How Democrats planned for doomsday
Progressive leaders prepared for chaos months before the attack on the Capitol
The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Trump sound far stronger than he was.
And they would demand stern punishment for Trump and his party: Republicans at every level of government who incited the mob “must be removed or resign,” read one version of the group’s intended message, contained in Shenker-Osorio’s presentation and reviewed by the New York Times.
The meeting was no lucky feat of emergency organizing, nor was the highly disciplined and united front that emerged from it. Instead, it was a climactic event in a long season of planning and coordination by progressives, aimed largely at a challenge with no U.S. precedent: defending the outcome of a free election from a president bent on overturning it.
By the time rioters ransacked the Capitol, the machinery of the left was ready — prepared by months spent sketching out doomsday scenarios and mapping out responses, by countless hours of training exercises and reams of opinion research.
Progressive groups reckoned with their own vulnerabilities: The impulses toward fiery rhetoric and divisive demands — which generated polarizing slogans like “Abolish ICE” and “Defund the police” — were supplanted by a more studied vocabulary.
Worried that Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3. In a year of surging political energy across the left and of record-breaking voter turnout, one side has stifled itself to an extraordinary degree during the precarious postelection period.
Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all.
For the most part, the organized left anticipated Trump’s postelection schemes, including his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show.
Ai-jen Poo, a prominent organizer involved in the effort, said the realization had dawned on a wide range of groups: “We all had to come together and bring everything we could to protecting our right to vote.”