The 2016 American presidential election has been an absurd, exhausting and bruising spectacle. Now imagine living through it all as a Muslim American. Somehow, this election has managed to cram all the Islamophobic sentiments of the last 15 years into the span of 15 months, and then morph them into one ugly thing.

Donald Trump is largely to blame. He called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims” entering the country until it became clear that the proposal was embarrassingly ill-conceived, only to be replaced by the equally vague “extreme vetting”. He fought publicly with the Gold Star Khan family, suggesting Ghazala Khan was not “allowed to speak” at the Democratic convention because of her Muslim faith. He accused Muslim Americans as a group of harboring terrorists. There’s more, but we all know the story by now.

Trump has insulted and defamed many different groups along the way, but what we may not realize is how it’s different when it comes to Muslims. Over the course of the campaign, Trump has very publicly reached out to Latino, African American and LGBTQ voters to ask for their support. We can question his sincerity, but the gestures are there. He even briefly tempered his tone regarding Mexicans during a quickly arranged visit to President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City last August.

His daughter Ivanka and wife Melania have defended him for his unforgivable behavior toward women, and Ivanka also recorded an official campaign television advertisement openly courting women voters for her father. Trump denies the charge he mocked a disabled reporter, and despite a bevy of antisemitic incidents involving Trump and his supporters over the past months, he has also directly sought Jewish American support. Such is his style of leadership: he may insult you, but he still wants your vote.

Not so with the Muslims. A tiny handful of Muslim Americans may, bizarrely, be Trump supporters, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that, while attempting to engage every other constituency, Trump’s campaign has made essentially zero public outreach to the Muslim electorate. It’s as if Muslim citizens already don’t exist in Trump’s America.

The irony is that Trump’s willful blindness to Muslim voters may lead to his defeat. Muslims may only account for a small part of the American population, but a concerted push by Muslim Americans during this season has meant that there are now over a million registered Muslim voters, more than double the number in 2012. And Muslims tend to live in key battleground states such as Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia.

But Hillary Clinton may not be able to count on all of those votes either. Many Muslim Americans have long been uncomfortable with her hawkish foreign policy record and her superficially inclusive rhetoric. “We need American Muslims to be part of our eyes and ears on our frontlines,” is a standard Clinton refrain, and with it we hear the suggestion that our communities live on some kind of “frontline” of warfare.

This is so not true: the front line of Costco, maybe. Most Muslim Americans are boring, middle-class folk. Clinton also seems to see Muslim Americans as separate from her idea of “we” (“we” need “them” to be part of “us”) and to believe that we, as a group, carry some insider knowledge about evildoers that we may – or may not! – be willing to trade in exchange for equal treatment in the United States.

This is offensive to our citizenship, and Muslim Americans must be afforded the same rights and protections as everyone else without precondition. But what this campaign has really shown is how contested and precarious the place is for Muslim Americans today. That won’t change after 8 November, regardless of who wins.

Even with a Clinton victory, Trump and his “movement”, which is how he refers to his campaign, will not simply vanish. And the suggestion that Trump is merely using the election as a platform from which to start a new media empire is hardly comforting, as if there has never been a connection between mass media and far-right politics. So how prepared are we, as a nation, to deal with Trumpism after Tuesday?

If there’s any good news to come out of this election, it’s that the country now recognizes the potent political force that is Islamophobia. And Americans are beginning to understand that fighting anti-Muslim bigotry is not fundamentally about protecting Muslims, but about preserving the vision of a functioning, pluralistic and democratic society. Now we must be prepared to do the work necessary to hold our leaders to that standard every day, and not just once every four years.