As Election Day approaches, anxiety is naturally rising over whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win.
But there’s reason to be anxious about another prospect, too: just what Trump and his supporters will do if Harris wins narrowly.
Trump has repeatedly insisted that the only way he could lose is if Democrats cheat. It seems clear he will try to deem any Harris victory illegitimate. Many expect he will reprise in some form his shocking behavior after the 2020 election, when he tried to overturn Joe Biden’s win — and that his supporters may try in some way to help him.
There are a number of new safeguards in place this time around, making any election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed. A 2022 law reformed the vote-certification process, which may make it more difficult for Trump to procedurally overturn any results. Trump is no longer the incumbent president and can’t use the powers of the executive branch. And authorities are more thoroughly preparing to preempt a Jan. 6-esque mob action.
The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry that scheme out.
Since then, many critics have been purged from the party, while others have made their peace with Trump. Additionally, Trump’s team — along with a supporting web of Republican activists — has had four years to prepare to challenge the results again.
But perhaps the most ominous threat is that this time around, there’s a widespread expectation in the MAGA world that Trump is sure to win (even though the polls clearly point to a very close race that could go either way).
If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given his ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day.
This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing resentment, using fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate election officials into embracing his lies.
The political context of the current Trump-dominated GOP may spur the party to depart further from the law or procedural norms, which would raise the chances both of system breakdown and violence. The sympathies for Trump among much of law enforcement and the military are also concerning in such scenarios.
Such scenarios may sound like absurd fear-mongering, more fit for a less stable democracy, but Trump’s utter lack of restraint and willingness to shatter democratic norms for power may mean those other countries have relevant lessons for us.
The scenarios most likely to actually change the outcome are probably less about violence, and more that Trump will triumph in the procedural struggle — that he will get some Republican officials in the states or Congress, or conservative judges, to throw out state results showing a Harris win under bogus pretenses.
This would lead the country into uncharted territory. Would Congress pick a winner? Would Biden step aside and recognize its verdict, if it did? How such a crisis would be resolved is impossible to foresee.
There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad.
This month, the Washington Post asked dozens of Trump fans at rallies how they’d interpret and respond to a Trump defeat. Nearly everyone they interviewed believed the 2020 election was stolen from him, and the 2024 election might be stolen, too. But, per the Post, these Trump fans “notably did not express interest in a repeat of the heated rhetoric that led to the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.” Instead, they suggested they’d respond to Trump’s defeat with resignation.
The risk, though, is that Trump and the most hardcore MAGA believers will push for something different. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox.com.
