In a speech filled with promises, falsehoods, insults and jokes delivered by Donald Trump to a packed Wisconsin arena six days before the presidential election, one line stood out: “November 5 will be the most important day in the history of our country.”

Hyperbole? Undoubtedly, and exactly the sort that the former president has used repeatedly in the past months, as he plots a return to the White House from which Joe Biden ousted him four years ago. Did it ring true to his supporters? For many, the answer was yes.

“We’re screwed. Plain English, we’re screwed,” 72-year-old retiree John Martin replied when asked what would happen if Trump lost at the ballot box on Tuesday. “We’re going to become a third-world country,” added Mary Watermolen, 55, as the couple left Trump’s speech in Green Bay on Wednesday evening.

Two days earlier and hundreds of miles away, Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Trump’s Democratic opponent, had used similar framing to describe the stakes of the election to hundreds of people who turned out to see her in a Michigan college town.

“I do believe Donald Trump to be an unserious man, but the consequences of him ever being president again are brutally serious, brutally serious,” she said at a city park in Ann Arbor. “So much is on the line in this election, and this is not 2016 or 2020. We can all see that Donald Trump is even more unstable and more unhinged, and now he wants unchecked power, and this time … there will be no one there to stop him.”

They have little in common as people or politicians, but as they campaigned in swing states and elsewhere in the final week before the presidential election, both the vice-president and former president converged on a unifying message to their supporters: America is at a turning point, and if I lose, the country will not be the same.

It was in Harris’s speech on Tuesday evening, held at the same Washington DC park from which Trump addressed his followers who would go on to storm the Capitol on January 6. “This election is more than a choice between two parties and two different candidates. It is a choice about whether we have a country rooted in freedom for every American, or one ruled by chaos and division,” she said.

And it was laced throughout the conversation on Thursday evening in a suburb of Phoenix, where Trump sat down with a fawning Tucker Carlson, the conservative commentator. “She’s dumb as a rock, and you can’t have that,” he said of Harris. “We love our country too much. You can’t have it, we just went through four years of it. You can’t have any more. A country can only take so much.”

The sentiment now seems certain to be on the minds of tens of millions of Americans who will vote on Tuesday. In past elections, the world’s third-most-populous country has selected its next leader while its troops were fighting overseas, its economy had collapsed and, most recently, it was in the grips of a global pandemic. No external factors exist with any similar severity this year, and yet, in interviews at campaign events in Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona this week, many Democratic and Republican voters expressed a belief to the Guardian that the country stands on a precipice.

“It’s lies all the time, tells them what they want to hear,” retired steelworker Kevin Hinckley, 68, said of Trump as he left Harris’s rally in Ann Arbor. “He’s so mean, he’s an awful person, pretty awful. I just hope he doesn’t make it. God forbid if he does.”

Fueling much of this mood is Trump himself, who has preserved his position atop the Republican party for the better part of a decade. Big promises and dire threats have been a hallmark of his campaign style ever since he entered politics in 2015, but this year, voters are heading to the polls cognizant of what it’s like having him in the White House.

His four years in office ended with Biden defeating him and Trump spending weeks looking for ways to keep the Democrat from entering the White House anyway, which culminated in his supporters’ violent and unsuccessful attempt on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.

Far from backing away from his involvement in the riot, Trump has instead talked about pardoning those convicted of the attack, mulled acting as “a dictator” on his first day back in office, and lately taken to referring to his political adversaries as “the enemy from within”, against whom he might send the military.

Intellectuals with ties to Trump have authored a rightwing blueprint to remake the US government called Project 2025. The former president denies having anything to do with it, but Harris argues the plan could do perhaps-irreversible damage to America’s institutions, if it is followed.

With the three supreme court justices he appointed having already supported a ruling protecting presidents from prosecution for official acts while also throwing out the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed by Roe v Wade, Harris’s supporters believe Trump would spend the next four years sending the country into uncharted political territory, from which it might not emerge the same.

“I see this is really critical if we want to hold on to democracy. I really see it as sort of an existential election in that sense,” said Jamie Taylor, 62, a retiree waiting to hear from Harris in Ann Arbor.

She feared a second Trump administration “would be more fascist. So, I do think that he will carry through on his promises to really gut the civil service and put in loyalists. I don’t know if he’ll quite do the mass deportations the way that he’s claimed, but I think he will do some sort of mass deportation in a way that’s pretty harmful to families and probably the economics of the country. I think he’ll continue to do things that … break the law.”

To his supporters, it’s the opposite: Trump is the only man to fix what ails the country, from the immigrants who enter from Mexico to the consumer prices that have risen under Biden’s term. “On issue after issue, Kamala broke it and I will fix it,” he declared in Green Bay.

The day prior, in Saginaw, Michigan, his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, warned that if Harris wins, manufacturing jobs would be taken away from the state and go to China. Drug cartels would be free to enter from Mexico, bringing with them fentanyl that they would disguise as candy, he said.

“I think it’s going to be the crash of 1929, and us, we’re thinking maybe … to leave the country. We don’t want to be around here to see them go back to the chaos,” said Xavier Bartlett, a high school student who, at 17, attended the speech even though he was not yet old enough to vote.

“Civil war’s going to break out,” added 33-year-old fast-food worker Thomas Powell. If such a thing were to happen, and he doubted it would, Bartlett said it would be because Trump’s supporters thought Tuesday’s election was rigged.

Standing on a busy road outside the recreation center where Vance spoke was Carol Kubczak, a volunteer with the Republican US Senate candidate Mike Rogers’ campaign.

Amid the honks of passing cars whose drivers spotted the Trump signs she and others were carrying, Kubczak, 67, described how she broke with the Democratic party and voted for Trump in 2016, but kept her choice a secret from her family. She is now barely on speaking terms with her sister because of it.

“If, God forbid, [Harris] gets in, I really don’t believe there will be any more free elections,” Kubczak said.

In the audience for Trump’s Green Bay speech was Steve Wallace, a former professor turned community college administrator who reckoned that no one he works with knows about his political leanings. Dressed in a red Maga shirt, the 62-year-old said he had voted Republican for decades and that Trump’s politics fit right in with his libertarian-tinged view of how the government should be run.

He had already gotten in his ballot to help Trump win Wisconsin, but didn’t share in the predictions of dire consequences if Harris is elected.

“I wouldn’t see much change. I think it’d be more divisive,” he said, predicting that a Harris administration would be similar to that of Barack Obama, who many Republicans in Wisconsin believe continues to hold sway in Biden’s White House.

“There’ll be brighter days, there’ll be dark days. It’s not the end of the world – it isn’t,” he said. “This is a huge country with great opportunities.”