To steal the election, we suspect he will adapt the standard playbook of authoritarians everywhere: cast doubt on the election results by filing numerous lawsuits and launching coordinated federal and state investigations, including into foreign interference; call on militia groups to intimidate election officials and instigate violence; rely on fringe social media to generate untraceable rumors, and on Fox News to amplify these messages as fact; and create a climate of confusion and chaos. He might ask the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security — which he has now weaponized against democracy — to deploy to big cities in swing states to stop the vote count or seize ballots. If he does all this right, he’ll be able to put soldiers on the streets, inflame his base, and convince millions of people that the election is being stolen from him. This would create the predicate for overturning the will of the voters.

What’s his end game? Under the Constitution, state legislatures decide how to appoint electors. They have all chosen to rely on the popular vote. But could they create a false justification to claw back this power? The legislatures in all of the closely contested states this fall — Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina — are controlled by Republicans. Trump could argue that mail-in ballots should not be counted and ask state legislatures to appoint electors different than the ones chosen by voters. This would be undemocratic and illegal; it’s hard to conceive how you justify changing the rules for appointing electors after the election. But they have contemplated it before: Florida’s Republican legislature seriously considered doing just that in 2000 before the Supreme Court ultimately stepped in.

What must we be prepared to do if Trump questions the legitimacy of the electoral results and won’t concede defeat? We can learn what not to do from the disastrous 2000 election in which George W. Bush lost Florida and therefore the election to Al Gore but ended up taking the White House anyway. Republicans famously mobilized a “Brooks Brothers riot” of young white male campaign staffers, many flown in from D.C., to protest the recount and create an atmosphere of intimidation and chaos. Democrats dithered, mobilized no one, and played by Marquess of Queensberry rules. They naively relied on the courts and local election officials to validate Gore’s victory. The ultimate result of this pathetic Democratic strategy was not only a Bush victory but the Iraq War, the racist and inept response to Hurricane Katrina, and trillions of dollars of tax cuts for the rich.

Exactly the same dilemma will face us this time if Trump won’t accept defeat. Joe Biden’s campaign is recruiting lawyers, not organizers, and Biden himself has expressed misplaced confidence that the military “will escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” on Inauguration Day. Democratic Party operatives, good-government types, an army of constitutional lawyers, and other self-appointed experts will urge us not to “politicize” the process, to wait patiently and talk about the “rule of law,” to not “prejudge the results” — to trust the process and the courts, to stay home and let the smart boys in D.C. work things out on our behalf.

We need to ignore such advice and take to the streets. We have been through four horrendous years in which our vaunted institutions have failed to hold Trump to account — most notably with the failure to convict him in the Senate after the House impeached him. The Republican Party and Fox News have divorced themselves from both the formal rules and the unwritten norms that constrained unaccountable executive behavior. During the public health crisis, the president and many Republican leaders have shown contempt for truth and a willingness to fan the flames of outlandish conspiracy theories. There’s no reason to believe that there are any norms that will constrain this president, who likely faces criminal prosecution when he leaves office. His fellow Republicans have had four years to reign him in and have chosen not to. And if you think John Roberts’s Supreme Court will save us, think again: For all the attention given to a few unexpected victories for liberals, the Court ruled four separate times this term against voting rights.

While institutions, norms, and elites have failed us, there is abundant evidence that mass protest produces change. We are living in a golden age of social movements. Most recently, the Movement for Black Lives changed how white people think about policing in America, put bold new demands on the agenda, and is producing substantial, albeit thus far insufficient, changes in policies. The immigrant rights movement responded to the Muslim ban and the caging of children at the border with mass protest that forced a national reckoning with these cruel policies. Workers, often outside of union structures, have taken to the streets in extraordinary numbers – from the Fight for 15 to strikes by teachers and mobilizations by Amazon employees and essential workers. They have won big increases in wages and improved working conditions. The Occupy movement reintroduced the problem of economic oligarchy into the political debate. Bernie Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s presidential candidacies were powered by this movement vision and pushed the Democratic Party to the left. And the “resistance” groups that mobilized early in the Trump years — the Women’s March, Indivisible, and others — have built muscle memory among millions of people of what it’s like to engage in sustained activism. Most encouraging, these movements have recruited millions of new supporters. These groups together provide a powerful social base from which to contest the president’s planned usurpation of power.

And the movements have substantial leverage in two decisive arenas: politics and the economy. In politics, the Democratic Party relies on voters allied with these movements. If the party decides to play hardball, it can stop Trump from stealing the election. Right now, Democrats can insist on funding for a free and fair election as well as the Postal Service, and ensure that local election systems have the resources and systems in place to accommodate the surge of mail-in ballots. And when Trump tries to steal the election after November 3, Democrats will control governors’ mansions in Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. If the Republican legislatures in these states try to overrule the will of the people, governors can push back and send a legitimate electoral vote tally to Congress. Likewise, after the election, Democratic House and Senate members will have leverage of their own.

Getting Democrats to use the full extent of their power will not be easy. It will take a mass movement on a scale we have not yet seen, and the mobilization will need to be sustained for weeks and possibly months. Intense pressure from millions of people — that rivals the intensity of the Trump base — will be needed to stiffen the spines of national and state Democratic leaders.

The professional communicators, technocrats, and lawyers in much of the mainstream Democratic Party and some in the media will be horrified by this call for a mass nonviolent uprising in response to the theft of an election. Culturally, the professional, middle-class people in these roles believe that expertise and good judgment, not mass protest, deliver the goods. They have learned in their own lives that rational debate, rule-following, and conflict avoidance help them climb the ladder. Unfortunately, these traits and behaviors don’t work against autocrats. Politically, the Democratic Party has, for 30 years, triangulated, dodged, and capitulated to its ruthless opponents, and since its leaders are from that earlier generation schooled to cower, they will not adapt quickly now. The liberal establishment inside the Beltway will argue for sober analysis, moderate messages, following procedures, and, above all … for waiting. We must prepare to defy those milquetoast nostrums just as much as we prepare for Trump’s planned theft of the election. Overcoming complacency, rampant incredulity that “it could happen here,” and misplaced faith in norms, courts and elites may be our biggest challenges.

Another key movement objective should be to force corporate and Republican elites to break with Trump. Doing so will require pushing them to answer a simple question: Is the price of keeping Trump in power greater than the price of allowing Biden to take over as president? Truth be told, Biden should not scare the elite. He has been sympathetic to their agenda on everything from bankruptcy to trade, and has resisted policies like Medicare for All. But Trump has delivered deregulation, tax cuts, and huge numbers of judges for the right’s core constituencies. He has, until perhaps recently, been good for their bottom line. So the protests will need to be not only boisterous and performative but also to put profits at risk. We should plan for and encourage forms of mass action such as work stoppages, consumer boycotts, and rent strikes that target the corporate class. The message from us to them needs to be clear: If you stand by and allow Trump to steal the election, we will threaten your profit. The only thing that would compel corporate titans and their political lackeys in the Republican Party to abandon Trump would be a crisis — not a crisis of conscience but of profitability.