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We need a Plan B in case Plan A doesn't work [1]

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Date: 2023-08-07  

The J6 indictments improve the odds of Biden’s re-election, but by now we must learn to always plan for the worst however improbable it may seem

I am, like many of you, overcome with welcome emotions in response to Jack Smith’s announcement last week of the four serious indictments against Trump and his efforts to overthrow our democratic system and steal the election he lost. Those feelings include: deep appreciation for the methodical diligence and hard work by Garland and Smith and the many professionals who avoided damaging leaks or foolish fumbles with witnesses or evidence; profound thankfulness for the degree to which our system of courts has remained independent, going all the way back to all of team Trump’s late 2020 failures to get courts to validate their baseless claims of election fraud, even with Trump appointed judges involved; and finally, enormous gratitude for the mountains of work that the J6 House Committee did, paving the way for this moment.

As a friend put it, these indictments are the third major public moment of accountability that has happened since the J6 insurrection. The first was Impeachment, the second was the J6 House Committee Report, and now Smith laying out the evidence for why Trump’s behavior was criminal. Even without knowing how the future will unfold — when it will go to trial, if the trial go smoothly for the prosecution, if there will be convictions? etc. — this is an historic moment.

Considering the 2024 election

It’s also reasonable to think that the overall impact of these indictments will damage Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election. Sure, he’s fundraising a ton off this and probably the same GOP leaders who’ve refused to ditch him will continue to lie for him. But anything that reduces Trump’s odds of reclaiming the White House is welcome news.

There are other good reasons for optimism about Biden’s re-election. He’s presiding over an economy that is improving and probably will continue to improve incrementally over the next 16 months — maybe not enough to convince the mainstream media to depict Bidenomics as genius policy, but very likely enough to give him plenty of bright narratives to highlight (so much new infrastructure getting built, new American manufacturing, new EVs on the road, better wages for people who were making the least hourly money, low unemployment, and he’ll be able to play the “are you better off than you were 4 years ago” Reagan card too.)

He’s got some other political winds at his back that will also help him: a strong majority of Americans even in some very red states wanting abortion rights restored; some impressive state-level Democratic organizations that have worked very hard to string together solid election wins in 22 and 23 in swing states; and so long as Ukraine at least keeps holding off Russia while NATO keeps growing thanks to Biden’s leadership, he’ll have a foreign policy success that he’ll be able to repeat a zillion times. He’s also a much better candidate than people tend to think. (See my earlier article, “Joe Biden is the Columbo of Politics” for more on how Biden gets repeatedly underestimated.)

Regarding the election, these indictments move the needle in a good direction. How much? I don’t know, but hang in there with me while I think out loud about it here. I’m totally making these numbers up, but let’s just say that if Biden’s probability for being re-elected hypothetically stood at 67% before last week’s indictments, it likely just jumped up to something like 72%. If Biden’s next 16 months are free of any major stories that damage him seriously and Trump gets slapped with yet more indictments in Georgia, then maybe by the time we get to October 2024 Biden’s odds will be up to 80%. On the other hand, if something goes unexpectedly badly for Biden – a health scare, a foreign policy embarrassment akin to the difficult withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan – while all of Trump’s legal problems continue to snowball, then maybe Biden’s odds of winning end up back in the 72% range.

You can play this speculation game all night. Just keep plugging in or subtracting different kinds of scenarios playing out in the theater of public attention.

For example, if by next September gas is selling almost everywhere for less than $4/gal, inflation is down to 3 or 4% and people have really noticed groceries and other basic items coming back down in price (something I’m seeing where I grocery shop), then add a few percentage points into Biden’s probable victory column. On the other hand, if gas is $5/gal everywhere and inflation is doing another spike next September, knock 10 percentage points off Biden’s chances.

If these third-party tickets we’re hearing about gain traction among a meaningfully large set of voters and seem to be mainly costing Biden votes, knock more points off Biden’s chances. If, on the other hand, progressives and liberals unify around Joe and Kamala, eschewing Cornell West, while Manchin & Hunstman’s “No Labels” gimmick only attracts some Rs and R-leaning independents who just can’t stomach Don-the-Con anymore, it could add percentage points into Biden’s column.

Probably the best thing we can say at this point is that if the patterns and trajectories we’ve been seeing play out over the past year for both Biden and Trump continue in their same trajectories, Biden is the favorite to win (and I think the data we have support that even despite the occasional pundit freak-out over polls that are still too early to be meaningfully predictive).

That’s good news. And it means that for all of us who are part of a broad coalition of progressives, mainstream Democrats, independents, voters who value abortion rights, and some historically conservative voters who understand that stopping Trump is saving our democracy — we know what we’re going to do between now and November 2024. Our plan is to organize and volunteer and donate and talk to people and campaign hard and fight like hell to deliver Biden’s re-election victory. That’s our plan.

But it shouldn’t be our only plan. It should be our Plan A. We also need a Plan B.

Plan B

Plan B is the plan we start working on NOW for what we do if the improbable happens and Trump wins. We know what that would likely look like – he pulls in 45 or 46% of the popular vote, but the oddities of the Electoral College and some bad luck on how West and Manchin/Hunstman impact certain swing state results lead to razor thin Trump wins in those states allowing him to get the 270 Electoral votes while losing the popular vote again, maybe even by 10 million votes. Yuck and vomit and God help us all if that happens, right? I don’t want this to be a possibility, but unfortunately it is, and that is why we – and I’ll say who I mean by we in a moment – we need to get to work on developing Plan B. Plan B is how we work to save American democracy in the event of a second Trump Administration, by enacting a set of plans that we have spent some time thinking about and developing together well before the election.

The “we” who needs to be involved in developing Plan B must be a broad coalition whose unifying cause is the defense and eventual repair and improvement of American democracy. It’s a coalition that includes progressives, mainstream liberals, moderates, abortion rights advocates, LGBTQ+ rights defenders, climate-change policy advocates, and some anti-Trump conservatives. It’s a pro-democracy coalition whose unifying cause is focused: Saving American Democracy. This coalition isn’t that hard to imagine because we’ve already seen something like it in the composition of the House J6 Committee and in the composition of the voters who gave Democrats key wins in races like the recent Wisconsin state supreme court election that drew support from some non-Democrats determined to protect abortion rights. To a large extent, it’s the coalition that won the 2020 election, re-ignited and organizing proactively for worst case scenarios before they happen.

Such a movement needs to get to work now planning two major kinds of sustained action: 1) protesting moves by a new Trump Administration that seek to dismantle democratic institutions, and 2) advocating for a clear set of reforms that Congress must implement to prevent future tyrants from doing the kind of damage Trump would be doing. Plan B should have at minimum a 2-year arc of different kinds of creative, large-scale, and energetic public actions planned in locations all around the country. It can be flexible and adaptive, but it must involve grassroots input and staggered public actions by many different constituencies with a stake in saving democracy (lawyers, teachers, librarians, social workers, students, LGBTQ+ groups, business leaders, Black leaders, clergy, etc.). It needs a leadership strucure that is vertical enough and nimble enough to avoid bog downs in keeping plans moving forward, but that is also inclusive and representative of its subgroups and responsive to grassroots inputs.

We can learn a lot from the Israeli pro-democracy movement that has shaken that country’s society to the core over the past nine months.

They have maintained a politically diverse coalition successfully focused on a core set of democracy issues by creating a leadership network that has enough vertical structure to be able to make decisions quickly and effectively, but whose leaders have constant close contact with the more narrow political movements they represent. For most of the past year they enacted a “Plan A” strategy with discipline, energy, and stamina. For pro-democracy Israelis, Plan A was to cause so much non-violent disruption and provide so much repeated mass-education about democracy that the sitting coalition government would lose its nerve and not be able to pass their series of proposed laws that would disembowel the major checks and balances of Israel’s democracy.

Their Plan A nearly worked. It caused several members from the ruling coalition to waver on the package of proposed laws, and it led to delays on some key votes. But the pro-democracy protesters always knew that the odds were at best 50/50 that their Plan A approach would lead to outright victory. A couple weeks ago, Plan A had to be discarded when Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, pushed through the first major law in the anti-democratic package and demonstrated that they are likely to pass the rest of the dreaded new laws as well.

This was a gut punch for the Israeli pro-democracy movement – I know, I’m in touch with a couple of their leaders. But they were not unprepared. They had a Plan B. And their Plan B prevents them from getting demoralized and disorganized and dispersed.

First and foremost, their Plan B is not to give up on Israeli democracy and to recognize that no situation created by demagogues and extremists is permanent. Their Plan B understands that much of what they’ve accomplished during Plan A will be of service as they shift to Plan B, which is a plan that has eyes on the next election in Israel. Plan B has begun. It includes rolling strikes taking place across various professional sectors – attorneys, doctors, and a growing number of military reservists refusing to re-up their volunteer status. It will continue to use the tools of mass demonstrations, but it is also busy communicating a clear set of legislative priorities to the major opposition political parties, in effect doing the work now for the day after Netanyahu and his extremist religious-right coalition are finally out of office. The Israelis’ Plan B is directing the opposition party leaders to reshape thier priorities to align with the unpreceented left / center / center-right coalition supporting Israeli democracy that they’ve defined and organized. And their Plan B is continuing the strategy they embarked upon during Plan A — weilding the national symbols of patriotism for their movement (their flag, national anthem, and Declaration of Independence). Brilliant.

We need a Plan B in the United States.

We need to recognize that our Electoral College system is a freakish thing that unfortunately leaves the door open for Trump to regain the WH even if he loses to Joe by 10 million votes. We need to not face that frightening possibility with an attitude that if it happens we’ll all just collapse into despair, and then maybe wait for some organic and spontaneous resistance movements to emerge. (Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for organic, spontaneous resistance movements, and many that emerged after 2016 deserve credit for our defeat of Trump in 2020.) But I think we could all go into the 2024 election feeling less terrified of a redux of our 2016 nightmare if we had a plan B. Not a secret plan B, mind you – but a plan developed by a cohort of leaders of different constituencies who are willing to set aside political differences for the sake of priotitizing saving our democracy. A plan we would know how to implement from the moment we first got the bad news on election night 2024, if that is what fate hands us.

Our Plan B can not consist of just one or two mass marches; no, it needs to be a multi-year road map of smart disruptive activism and sutained legislative demands to cement into place the checks, balances, and guardrails that Trump would be tearing down as fast as he could manage. Our Plan B should take the American flag as its symbol and the Star Spangled Banner as its theme song and be unrelenting in flooding the visual space with our patriotism, leaving the other side to Confederate flags and Trump flags. Our Plan B should center saving democracy while allowing room for more specific agendas (climate activism, LGBTQ+, BLM, etc.) to be present but not to dominate. We can learn a lot from the Israelis about this.

Their demonstrations consistently flood the visual and message zone with their central ideas and images, though you can see a smattering of rainbow flags and Palestinian flags and anti-Occupation signs in the mix. This didn’t happen accidentally. Israeli protest movement leaders forged agreements with anti-Occupation and pro-Palestinian Israeli rights groups about the need for common tactics centered on Israeli democracy. They convinced left-wing activists focused on Israel/Palestine of the need to win the fight for democracy within Israel’s current system in order for there to be any hope for progress on the other fronts, and on the wisdom of their tactical decision to take the country’s national symbols of patriotism away from the right – hence the huge seas of Israeli flags one sees at these demonstrations. All those agreements between activist leaders in Israel led to decisions about how the symbols and messages of anti-Occupation and pro-Palestinian groups would be present, but in small numbers, during the pro-democracy demonstrations. As more demonstrations took place and the various activist leaders kept their promises, trust grew and demonstrators gained confidence through their ability to exercise message discipline and stymie the right’s efforts to divide and conquor the center-left. Also, once the mass-protest movement credibly established itself as coming from the public mainstream, the periferal role that more controversial activist stands were assigned at the beginning of the movement began to get incrementally less periferal, in part because centrists and even center-right Israelis who had gotten very active in the protests were getting new opportunities to march and talk with anti-Occupation activists, which has had the effect of breaking down some of the social barriers between these different political camps as they struggle together for a common cause.

We should take a page from what the Israeli protest movement has done. We should forge a Plan B here just in case we need it. It should have lots of highly visible meetings of organizers and grassroots inputs leading up to its leadership’s formation, starting now. I know that if this happened, I would feel less terror about what will happen if the worst happens next election. We’d have a game plan and a reason to believe we can win the fight for American democracy in the longer run. We’d also have a sense of belonging and community and common purpose instead of fractured recriminations and internal division and despair on the left. I’m tired of feeling terrified of Trump and the 35% or so of my fellow Americans who are drawn to neo-fascism. Aren’t you?

Final thoughts: have faith in Plan A, but organize for Plan B

We should have faith in our Plan A. It’s similar to the plan that we used in 2020 to beat Trump by 7m votes and bring Arizona and Georgia into Biden’s column. It relied on great local and state organizing in places like Georgia (thank you Stacey Abrams) and Wisconsin (kudos, Ben Wikler), as well as smart and energetic campaigns in places like my home state, Pennsylvania, to get Dems registered to vote by mail. 2024’s Plan A is going to be robust and energetic, and I’m optimistic about it. Biden has already raised a lot of money for it, and team blue is still hungry to win. In addition, Biden and Harris are actually doing well, and the MSM underestimates both of them as impressive and attractive candidates in the heat of a campaign. There are also some national demographic changes in our favor, continued backlash against the loss of abortion rights, and even some backlash against the anti-trans hate we see on the right.

I’ll even say it now – we are probably going to win this election. If there were no Electoral College in the mix, I would even say we are very probably going to win. But the E.C. really scrambles the game and gives Trump a plausible way to win even while losing the popular vote badly. Even with the extra challenges the E.C. presents for Biden, I think he probably wins. But “probably” is not “certainly,” and we must face the fact that if Trump is their candidate, there is some non-zero chance he will win.

We need a Plan B so that if that’s what happens we aren’t spiritually crushed for so long that we lose our minds and become depressed and only find ourselves re-emerging into political action as new movements of resistance inevitably start to emerge organically. Those emergent, organic movements can be excellent catalysts for remotivating the hopeless among us, and they can generate brilliant and creative public messages. But by themselves they’re not as effective as having an organizing strategy ready to activate before the fact. We will all be better off if we get to work now on building a pro-democracy coalition with a Plan B as described above. Doing that will give us a much greater collective sense of strength should the unthinkable (the improbable) happen in Nov 24. It will also give us healthy ways to network, organize, and set some of the public media agenda in the early months of a new Trump Administration (hurts to even write those words).

There’s also an added bonus. The same planning and organizing that a diverse group of leaders should do for Plan B can be put to good use even if Biden whips Trump and we all celebrate our hearts out. The activist events that Plan B would prepare for over the next couple years could be adapted to push the Biden Administration to enact the core legislative demands of our pro-democracy movement. Those might include statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, seeking a Constitutional Amendment to end the Electoral College, establishing Roe as a federal law, and filibuster reform, or they might go further and push for a serious national conversation about reparations and the values of equal opportunity and justice in a democracy. If Biden wins a lot of the planning that would have gone into building a sustainable and potent resistance movement can pivot into being a determined activist movement with a receptive administration that may benefit from being pushed to move faster and bolder at times.

Anyway, we need a Plan B. I’m willing to help, even though I’m no one of political stature. If you think this idea sounds about right, and you are a mover and shaker politically or you know people who are, please share it with them. Thanks.

Note: a version of this article is available on my blog at theaccidentalrabbi.substack.com/...

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