Could 2024 election cause society to collapse? Some preppers think so — and they're ready.

Brekke Wagoner looks out of the windows of her North Carolina home and sees disaster coming.

Not immediately, but someday, as hurricanes and other storms supercharged by climate change barrel up the Eastern Seaboard, drenching neighborhoods, knocking out power and destroying roads.

But it's not the storms she worries about, not exactly.

Instead, she worries that an incompetent federal government run by someone like current Republican frontrunner and former president Donald Trump will botch the humanitarian response to a predictable disaster. She's one of a growing number of people on both sides of the political divide who are preparing for the possibility of a disastrous collapse of society following the 2024 election.

Wagoner, 39, represents a relatively small but growing segment of Americans who consider themselves "preppers" ‒ people prepared to survive without government assistance during disasters. Those disasters could encompass anything from a major storm to widespread looting sparked by election anger.

More Americans preparing for disaster ahead of election

In the past 12 months, 39% of Millennials and 40% of Gen Z reported having spent money on prepping, according to Finder.com, which has collected similar data since at least 2017. Overall, almost 30% of Americans surveyed reported taking some steps toward emergency preparedness last year, up from about 25% in 2017, according to the annual Finder survey.

"On the left, you have people afraid (Trump's) going to declare himself dictator of the United States and people on the left are going to end up as targets in some sort of authoritarian system," said prepping expert and author Brad Garrett. "On the right, it's general malaise and a fear of society unraveling. They point to these smash-and-grab robberies, riots and protests."

One expert consulted by USA TODAY said a failure or perceived failure of government is almost always the trigger for people to begin prepping. He said the number of younger, more liberal people prepping indicates a loss of trust in government.

"That's the impetus for all the preppers I've ever dealt with: They saw something and felt the government could not or would not help,” said Prof. Chad Huddleston of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, an anthropologist who has studied the prepping community extensively.

Huddleston said it’s important to distinguish between the large numbers of people who consider being prepared for emergencies their civic and family responsibility and those who are, sometimes eagerly, awaiting societal collapse. But he said the number of people deliberately preparing for a crisis tied to a Trump-Biden election is growing.

“On one side, people think Trump may bring a New World Order and ‘they’ will come and get us so we need to be ready," he said. "And then on the other hand you have the communities who think things will get just get worse so we have to help ourselves."

Count Wagoner among those people. She sees climate change as a worsening existential threat that the government isn't prepared for, especially if a Republican is in charge.

"The intensification of our natural storm seasons is the No. 1 thing that's going to happen to you," she said. "An electromagnetic pulse that takes out the electrical grid could happen. A nuclear war might happen. A civil war might happen. But a storm will happen."

Prepping is becoming increasingly diverse

While the movement has long been associated with libertarian-fueled apocalyptic scenarios like a zombie infestation or the total collapse of modern society, as highlighted by the 2020 television show Doomsday Preppers, Wagoner is among younger, more liberal people who say the Trump administration flubbed its responses during the 2017 hurricane season, particularly in Puerto Rico, and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overall, prepping appears to reflect the deep uncertainty many Americans feel: A recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found that 67% of Americans think the country is facing either bigger problems than usual or is in the most troubled state they've ever seen. The poll of 1,000 registered voters, taken Oct. 17-20 by landline and cell phone, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Experts say younger preppers like Wagoner reflect broad concerns for the nation's future as we choose our next president. Some are stockpiling weapons and medical supplies in armored bunkers. Others are urging their neighbors to set aside enough food to survive for weeks or months without outside assistance.

"If you can be prepared, you won't be a drain on the resources needed to help the people who didn’t prepare,” said Wagoner, who has a 90-day supply of food set aside for her six-person family. Wagoner, who works for a nonprofit, runs a YouTube channel where she offers prepping advice to young people, urban residents and people who have small homes.

"In the face of an apocalypse, I want to come out and calmly help people,” she said. “I want to be able to create a society that instead of wanting to shoot every stranger, understands our interdependence and creates a better society.”

Many disaster-response experts say the ideas espoused by Wagoner is the most reasonable and responsible approach for Americans to take, building off the assumption that neighbors, churches and nonprofits like the Red Cross or Salvation Army will always play a frontline role in helping recover from a disaster, filling in the gaps until the federal government gets organized.

Guns and bunkers: Some preppers are focused on their own survival

If Wagoner represents one end of the spectrum ‒ focused on community, interdependence and cooperation ‒ retired U.S. Air Force Col. Drew Miller represents the other. He's prepared for a full societal collapse caused by war, a nuclear explosion or rampaging mobs angry at election results.

Miller's "Fortitude Ranch" has built seven compounds around the country, including Nevada, Wisconsin and outside Washington, D.C., where members can retreat for up to a year, armed and isolated from whatever may come. In addition to stockpiles of food, propane and whiskey, the compounds are outfitted with solar panels, wells and two-way radios. And lots and lots of guns.

Their plan during a collapse: members will immediately flee to the closest compound, poach nearby wildlife for meat, surround their compound with log walls and then shoot any "marauders" who approach too close. USA TODAY toured one of the compounds in southern Colorado, where spartan accommodations await members who pay a minimum of $1,200 annually for what Miller calls a different kind of life insurance.

“We’ll have decent chow here come a collapse,” he said. “We guarantee a year of food, but not of toilet paper.”

Fortitude Ranch in Colorado has about 100 members, Miller said. He acknowledges the cost of joining would be a financial burden for many Americans, but pulled out a $300 pistol to argue being prepared doesn't have to cost a fortune. He said the ultra-rich have their own compounds but will be dependent on paid staff to protect them, while he believes individual families in cities will become targets for armed gangs, especially if people get hungry and desperate.

His advice for city-dwellers stockpiling supplies in their homes: "The first rule of prepping is to not tell people you're a prepper."

Inside Fortitude Ranch's Colorado compound, which includes an armored guard post, sniper positions and underground bunkers, members aim to remain isolated for as long as needed. Members have added their own beds, furniture and ammunition stockpiles to the group supplies cached around the property.

Among the weapons: a .50-caliber rifle to disable oncoming vehicles, hunting rifles to kill deer and plenty of pistols. They also have cupboards filled with first-aid kits, and have recruited doctors and people with military medical training to help keep their fellow members healthy.

The group's plan is to ride out any collapse and then be positioned to take advantage of business opportunities opened up by widespread urban deaths. That's what happened when the Black Death killed tens of millions of Europeans and Asians in the 1300s: It concentrated wealth and resources among survivors.

Miller said the compounds are primarily set up to be defensive, and while they'd be open to bartering with their neighbors during a collapse, they wouldn't help non-members who came begging for food or assistance. Otherwise, he said, no one would pay to join Fortitude Ranch until times got tough.

Miller worries about a wide variety of problems, from a true pandemic that kills a large majority of Americans to a nuclear detonation that wipes out the nation's electrical grid and our modern electronic devices. He said many of his clients started thinking seriously about survival during the protests and riots following George Floyd's 2020 murder. The overwhelming majority of those events were peaceful, although some caused significant property damage in multiple cities, and drew threats from Trump that he would dispatch the military to stop them.

"There could easily be a civil war during a Biden-Trump election," he said, referencing the violent 2020 clashes in Portland between armed federal agents dispatched by Trump against Black Lives Matter protesters, some of whom shot fireworks at officers.

Miller's group deliberately avoids getting into the political debate, although he acknowledges many members have military training. And scattered around the compound are multiple copies of his 2011 novel Rohan Nation, a Libertarian-focused tale of survivalists written as a call to break "nation's addiction to socialist entitlements and return to Constitutional, strictly limited government, focused on security."

Miller said your politics don't matter in a cataclysm ‒ only your willingness to work with the small number of survivors in the compound to get through the first worst months of a crisis so you can launch a new business to take advantage of vacant real estate and free-market needs.

“I want middle-class Americans to survive and we make it affordable to do that," Miller said. “I think eventually things will recover ‒ and I want to be alive for that.”

'Unfortunate arms race' for conservative, liberal preppers ahead of election

Garrett, the author and academic, spent three years visiting eight counties and interviewing hundreds of preppers for his 2020 book "Bunker," which explores the philosophies driving the prepper movement. He said Miller's Fortitude Ranch reflects a typical Libertarian-focused prepper mindset, in which the government is inherently incompetent and that everyone is more or less on their own.

But he said some liberals, especially younger ones, were shocked into action by the pandemic and the federal government's response to the George Floyd protests ‒ they'd never personally experienced such government failure or hostility before, and suddenly feel vulnerable. He said the upcoming presidential election is only sharpening those concerns on both sides of the nation's divide.

"We do have this authoritarian streak running through the right and prepping plays into that. They are prepared for violence, no question," he said. "But you're also seeing an increase in militancy on the left. I'm seeing a lot of liberal preppers buying guns, saying that they waited too long. It's an unfortunate arms race that I do think we're going to see escalating as we head into the election, particularly if it's Trump vs. Biden."

Garrett said many of the younger preppers, while worried about a fascist federal government under a second Trump administration, are also concerned about the growing impact of climate change. He said there's a shift back toward being prepared for disasters in a way people routinely were 100 years ago, especially in rural areas.

"You're seeing a lot of people who are not worried about the apocalypse but if the power goes out for three days," he said. "You're seeing more prepping but less extreme prepping."

Prepping can help others

Back in North Carolina, Wagoner would consider herself among those who take responsible, reasonable steps to prepare. She and her husband got rid of some of their books and camping gear to make room for their food stockpile. And they eschew having guns, even though they'd be prepared to use them in self defense, she said. For Wagoner, being prepared comes with an explicit addendum: so she can help others.

On her YouTube channel, Wagoner said she tries to help people understand that being prepared doesn't need to be expensive, and that gradually building up a stockpile of non-perishable foods like pasta and rice is an easy way to be self-sufficient in a crisis.

She explicitly rejects the philosophy of what Garrett calls "dread merchants" ‒ people capitalizing on fear to sell pre-made packs of freeze-dried meals, "bugout bags," battery banks or guns ‒ and encourages her audience to think about how prepping will help their community.

"When I talk about preparedness, I start with 'what's most likely'?" she said. "You have to ask, what are you prepping for? Are you prepping to survive for a Max Mad world? Because if that's what prepare for, that's what you'll ultimately create. And I'm prepping for community survival. My perspective is that we are better together."

She added:  "Jesus would slap the s--- out of anyone who had food and refused to help their neighbors who were hungry."