Collective action

We can’t know ahead of time what will happen on Election Day or what will happen in the weeks following. I hope that Biden wins with such a landslide that Trump and his supporters see that they have no choice but to accept the results. However we do need to be prepared for the possibility that Trump meant it when he said he would only accept the results if he wins. If he prevents the votes from being counted or tries to stay in office after losing the election, that’s a coup, an illegal power-grab.

If that happens, everyone who cares about justice, democracy, racial justice and climate change must participate fully in an outpouring of opposition. None of us can “wait and see”. All of us must act.

As terrible as the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden was, it made one thing perfectly clear. Donald Trump has no intention of conceding the election or yielding power, even if he loses. He explicitly said that the mail-in ballots will make the election fraudulent and refused to agree either to count all the votes or to accept the outcome of the election.

He clearly plans to do everything possible to see that the mail-in ballots are not counted, including taking it to the Supreme Court where he expects to have a solid partisan majority. (It remains to be seen how much he may also use armed forces to intimidate voters on Election Day or to seize mail-in ballots before they are counted on the pretext of safeguarding evidence of fraud.)