What Will You Do If the Election Is Stolen?
It's negligent not to plan a general strike. Just in case.
The US presidential election is less than six months away. I do not know what the outcome will be, and neither do you. What we do know, however, is the range of what very well might happen. Let’s talk about one scenario in particular: Trump loses, but refuses to concede, and makes a concerted effort to steal the election. The time to make a plan for this is now.
There is more or less a 50/50 chance that Trump wins the election outright. If he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, there is much better than 50% chance that he claims that he won anyhow and tries to steal it. I am basing this estimate, first, on the fact that that is exactly what he did last time. (This motherfucker hasn’t even conceded the 2020 election yet.) Secondly, and more worrying, the years since 2020 have seen Trump’s strongest internal opposition effectively purged from the Republican party. The remaining Republicans in Congress have, for the most part, made the calculation that they must be ostentatiously pro-Trump in order to maintain their positions. The level of spine that existed among Republicans in Congress in 2020, which was pathetic but adequate to certify the presidential election after January 6, is not there today. It is more likely that the 2024 election could successfully be stolen.
For many weeks now, high profile Republicans in Congress have been going on the Sunday political talk shows and refusing to say that they will accept the results of the election. This list so far includes Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik, Byron Donalds, JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others. They all say some mealy-mouthed version of “I’ll accept the results if the election is fair,” but we know what they mean. Clearly, some of this is a litmus test for anyone who wants to be Trump’s VIP. But the litmus test will not go away after he picks his VIP—it will then become a litmus test for the entire party, a requirement to unite around their insane candidate with the expectation that he will never admit to a loss. As a group, today’s Republicans in Congress are perhaps the most loathsome, cowardly collection of groveling, malignant worms that this nation has ever assembled. That’s where we are, though. No use crying about it.
Common sense tells us that, unlike in 2020, the entire Republican Party would unite in support of Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2024. I take this as a given. If we imagine a replay of 2020, but with the full and undivided heft of the Republican Party nationally and in every state, plus the full support of the right wing media, plus the support of the entire constellation of Republican-leaning special interest groups who have made the calculation that this is the price to staying in good standing with the party, plus the support of tens of millions of Republican voters who have been indoctrinated for years for this very occasion… it should make you nervous. We would come to the same “test of our institutions” that we came to in 2020 except that the institutions would be weaker and the weight pressing on them would be stronger. We have an extremely right wing Supreme Court. The bulk of the sentiment within most law enforcement agencies and within the US military is probably pro-Trump. And, on top of everything else, Biden himself—even if he rallies and wins—will be much less popular than he was in 2020, sapping the support of his own coalition. It’s not necessary to make a definitive prediction here of what would happen if this scenario unfolds. It’s enough to say that there is a very real chance that Donald Trump, having lost the election, could successfully seize power anyhow, with the combined tacit or explicit support of all of the aforementioned groups. The possibility is significant enough that we better think about what we would do if it all goes down.
The Democrats would fight it in Congress and in the courts. Maybe the courts would hold up, as they did last time, but then again, maybe they wouldn’t. It is notable, I think, that we don’t hear as many smug institutionalists hand-waving away the possibility of a stolen election today as we did four years ago. Trump’s entire political career—as a candidate, as a president, and as a budding strongman/ cult leader with the Republican Party at his knees—has been in defiance of the prediction of the intelligentsia. Even the conventional wisdom, which always lags behind the truth, is catching up to the realization that laws don’t mean very much if the lawmakers and the law enforcers decide they want to ignore them.
With the possibility of end of our tattered but functional quasi-democracy sitting out in plain view, it would be negligent of us to just wait around for it to happen, then all run out into the streets babbling about how outrageous it all is, until the riot cops herd us back inside and we proceed on into our dictatorship. And, folks, do not deceive yourselves: that is exactly what will happen, in the absence of a countervailing force to stop it from happening. If the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Trump in this scenario, the entire government and its law enforcement agencies would shrug and proceed in service of President Trump. I do not have great faith that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries will pass out a stash of M-16s and lead their caucus into revolutionary battle. What they would do would be: make some statements about being upset, and then keep on going in their nice little jobs. Democracy would end not in flames, but in bureaucracy.
There is one practical, powerful, and plausible thing that all of us can do in the event this happens: We can have a general strike. I fully expect that there would be massive and ongoing street protests, but a general strike is a tactic that can harness and magnify the sense of common outrage into actual influence. This idea has occurred to some people in organized labor before. In November of 2020, when Trump was refusing to concede, the Vermont state labor federation passed a resolution calling for a general strike if Trump did not leave office in January. There was something of an ad hoc effort to get other unions to sign onto this pledge as well. (In my own union, some of us raised this at the time, and had the idea shot down because A) some elected leaders of our union did not know what a general strike was, and B) many others indignantly said that such a strike would be a violation of our contracts, which is little like an ambulance driver with a gunshot victim in back declaring that they would never exceed the speed limit.) The end of that little moment of thankfully unnecessary militancy came the following June, when national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka formally reprimanded the Vermont affiliate for their unauthorized resolution, explaining: “In the lead up to the presidential election, the Executive Council debated the labor movement’s appropriate response in the event then-president Trump refused to concede defeat. The Executive Council made the strategic decision to not immediately call for a general strike in such a situation, in order to avoid providing Trump a reason to invoke martial law.”
I sincerely hope that the past four years have given the leaders of the labor movement a more clear-eyed view of how perilous our collective situation is. Given everything discussed above, failing to at least plan for a general strike seems unforgivably cavalier. We need to plan for it. If the bad things don’t happen, fine. If the bad things do happen, we have a plan, and we can do it, and we’re not all just rushing around frantically. These things take time and a lot of internal communication. Tick tock.
As a baseline, imagine something like this: Trump loses the election. He alleges fraud, the Party backs him, the Supreme Court ultimately backs him as well. The election is legally stolen. What then? Well, the AFL-CIO, along with all the other major unions like the Teamsters and SEIU, calls a general strike in defense of our democracy. We all stop working. The trains stop. The delivery trucks stop. The stores close. And, crucially, public employees strike as well. Schools close. Government agencies close. Other than essential services like fire and police and health care, everything stops. The crisis that the coup plotters created within our government is then manifested in everyone’s daily lives. The option for the public to close their eyes and ignore what is happening is taken away. We do not allow the collective societal shrug, the almost imperceptible descent into dreary fascism that allows most people to continue on in mostly normal ways. We all make clear that the country does not run for a dictator.
This is the power of the general strike. Stuff stops. Including government services. One reason you may find this all hard to imagine is that we have never had a national general strike that was fully supported by America’s unions. Outside of America, though, such things are not unfamiliar. Hell, Argentina has had two national general strikes since Javier Milei was elected last year. If organized labor accepts the basic premise that Trump might steal the election—which really means simply accepting the reality of America’s political landscape—it would be malpractice not to make these preparations now. It means getting unions to sign onto a sort of memorandum of understanding that they will be willing to strike in the event of the worst case scenario. The scale of a potential general strike can be made much larger, also, by doing outreach to the entire constellation of civil society groups and nonprofits that could also be convinced to urge their own members to participate. Thus we would not just be talking about 15 million union members, but about the 50 or 100 million other Americans who could follow their lead, in defense of the existence of democracy.
We are talking about disaster planning here. Of course we all hope that there is not a disaster. But we know that there might be. And if there is, we need to do something. I actually cannot think of a single legitimate objection to laying the groundwork for such a general strike, even from the most conservative precincts of the organized labor world. Don’t like Biden? This is not for Biden. This is for democracy. (If Biden loses and does a coup, I will be happy to strike then also.) Objections that public employees are legally barred from striking, and others are subject to no-strike clauses in their contracts? Brother, we are talking here about the end of the rule of law. This strike is very much in support of law, and the principles that underlie its ethical legitimacy. This scenario would provide the single most justified reason for everyone to strike that has ever existed in the history of the United States of America, at least since the Civil War. Those are the stakes.
There is always a certain level of illusion in the stability of our democracy. World history is record of rises and falls, wars and revolutions and grand social collapses. America and its government will not last forever, I’m sure. But most of us like to believe that, notwithstanding all of the political battles that we will always be having as long as we are alive, the overall structure of democracy and rule of law will continue to exist. Those things, today, right now, are threatened. The very worst thing that I can imagine is not a chaotic struggle in the streets in the face of a coup; it is the possibility that the election could be stolen, blessed by a corrupt court, and then… nothing happens. My greatest fear would be that the institutions that are supposed to protect us, like organized labor, are unable to rouse themselves out of the comfortable stupor that institutions can sink into over time. This scenario presents the possibility of an extreme moment—one that would require rule-bound institutions to understand the need to break the rules, in service of the greater good. Let’s get our minds ready for that now. The scariest thing about waking up in a dictatorship would be the sinking realization that it already felt familiar. Because we had accepted it.
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Related: America Is Built to Feed Us Poison; You Have to Grind This Motherfucker Down; Well We Still Haven’t Done Anything About the Electoral College.
As you can see, I just learned to embed Youtube videos, which has caused me to repost my very interesting recent interview with Adam Conover about my book above. That book, “The Hammer,” which is about the labor movement and how it can save America, is now available for purchase wherever books are sold. I will be sharing info on a couple more book events coming up in ROCHESTER and LOUISVILLE and possibly elsewhere very soon. If you’d like to invite me to your city to speak, or if you’d like to order an autographed book for $40 via Paypal, email me: Hamilton.Nolan@gmail.com.
One funny thing that happened this week is that I was invited on a propaganda tour of Israel for journalists. Unfortunately I already wrote my “go on a junket and then write about how the junket is corrupt” story in 2012.
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This is a really interesting and helpful post – thanks for writing and sharing it. For those of us who are not union members but want to be prepared, where do we get started and what levers do have to pull on? The good-society / enviro / justice groups you mention in the comments?
I’m appreciative that you are writing this and sharing it now. There is a woeful lack of practical and realistic planning on the left. I’m curious, beyond the AFL-CIO and union leaders, who else you think should marshal a strike in this instance? Seems like cultural leaders will be of vital import…