Preface

“Not much” seems to be the answer to my question above.  Bush Jr. and a friendly Supreme Court stole Florida from Al Gore, which gave Bush the Presidency.  Richard Daley, Sr. and his Democrat and Republican counterparts in “machine” cities across the country used to steal elections regularly.   Robert E. Caro’s impeccably researched biography of Lyndon Johnson details how LBJ stole his first Texas Senate race.  

The evidence is abundant that Trump and his allies (Republican secretaries of state, majority Republican state legislatures and governors, the supreme court, vigilantes to intimidate people at polling places, etc) will seek to steal the ’26 election.  In response, there are cries of outrage but no one has a contingency plan for action if, in fact, that theft becomes reality.  

A contingency plan would say:

— If “A” (electoral victory by the center/left despite Trump, et al’s effort to steal the election), celebration and pursuit of a people’s agenda that Trump will veto leading to a strong movement for a “progressive” Democratic Party presidential nominee in 2028.  (I see almost no evidence for this possibility.)

— If “B” (anticipated defeat becomes a reality that was anticipated and planned for so that our side isn’t off balance as a result of it).  Defeat will make abundantly clear that our formal, Constitutional ELECTORAL, democracy IS NOT WORKING.  That possibility was envisaged when the first Ten Amendments–the Bill of Rights–were fought for and won in 1791.

Such a plan would be made public now so that significant numbers of Americans can adopt as their own the out-of-the-box framework of non-electoral action to accomplish electoral purposes.  

In fact, the threat of a tactic can be worse than its implementation.  Let the MAGA forces ruminate on how to deal with it.  The military might shoot demonstrators in public squares; it doesn’t know how to run street cars and buses, operate supermarkets or teach high school.

A Lesson from the Past

The pre-election drive for voter participation is now gaining momentum.  What happens to momentum when it is defeated?  

In 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) defeat at the national Democratic Party Convention was followed by disarray in “The Movement”:  the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC’) collapse (except for Lowndes County) was irreversibly underway: individuals dropped out (drugs, alcohol, withdrawal, radical rhetoric, super-militancy). SNCC’s legendary Mississippi Project Director Bob Moses dramatically withdrew from SNCC, telling his comrades at a late ’64 staff meeting (I was there), “you can have ‘Moses’; I will from now on be ‘Parris’–adopting his mother’s maiden name.

MFDP Convention delegates returned to Mississippi and campaigned for the Lyndon Johnson/Hubert Humphrey ticket.  They also adopted a January campaign targeted at the House seating of the newly elected Mississippi Congressmen because Blacks had been denied the right to vote.  It had no chance of success.

In 1968, an integrated Mississippi Convention delegation was celebrated as a victory.  It was a partial one.  MFDP delegates constituted only one quarter of the them.  MFDP’s 1964 program for radical economic reform (in addition to formal democratic reform) was omitted from the ‘68 state reform platform. 

In retrospect, the 1964 Convention Challenge may have been a premature effort from the outset.  Maybe it wouldn’t have ended in disaster if there had been a contingency plan based on the possible refusal to seat the MFDP delegation.  A contingency plan  might have lead to something else already adopted as an alternative strategy–and readied people for the possibility that defeat would take place.  (When you anticipate a failure/defeat and have a strategy to respond to it, the result is not so devastating, and may even open new possibilities.  For example, a union leadership might propose to the membership a contract agreement the leaders know will be defeated by the rank-and-file.  That defeat is used to build unity behind a strike that can be won.)

Contingency Planning

There is now, as far as I can tell, no contingency plan for the ‘2026 national election being stolen. To meet after defeat and then plan a next step is not sufficient to anticipate and contain disillusionment that otherwise happens after major defeat—negativism, defeatism, factionalization, crazy militancy, dropping out and on-and-on. 

Such a contingency plan could include non-electoral mass-based action that the people of the country wisely anticipated as a balance against political corruption, namely the Bill of Rights— adopted by three-fourths of the states by December, 1791.

For such a contingency plan to be put into operation the day after a stolen election requires widespread discussion of its potential necessity beginning yesterday.  A center-left alliance against autocracy can now be created that would engage non-electoral political groups in voter education, (attempted) registration and get-out-the-vote action.  That would require of “the left” that it participate in electoral activity that it might otherwise disdain.  

The trade off for that participation would be pre-2026 election agreement by centrists on a strategy of mass disruption to bring the system to a halt until a new election or some equivalent is held.  The non-electoral campaign’s central elements would be nonviolent direct action and economic action (general strikes that begin with 10 minute work stoppages and escalate, slowdowns, sick-outs, boycotts, etc until the election results are thrown out).

Success in persuading centrists to enter such an agreement in effect moves them away from their present compulsive centrism (as Texas Populist Jim Hightower put it, “There’s nothing in the middle  of the road but a yellow stripe and dead  armadillos.”)  Failure to so persuade them makes self-evident their lack of an effective response to MAGA.

The Current Warnings Don’t Go Far Enough

In his New York Times Opinion piece (8/14/25), James Bouie writes, “for reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.”

In the letter to supporters, “How does a man like this get elected,” Bernie Sanders writes, “[D]espite his horrific…policies, …Trump has become the ‘agent of ‘change’.”  

So far, so good.  

Sanders then lists the outrageous housing, health care, education, food system, income and wage, tax, foreign policy (he could have added climate change and environment) policies that are leading us to disaster, and proposes new directions in these and other areas. 

So far, so good.  

He asks, “[W]here do we go from here?…[W]e need to think big…But how?”  

Not so good.  

Having “courage to fight back” is not enough. He doesn’t tell us how he thinks we can do that.

The 8/13/25 Hartmann Report concludes, “Our best hope is that, when the crackdowns come, enough of us can mobilize [emphasis added] to bring about a rebooting of our democracy like average people did in South Korea last year as they restored democracy to that nation.”

“Mobilize” to do what?  

Polls showing Trump’s declining voter support are irrelevant if the election is stolen and there is no plan to retrieve what was illegally taken.

Conclusion

Think outside the box.  That’s what Trump and his allies have been doing. What many observers consider his irrationality is, in fact, the rational plan of a man and movement who/that recognizes tearing down the formal democratic system requires the activities in which they (including the Supreme Court) now engage. 

It takes Trump about five minutes to make a statement that engenders an almost-endless response in mainstream and progressive media, from Democratic politicians, and from public interest groups.  He moves on to his next outrage.  His strategy is to stir chaos.  

It is important to recognize that narcissists and otherwise mentally disturbed people can also think rationally about what we might understand as irrational ends.  Assassins make careful plans to kill.

The time for action outside the electoral framework and inside the Bill of Rights framework is near; its possibility should be widely discussed now so that the broad base of support it requires can be built.

Postscript

Several concerns have been raised regarding what I wrote above.  Below are the principal ones, and my responses.

1.  My piece doesn’t respond to the actual time, place and conditions of our current political realities.

The present reality is that Trump and his allies are well on the way to stealing the 2026 election and as far as I can see there is no place in our formal political system to stop him:  not Congress, not the Judiciary, and certainly not the Executive.  Fighting on those battlegrounds is fighting on his turf.

2.  Now’s the time to get out and work to defeat Trump and his allies.

I agree.  We can chew gum and walk at the same time.  

Without a contingency plan, sectarianism and/or withdrawal are the likely outcomes of defeat.  I think 1964-1980 is filled with examples of that.  Electoral victories were followed by elected politician betrayals of promises made during the election.  The betrayals lead to disillusionment, especially because nothing independent of electoral politics was being built before, during and after voting. 

Further, the identity politics agenda subordinated a majority rule/minority rights and economic justice program because the latter was overwhelmed by the former.

In the last 50-or-so years I’ve voted for lesser-of-two-evils Democrat (and some good ones too).  I also spent most of my time trying to build community organizations that could shape politician’s platforms–like the civil rights movement did in its day, and enforce those platforms if endorsed politicians won elections.  We lack those mechanisms for enforcement which, in turn, leads to the disillusionment that is expressed in the Trump vote.

To state my principal point in a different way, you have to have options, especially when the other side cheats.  Those options are to be found in mass nonviolent disruptive action and in economic action like strikes, boycotts, slow-downs, sick outs, work-to-rule and other tactics.  My favorite is general strikes beginning with widespread 10 minute work stoppages, and rapidly escalating to strikes that last hours, days or weeks until victory is won (or defeat certain).

If there isn’t a powerful, believable, option, a stolen election will be followed by the defeats our side underwent beginning in the mid-1960s. They were expressed in slogans like, “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh…” or “Burn, Baby, Burn”; in activities like burning bras, draft cards and neighborhoods   They contributed to the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan.  

We have been on a slow, steady, painful, road to where we are now. Doing what we did, only better, isn’t sufficient to change and reverse directions.  As Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, “Insanity is doing  the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

That’s true even if the repeat performance is a better one.

…