The ascendant faction of the Republican Party is organizing to steal the 2028 Congressional and Presidential elections and cement minority rule over all three branches of the government of the United States. The centrist leadership of the Democratic Party is clearly inadequate to the task of stopping them.

Over the next three years, the Left must seize the initiative and lead a broad-based popular mobilization to try to prevent authoritarian rule.

The urgency of forming such a movement makes the 2028 presidential campaign a critical site of intervention for the Left—we need a campaign that both can win the Democratic primary and lead an organized, mobilized popular movement into confrontation with the forces of authoritarianism.

Programmatically, that movement will fail if it is based on an abstract appeal to “democracy” alone: instead, it must be rooted in an ambitious, popular program that connects with working people and is grounded in the reality of our daily lives. In scope, the movement needs a broad base of many millions of people who do not just passively oppose the Trump administration but are prepared to take action to confront it. In terms of structure, that mass base cannot be held together by a thin layer of NGOs or by labor unions (representing only 10% of US workers), but must instead be united by a committed layer of organic leaders across every sector of our society.

The Likely Coup

The easiest path for a right-wing coup is a facially legal maneuver relying on the advantages provided by the deeply undemocratic nature of the US Constitution. The pieces for such a constitutional coup are largely already in place. 

The Supreme Court is on track to strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in June, which for five decades has required southern states to create majority–Black Congressional districts. That ruling will open the door for Southern states to follow Texas’s lead and aggressively gerrymander their congressional maps to disempower Black voters and ensure overwhelmingly Republican delegations in 2026 and 2028.

While Democrats may, in response, undertake their own retaliatory gerrymandering, Republicans have a number of asymmetrical advantages: Democrats are more clustered in urban areas, Blue States are more likely to have passed redistricting reforms that constrain their ability to fight back, and the Democratic Party is less politically united around partisan redistricting. It is very possible that Republicans will secure a national Congressional map that allows them to “win” a majority in the US House, even if voters support Democrats by as much as five percentage points.

Gerrymandering the House doesn’t just cement minority control of the legislative branch; with control of the House, the GOP can continue apace with its constitutional coup, exploiting Congress’s role in certifying the outcome of presidential elections and in resolving disputes in the Electoral College.

Republican state legislatures, even in states where the Democrat wins the election, and even in states with a Democratic governor, can send delegations of fraudulent electors to Congress. The Republican-controlled Congress could either certify the fraudulent electors or claim that the competing sets of electors means no majority exists, and select the President themselves.

In fact, under the 12th Amendment of the US constitution, the House vote on resolving contested presidential elections is by equally weighted state delegations—rather than a full vote of the House. Because of this, Republicans might even attempt this move without a majority in the House at all. A congressional minority or gerrymandered congressional majority could install a Republican president—even in the face of a clear vote outcome and overwhelming opposition from the public—without facially violating the Constitution.

These particular procedural maneuvers are the most likely way for Republicans to steal the 2028 election, but of course there is every indication that they are open to more direct methods. While canceling elections or staging a military coup seem deeply unlikely, less dramatic extra-legal options—a replay of the January 6th insurrection, imposing restrictions on the right to vote, deploying ICE or the National Guard to urban polling locations, politicized prosecutions of Democratic elected officials—are clearly on preview right now. And of course, there is always the trump card of the election: relying on the Republican-dominated, anti-democratic Supreme Court to declare a winner.

This coup is not inevitable, but our situation is extremely dire. If Republicans do cement their control over all three branches of government without popular support, they will be more deeply and existentially wedded to autocracy and minority rule than ever before. Their only option to hold onto power will be to rapidly escalate the repression of any part of our society capable of being a site of dissent or independent check on their powers: the courts, the media, academia, liberal philanthropy, the labor movement, and the organized Left.

We are already seeing what this assault on civil society looks like right now, and clearly it can get much worse.

The priority for the Left in the United States must be to take whatever steps we can over the next three years to build an opposition movement powerful enough to defeat this authoritarian threat in 2028, and establish a leading role for ourselves in that movement.

How to Stop It

There are three essential components to an effective strategy that could stop the unfolding coup: a left-wing populist Democratic primary campaign, led by a candidate who is clear-eyed about the need for direct action; a middle layer of organizers with an organic connection to millions of Americans, brought into organization through the left-wing primary race; and active ties between the organization that emerges from this campaign and existing initiatives against authoritarianism, including the growing No Kings marches, widespread anti–ICE organizing, and the labor organizing building up to planned May Day 2028 strikes.

Given the lack of working-class organization in the US, the potentially electrifying power of a nationwide left-wing campaign is an unparalleled vehicle for reaching people at scale. As long as it is committed to the type of structured, scalable, mass-engagement field organizing that defined the 2008 Obama campaign as well as Zohran Mamdani’s recent mayoral victory in New York City. A winning left-wing Democratic primary campaign would be vastly better than a losing one, but even if we lose, the organization and mobilization that only a presidential primary can produce will be essential if we hope to stop this likely coup.

For better or worse, the leadership of the opposition movement will most likely be the Democratic nominee for president. And for the candidate, taking the presidency in 2028 might require more than beating the Republican on an already uneven playing field—it might well require mobilizing tens of millions of Americans for an unprecedented confrontation outside the electoral arena.

We must be able to stage a “mass refusal”—refusal to accept election interference, refusal to accept fraudulent electors, refusal to allow those electors to meet with Congress, refusal to let congress meet, refusal to comply with an illegitimate government, and refusal to let society continue as usual as long as an illegitimate government is in place.

In South Korea last year, when President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, mass protests immediately began at the capitol. Parliamentary leaders backed by protestors had to climb fences and confront military units to gain entry to the capitol building, and then fend off military units loyal to the president with barricades to conduct their impeachment proceedings.

We can dissuade ruling-class decision makers from enacting a coup, or persuade them to stop one in progress, but only if we have a movement capable of sustained, society-shaking disruption, and a political leadership—in our case in the form of a left-wing presidential candidate—prepared for the direct confrontation that will be necessary.

Most people in the United States see “politics” as synonymous with voting, but increasingly the Democratic base is seemingly open to understanding politics in more participatory terms. The “No Kings” marches during Trump’s second term have been the largest mobilizations in US history, with seven million people at the most recent march in October. Optimistically, these marches may be a dress rehearsal for members of the Democratic base contemplating direct action as a response to authoritarianism for the first time, but, as labor historian Eric Blanc writes, defeating an authoritarian regime will take more than one-off protests.

In short, the Left has to wed momentum-based mass mobilizations with structured organizing that can scale to absorb thousands and thousands of new organizers.

Many socialists have focused their attention on organizing for a May Day 2028 general strike, called for by UAW President Shawn Fain and organized through the May Day Strong coalition. An ambitious, disruptive action on that day could be a powerful tool for the left and labor to take leadership in the struggle against authoritarianism. But the plan as it currently stands also has limitations.

Unions represent only 10% of workers in the United States, and only a small fraction of them will have lined up their contracts to expire on that date, in line with the May Day Strong strategy. To the extent that contracts are successfully lined up, that will militate towards action more focused on bread-and-butter economic issues for striking members, instead of more expansive social demands. The Left should support these efforts, but also work in parallel to escalate toward a more expansive general strike on May 1, 2028—one that could launch disruptive mass resistance that continues through the summer and fall of 2028.

Taken on their own, neither the relatively leaderless one-day protests of No Kings nor the historically weak labor unions are positioned to reshape US politics in the next few years, but they do represent key opportunities to politicize and mobilize broader segments of our society. A presidential campaign can be a key vehicle to knit these together and amplify their disruptive potential, but only if it leads politically with a transformative program, and only if it has the scalable, structured model for mass engagement that defined the 2008 Obama and the 2025 Mamdani campaigns.

Scaling a Movement to the Size of the Task

Building a nationwide, dynamic structure for the mass engagement of volunteers is not necessarily the exclusive purview of the Left. It was the Obama campaign in 2008 that inspired the most notable contemporary example of such a campaign, even though it was defined more by the historic nature of the candidate and inspirational rhetoric than left political or policy commitments. In fact, the absence of a consistent left ideology may well have paved the way for the disastrous decision to demobilize the movement around Obama after the election.

The unapologetically left-wing Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 generated an outpouring of organic support, but didn’t achieve the same level of organization, relying more on a decentralized “distributed organizing” model than the type of unified, structured, field program that powered Obama and Mamdani. Perhaps because of that decentralization, Sanders’s effort to continue his campaign infrastructure by forming Our Revolution fell flat.

But in the contemporary political moment, it is democratic socialists who are writing the playbook when it comes to building this type of infrastructure. The marriage of a mass engagement electoral field program and a democratic organization—referred to internally as “the DSA difference”—has been producing large and small political upsets across the country for a decade, and has achieved previously unimaginable success with Mamdani’s victory. Partly through his partnership with the grassroots organizing powerhouse of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA), Mamdani was able to build a massive program of over 104,000 volunteers, and more than 700 field leads who organized and led individual field events.

Scaled to the population of the United States, a presidential campaign that replicated Mamdani’s organizing would have a staggering 4 million volunteers contacting working class people with a transformative political vision, and almost 300,000 leads organizing events, building relationships, and recruiting people into the movement. An army of organic leaders and volunteers along these lines could be a decisive factor in winning the presidential primary and general elections, but they could be equally important in their ability to bring tens of millions of people into the streets to ensure a democratic transfer of power.

If a viable presidential candidate does materialize, their campaign will be starting with a great advantage compared to the 2016 Sanders campaign: thousands of socialist organizers who have been developed through DSA’s electoral campaigns, many of whom will flock to a serious left-wing presidential effort. This is the layer that can help scale the campaign to reach an even broader base than Bernie Sanders did, and fuse it to a mass protest movement that is already underway.

It’s (Probably) AOC

Days before the 2025 New York mayoral election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took the stage at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens in front of a raucous crowd of more than 10,000 Zohran Mamdani supporters.

She spoke about a United States that has always been defined by struggle—“between humanity’s highest and lowest natures…subjects and citizens, the Confederacy and the Union, freedom and bondage, labor and capital.” 

Ocasio-Cortez identified the key struggle of our time as that against the “most unjust concentration of wealth in the hands of the very few” in history. She championed demands for “affordable and decent housing, a decent wage, [and] the right to health care,” and decried the financing of “the flattening of Palestinians and oppressed people abroad” instead of meeting these basic human needs.

She celebrated and centered the working class—delivery workers, line cooks, and childcare workers—as the essence of both New York City and of America. And, to deafening applause, AOC raised up to the status of heroes those regular citizens who risked their safety to fight for someone they didn’t know. “A young woman in a polka dot dress standing up to a secret police officer on Canal Street. That is New York. A young man in a white helmet jumping off his bicycle, saying, ‘Not in my neighborhood.’ That is New York.”

In short, in what should be viewed as the first speech of the 2028 presidential election, Ocasio-Cortez did much of what the Left will need to do over the next three years.

We have to popularize demands that speak to overwhelming majorities of Americans. We have to name our enemies in the plain terms of class struggle. We have to center working people, in all their diversity, as the protagonists of America’s past, present, and future, and call them into motion. Perhaps most importantly, we must prepare that broad base of working-class people to face a difficult truth: that winning the world they want will require more than just voting—it will require being brave enough to confront a brutal and lawless autocracy. 

The most important intervention the Left can make over the next three years is to build a presidential campaign along these political lines—one big enough and popular enough to win the Democratic primary, and with the political character that will be necessary to face down an authoritarian coup attempt.

Congressperson Ocasio-Cortez is not the only possible candidate for a 2028 presidential campaign in the Bernie Sanders mold, but she is by far the most formidable in terms of name recognition, popularity, fundraising, and—perhaps most importantly—her exceptional gift for communication. She is the only left-wing candidate polling as a leading candidate in the primary, alongside Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris.

For some on the left, the exigencies of the political moment are going to create pressure to unify with centrist forces to defeat Trumpism in 2026 and 2028. “Electability” arguments (that only a moderate candidate who eschews “social issues” can defeat Trump) will be deployed to argue against any left-wing presidential primary candidate. This orientation misses the fundamental truth of this election cycle: we don’t just need a candidate who can win the presidential election, we need one who can defend that victory in the streets.

A centrist might be able to win in the electoral college, but unless they are prepared to lead a movement to stop a coup, it is hard to imagine the Trump administration allowing them to take office. In the run-up to the 2020 election, segments of civil society were actively mobilizing for a democratic transition, though not at a scale that prepared them for the January 6th insurrection. If the No Kings protests are any indication, the liberal base of the Democratic Party is now far more conscious that mobilization to defend democracy may be necessary.

In the face of a far more powerful and organized authoritarian push with substantial elite support, the movement will need leadership that can speak to deeply-felt issues that go beyond democracy. It also requires a level of organization that makes it possible to work in concert with that leadership. On the key questions that could be decisive—organization and leadership—there is little indication that centrists in the Democratic Party are up to the task.

Learn from 2020

Defeating the Republican coup attempt unfolding in 2026 and 2028 won’t be enough to put the authoritarian threat to bed. A repeat of the Biden presidency, in which a centrist-led coalition ousted Trump but failed to deliver transformational change, will leave the threat in place, albeit with a temporary reprieve. 

To actually move to a new political paradigm, we will need to ensure the passage of an economic program that meets the basic needs of working people and shifts power decisively away from the billionaire class. We will have to confront the outrageous influence of a handful of billionaires wield over the media, and dismantle the fascist fifth column represented by ICE. We will need to destroy the Right’s ability to gerrymander, and confront the dictatorial power of the Supreme Court directly.

Of course, all of this will have to be done while we enact our agenda on a hundred fronts, from abortion rights to trans rights to foreign policy to climate. While socialism may not be on the table for 2029, we absolutely must choose between falling victim to barbarism or winning a profound social transformation.

Those stakes make the Left’s engagement in the presidential election especially crucial. It’s not enough to build a mass movement powerful enough to elect a democratic socialist in the electoral arena and to confront and defeat an authoritarian regime in the streets.

We, the Left, have to take a leading role in that movement exactly so that we can stay organized and mobilized for a rapid push to shift our society in a more democratic direction. It’s the only chance we have to win the world we want.Email