With just a few thousand votes between the two candidates for governor, election night during the US midterms in Wisconsin could not have been more tense. The slender lead kept flipping between Republican and Democrat as various precincts reported their results. Then shortly before midnight a local news presenter suggested, almost as an aside, that there could be about 40,000 more votes yet to be counted from the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee. A week earlier, at a Republican event in nearby rural Kenosha, Milwaukee had been a punchline – an emblem of crime-ridden, multiracial, urban dysfunction. But they weren’t laughing now.

This year is on course to be the worst in 10 years for numbers of young people in England and Wales killed in knife attacks, with 37 children and teenagers stabbed to death so far, continuing a five-year upward trend, according to figures collated by the Guardian.

I remember the first time I started to understand Donald Trump’s appeal to white, working-class Americans. It was in 2016, a few days before the Iowa caucuses, and he was being introduced by Jerry Falwell Jr, the eponymous son of the famous preacher, in Council Bluffs. Falwell told the crowd that Trump had picked him up in his private plane and offered him dinner. He had been expecting something lavish. “But you know what we had?” he asked the crowd. “Wendy’s.” The audience cheered and laughed along with him.

Shirley (not her real name) tried her best. As her son grew into adolescence and became increasingly wayward she sought help. She enrolled in parenting classes, asked the council to relocate her family out of the London borough of Brent and had endless meetings with social workers and psychologists. She sought referrals for mental health assessments but was told her son Sean (not his real name) did not meet the threshold. She sent an email to her MP with the heading “PLEASE HELP ME SAVE MY SON!!!”

In the end there was no overwhelming blue wave. A wave washes all before it. But when Republicans expand their majority in the Senate, win governor’s races in Florida, Ohio, Iowa and New Hampshire, Democrats cannot claim a broad and decisive shift in electoral opinion towards them.

Three weeks before the midterm elections the first of several mail bombs started arriving at the homes or workplaces of Donald Trump’s critics, including the media, and kept coming for a week. The devices appear to have been sent by an unstable man radicalized by Trump’s rhetoric. A few days after the first mail bomb was found, an armed man tried to break into a black church in Jeffersonstown, Kentucky. When he found the door locked he went to a nearby supermarket and shot dead two elderly black people. When a white passerby with a gun challenged him he reportedly said: “Whites don’t kill whites.”

On Saturday in the middle of the day a Latino man, half-dressed and barely awake, answered a knock at his door.

When Angelina Cruz, the head of the teachers’ union in Racine, Wisconsin, goes canvassing, she doesn’t just knock on doors. If she sees someone in the street she approaches them and starts a conversation.