Unjapanologist

If it seems as though Trump plans to steal the midterm elections, you’re right. If it seems as though there’s no way to stop him, you’re wrong. But if you think the institutions we already have are up to the job of stopping him, you’re also wrong.

I’ve been attending Indivisible’s weekly “What’s the Plan?” meetings with co-founders Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin for almost a year now. Indivisible’s strategy for the whole year is built around the midterm elections:

- making sure the Democrats who are elected are actually going to fight fascism instead of going along with it.
- making sure that the November election is free & fair, that we win, and that the results are enforced.

The critical, unprecedented period will be between Election Day and January 3, 2027, when the new Congress is seated. Indivisible National and other parts of the anti-MAGA movement have been taking advice from scholars of authoritarianism like Erica Chenoweth. They say that one of the most dangerous times for a democracy under threat is right around or after an election that the authoritarians are losing. That’s the point where mass mobilization, *society-wide mobilization*, may be critical.

Chenoweth and their colleagues have found that authoritarian governments will fall when when 3.5% of the population is committed to active, nonviolent resistance. For the U.S., that means we need at least 12 million people ready to make sure that when they try Jan 6 2.0 (and they *will*) it stops, flails, and falls over.

To get to that point we have to BUILD to that point. Think of a major political action as requiring muscle, which needs to be strengthened over time, it can’t just be summoned in a moment.

We KNOW the Trump Regime, the corrupt SCOTUS, and state & local level MAGA will be attacking our right & ability to vote in every way they can. We’ve mostly done what we can already with gerrymandering and counter-gerrymandering, from now on it’s going to be what Leah Greenberg calls legal whack-a-mole, where we all have to be alert to attacks on the right to vote and hit them wherever they come up.

Our tentpole events will be a series of #NoKings rallies, growing in size (numbers from What’s the Plan meeting of January 8, 2026):

• #HandsOff in April ‘25 was 3 million people.
• #NoKings, June ‘25 was 5 million.
• #NoKings2, October ‘25 was 7M.
• #NoKings3 will be March 28, we want 9M people.
• #NoKings4 in the summer, 11M
• #NoKings5 in the fall, leading up to the election, 13 million people – which is over 3.5% of the country.

Each #NoKings event is made up of thousands of local ones, they don’t involved a big march to the seat of power, unlike what you see in smaller, more centralized countries.

All US politics starts at the state and local level, organizing starts local, community is local. And importantly, elections are administered locally. #NoKings will be a way for people to become aware and connect with others in their area to monitor polling places, and to let state & local officials know that they can’t do anything in the dark.

These growing numbers are how we build to a number of people committed to oppose the regime that’s so large that even when they try to steal the election, which they will, even when they don’t want to certify the results, which they won’t, they won’t be able to stop us. Even though we won’t be fighting them with guns.

TLDR: both the doomers & the institutionalists are WRONG. Trump doesn’t have the power to just “cancel the elections”, but existing institutions aren’t enough to ensure that we have meaningful elections and that the results are honored.

We the people, organizing and working together, are what’s going to stop him. Bad news for both doomers & institutionalists: there’s work for *you* to do. Join a local organization--Indivisible, 50501, immigrants’ rights, or your local Democratic, Democratic Socialist, or Working Peoples Parties. Get to know more of the people in your neighborhood and congressional district. Become part of a team.

Here’s the motto Leah Greenberg says we should put on our walls and phone lock screens, to keep our eyes on the prize:

They are losing, so they're going to try to steal the election.
They're gonna fail, because we're gonna stop them.

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this is something of a first draft. I'd like advice about how to make it punchier, more like something that would draw eyeballs on substack etc. Where do I need links? Is it structured properly, with the right things at the top?

Where should I put something about how I fit into Indivisible? I'm just a joe-normal member of a joe-normal Indivisible group, this is really reporting based on attending the weekly "What's the Plan meetings for the past year.

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ETA: This is now a second draft, incorporating more links and suggestions.