About those election sabotage headlines…

By Leah Greenberg, Indivisible Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

It’s September, and you know what that means: Brat summer is over. Voter contact fall has begun.

And as we turn to the final stretch, I wanted to send out a note about something that’s started to come up in my conversations with Indivisible groups nationwide: the fear that Donald Trump will try to overturn the election.

Now, this is obviously not a new fear. If you were with us back in 2020, you remember there was an extended period when smart pundits were pooh-poohing the risk that Trump would make a serious attempt to do this. Four years and one attempted coup later, there’s much broader recognition that Trump will pull any lever he can — legal or illegal — to get back in power and to stay there.

So we all know that Donald Trump will not simply concede and ride off into the sunset if he loses. We’ve seen the stories on local MAGA election officials who are getting ready to try to hand the election to Trump, or how Trump is investing in an army of lawyers and goons to try to sabotage the election.

What does this mean for us?

I wanted to take a minute to share a few topline thoughts:

1. The risk is real, but it’s different than in 2020. Just to state the obvious: Donald Trump is not the president right now! He does not control the National Guard or the Department of Justice. And — thanks to 2022! — we hold governorships and Attorney General positions in many of the key states that will determine the elections. That means his tools to sabotage the election are more limited than they were in 2020. There are places where we’re really worried — like Georgia, where the state board of elections has been captured by MAGA hacks — but we don’t have to worry about some of the nightmare elements of 2020, like Trump deploying the National Guard.
2. We — and the broader ecosystem — are taking this seriously. The Harris campaign has assembled a Democratic legal dream team, and they’re already going head to head with the Trump campaign around the country and preparing for the post-election legal chaos to come. In key battleground states, there’s ongoing planning and preparation. And at the national level, Indivisible is in close conversations with partners about how and when we can support in a post-election sabotage situation. No one will be caught by surprise.
3. We need to be really careful about how we talk about this threat, or else we play into Trump’s hands. Donald Trump, like all would-be authoritarians, thrives on projecting strength. He would like nothing better than to convince large numbers of Democrats that they shouldn’t bother to knock doors or vote, because he’s just going to steal the election anyways. If we play into his frame, or pretend he’s got that power, we demobilize our own people. So don’t give him power he doesn’t have, and don’t do his work for him. And that’s why…
4. The single best thing that you can do right now is focus on winning big. There’s a simple strategic logic: Our best chance to avert prolonged election chaos is to win the electoral college by such a dramatic margin that no single state matters for determining the outcome. If we’ve won by a single state — let’s say, for example, it all comes down to Georgia — Trump and his cronies will only need to fight to overturn the results in that one place. But if we’ve swept the swing states, they’d have to mount a campaign to overturn results in three to five states — a nearly impossible and incredibly dangerous course of action, given the risk of criminal liability if they fail.

In short, our best defense is a good offense: Winning by the kinds of margins that simply aren’t vulnerable to their shenanigans.

And here’s where I ask you for money, because with your help, we think we can not only win, but win big.

• We’re working on the ground with Indivisibles in 11 states and 18 congressional districts, and we are currently blowing our targets out of the water.
• We’re seeing incredibly enthusiastic pickup of our Neighbor2Neighbor program for mobilizing low-propensity Democratic voters — so much so that we’re having to staff up to support all our new volunteers.
• We’re expanding the map of targets that are potentially in play for the Senate and House.
• We’re supporting a brand new wave of volunteers and activists inspired by Kamala who are knocking doors, leading canvassing trips, and activating their own networks.

In simple terms: More money in the door this month means more doors knocked, more votes banked, and bigger potential margins to defeat Donald Trump and make everything I talked about in the paragraphs above totally irrelevant.

So please give now — because I want to spend my November celebrating the incoming Harris administration and Democratic trifecta, not dealing with this awful stuff. And I bet you do, too.