THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020 45
lence is essential to unseating a coup.”
“Mark, have you read the Hold the
Line guide? Nonviolence is a core prin-
ciple,” Jamie, in Colorado, wrote. “Non-
violence is also what’s most able to be
successful! Check the writings of Erica
Chenoweth for some interesting stuff
on why it’s so important!”
O
n Election Day, Shah wore a red
striped turtleneck, a blue hijab, and
white jeans and sneakers. “This is about
as patriotic as I get,” she said. As part
of a mutual-aid group, she had spent
the morning helping elderly neighbors
get to the polls, and had voted herself.
Now, like roughly half of the American
adult population, she was alternately
claiming that she’d paid no heed to the
election forecasts and fantasizing about
a swift and uncontested Biden land-
slide. “I hope people don’t come away
with a sense of: ‘See, the institutions did
work in the end—what was I so para-
noid for?’” she said. “Americans are way
too good at amnesia and apathy.”
Late in the afternoon, Shah’s hus-
band, Ali Soroush, returned from a shift
at the hospital wearing blue-green scrubs.
“My attending started asking, ‘How do
we stop Trump if he starts doing crazy
things?’” he said. “I told her, ‘You may
enjoy the Hold the Line guide.’”
“Love it,” Shah said.
Soroush, whose parents lived through
the Iranian Revolution of 1979, is gen-
erally wary of sweeping change. “I like
to think about what’s possible within
the existing systems,” he said. “Think-
ing outside of that makes me a bit un-
comfortable.” During the summer, when
Shah first described Hold the Line to
Soroush, he found the power-grab sce-
narios difficult to fathom. “He went,
‘None of that is gonna happen. We have
a constitution,’” Shah recalled. “I said,
‘Babe, it’s just a document!’”
“I’m the institutionalist in our house,”
he said.
When darkness fell, Shah turned on
the TV, and the results began coming in.
Virginia was called for Biden, then briefly
un-called. Trump had an early lead in
Pennsylvania. Someone on ABC News
mentioned the prospect of recounts;
someone else mentioned the possibil-
ity of an Electoral College tie. “This is
fine,” Shah said. She stood up and started
pacing. “This is what we’ve been talking
about for months. This is what we
planned for.” Soroush went into the bed-
room to lie down.
The next day, I spoke to Chenoweth.
While the rest of the country was por-
ing over the latest vote tallies from Al-
legheny County, Chenoweth was think-
ing about pillars of support, trying to
gauge which key figures seemed unshak-
ably loyal to Trump and which seemed
prepared to defect should Trump’s loss
start to look definitive. That morning,
Marco Rubio, the Republican senator
from Florida, had tweeted, “Taking days
to count legally cast votes is NOT fraud.
And court challenges to votes cast after
the legal voting deadline is NOT sup-
pression.” The tweet was “kind of both-
sides-y,” Chenoweth said. “He seems to
be hedging, waiting to see which way
the wind blows.”
On Friday, at Marks’s suggestion,
Chenoweth and Marks began channelling
their anxiety into a Google spreadsheet.
One tab, documenting public statements
of support for the vote-counting process
or repudiations of Trump, was titled
“Counting Commitments to Democracy.”
A separate tab, containing defiant state-
ments from Trump loyalists, had the
heading “Counting Complicity.” When
Sean Hannity, on Fox News, asked Sen-
ator Lindsey Graham whether states
should put forward alternative slates of
electors, Graham responded, “Everything
should be on the table.” Graham was
added to the “Complicity” tab. (Later in
the interview, Graham claimed that elec-
tions in Philadelphia were “crooked as a
snake”; in the spreadsheet, this was filed
under the “Alleges Fraud” column, though
it could just as easily have gone under
“Supports Misinformation.”) The fol-
lowing night, the Fox anchor Laura In-
graham, speaking directly to the camera,
urged President Trump to leave grace-
fully—a surprising and significant addi-
tion to the “Commitments to Democ-
racy” tab. Every few hours, Chenoweth
sent me an update by e-mail—“Extremely
clear repudiation from Carlos Curbelo”;
“McConnell refusing to comment”—
treating the election as a volatile and
fluid process, a matter not only of math
but also of momentum. Everyone else I
knew was waiting for the final result to
be revealed; for Chenoweth, there was
no such thing as a final result, at least
not until the Inauguration.
On Saturday, November 7th, Shah
and I had plans to meet at Columbus
Circle, in Manhattan, for a rally that was
originally billed as a reaffirmation of the
sanctity of the democratic process. I was
still at home, in Brooklyn, when I heard
cheers erupting outside my window.
I headed north toward the Brooklyn
Bridge on my bike. Suddenly, somehow,
everyone was carrying banners, tambou-
rines, huge American flags, portable ste-
reos playing “We Are the Champions”
and “Philadelphia Freedom” and the
timeless rap anthem “FDT (Fuck Don-
ald Trump).” The bleating horns of mail
trucks and taxis, for once, heralded not
frustration but peace and good will. I
received a flurry of texts, all containing
exclamation points or emojis. The only
two exceptions were Chenoweth and
Shah, who remained cautious. “Momen-
tum is definitely in Biden’s favor,” Che-
noweth wrote; as for Trump, “we’ll see
if he has any enablers left.”
At Columbus Circle, Shah stood be-
tween a young man in a T-shirt, carry-
ing a bullhorn and railing against Biden’s
centrism, and a middle-aged woman in
a pink feather boa, dancing with her eyes
closed on top of a parked S.U.V. A very
tall drag queen in a witch’s hat roamed
through the crowd, shouting, “You’re
fired, honey!”
“The whole Democratic coalition is
out today,” Shah said, smiling. “This is
a victory, but not a permanent victory.
It’s, like, Let’s celebrate for an afternoon,
and then let’s go home and make sure
there isn’t a power grab happening under
our noses.”
The week after Election Day, mem-
bers of the Trump Administration con-
tinued to act as if the election results
were still in doubt, or simply to pretend
that Trump had won. A reporter asked
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether
he would start coöperating with Biden’s
transition team. “There will be a smooth
transition to a second Trump Admin-
istration,” Pompeo responded. Trump
fired the Secretary of Defense and other
top Pentagon officials, replacing them
with loyalists. “There will be others,”
Chenoweth wrote to me. In October,
Chenoweth had told me, “If Trump
does leave office safely, we might not be
in immediate crisis mode anymore, but
the struggle doesn’t end. That’s when
the real work begins.”
