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The question I started with is who had the Federal Election Commission’s passwords before the agency shut itself down on the night of Oct. 26, and who in the United States government is in a position to find out. I read the FEC’s notices to filers against the clock of the wire stories, the warnings that came in the two weeks before, the sworn record of what this administration’s people did the last two times they held federal data, and then I counted the offices that existed two years ago to investigate exactly this. As of tonight no government has named the attacker, ours or an ally’s, and the reason is the second half of this piece.

At 1:54 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, Oct. 27, the FEC’s Electronic Filing Office wrote that the system was offline, that “you cannot submit electronic reports to the FEC,” and that the upload tools, the password assignment system, the FECNotify alert service and the webforms for the 24-hour and 48-hour notices that disclose last-minute money were all down. At 4:28 p.m. Wednesday it wrote that the system was back and that every filer must first create a new password: “This action is required because some passwords were compromised prior to the service disruption.”

Two hours later, at 6:38 p.m., Reuters, which had broken the story Tuesday with an FEC officer’s email about “a bad actor attempting to breach FEC systems,” reported that managers had to reset their passwords and that the FEC did not return requests for comment on the cause. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred reporters’ questions to the FEC. CNBC wrote that the commission had not said whether anyone got in or whether any data was compromised. Nothing published since has printed the sentence above.

The Don’t Make Me Call Your Donors hoodie, free with a new annual membership, last 24 hours, any hoodie in the store, you pay shipping and handling. Click this caption to get your year and your hoodie. Already a paid member? Your half-off hoodie code is in Monday morning’s members-only email. So two hours after the commission told every committee treasurer in the country, in writing, that passwords had been compromised, it told the reporters covering the story nothing, and the two agencies that exist to investigate attacks on federal systems sent those reporters back to it.

A filing password authenticates every report a committee submits. Only a committee’s treasurer or assistant treasurer can create one, and whoever holds it can file a 24-hour report in the committee’s name, amend one, or amend the Form 1 that lists the committee’s official email, which is the address the FEC’s own reset instructions route through. The FEC has not said how many passwords, whose, for how long, or whether a single filing was made with them.

Outside groups were reporting more than $50 million a day going into the outage, with more than $250 million reported on Oct. 20 alone, and Elon Musk’s America PAC by itself reported nearly $6.8 million for that one day. Steven Mele, who has run the compliance firm MBA Consulting Group for 26 years, told Reuters he had never seen the system go down like this. Ross Filipek, chief information security officer at Corsica Technologies, said what the order of operations should have been: “Before restoring filing services, responders need to establish whether anyone gained unauthorized access.” The FEC restored filing 22 minutes after telling filers their passwords were compromised, and has not said whether anyone did.

The warnings came in the two weeks before, from every direction. On Oct. 21 the FBI’s Cyber Division told every organization whose websites use PHP, the language behind roughly 70 percent of websites, that two flaws allowed remote code execution in PHP core and that any system that could not be patched at once should be taken offline. The same day the Election Security Exchange, which advises election officials, warned that the affected software ran voter registration lookup, polling-place lookup, ballot-tracking and election-night results sites. The same day the top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said a classified briefing showed Russia running a disinformation campaign against Democrats in these midterms. In April the head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency told Congress to expect foreign adversaries to target these elections. In May, Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin that he was “gravely concerned about the lack of critical federal support” to states before the midterms. In July 2025 the FEC’s own inspector general told the commission to fix its highest-rated vulnerabilities faster. And the intelligence community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, the document that warned about Russian election operations every prior year, left election interference out entirely.

Then I counted what the administration dismantled that would have had agents, analysts, advisers or board members on this by now. Two years ago all of these existed:

• CISA’s election security program: 17 election security staff put on leave in February 2025, all election security work paused for a review CISA has never released, and the 10 regional election security advisers pulled from the field
• the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the threat-sharing network for every state and county election office, defunded in March 2025 because it “no longer supports Department priorities”
• the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, built after 2016 to investigate foreign operations against elections, dissolved by Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 5, 2025, her first day in office
• the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which housed the Election Threats Executive, gutted by Tulsi Gabbard
• the State Department’s counter-foreign-interference office, successor to the Global Engagement Center, shut down by Secretary of State Marco Rubio in April 2025
• the Cyber Safety Review Board, the body that investigates major cyberattacks on the country, every member dismissed on Jan. 20, 2025, its investigation of China’s Salt Typhoon intrusions left open
• the leadership of the NSA and Cyber Command, with Gen. Timothy Haugh fired in April 2025
• CISA itself, about a third of its workforce gone by the end of 2025

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, whose office ran that state’s 2024 election, said election officials were “effectively flying blind.” On Nov. 1 CNN reported that the channels for federal officials to warn election officials about foreign threats are at their weakest since 2016. So when a reporter asked the FBI and CISA about the FEC, the answer was to ask the FEC, which has two commissioners out of six, no quorum since May 2025, two nominees the Senate has not held a hearing on, and a backlog that doubled to 307 matters it cannot touch.

In two whistleblower reports, one to the Senate Intelligence Committee and one to the Office of Special Counsel, two federal officials described what the administration’s people did the last two times they held federal data. Daniel Berulis, a security architect at the National Labor Relations Board, told the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2025 that DOGE engineers got accounts that could read, copy, alter or delete anything in the agency’s databases, and that within 15 minutes of one account’s creation someone at an IP address in Primorskiy Krai, Russia, began trying to log in with its correct username and password, more than 20 times. Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s chief data officer, disclosed in August 2025 that DOGE staff had a live copy of NUMIDENT, the master file of every Social Security number, in a cloud environment they administered themselves. The agency’s acting commissioner had sworn that DOGE never had access to its systems of record. On Jan. 16, 2026 the Justice Department filed a correction: DOGE staff had used a Cloudflare server unknown to SSA leadership, the agency could not determine which data left or whether it still exists outside federal control, and DOGE employees had signed a voter data agreement on March 24, 2025 with a group seeking to overturn election results in certain states.

An agency with only two commissioners lost its filing system for 41 hours in a week when outside groups report $50 million a day, told the committees it regulates that their passwords had been taken before the lights went out, restored filing 22 minutes later, and told the public nothing. Eight offices that would have had people on this by now were dismantled in 2025, and the two agencies left standing sent the reporters back to the victim. Whoever took the passwords picked a week when the referee for campaign money could not hold a meeting, in a year when the government that would investigate them had already fired the investigators. The question in the title stays open because the people who could close it are the people who made the opening.

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CALL TO ACTION

Vote. If you vote in person, Tuesday, Nov. 3 is the day, and vote.gov has your state’s polling hours, locations, ID rules and what to bring. If you have a mail ballot, take it to a drop box or your county election office; a ballot mailed now may arrive after your state’s deadline.

Make sure your friends vote. Text the people you know who have not voted yet and ask whether they need a ride or the address of their polling place.

Make sure your vote was counted. Most states have a ballot tracker on their election website, and vote.gov links to yours. If your ballot shows as rejected or missing, your county election office can tell you how to fix it before the deadline.

If something goes wrong at the polls, the Election Protection hotline is 866–687–8683 (866-OUR-VOTE), run by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, with lawyers on the line on Election Day.

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Originally published at https://theexistentialistrepublic.com on November 2, 2026.

On Oct. 20, Trump launched a program that pays up to $30,000 for a fraud.gov tip that leads to a conviction or a significant federal enforcement action. When more than one person claims the same tip, Trump said, “I will be the arbitrator of all these decisions.” At the same event, Trump handed a $10,000 check to Nick Shirley, the YouTuber whose video accused Somali-run childcare centers in Minnesota of fraud.

I put together 67 tips about Trump and the people he put in charge. Each one has a source link to paste into your report at america.gov/fraud. Your name is optional. I filed all 67 myself, and you’re welcome to file as many as your heart desires. If you file any, I’d love to hear which numbers in the comments.

I’m also sending this list to 10 friends, and I’m inviting you to consider texting or emailing it to 10 friends of your own. Ten forwards and a few reports seem like a nice use of a half hour to gum up the works.

1. Trump took out two Palm Beach mortgages seven weeks apart and called each home his principal residence. His administration accused Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook of fraud over the same kind of loans.
2. Trump dropped his lawsuit against the IRS in exchange for a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that Justice Department appointees pay out to people they call victims of lawfare.
3. The same settlement ends the IRS audits of the Trump family’s filed returns. The New York Times reported the deal frees Trump from a possible penalty of more than $100 million in the audit of his Chicago tower losses.
4. Trump personally told his budget director to find money for TV ads praising him, and the budget office moved $20 million of Customs and Border Protection funds to pay for them.
5. Trump’s properties took in nearly $100,000 from the Secret Service in the first few months of this term.
6. The Air Force estimates the retrofit of the 747 Qatar gave Trump will cost less than $400 million in taxpayer money. Sources told ABC News the plane will go to Trump’s library foundation before he leaves office.
7. A firm tied to the UAE’s national security adviser bought a $500 million stake in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company, days before the inauguration. The Commerce Department later cleared G42, an AI company the adviser chairs, to buy up to 35,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips.
8. Abu Dhabi’s MGX paid for a $2 billion stake in Binance with World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin while Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff pushed AI chip sales to the UAE, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy wrote.
9. Witkoff’s family entities got at least $31 million from the same UAE-linked purchase of World Liberty, CNN reported.
10. The Securities and Exchange Commission, led by Trump appointee Paul Atkins, settled their fraud case against crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun for $10 million paid by one of his companies after Sun became the largest outside investor in World Liberty, at $75 million.
11. Buyers spent an estimated $148 million on Trump’s meme coin competing for seats at a private dinner with him.
12. Paramount paid Trump a $16 million settlement over a “60 Minutes” interview, and Brendan Carr’s Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance weeks later.
13. Carr later accepted Paramount gala seats valued at $125,000 per ticket.
14. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro requested a $620 million Pentagon loan for Vulcan Elements, a magnet startup Donald Trump Jr.’s firm 1789 Capital had bought into months earlier, ProPublica reported.
15. Drone maker Unusual Machines, where Trump Jr. sits on the advisory board and reportedly holds a multimillion-dollar stake, won a $12.8 million Pentagon contract.
16. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy holds primary-residence mortgages on two homes, in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
17. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin holds primary-residence mortgages on two homes, on Long Island and in Washington, D.C.
18. Former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer took out two primary-residence mortgages in 2021. She resigned in April while the Labor Department’s inspector general was investigating reports that she used department money for personal trips.
19. The White House started a contest that gives Cabinet secretaries points for visiting swing districts, and Zeldin has made official, taxpayer-funded stops with five Republicans in tight races.
20. Border czar Tom Homan took $50,000 in cash in a Cava bag from an undercover FBI agent and promised immigration contracts once he joined the administration, two sources told Reuters. FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the case closed.
21. Patel used the FBI’s $60 million jet to see his girlfriend perform and to visit a Republican megadonor’s hunting resort.
22. Patel also assigned an FBI SWAT team of four agents and two vehicles to protect his girlfriend full time, The New York Times reported.
23. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s department handed Safe America Media a $143 million no-bid contract for the ad campaign that put her on horseback at Mount Rushmore.
24. The Coast Guard bought two Gulfstream jets for a little over $172 million for Noem and other top officials during last fall’s government shutdown, after budgeting for a single jet.
25. Trump donor Eric Deters told CBS News that then-Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle asked him to wire $100,000 to her American Express account so the money would stay off her financial disclosures.
26. Todd Blanche, now attorney general, disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto enforcement team while he still held Bitcoin worth between $100,000 and $250,000.
27. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi sold $1 million to $5 million of Trump Media shares on the day Trump announced his tariffs, before the stock fell.
28. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent kept as much as $25 million in farmland months past his ethics deadline while negotiating Chinese soybean purchases.
29. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte’s agency set the budget of the inspector general’s office investigating him at $20 million, a 61% drop.
30. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth flew with Kid Rock in Army Apache helicopters that cost about $7,000 an hour to fly, weeks after he shut down the Army’s inquiry into Apache flights near the singer’s home.
31. Pentagon official George Kollitides was still listed as an adviser to Alvarez & Marsal’s investment arm when his office gave the firm a no-bid consulting deal. The firm now holds almost $350 million in Pentagon contracts.
32. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller held Palantir stock worth $100,001 to $250,000 while Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave Palantir a no-bid contract.
33. Agriculture Department appointee Michael Boren pushed for help with a small fire near his Idaho ranch, and the government sent about nine aircraft, costing nearly $115,000, The Washington Post reported.
34. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’s nonpartisan auditor, found that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, claimed $27.4 billion in savings that never happened.
35. Democratic staff on a Senate investigations subcommittee estimated DOGE wasted at least $21.7 billion, mostly by paying federal workers not to work.
36. The same staff found Musk and his companies faced $2.37 billion in potential federal penalties when DOGE began cutting the agencies pursuing them.
37. The SEC dropped their demand that Musk repay the $150 million the agency said he saved by disclosing his Twitter stake late, and settled for a $1.5 million penalty paid by his trust.
38. The Justice Department dropped their hiring discrimination case against SpaceX while Musk worked in the government. Senate staff estimated the dismissal spared SpaceX up to $46.1 million in penalties.
39. DOGE cut between 70 and 80 people at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration while the agency had eight open investigations into Tesla.
40. DOGE staff pushed Homeland Security officials to use Musk’s Grok chatbot, two sources told Reuters, and the General Services Administration later offered Grok to every federal agency at 42 cents per organization through March 2027.
41. DOGE aide Gavin Kliger, now the Pentagon’s chief data officer, held as much as $715,000 in seven companies that Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staff may not own while he helped oversee layoff notices to more than 1,400 bureau employees.
42. Charles Borges, Social Security’s former chief data officer, filed a whistleblower complaint saying DOGE put the Social Security records of more than 300 million Americans on a cloud server with no independent security checks. The complaint accuses DOGE staff, including Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, of breaking federal privacy law.
43. The Justice Department admitted in court that DOGE staffers breached Social Security data at least twice, and one of them signed an agreement to share the data with a political group trying to overturn election results.
44. A DOGE engineer’s AI tool for canceling Veterans Affairs contracts valued many of them at $34 million each when some were worth $35,000.
45. DOGE staffers Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh used ChatGPT to pick more than 1,400 humanities grants worth upward of $100 million for cancellation, and a federal judge ruled DOGE had no legal authority to end them.
46. Cavanaugh was also installed as head of the U.S. Institute of Peace after nearly all 300 of the institute’s employees were fired, and a federal judge ruled the takeover “null and void.”
47. Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who had pleaded guilty to violating anti-money-laundering law, after Binance paid $450,000 for one month of White House lobbying by a firm led by a friend of Trump Jr.
48. Trump pardoned former nursing home executive Paul Walczak after his mother donated $1 million to Trump at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser. The pardon wiped out nearly $4.4 million in restitution.
49. Trump pardoned banker Julio Herrera Velutini in a Puerto Rico bribery case after his daughter gave $3.5 million to the pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc.
50. Trump pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was convicted of defrauding investors, after Milton and his wife gave Trump more than $1.8 million less than a month before the 2024 election.
51. Trump pardoned nursing home owner Joseph Schwartz, who pleaded guilty in a $39 million payroll tax scheme, after Schwartz paid a lobbying firm $960,000 to seek the pardon.
52. Trump pardoned Oak View Group co-founder Tim Leiweke before his bid-rigging trial, after the company gave $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee.
53. Trump commuted the prison sentence of donor Imaad Zuberi, who was convicted of obstructing an investigation into a $900,000 donation to Trump’s inaugural committee.
54. Trump commuted the sentence of Lawrence Duran, who ran a $205 million Medicare fraud scheme.
55. Trump’s commutation of former Rep. George Santos’s fraud sentence erased $373,000 in restitution he owed.
56. Bitcoin investor Roger Ver paid Trump adviser Roger Stone $600,000 to lobby on his behalf, and the Justice Department then agreed to drop Ver’s tax evasion charges if he pays what he owes.
57. Emil Bove, Trump’s former defense lawyer and now a federal appeals judge, ordered prosecutors to drop the corruption case against then-New York Mayor Eric Adams, who was accused of taking more than $100,000 in luxury travel. The judge who dismissed the case wrote that everything about it “smacks of a bargain.”
58. Energy Secretary Chris Wright canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris. After Wright told Congress politics played no role, his department’s lawyers told a court the cuts were “based solely on the political identity” of each state.
59. Budget director Russ Vought held more than $800 million that Congress approved until the money expired on Sept. 30. The GAO found the move illegal the day before.
60. Zeldin terminated more than $1.5 billion in Community Change Grants that his agency’s own inspector general found were properly awarded. The GAO found the cuts illegal on Oct. 7.
61. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s department paid Head Start programs more than $825 million less in early 2025 than the year before. The GAO found the department illegally withheld the money.
62. The National Institutes of Health, also under Kennedy, obligated almost $8 billion less in grants than the year before. The GAO found the withholding illegal.
63. Under Noem, the Federal Emergency Management Agency pulled about $80 million out of New York City’s treasury account. The GAO found the agency illegally withheld shelter and food program money.
64. Duffy’s Transportation Department had obligated only $526 million of $3.27 billion for electric vehicle chargers when the GAO found the freeze illegal.
65. Keith Sonderling, now leading the Labor Department, terminated about 1,200 museum and library grants as acting head of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The GAO found the terminations illegal.
66. Hegseth’s Army paid up to $11.5 million for services and meals at the Fort Bliss detention camp before any detainees arrived, under a $1.3 billion detention contract that the GAO found wasteful.
67. Trump’s National Guard deployments to U.S. cities cost $496 million in 2025, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated, and a federal judge ruled the Los Angeles deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

Every report filed at fraud.gov goes to Scott Bessent’s Treasury Department, the reward money comes through Todd Blanche’s Justice Department, the FBI agents who investigate federal fraud answer to Kash Patel, and when two people file the same tip, Trump decides who collects. All four of them are on this list, at Nos. 28, 26, 21 and 1.

This administration won’t hold themselves accountable, and I filed all 67 anyway. I’ll explain why it still makes a difference, it’s just a short walk to get to the answer from “why does this matter?” I hope you’ll read the next few sentences and that it’ll then be clear just how much this matters.

Otpor, the Serbian student movement that helped bring down Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, used his own government’s fundraising drive against him. When his government put out boxes asking people to donate a dinar for planting crops, Otpor rolled a barrel onto Belgrade’s main pedestrian street with Milosevic’s face painted on it and a sign that read “Smash his face for just a dinar.” The two officers who showed up could arrest the people lining up to take a swing or seize the barrel, and Otpor co-founder Srdja Popovic wrote in Slate that they had “only one viable choice: Arrest the barrel.”

Fraud.gov is Trump’s dinar box, and these 67 reports are our barrel. Otpor printed more than 1 million “He’s finished” stickers before the September 2000 election, and Milosevic was out of power within two weeks of losing it. This Fraud.Gov campaign is one campaign of many that we need to take back our country. Your decision to participate in our call to action is a decision to be part of that movement that removes a tyrant. No one action ends things, but it all builds an opposition movement that continually looks for new ways to fight back, grows more and more numerous in membership, and more sophisticated with each iteration of effective opposition.

Anyone who wants to join in can post this list anywhere online, in friendly spaces and hostile ones, in addition to reporting the fraud yourself. More detailed instructions are below in our “Call To Action” section. If we each take a few minutes today, we can inundate the internet with the Fraud Administration’s actions.

CALL TO ACTION

Trump’s fraud.gov takes reports at america.gov/fraud, and each of the 67 cases above is one report. Your name is optional, and the form hands back a reference number and a copy of what you filed. A report says what the linked source reports, in your own words, with the source link pasted in. A false statement on a federal form is a crime, so the report stays on what the source says.

Once you’ve filed, you write that you submitted the fraud report and share that with the list anywhere people will see it: your social media feeds, a conservative Facebook group, the comments under any story about the program, a text or email to 10 friends, your conservative uncle, or even your weird incel MAGA neighbor.

Hey, guess who’s releasing a book today? Me. Zombie Democracy is out. The paperback is $19.99 in the ER store, or you can download the PDF for free.

Vote. Please vote. Now, the article.

In 2021, Kenneth Roth, who led Human Rights Watch for 29 years, called Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela and Russia zombie democracies: governments that keep the form of elections without the substance. In plain terms, a zombie democracy is a nation where people go through the ritual of voting but what actually happens in policy is totally disconnected from the public will. All four kept holding elections afterward. The United States holds elections too.

On July 26, 2024, Donald Trump told a Turning Point Action audience of Christians, “You won’t have to vote anymore.” He did not cancel the elections. From May 22, 2025, through June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court let him remove members of four independent agencies and withhold $4 billion Congress had appropriated. Trump fired 17 inspectors general on Jan. 24, 2025. ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, grew to about 29,000 employees by July 2026, roughly 8,000 more than on the day he took office. He banned three newsrooms from the White House on Sept. 18, 2026. Elections continued through all of it. A public that loses faith in elections as a route to reform gets radicalized, so the regime stays short of that: obstruction and middling interference are enough to give the appearance that we just need to vote harder next time, or that maybe some investigations can happen.

I wrote Zombie Democracy to find out whether the United States has become one. The book is built on a test of eight questions, one for each thing your vote is supposed to control, asking whether it still does.

1. Representation. Does the House still reflect how the country voted?
2. The power of the purse. Does Congress still decide what the government spends?
3. Rule of law. Does the executive obey court orders?
4. An impartial court. Does the Supreme Court rule the same way for presidents of both parties?
5. Civilian control of force. Do the military, the National Guard, ICE and federal law enforcement answer to whomever the voters elect?
6. A free press. Can reporters cover the executive from inside its buildings without being barred for what they publish?
7. Political prosecutions. Can the opposition oppose without being investigated or indicted for it?
8. Accountability. Do the institutions built to catch abuse still act: the inspectors general, the whistleblower channels, the bar committees, the prosecutors and the Senate?

The book asks the same eight questions about Russia, Belarus, Venezuela, Turkey and Hungary before it asks them about the United States, and it ends with what our states can do about it. I saved the hope for the end because it has to be earned.

Every question in the test is about a federal office, and the state offices are on the ballot Tuesday too. A governor can keep the state police out of federal immigration raids. A secretary of state can refuse to hand the voter file to the Justice Department. An attorney general can sue. A legislature can charter a public bank and build a state health plan. Those are the people who decide whether a state uses the powers it already has, and we pick them on Tuesday.

If you want the whole thing, the PDF is free for everyone, and the paperback is $19.99 in the ER store.

None of this keeps going without you. This publication runs on readers, and if you want to keep it running, buy the book, grab some merch from the store or become a paid subscriber. Every bit of it goes back into this work.

Two-thirds of the dictators in Milan Svolik’s data fell to their own insiders. The two years to Jan. 20, 2029 are where this regime’s insiders decide.

Will this last? The comparative literature on authoritarian durability addresses that question directly, with datasets of every dictatorship since 1946, every democracy that died, every campaign to overthrow a government since 1900 and every election an autocrat lost. This article reviews that literature and applies its findings to the elections and uprisings of the past year in Brazil, Hungary, Nepal, Madagascar, Iran and South Korea.

The question “will this last” is four different questions, and the research answers each one separately. The constitutional order is one object, and the autocratization research (V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Nancy Bermeo’s work on backsliding) measures whether that order survives. The ruling coalition, MAGA and the officials and donors who hold power with it, is a second object, and the authoritarian durability research measures whether a government like this one keeps power. The leader is a third, because the research on personalist rule separates the leader’s exit from the regime’s survival. The country itself is a fourth, and the political instability research measures whether the United States stays governable and at peace.

In March the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, which scores democracy in 202 countries from hundreds of indicators coded by thousands of country experts, moved the United States out of its liberal democracy category and into electoral democracy. Their report puts American democracy back at the level of 1965 and describes the scale and speed of the change as unprecedented in modern times.

Freedom House, founded in 1941 and publishing Freedom in the World since 1973, scored the United States 81 of 100, its lowest score ever, a 3-point drop matched among free countries only by Bulgaria.

Bright Line Watch, the survey project political scientists at Dartmouth, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester have conducted since 2017, had 568 political scientists rate American democracy at 60 on a 100-point scale in July, down from 67 in November 2024. Protect Democracy’s Authoritarian Threat Index, built on the Authoritarian Warning Survey, which George Washington University political scientists conduct by polling a pool of about 1,000 democracy scholars every weekday, reads 3.4 of 5, severe threat.

All four of those measures answer the same question, whether the constitutional order survives. None of them answers whether this government keeps power, and that is the question the rest of this article is about.

Flávio Bolsonaro, at a podium in Brasília that night with his running mate and his campaign coordinator beside him, said it is “impossible to recognize the outcome of this election”, and that his lawyers will ask the courts to annul it. Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court, which administers and certifies the country’s elections, reported that its election-day integrity test, in which auditors cast paper ballots into randomly chosen voting machines and compare them with the machine tallies, found no discrepancy.

In April Hungarian voters ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. The European Parliament had declared Hungary in 2022 to be “a hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. Péter Magyar led the Tisza party to 138 of the 199 seats in parliament, a two-thirds majority, on record turnout of about 79 percent.

On Nov. 3 the United States holds its own election, and either thing can happen here. The governing party can lose and concede, as Orbán did, or the losing side can contest the count, as Flávio Bolsonaro is doing. The difference between Brazil’s contested count and an American one is who commands the police and soldiers. Flávio Bolsonaro is contesting the result from a Senate seat, with neither under his command. An American refusal would come from the party that holds the presidency and, with it, command of the armed forces and ICE.

Milan Svolik, a Yale political scientist whose 2012 book The Politics of Authoritarian Rule built a dataset of every dictatorship from 1946 to 2008, argues that every authoritarian government faces two problems, control of the people it rules and power sharing with the elites it rules with, and that the second one ends more regimes.

His 2009 study in the American Journal of Political Science counted 303 dictators who lost power by nonconstitutional means and found 205 removed by regime insiders and 32 by popular uprising. Two-thirds of the dictators in the dataset fell to the people standing next to them.

The rule for the United States follows directly: the people positioned in the data to end this regime are inside its coalition, the senators, governors, donors, generals and judges whose cooperation the coalition needs, and every indicator worth reading measures their cohesion.

Eva Bellin, a Brandeis political scientist, wrote the 2004 article in Comparative Politics that put the security forces at the center of the durability research. Her finding: a regime survives as long as its coercive apparatus keeps both the capacity and the will to repress, and four things set those, the fiscal health of the forces, their international support networks, whether they are professional or built on patronage, and how many people are in the streets.

Her 2012 reconsideration after the Arab Spring kept the will to repress as the decisive variable: the Egyptian army let Hosni Mubarak fall and the Syrian army fired on Syrians. A professional force promoted by merit and bound by law is the kind that declines to fire, and the last 13 months produced two readings of that variable.

In Madagascar, Col. Michael Randrianirina of the CAPSAT unit, the unit that had put President Andry Rajoelina in power in 2009, posted a video on Oct. 11, 2025 telling the security forces to refuse any order to shoot the demonstrators; his soldiers walked the protesters into the capital’s main square the next day, the gendarmerie joined on Oct. 13, Rajoelina left the country, and Randrianirina was sworn in as interim president on Oct. 17.

In the United States, Bellin’s finding comes down to which force gets the order to fire: the military, promoted by merit and sworn to the Constitution, or the second force the regime is building. Congress gave ICE $76.5 billion, nearly 10 times its annual budget, close to $30 billion of it to hire 10,000 officers.

Steven Levitsky of Harvard and Lucan Way of the University of Toronto, the two scholars who named competitive authoritarianism in 2002, published Revolution and Dictatorship with Princeton in 2022 to answer why some dictatorships survive everything. Their finding: the most durable dictatorships on earth, China, Cuba, Iran, the Soviet Union and Vietnam, were born of violent social revolution, and the counterrevolutionary wars that followed destroyed every rival power center and forced the party and the security forces into a single loyal structure.

Iran is on that list, and January was their finding in real time. Protests over the collapse of the currency began on Dec. 28, 2025 and spread across the country; on Jan. 8 the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, its Basij battalions and the police opened fire nationwide and the government cut the internet. The regime’s own Supreme National Security Council put the dead at 3,117, Human Rights Watch found evidence that thousands were killed, and by Jan. 12 the protests were over with no sign of defection from the government or its security forces.

Henry Hale of George Washington University, whose 2015 book Patronal Politics covers every post-Soviet regime, showed that single-pyramid systems built around one patron break down when succession looms and the networks under the patron start maneuvering for what comes after him.

This presidency ends Jan. 20, 2029, Trump turned 80 in June, and the networks under him are already maneuvering; Bright Line Watch’s experts expect American democracy to fall to 49 by 2032 if a Trump-endorsed Republican wins in 2028, to rise to 67 if a Republican he did not endorse wins, and to 72 if a Democrat wins. By the personalism research the regime is at its strongest now and at its weakest the day its coalition starts planning for his exit.

Marc Morjé Howard of Georgetown and Philip Roessler of William & Mary published the study of elections under competitive authoritarianism in the American Journal of Political Science in 2006. They asked why incumbents who use coercion and fraud sometimes lose anyway, and their answer across every case was a strategic opposition coalition, which explained those incumbent defeats better than any structural or institutional factor.

Erica Chenoweth of the Harvard Kennedy School and Maria Stephan, then at the State Department, built the dataset of every campaign to overthrow a government or win independence from 1900 to 2006 for Why Civil Resistance Works (2011) and found nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53 percent of the time against 26 percent for violent ones. The mechanism is the one Bellin found from the other side: a campaign wins when it produces defections inside the regime, including the security forces. The newest rows are the 2025 youth protests in Nepal, Madagascar, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, Peru and the Philippines, and governments fell in two of the seven, the two where the army declined to put the protests down.

Marina Nord, Fabio Angiolillo, Martin Lundstedt, Felix Wiebrecht and Staffan Lindberg of the V-Dem team published the first systematic count of what they call U-turns in Democratization in 2025: 52 percent of all autocratization episodes since 1900 became U-turns, 73 percent in the last 30 years, and 90 percent of the U-turns ended with democracy restored or improved. V-Dem’s policy brief on the same data adds that in most of those cases the democracy broke down first and came back, and that the reversal came on average within five years of onset. Hungary’s reversal came through the election the regime still had to hold, 16 years after Orbán took office, and Poland’s came in 2023 after eight.

I have written in this publication that once you elect fascists, elections do not remove them, and the record behind that sentence stands: Germany and Italy ended in war, Spain at the dictator’s death, Portugal by a military coup, and Greece’s junta after a failed war in Cyprus. No consolidated fascist regime has ended at a ballot box. The U-turn data describe a different kind of regime, one Levitsky and Way named competitive authoritarianism: the elections are tilted, and the government can still lose them. Russia holds elections, and Putin cannot lose one; Orbán held elections, and in April he lost one. In a competitive authoritarian regime the election removes no one by itself. The insiders do, and the election is where the insiders decide. The United States is in that category: its elections are tilted, and the government can still lose them.

Matthew Graham and Svolik published Democracy in America? in the American Political Science Review in 2020, a survey experiment with a representative sample of Americans choosing between candidates, and found that in matchups built to resemble real races only 3.5 percent of voters abandoned their own candidate over an undemocratic position. By their numbers a majority-party candidate in most House districts can violate a democratic principle and keep the seat, which leaves the elites inside the coalition as the check.

Bright Line Watch’s experts are 94 percent confident the votes will be counted as voters intend in their own states and 82 percent nationwide ; the public is at 74 and 60. The share of Republicans who say American elections are free of pervasive fraud fell from 50 percent in February 2025 to 25 percent after a year of the president claiming the opposite, including his July 16 national address, and Republican confidence in the national count fell from 70 to 58 percent between March and July. And in Bright Line Watch’s standing measure of the two Republican factions, Republican Party supporters outnumber Trump supporters in 2026, reversing the balance that held through most of 2024 and 2025. In Svolik’s terms every one of those is a cohesion reading, and every one fell this year. The elites are being told by their own voters that the elections are rigged, which is the condition under which a coalition either accepts the count or contests it.

Four results are possible on Nov. 3. If the governing party loses the House and accepts the count, that is the liberalizing electoral outcome in Howard and Roessler’s data, the one Colombia produced on June 21, when the governing coalition’s candidate lost the runoff by under a point and President Gustavo Petro, after alleging fraud, recognized the result three days later; it is the point at which the coalition’s insiders start recalculating, and the five-year clock the V-Dem team measured starts. If it loses and contests the count, the variables become Bellin’s at once, which force takes the order to block the count and whether the courts ratify the refusal, the sequence Brazil entered on Sunday night; the calibrated experts put a 14 percent chance on two or more losing governor or Senate candidates in competitive races refusing to concede, and conditional on a refusal the experts give 27 percent to the winner being kept out of office past Jan. 31, 2027.

Here is what I learned. This regime has two of the assets the research found under the dictatorships that lasted, money and an electoral machine that still turns out, and none of the others. Iran has the fused force the durable regimes were born with and used it on Jan. 8; this regime has a coalition, and a coalition is what gave way in Seoul, Kathmandu, Antananarivo and Budapest in the last two years: a parliament that climbed the walls, an army that would not clear the streets, a unit that changed sides, and an electorate that turned out at 79 percent against its own district map.

By the field’s own measures the United States is an autocratization episode in a wealthy democracy, and of those in the last 30 years, 73 percent reversed, most within five years of onset, many after the democracy had broken, and the reversals came through the elections the regime still had to hold. Nov. 3 and November 2028 are that episode’s two elections, and Jan. 20, 2029 is the day the second one has to produce a transfer of power. The elections decide whether the insiders recalculate, the insiders decide whether the regime lasts, and the voters decide the first of those two on Nov. 3 and again in November 2028.

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CALL TO ACTION

Who you are contacting: your governor and your state attorney general.

What you are asking for: a public statement before Nov. 3 that state and local police will enforce state law at every polling place against anyone who interferes with a voter, whether federal agent or private party.

What that is:Several states wrote laws this year barring or limiting troops and federal agents at polling places, and Bellin’s research finds the force that matters is the one that takes the order. Your governor commands your state’s National Guard and, in most states, its state police, and your attorney general is the state’s chief law officer. A statement from both, made before Election Day, tells every sheriff and police chief in the state what to do if an armed agent shows up at a precinct, and tells the agent too. The research also finds participation and a united opposition to be the variables that decide an election like this one, and elite defection to be what ends a regime like this one, so voting on Nov. 3 and bringing the people in your life to the polls with you is the action with the most evidence behind it in a century of data.

How to write it: in your own words. Say who you are, where you live, what you do and why you care, so it never reads as a form letter. In Washington State that is Gov. Bob Ferguson and Attorney General Nick Brown. Everywhere else, find your attorney general here and find your governor here. Email, call, send a free fax through FaxZero, or mail a letter.

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The European Union will spend €192.8 billion in 2026, 1 percent of the 27 members’ gross national income, and Congress spent $7 trillion in fiscal 2025, 23.3 percent of the United States economy.

A reader asked me whether the United States would be better off as a European-style union of countries, and those two budgets are where I started, because the money is the first thing that changes. A union that spends 1 percent of the economy leaves everything else with its members, and I wanted to know what the blue states would do with the other 22 percent, so I went through the EU treaties and the EU’s record since 2022 one power at a time.

Each EU member commands its own police and soldiers, and the treaties give the union no army and no command over any member’s forces.

Under the EU treaties neither order could be written, because the only soldiers in Illinois would be Illinois soldiers.

Each member also conducts its own national elections, and the union counts none of the votes.

On March 31, 2026 the president signed Executive Order 14399, which directs federal agencies to build lists of eligible voters for each state and tells the Postal Service to restrict mail ballots to its own list, with prosecution and the loss of federal money threatened against election officials who refuse. A coalition of 23 attorneys general sued within days, Judge Indira Talwani of the federal district court in Massachusetts declared the key sections unconstitutional on June 25, and on Aug. 24 the Supreme Court stayed her ruling 6 to 3 on the ground that the states had sued before suffering a concrete injury.

Under the EU treaties, who votes and how the ballot arrives is each member’s law alone, and no office in Brussels can write a voter list for Vienna.

Each member pays for its own health system, and the EU treaties leave the organization and financing of health care to the members.

Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, legislators in 21 states have filed 66 single-payer bills, by the count of Erin Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey, the health law professors who surveyed every one of them in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and every one of those bills has to be drafted around the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, the federal statute that preempts state regulation of employer health plans and leaves a state a narrow and risky path to the employer spending a single-payer system needs.

Whole Washington, the coalition of health care professionals and volunteers behind the Washington Health Trust, is bringing Senate Bill 5233 and House Bill 1445 back to the Legislature in 2027, and the bill will carry the same ERISA workarounds. In the EU, a Washington State health trust would answer to Olympia alone.

The EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights binds a member only when the member is applying EU law, so a member’s gun law or campaign finance law answers to its own constitutional court and, under a separate treaty, to the European Court of Human Rights. The U.S. Supreme Court applies the Bill of Rights to every state.

In 2022 the Court struck down New York’s concealed-carry licensing law in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, and in 2012 the Court reversed the Montana Supreme Court in American Tradition Partnership v. Bullock and applied Citizens United to the ban on corporate election spending Montana voters passed in 1912. Under the EU model, New York keeps its licensing law and Montana keeps its ban.

Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union lets any member leave for any reason. The member decides under its own constitution and notifies the European Council, and the two sides then have two years to negotiate a withdrawal agreement, which the Council of the EU approves by a strong qualified majority of 72 percent of the remaining members. If no deal is reached, the treaties simply stop applying to that member two years after notice, and the leaving member sits out the Council’s discussions and votes on its own withdrawal. No other member can block the exit itself.

The U.S. Constitution has no exit clause, and in Texas v. White in 1869 Chief Justice Salmon Chase wrote that a state’s place in the Union could be undone only through revolution or through consent of the States.

A member that can leave on two years’ notice can bargain for the terms of staying, and the EU has granted those terms: Denmark kept the krone through a negotiated opt-out from the euro, and the United Kingdom stayed outside the euro and the Schengen passport-free zone for decades before it left. California, New York, Illinois and Washington State could bargain the same way for any union program they rejected, with departure as the fallback.

A union with a 1 percent budget cannot pay for Social Security and Medicare, so each member funds its own retirement and health programs, and that is the part of the deal the blue states already pay for.

Over the five federal fiscal years before 2020, New York’s taxpayers sent $168.2 billion more to the United States government than New York got back in federal spending, the most of any state, by the count of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the State University of New York’s public policy research arm, which has tracked the balance of payments since 2015. Laura Schultz, the institute’s executive director of research, names New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois as the states that pay more in taxes than they receive in a normal year, with Massachusetts and Connecticut behind them.

In an EU-style union those states keep that money and set their own benefit levels. West Virginia and Mississippi, which receive more federal spending than they pay in, lose the transfers.

Hungary cast 21 of the 48 vetoes EU members have used, because the treaties require unanimity for foreign policy, sanctions, taxation and enlargement while about 80 percent of EU law passes by qualified majority. On Feb. 20, 2026 Hungary’s representative blocked the €90 billion loan to Ukraine, and on Feb. 23 Viktor Orbán’s government blocked the 20th sanctions package against Russia. The union never suspended Hungary’s vote in Orbán’s 16 years in power.

Every power a treaty gives California it also gives Texas and Florida, so the design rule for an American version is qualified majority voting for everything, with no unanimity carve-outs.

An American version keeps the dollar, so the treaty needs the fiscal backstop the euro lacked in 2010: a union fund that stands behind a member’s debt, or a rule that lets a member borrow against the common currency when its economy fails.

The Brexit figures measure leaving, and only leaving. The UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility, the government’s independent fiscal forecaster, estimates Brexit will leave British output about 4 percent smaller in the long run than it would have been inside the EU, and a 2025 paper with a senior Bank of England economist among its authors put the loss at 6 percent to 8 percent of GDP per person. A member that stays pays none of that, because the EU keeps a single market and a customs union among the members who stay, and under an American treaty a truck from Seattle would cross into Idaho the way a truck from Lyon crosses into Turin today.

The EU has no army and no nuclear weapons, and the treaties leave defense to the members and to NATO. A treaty of American states has to decide who commands the Navy, the Air Force, the Army and the warheads in the Montana and Wyoming silos, and the EU’s record offers no answer, because no EU member ever had to divide an existing military. The closest precedent is the one the United States already uses for the Guard: a force a state commands until a union authority calls it up under rules the treaty spells out, which is the arrangement the Supreme Court enforced for Illinois in December.

Texas v. White permits dissolution only by revolution or by the consent of the states, and Chase never said what consent requires: an act of Congress, an interstate compact Congress approves, a vote of every state legislature, or a constitutional amendment ratified by 38 state legislatures under Article V all fit his words. The states that lose the transfers hold the votes to withhold that consent, and any 13 states can block an amendment.

The other route, a unilateral exit law and a lawsuit that asks the Court to overrule White the way Dobbs overruled Roe, fails under the Dobbs test itself: the majority asked whether a claimed right is rooted in the Constitution’s text and the nation’s history, and the text has no exit clause while the history includes the Civil War.

What I learned is that the blue states are already building the EU arrangement by statute, without the treaty.

Maryland’s law does it for the money, Whole Washington’s 2027 bill does it for health care, the December ruling for Illinois does it for the Guard, and the Massachusetts ruling did it for elections until the Supreme Court stayed it in August. Those are the four powers the EU treaties give every member, won one statute and one lawsuit at a time, and the arithmetic says the blue states can afford the rest of the deal: New York alone sent $168.2 billion more than it received over five years, and the EU pays for the whole union with 1 percent.

For the states that pay in, the answer to the reader’s question is yes, and the price of waiting for a treaty nobody will ratify is the 18 months of Guard deployments and voter-list orders they just lived through.

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Each of the four powers above is won in a state capitol, and the first one is already law in Maryland. The people who decide it for you are your state senator and your state representative, who can file the Federal Obligations Enforcement Act in your state’s next session; the ER’s model bill, built from Maryland’s Chapter 248, is a Google Doc you can open by clicking this sentence.

The message is one sentence, that they file the Federal Obligations Enforcement Act and tell you when, followed by who you are, what you do and why you care, in your own words, because a legislative office reads a hundred identical messages as one message and a letter that sounds like a constituent as a hundred. This article is free to forward to anyone who wants to know why their state should have the same powers as Denmark.

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Originally published at https://cmarmitage.substack.com on October 25, 2026.

Everything described in this guide is legal and constitutionally protected political speech. You have the right to access public campaign finance records. You have the right to contact any person based on public information. You have the right to educate citizens about their representatives’ positions and voting records. These rights are protected by the First Amendment and affirmed by federal law and FEC advisory opinions. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to intimidate you. They’re counting on you not knowing your rights.

You have immense power to influence the behavior of politicians.

Using that power begins by recognizing that even the best politicians answer to whoever pays them. It’s just a fact that funding helps win races and even the most well intentioned representative needs to do that math to win election and reelection. But most donors don’t actually know what they’re funding, they’re going on momentum. There’s a powerful tool that even individual activists can use and it starts with the fact that in most states, political contributions above certain thresholds are public record.

That record typically includes name, address, occupation, and employer. Every state has its own campaign finance database. You start by searching “[your state] campaign finance” or “[your state] secretary of state campaign contributions” to find yours. The people funding your state representative live in your community, run local businesses, serve on local boards. They might not even agree with what their money supports. Maybe nobody’s asked them.

The same file exists for Congress at FEC.gov, and the method below works on your member of Congress the same way. Every campaign for Congress reports the name, mailing address, employer and occupation of anyone whose contributions pass $200 in an election cycle, and the Federal Election Commission posts the reports. An individual can give a House or Senate candidate $3,500 per election, $7,000 across a primary and a general, so the list of people who maxed out is short and every name on it is in the report.

Want to make your representative listen, start by pulling their campaign finance reports from your state’s database. Find the donors who maxed out, the limits vary by state but typically range from $2,000 to $10,000. Even previous years donors are valuable for incumbents. The real estate developer. The law firm partners. The local business owners. These people profit from your state’s functional infrastructure like schools, power grids, and public utilities.

In Nevada the state maximum is $10,000, and The Nevada Independent, the nonprofit newsroom that covers the state’s politics, reported on Oct. 21 that in the open Assembly District 2 race in Las Vegas the largest check in each campaign was a single $10,000 contribution: a seventh of Republican Drew Teitelbaum’s roughly $68,000 and nearly a third of Democrat Kamilah Bywaters’ roughly $32,000.

Ask them a simple question: “Did you know Representative Whateverson refuses to support interstate compacts that would let us keep our tax dollars for our own infrastructure instead of subsidizing poorly managed states?” Or say whatever you want, because if you make your point well enough then you better believe you’ll have the attention of that representative. The victory isn’t in getting the donor to stop contributing. The victory is saying “We see you.”

State election laws explicitly allow you to contact these donors. You’re exercising your First Amendment rights to political speech. You generally can’t solicit for another candidate, but you can absolutely educate donors about what their money supports.

You think you don’t matter because you’re not rich? That’s exactly why this works. Donors expect calls from lobbyists, not from nurses and teachers in their own community. When a local parent calls a business owner about education votes, or when a small business owner contacts a law firm about anti-competition policies their representative supports, they’re going to listen. You’re not asking for money. You’re asking them to explain why they fund someone working against your shared community’s interests.

One of the most valuable results of this strategy is that all the top donors will start calling that representative to complain. Let me tell you, the state house member will answer calls from people who have given them $5,000. Joshua Kalla and David Broockman, political scientists then at Berkeley, measured this on Congress in 2013 by asking 191 House offices for meetings about a pending bill, with the requesters identified at random as donors or as constituents. The offices put donors in front of the member or chief of staff 12.5 percent of the time and constituents 2.4 percent.

Start with your local representatives. Call their office about specific policies like state attorney general independence measures, interstate compacts for resource sharing that bypass federal oversight, and billing red states when their residents use our hospitals and emergency rooms. When they refuse (they probably will), you’ll have your talking points. Then contact their donors: “We called Representative Whateverson about requiring red states to reimburse us when their residents use our hospitals and clinics because they’ve gutted their own healthcare. They refused to even consider it. As someone who funds their campaign, do you support other states freeloading off our medical infrastructure?”

The communication is educational. Letters, emails, calls, mailers, meetings, megaphones outside of businesses. Here’s the framework, put it in your own words and swap in the issues that matter to your community:

Opening: Reference the public campaign finance record showing their precise contribution.

Education: Share two or three specific votes or positions the representative has taken or their statement refusing to engage with various ideas when you reached out to them.

Local Impact: Explain what this means for your community, be as specific as you can.

The Question: Ask a specific question, for example “are you comfortable with funding a politician who votes against feeding hungry children in our schools?”

Welcome to the new era of donor accountability. The donor class has never been challenged. Take them to account if they’re funding fascism. Ask why they are donating to someone who has introduced three book bans and zero bills to address the local clean water crisis?

Give politicians a chance first. Document the time and specifics of their response, or lack of response. Then inform their funders.

You can start this process now and you’ll have donors asking questions that make those representatives real nervous. The earlier you begin, the more pressure builds. A few concerned donors in January becomes a dozen by March becomes a story by summer.

The process is straightforward. Your state’s campaign finance database lists every donor. Search for your representative. Download their reports. Start with maximum donors. Write professionally and keep it simple:

“Representative Whateverson opposes municipal broadband that would provide cheaper internet and generate revenue for our city. Why does your business not want the rest of the community to have more affordable internet?”

“You gave them $4,300, are you okay with them voting against clean drinking water for our county?”

“Our city just paid for a stadium downtown while closing homeless shelters and annexing livable space. Do you support Councilmember Whatever’s decision on this?”

For businesses, adjust accordingly: “Your company depends on our state’s infrastructure and educated workforce. You contributed $10,000 to someone in active opposition to public schools. Your customers might want to know whether you agree with these positions.”

Remember to keep it simple, this isn’t a debate. Just a question. You can also share the letter you wrote, share the script you used, or even invite people over for a pizza and donor contact party.

When constituents start asking other constituents specific questions about specific votes, the political calculation changes.

The data is public, the contact is legal, the questions are simple. If they don’t give a straight answer, then just annotate that they refused to answer the question. For example “Do you support letting children in your municipality go hungry?” “Do you support corporate welfare while reducing disability assistance?” “Do you support allowing masked and warrantless federal officials unmitigated access to illegally assault and kidnap innocent community members?”

A refusal to give a yes or a no can now accurately be framed as “they refused to answer.”

For now, start calling your school board, city, state representatives. Document refusal. Then ask their donors the hard questions. The stakes are too high not to hit them where it hurts. Right in the donations.

Who you are contacting: your state senator and your state representative.

What you are asking for: a public commitment to file a bill in 2027 creating a state bank on the Bank of North Dakota model.

A state bank can bring your state, or your city, millions in additional revenue every year without raising taxes or cutting social safety nets. North Dakota has owned one since 1919, and it earned the state $231.8 million in 2025. Is it that hard to believe that starting a bank is profitable? Your state’s figure is in North Dakota’s Bank Earned the State $231.8 Million Last Year, and the one-page summary gives their office the findings on a single page.

You can send either one to your own state senator and state representative and ask them directly: can our state do this, and will you file it? Find your state legislators at OpenStates. Email works, and so does a call. Your own words work better than anything copied from here, because a legislative office reads a hundred identical messages as one message and a letter that sounds like a constituent as a hundred.

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Originally published at https://cmarmitage.substack.com on October 23, 2026.

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In the last week of December 2014, New York City police officers made 66 percent fewer arrests than the same week a year earlier, and traffic tickets fell 94 percent, from 10,069 to 587. Summonses for offenses like public drinking fell from 4,831 to 300, and parking tickets fell 92 percent. The New York Post obtained the department’s own enforcement figures and reported them as a work stoppage in all but official declaration. On Jan. 9, 2015, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton confirmed in a radio interview that officers had deliberately stopped the discretionary part of the job. He said they kept answering 911 calls and making the arrests that had to be made, and that through those weeks “crime continued to go down.”

I went back to that record because of how this month’s coverage describes the choices in front of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. On Sept. 24 the NYPD arrested dozens of protesters outside the United Nations during Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit, some of them elected officials from the Democratic Socialists of America, with the Strategic Response Group among the arresting units. On Oct. 8 an ICE agent shot 28-year-old Oscar Belgal in Marble Hill, and at the protests that followed, officers knocked down congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier. The national DSA then demanded that Mamdani fire Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and abolish the Strategic Response Group.

Mamdani answered on Oct. 12 with a use-of-force review, the first of its kind in a decade by City Hall’s account, and $2.6 million more for the Department of Investigation’s oversight of the NYPD. On Oct. 13 he said Tisch stays. Patrick Hendry, president of the Police Benevolent Association, the union for NYPD patrol officers, said the review was an attempt to appease a base that “wants a wholesale dismantling of the NYPD.” Political analyst Michael Lange, whose newsletter covers New York City politics, wrote on Oct. 15 that the standing fear at City Hall is that firing a commissioner provokes the rank and file, “prompting sick-outs and slowdowns.” Tisya Mavuram, The Nation’s engagement editor, wrote on Oct. 19 that Mamdani keeps his distance from the department because “a police strike could derail his administration.”

That fear names a specific act: officers withhold work until the mayor backs down. The NYPD rank and file have carried it out at scale once, so the record of that episode is the test of what the threat is worth. The 2014 slowdown began on Dec. 22, two days after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu to death in their patrol car in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and three weeks after a Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. A memo circulating among officers that weekend said no arrests or summonses were “to be taken unless absolutely necessary.” The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association denied writing it and denied sanctioning any slowdown. The numbers above are what followed. By the third week, the city’s Independent Budget Office put the loss at $10 million a week in parking ticket revenue alone.

The best-known analysis of those weeks is a 2017 paper in Nature Human Behaviour, the peer-reviewed social science journal of the Nature group, by Christopher Sullivan, a political scientist at Louisiana State University, and Zachary O’Keeffe of the University of Michigan. They took weekly NYPD data from 76 precincts and compared enforcement and civilian complaints of the seven major felonies across the slowdown weeks with the same weeks a year earlier. Complaints of major crimes fell 3 to 6 percent during the slowdown, with the drop concentrated in felony assault and burglary, and the effect faded in the spring of 2015 as enforcement returned. Their total came to about 2,100 fewer major crime complaints. Their explanation is that aggressive enforcement of petty offenses erodes residents’ willingness to comply with the law, so taking it away improved compliance.

The paper has a published challenge. In August 2024 Aaron Chalfin and David Mitre-Becerril, criminologists at the University of Pennsylvania, and Morgan Williams Jr. of Barnard College re-analyzed the same data in the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics, a journal built for re-checking published results. Their central finding is that the slowdown varied a great deal by precinct, and the largest drops in major crime came in precincts other than the ones where enforcement fell most, which they call “a quintessential fallacy in statistical reasoning” in the original analysis. They conclude the slowdown changed major crime very little in the short term, in either direction.

The dispute between the two papers is over the cause of the drop. Sullivan and O’Keeffe credit the seven weeks without broken-windows enforcement. Chalfin’s team credits the citywide decline already underway, the one that closed 2014 with 332 homicides against 335 the year before. The union’s threat is a third claim, that the city becomes dangerous when officers stop writing summonses, and both papers contradict that claim. The one time the NYPD tested that claim at full scale, major crime complaints fell and the city lost ticket revenue.

On Oct. 6 the NYPD reported major crime down 6.6 percent citywide this year, with the fewest murders and shootings in the city’s recorded history through nine months. Those are Tisch’s numbers under Mamdani. If the PBA answers the use-of-force review or the end of the Strategic Response Group with another slowdown, the count starts the first week: complaints of the seven major felonies in each precinct against the same weeks of 2025, matched this time against how far enforcement fell in that precinct, which is the comparison Chalfin’s team demanded.

What I learned going back through this is that the slowdown Lange and Mavuram describe as the danger to Mamdani’s administration has already happened, and the city came out of it with lower crime and less parking revenue. The Strategic Response Group and the gang database are his decisions to make on the merits. Two council members, Julie Won and Carmen De La Rosa, asked Mamdani this month for a new commissioner, and the answer to any official who says the union will shut the city down is seven weeks of the NYPD’s own numbers.

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CALL TO ACTION

Mamdani pledged during his campaign to disband the Strategic Response Group, and that decision is his. New Yorkers who want it made can say so through the Contact the Mayor page and to their own representative through the City Council’s district lookup, and the message is the record above: in the seven weeks the NYPD last withheld work, arrests fell 66 percent and major crime complaints fell with them. Readers in any other city where the police union has made the same threat can put the same record in front of their own mayor, and this article is free to forward to anyone who has heard that threat.

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Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
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Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross
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