luther King – there was an acute sense of the precipice on which the country now sits and the prospect of history repeating itself. First, by re-electing Trump; second, by empowering the old anti-democratic values that he has come to embody. This election has the potential to end in tragedy and farce simultaneously.

For the next six weeks, I am travelling the US with the film-maker Tom Silverstone for our series Anywhere but Washington. The aim is not to predict who will win – a question that American cable news is perpetually obsessed with, but one that remains unanswerable until 5 November. Polling indicates an unwaveringly close race , not only in Georgia, but in all seven critical battleground states. Our focus, instead, is the communities with the most at stake and the policy failures and other forces guiding the doom spiral of polarisation in American politics. And we will be asking if there is hope for progress, regardless of the outcome.

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In Georgia, a centre of election denialism in 2020 and the site of Trump’s failed efforts to press officials into “finding” him enough votes to overturn the result, the microcosms for the presidential election extend well beyond the state capitol building. Out in the Atlanta suburbs, I followed a race for the 48th senate district, where a young Democrat, Ashwin Ramaswami, is running against the incumbent Republican, Shawn Still.

Ramaswami, a lean, bespectacled computer science graduate, is vying to become the first Indian American gen Z state senator here. He was inspired to run, he said, after finding out that Still was charged with several felony crimes as part of an alleged plot to fraudulently seize the 2020 election for Trump. Still’s case is part of a sprawling election racketeering prosecution in Atlanta that saw him charged alongside Trump and 17 others . (Trump and Still have pleaded not guilty.)

The 25 year-old’s parents beamed with pride as they discussed their son’s candidacy and told me they migrated to the US from the same region of India as Kamala Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan. “She’s going to break the ceiling,” said his mother, Kalyani. “And Ashwin is part of that.”

It was in this competitive race, situated in rapidly diversifying neighbourhoods, that I found my first kernel of hope and clarity. As he canvassed on the streets, Ramaswami spoke with a young voter who was unaware that her state senator had been involved in an alleged criminal enterprise to subvert democracy. She listened attentively as Ramaswami made his pitch, which included fluid arguments for gun control and abortion rights.

“We need people who are like-minded and around our age to make the difference,” she said. “Everything has to evolve. If we can evolve in our technology, why can’t we evolve in our government?”

Like many other elected Republicans in Georgia, Still did not respond to our interview requests. And so, in a bid to find more voices on the other side, we drove out to the conservative-leaning county of Fayette. Here, we stumbled across a gargantuan bus, daubed in the stars and stripes and a giant portrait of a smiling Trump.

The Trump Bus, as it’s called, has been rolling around the state since 2015, when its owner, Danny Hamilton, got swept up in the Maga movement. It serves as a giant billboard and a vast emporium of Trump-themed goods.

He showed me the merchandise. It was largely T-shirts, caps and flags, but also included more sinister items, such as a large Trump-branded flick knife. Most of it was imported from China. I asked whether Trump’s pledge to impose large tariffs on Chinese imports concerned him.

“I’m a multimillionaire,” he said, revealing this is all a personal passion project. “I don’t need this shit.”

While Trumpism is a multifaceted political movement, I have found that some of the billionaire’s most ardent backers may have the least to lose in a high-stakes election.

All of those congregated around the bus were well versed in the conspiracy-tinged lexicon of the Trump bubble. But talk of the two recent assassination attempts on the former president moved the needle to a new level – whereby “radical Democrats” are believed to have orchestrated the incidents.

Many of the fears expressed on both sides of the aisle – of widespread political violence, targeted killings and a descent into autocratic government – might have seemed farcical four years ago. But as I looked down at the flick knife with Trump’s face emblazoned on the handle, it became clearer that they are more realistic now than at any time in recent history.

• Oliver Laughland is the Guardian’s US southern bureau chief