Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, in the WDET studio on Aug. 10, 2026. He announced his campaign in the same studio in April of last year. Photo credit: Jose Llanas, WDET

Note from the author: The photo is Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. The article never mentions him. I chose his picture because I find him inspiring, and because I would rather not make you look at a GOP ghoul’s face on your way into a piece like this.

For most of my 34 years on this Earth, I’ve been told that every presidential election is the most important election of our lifetime. I watched as my parents went from voting for “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush in 2000 to them heartily agreeing with John Kerry when he said it in 2004: “My fellow Americans, this is the most important election of our lifetime.” In 2008 three Democratic candidates said it in the same words, and Obama added “not just because I’m running.” Newt Gingrich called 2012 “the most important election since 1860.” Hillary Clinton told the New York Times in 2016 that she was “the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.” In 2020, 70 percent of Americans agreed the phrase was true. ABC’s presidential historian said of 2024 that it was “probably the most important since 1860.” In April 2024 McSweeney’s ran a satire titled “The 2044 Election Is the Most Important.

I think they were right in every case.

When Republicans won, the warnings came true: 2000 produced the Iraq war and eight years that ended in the 2008 crash, which the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded “was avoidable.” 2016 produced three radical SCOTUS justices, the Dobbs decision, January 6, and the immunity ruling. 2024 produced everything in this piece. Each cycle the country ended up further toward war, financial ruin, authoritarian capture, and mass detention.

When Democrats won, the threat survived the loss: 2008 and 2012 removed nothing, and the movement took the House in 2010 and a Supreme Court seat in 2016, which Mitch McConnell called “the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.” 2020 produced January 6 and then the 2024 “Revenge Tour.” The most important election of our lifetime got won, and the same movement came back four years later, stronger.

The losing side keeps power by design. In 2000 the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and Bush took office having lost the popular vote; Trump did the same in 2016. The Electoral College counted enslaved people at three fifths toward the South’s electors from the first election, and it came within five Senate votes of abolition in 1970, after the House voted 339 to 70 to end it, because a filibuster led by Strom Thurmond saved it. Meanwhile, impeachment gets blocked in a Senate where Wyoming’s 580,000 people get the same two votes as California’s 39 million. And the Court closed the federal courthouse to partisan gerrymandering claims in Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, which is why Texas could redraw its map in the middle of the decade last year when Trump asked, and Greg Abbott could sign it with the words “Texas will be more RED in Congress.”

Either way the risk survives the election.

The establishment believed otherwise. Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, wrote in January 2024 that “Democracy will not die if the Republican wins,” and that another election is always coming.

Here is what credible people said in those same months about what a Trump win would mean.

The Economist, November 2023: “Donald Trump poses the biggest danger to the world in 2024.”

Robert Kagan in the Washington Post, November 30, 2023: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.”

David Frum in The Atlantic, December 2023: a second term would bring “a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War.”

Trump himself, July 26, 2024, to a Christian audience: “In four years, you don’t have to vote again.”

John Kelly, Trump’s own White House chief of staff, October 22, 2024: Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of How Democracies Die, in the New York Times, October 24, 2024: “The U.S. establishment is sleepwalking toward a crisis.”

No matter how bad it gets in the next few years, there will still be people who consider themselves opposition and yet think the United States is always just one election away from ousting people who literally placed themselves above the law, pardoned the traitors who stormed the Capitol, opened domestic mass internment camps, investigate and charge political enemies, and now threaten to jail the county officials who count the votes.

The evidence shows that doesn’t get voted out, and Hungary, the example people keep citing, was never this captured.

Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik ran a candidate-choice experiment in which Americans chose between candidates, some holding undemocratic positions. When candidates held their parties’ usual positions, just 3.5 percent of voters would cross party lines to punish the undemocratic one.

Svolik: voters “are willing to forgive undemocratic behavior to achieve their partisan ends and policy goals.”

A president at 33 or 34 percent approval likely keeps every power of the office until January 20, 2029.

A stolen American election runs through the offices that certify and seat, and Richard Hasen laid those out in 2022: a process we all can plainly see that involves officials who refuse to certify, legislatures that override the result, intimidation of the people who count, and a Congress that seats the illegitimate winners.

His warning: “Next time, a few heroes in the right places may be inadequate.”

This year the FBI carried hundreds of boxes of ballots out of Fulton County; the Homeland Security secretary threatened local election officials with jail, and Heather Gerken and Robert Rubin wrote this week that “the federal government has tried to wrest control of elections from the states”; the House speaker has a route to refuse to seat members; and Trump, asked about a national election emergency, said “stranger things have happened.”

Regimes with those tools keep power after losing. They have no intention of relinquishing power and have dismantled the safeguards that stopped them before.

In Venezuela in July 2024 the opposition collected tally sheets from 80 percent of the voting machines showing Edmundo González winning two to one. Nicolás Maduro’s electoral council never published a result; Maduro “entrenched his power by jailing and killing those who opposed him,” and he stayed in office until an American military raid removed him in January.

Alexander Lukashenko claimed 80 percent in Belarus in 2020, and because “the police, military, and special forces continue to largely stand dutifully by his side,” he stayed too. Daniel Ortega jailed seven presidential candidates before Nicaragua’s 2021 vote. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s prosecutors jailed Ekrem İmamoğlu four days before his party’s primary.

Not one of them was voted out.

Hungary is the case people cite against all of that, on a recent Livestream I did with Rick Wilson and Big Tent USA, Rick mentioned that he saw Hungary ousting Orban as a sign that the US is not yet fully captured, because Viktor Orbán conceded on election night in April after 16 years and Péter Magyar told the crowd “this regime, this system has been broken.”

Firstly, Hungary is parliamentary government, so one vote removed the government. Second, the European Union held about 36 billion euros of frozen funds over Orbán, this exercise of soft power was able to make a financial cost to Hungary’s oligarchs, as US oligarchs continue to benefit from the Trump regime. Third, a brand new political party, Magyar’s Tisza, took 138 of 199 seats on a record 79.5 percent turnout. And finally Orbán never turned a taxpayer funded violent partisan paramilitary force on his own citizens, so when he lost he had no way to stay. Orban also never had his followers storm the capitol, nor did he then pardon 1,200 of those folks.

Kim Lane Scheppele says “Trump is trying to break things quickly.” A president in a fixed term, with an enforcement apparatus of his own whose “agents shot and killed two civilians” in Minneapolis in January, and no authority above him, is a different case.

So here is what the United States government is right now, one fact at a time. It holds about 5,000 nuclear warheads, one of the two arsenals that make up “approximately 86 percent of the world’s total inventory of nuclear weapons.” The Supreme Court and federal courts are captured by Federalist Society members who believe in the treasonous “Unitary Executive Theory” as a means of subverting the constitution to make a president above the law; so long as they’re a republican of course. In January Trump used that military to seize a foreign head of state in Caracas, and within two days said of an operation against Colombia, “Sounds good to me,” and of the American position, “There’s nobody that has the capability that we do.” He is at war in Iran and says he is “in no hurry to end the war.” He held more than 70,000 people in immigration detention on a single day this year.

The rest of the world has said what that adds up to. The governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, and Spain wrote in a joint statement that they “firmly reject the military actions undertaken unilaterally in Venezuelan territory,” the United Nations secretary-general called the raid “a dangerous precedent,” Spain’s prime minister refused to recognize “an intervention that violates international law,” and Brazil’s president said it crossed “an unacceptable line.” Pew’s 2025 survey of 24 countries found the United States “widely seen as a top threat,” the most-named threat in eight of them and the choice of majorities in Canada and Mexico.

The scholars have a name for the design that produced this. Robert Dahl asked How Democratic Is the American Constitution? in 2001 and Sanford Levinson answered with Our Undemocratic Constitution in 2006. Levitsky and Ziblatt’s Tyranny of the Minority in 2023 calls the Constitution “a pernicious enabler of minority rule,” and Ziblatt says of it: “It was written in a pre-democratic era.” The experiment was whether a constitution written to protect slaveholding states from majorities could also run a democracy. That is the experiment that failed.

2024 was the last chance because of the method, which Nancy Bermeo described in 2016: executive aggrandizement, “legitimated by the very institutions democracy promoters prioritize.” An election can stop that before the aggrandizer has staffed the courts and the agencies that run the electoral processes.

Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote in the same New York Times piece quoted above that elections by themselves would not stop a candidate who set out to subvert democracy.

Levitsky said in December that this is “an authoritarianism that can be reversed,” and his October line says what reversal takes: more than a ballot.

The belief that the next election fixes it costs the opposition every year it spends waiting for November.

Melis Laebens and Anna Lührmann studied recent cases where incumbents “slowly undermining the pillars of democratic competition” were stopped, and found that the vote worked only alongside courts and legislatures the executive did not control.

In the United States those institutions are the states, and the states have been winning. Illinois kept its National Guard under state control when the Supreme Court ruled in December that “the Government has failed to identify a source of authority” to put troops in Chicago. Democratic states have refused the Justice Department’s demands for their voter rolls, and the Brennan Center counted this week that the department has lost all 21 of those suits. Both of the president’s election orders met the same end; in the Brennan Center’s words, “Trump’s executive orders aiming to overhaul election rules have also failed in court.”

Stacey Abrams asked this week whether state legislation can dismantle “a searchable national record of where ordinary people go” built from license plate cameras, and it can, because state legislatures govern the police departments that query it.

That is the work this community has done for over a year: more than 250 calls to action, followed by tens of thousands of activists every month, that sent thousands of police reports and letters to state attorneys general and county prosecutors about federal conduct, sent thousands of calls and letters to the Hennepin County attorney after the Minneapolis killings, delivered model state legislation to legislators, and produced in-person meetings with dozens of elected officials.

The framework behind it is my academic work on federalism for anti-fascists, posted on SSRN as “Oppositional Federalism”: strong states, using powers the Supreme Court has already recognized, refusing to carry out an authoritarian federal program.

Erica Chenoweth’s data on twentieth-century movements found none that failed once 3.5 percent of the population joined sustained nonviolent action, about 12 million Americans, though she notes that movements have won less often since 2010 because governments learned to keep their soldiers and police from joining the crowds.

The same share of the electorate that won’t switch its vote to save democracy is, as a share of the country, enough people to end a regime. Nobody has to wait for November to start counting toward it.

I’ll also say, please vote in November and in every election after it, because elections still matter and it will take a lot of them in conjunction with mass education campaigns.

You can learn more about the four elements of effective social change programs in the Existentialist Republic’s Educate, Activate, Recruit booklet, which is free of charge and listed at the end of this article in The Existentialist Republic library.

Even a perfect president elected in 2028 by some miracle of overcoming the propaganda and the theft infrastructure couldn’t get anything positive done without a Congress willing to pass it and judges who aren’t Federalist Society appointees waiting to strike it down.

In most cases, only dictators can change a country quickly. Everyone else needs people in offices everywhere: county prosecutors, state legislators, secretaries of state, judges, and a Congress with the votes to impeach. The removals and the ambitious reforms this moment requires don’t happen without hundreds, even thousands, of elections that remove bastards and seat serious people who know that dire threats require ambitious responses.

That is a lot of elections. Let’s start with this one.

The United States as we have known it got us here. The old order is the cause, so restoring it is the mistake. We have spent 250 years fighting to maintain a country with bastards who care more about slavery and hate than democracy and progress, and what comes after this regime has to be a different country than the one that produced it.

I wrote this because to get the job done we need to align our expectations with that reality. Unrealistic expectations lead to painful and avoidable disappointment, and I’m not sure anyone has ever been led wrong by the truism: hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

Do you value The Existentialist Republic? How about do you value our community $0.22 worth? Because that’s all it is to fund the ER for a year. Don’t let activism be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent. But if you can be a paid subscriber then we can keep expand the reach of this fascism destroying machine, together! - Chris

Buy The Team Some Coffee