It’s a truism almost too pedestrian to put in print that presidential elections look radically different from the outside (to voters) and the inside (to the advisers, staffers, consultants, and pollsters who are involved in the campaigns). Yet at certain key junctures in every cycle, this dumdum obvious observation is worth making anyway, if only to capture the sheer strangeness of moments like this one—where any citizen who gives the slightest shit about the future of the country appears to be fixated on tomorrow’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, while many of the people most deeply embroiled in the orchestration and conduct of their campaigns have already cast their gaze beyond it.