personal to the authors and do not rep-
resent the views of any employer.”) In
October, the organizers began hosting
Zoom trainings, encouraging volun-
teers to form local Hold the Line groups.
By the end of the month, each session
was attracting hundreds of people.
In late October, I visited Shah, in her
sunlit two-bedroom apartment in Wash-
ington Heights. At the time, she was
corresponding with dozens of Hold the
Line volunteers, both by e-mail and in
one-on-one “office hours” by phone, at-
tempting to usher them away from gen-
eralized terror and toward a specific plan
of action. She paraphrased their worries:
“‘The election is going to be stolen!’ ‘The
Supreme Court is going to stop count-
ing our votes!’ I go, ‘I’m scared of that,
too. But neither of us knows anyone on
the Supreme Court. Who do we know?’”
Shah referred to this as a “sphere of in-
fluence” exercise—a sort of grassroots ver-
sion of the Serenity Prayer. “Maybe you
know your local law-enforcement offi-
cials, and you can ask them to pledge that
they’ll prevent militias from intimidat-
ing voters,” Shah said. “Maybe you get
more people in your group, and maybe
one of those people knows a state legisla-
tor.” Shah referred to this slow, modest
work as “building movement infrastruc-
ture,” or simply “building”—a neces-
sary component of any movement, not
only the movement to prevent Trump
from stealing power but also the move-
ments that would continue agitating
for progress as soon as Trump was gone.
Shah, who is thirty-two, was born
in Pakistan and moved to Palm Springs,
California, when she was three. “Know-
ing what has gone on in Pakistan and
many other countries,” she said, she did
not assume that election results are the
final determinant of who takes power,
even in a putative democracy. Her book-
shelves were a pleasant jumble—“Or-
ganizing for Social Change” next to the
Quran, “Good and Mad” not far from
a stack of gastroenterology journals.
(Her husband is a second-year medi-
cal fellow.) In the course of an after-
noon, over the hum of Broadway traffic
outside her window, Shah conducted
calls with two community organizers
in Houston, a group of tech employees
in Silicon Valley, and a Muslim Stu-
dents Association at Yale. In Virginia,
a woman named Margaret had single-
handedly solicited pledges from more
than two dozen state officials, both
Democrats and Republicans, affirming
that they would honor the will of the
voters. “You rock, Margaret!” Shah said.
“You are a natural!”
In Erie, Pennsylvania, a Benedictine
sister named Anne McCarthy and a
church volunteer named Juan Llarena
were organizing a prayer vigil at an Epis-
copal church across the street from the
county courthouse. The vigil would be
held on Election Night while the bal-
lots were being delivered to the court-
house to be tallied. “We’ve got about
thirty people signed up,” McCarthy told
Shah over the phone. “They’re all trainedin de-escalation tactics.” McCarthy is
a member of Pace e Bene, a national
network of clergy and lay Christians
who teach nonviolent resistance. At the
group’s most recent annual conference,
in August, Chenoweth was one of the
keynote speakers.
“I love this idea, Anne,” Shah said.
“Do you all want help sending a press
release to local media?”
“We don’t want to risk a backlash,”
McCarthy said. “There are armed mili-
tias based about half an hour away, and
they might see us on the news and come
looking for a confrontation.” Shah raised
her eyebrows. When the call was over,
she said, “One of my mantras is: If you’re
organizing something locally, you know
your turf better than I do. How am I sup-
posed to know, sitting in New York City,
where all the Pennsylvania militias are?”
Two days before the election, I at-
tended a Hold the Line training on
Zoom. Shah and the other organizers
shared some recent accomplishments
by local Hold the Line chapters, her-
alding each small advance with the kind
of unqualified enthusiasm usually re-
served for a middle-school dance re-
cital. “Thanks for showing them love
in the chat, guys!” Shah said. “Y ’all are
doing some amazing work.”
“Feeling inspired,” Molly, in Tucson,
Arizona, wrote in the Zoom chat. “Go,
Democracy!”
Susan, in Iowa, wrote, “I heard Gene
Sharp back in the 70s and am glad you
all are carrying on!”
Others seemed to find the whole thing
baffling: If the country was on the brink
of collapse, how were nonbinding pledges
from local officials commensurate with
the scale of the problem? Mark, a sixty-
seven-year-old college professor from
Michigan, asked about the “end game,”
in the event that “Trump clearly steals
the election and gets the Republican gov-
ernors and Supreme Court to fall into
line. In that frightening but possible sce-
nario, do we take to the streets and at-
tack? Wouldn’t that be the end of non-
violent strategies?” He added, “I’ve been
a liberal Democrat since 1971.”
Roula, in California, wrote, “Mark,
I’m interested in that ‘what if ’ and
specifically want to know how we can
organize *economic* resistance.”
Laura, also in California, wrote,
“Sometimes I feel like the whole world is out to get me.” “What we’ve learned is that non-vio-