The crisis that could ensue if Harris wins narrowly

Trump speaks at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024 in New York City. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty

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 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 such election-stealing effort by Trump less likely to succeed, as Barton Gellman wrote in Time last week. 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 January 6-esque mob action.

Yet though it may be procedurally more difficult for Trump to challenge the outcome this year, the risk is that procedure and legality will end up mattering less this time around — that, instead, Trump will bring us into a world where force and partisanship and the naked drive for power could well triumph over any remaining norms.

Even an attempt at this could bring the country to a more dangerous and chaotic place — but it’s also possible, particularly in the event of a close race and a narrow Harris win, that it could succeed in restoring Trump to the White House, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney has written. 

For one, the Republican Party has become more MAGA-fied since 2020, and has largely made its peace with defending the indefensible: Trump’s election denialism. 

The 2020 GOP was deeply conflicted about Trump’s election-stealing scheme; almost all key GOP officials with positions giving them responsibility over the results — governors, statewide election officials, state legislatures, and Vice President Mike Pence — declined to help carry it 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. Last time around, their effort was shambolic and improvised; this time, they likely understand far better where the pressure points are. 

For instance, if Republicans hold the House, Speaker Mike Johnson could try to interfere with certifying the results – a fear intensified among Democrats by Trump’s recent public statement that he and Johnson have “a little secret.” 

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). “Donald Trump’s surrogates, allies and foot soldiers appear supremely confident he’ll be re-elected president next week,” Zachary Basu of Axios reports, adding that this “is setting the stage for a wholesale rejection of a potential Harris victory by Trump supporters.”

If a Trump win fails to materialize despite the right’s expectations, the fury and outrage among his supporters could prove far more intense than in 2020 — particularly given Trump’s ever-more-apocalyptic rhetoric leading up to Election Day. His supporters, already primed to believe in voter fraud, could mobilize more quickly and seriously around the belief that the election was stolen from Trump and that something must be done about it. 

That means, unless Trump chooses to back down — unlikely, given his past conduct — the country could be headed to an even more dangerous place. 

Fears of an enraged MAGA base

Here’s one way to think about the risks ahead: Last time, 74 million people voted for Trump. But very few of them lifted a finger to try and help him steal the election.

Trump’s 2020 election theft effort gained steam slowly and focused initially on legal and procedural efforts to overturn the results. Pro-Trump protesters, including far-right groups like the Proud Boys, began to pop up more in the closing months of 2020, in Washington, DC, and in state capitals, but scattered violence and intimidation tactics did little to impact the process of certifying the election. 

Then, on December 19, 2020, Trump tweeted that there would be a “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” adding, “Be there, will be wild!” That proved sufficient to mobilize a little over 50,000 people, of whom about 10,000 came onto the Capitol grounds; of those, 2,000 or so made it inside the building. It was a traumatic day for the country — and yet it is worth noting that only a relative handful of the vast US population were involved.

This time around, Trump falsely claiming victory and leveling fresh accusations of fraud could prove even more effective at mobilizing his base’s resentment, using their fury as a de facto weapon to intimidate Republicans and election officials into embracing his lies. The conditions are there: Four years have passed in which “the election was stolen from Trump” has become Republican conventional wisdom — which means this year’s message would be, “Are you really going to let them steal it again?” Harris outperforming her polls would be treated as immediate, damning proof of a rigged election. 

Trump also has a clear set of enemies at which to point his supporters, should he lose and refuse to accept that loss. In 2020, defining exactly who was stealing the election from him was more challenging — he was president, after all. This time around, he can blame the Biden-Harris administration and feed conspiratorial fears that “they” are stealing the election to keep her in power. Elon Musk’s ownership of X could help Trump better spread misinformation about supposed voter fraud. Dangerous lone wolves could be radicalized to violent action.

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 — if the MAGA base really rises up, would law enforcement restore order? 

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.

American democracy in the balance?

There is, of course, still reason to hope it won’t get anywhere near that bad. 

Despite many predictions in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, that event was not in fact followed by a new wave of far-right violence during the Biden years. The memory of aggressive federal arrests and prosecutions of the January 6 rioters — and state-level prosecutions of members of Trump’s own team — made clear that such behavior came with consequences, and memory of those consequences could deter future unrest (including from Trump himself, who would face renewed legal jeopardy in the event of an election loss). 

Perhaps the American public, including the right, simply isn’t that engaged or fired up about politics and they just won’t care too much if Trump whines that the election was stolen. Or perhaps Trump supporters will simply not prove as likely to descend into political violence as liberals fear.  

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 — that he’ll use every tool at his disposal to try to get back into power. And if they can convince millions of Trump’s voters to join him in that effort, the danger will be very real.