I predict that Trump will win, but I expect it will be too close for comfort. There may be losses in places like Michigan and Wisconsin, where polls are tight and the election rules permit various shenanigans. Even if Trump wins, there will almost certainly be a lot of post-election machinations, legal battles, and worse.

While a landside result for Trump would likely demoralize his opponents, I expect the Democrats will have an energetic and hostile response to a Trump victory if it’s a close loss. This hostility will be magnified if they hold on to the Senate or retake all of Congress.

Hostile would include physical violence, such as we witnessed in the attacks on the attendees of Trump’s inauguration and worse. Setting the stage for a constitutional crisis, lunatic congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has even promised to invalidate a Trump victory and has called for security measures adequate to deal with the Civil War level of violence he expects in response.

That said, I do not expect the support for violence and extra-legal responses to receive as much support as in 2020. In other words, it appears some sanity is creeping back into the ruling class.

Democrats Have Already Shown a Scorched Earth Response

The background history is rather simple: Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary was a surprise, and the elites only kicked into resistance mode after he was elected, tacitly approving violence in the streets, hamstringing him with investigations, encouraging noncompliance by the bureaucracy, and embracing draconian responses to the COVID pandemic to sabotage a strong economy.

In spite of all this, Trump set conditions for economic growth before and after the COVID lockdowns, and he was cruising to reelection in 2020 until the entire system united to stop him. This unified response included Pfizer delaying the news about an effective vaccine, billionaires pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into controlling the election process, months of BLM race riots fomenting chaos and delegitimizing his leadership, rank insubordination by senior military leaders, and a sustained media campaign to present the aging Joe Biden as a vigorous and effective leader.

It seems that some people on the Democrat side have gotten the message that such a scorched earth, win-at-all-costs strategy can be counterproductive. The Democratic Party’s senior leaders’ refusal to allow normal primary dynamics to play out is one reason the party has ended up with three mediocre candidates in a row.

Biden won the general election in 2020 only through strenuous back-channel efforts that have been euphemistically labeled “election fortification.” No one meets very many Biden fans in real life, yet somehow he got millions more votes than Obama and Hillary Clinton.

He has deteriorated so badly in office that he had to be replaced midgame after winning the nomination, and Harris has proven to be equally mediocre. With a bad and uninspiring candidate at the forefront, the media and party officials must work overtime to deal with daily crises, including accidentally telling the truth and revealing one’s actual beliefs.

Zero Sum Identity Politics Is Turning Off White and Male Voters

It is possible the Democratic Party is open to change in other ways. For example, I think that we are now past “peak woke.” The hate and doxxing campaigns, calls for censorship, egregious discrimination against whites and Asians, and institutional support for these un-American practices now face a widespread backlash.

This cultural moment is far from over, and it may not ever disappear completely. But, now that some of these tactics have been deployed against Israel’s critics on the left, there is more dissensus among Democrats about vigorous persecution of hate speech, misinformation, and the like.

It also seems the Democrats realize that their version of identity politics has certain inherent limitations. By neglecting the concept of the common good and selling policies simply because they are advantageous to women or minorities, they have simultaneously turned off whites and men, who are not admitted into the leftist victim pantheon. Unfortunately for them, votes by white men count the same as those of their preferred groups.

Not knowing many straight white men, Democratic attempts at outreach have been ham-fisted and ineffective. This includes selecting the odd Tim Walz for the VP slot, the poorly named “White Dudes for Harris” affinity group, and this TV ad, which is shockingly cringe and off-putting. Democratic strategists James Carville and John Judis have both criticized the Democrats’ tone-deafness and extremism in recent years.

In these small gestures of retreat, I suspect enlightened self-interest is the chief motive. In most cycles of violence and retaliation, both sides get more extreme over time. Democrats know that after everything they have done to Trump, they risk the same being done to themselves in retaliation. Having breached innumerable customs and laws, they have lost standing to complain about these activities when committed by their opponents.

The duller among them don’t understand this and credulously warn that Trump might prosecute his political enemies and fire his partisan opposition if he wins . . . as if exactly that has not already happened to him and his associates.

Those with a slightly longer view understand that this Hobbesian struggle will not end well for anybody, and it would make sense to find an off-ramp. There was a glimmer of hope when almost everyone said something conciliatory in the immediate wake of the first, nearly-successful assassination attempt against Trump.

Unfortunately, the Democrats’ rhetoric soon returned to crazytown.

A Successful Precedent of Moderation

There is some precedent for the Democrats corralling their crazies. When Bill Clinton led his party to power as a New Democrat in 1992, substantive policy changes were at the heart of his candidacy, particularly in the primary.

The Democrats had been out of office twelve years when he won in 1992. Clinton was no Mondale or Dukakis, each of whom was a self-described liberal who would be thoroughly beaten in national elections. Rather, Clinton was for the death penalty, critical of the welfare system, embraced free trade, and supported a muscular foreign policy.

Similarly, Obama ran and won as a moderate in 2008, promising to heal racial divisions, end “stupid” wars (a salient issue because of the Iraq War), and provide relief to Americans suffering from the housing crisis. He was, of course, an anti-American Marxist, but he won by pretending to be otherwise. The media worked overtime to conceal his biography, and his turn to the left during his second term would have much to do with Donald Trump’s rise to power.

The world is always changing, and, in the age of mass immigration, our country is changing quickly. Tens of millions of people from every corner of the planet have arrived since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. This demographic revolution shifted into high gear after the Democrats’ losses in the 1980s.

Large immigrant populations and an increasingly ideological public school system have done much to turn new voters into loyal partisans for the Democrats. Because of demographic changes and the country’s leftward drift, a 49-state win like Reagan’s in 1984 and Nixon’s in 1972 is essentially impossible today.

Democrats have only gotten more explicitly leftist after the Obama years. In 2016, they thought they could take the mask off and that the newly imported voters would turn the country into a one-party state like California. But nothing is static in politics. Many of the new Americans who were supposed to form the emerging Democratic majority have instead shown a surprising degree of affinity for Trump. It turns out, just like native-born Americans, that many are wary of high crime, inflation, and an arrogant ruling class, preferring instead Trump’s toughness and plain talk.

The continuing flirtation with radicalism will likely cost Democrats another election. It would be good for their party and their country if they jettisoned their current course and emphasized the rights of workers, a clean environment, civil liberties, and the cause of peace. I suspect they will only do this, however, if they lose “bigly.”

A close loss will encourage the Democrats’ worst tendencies: endless lawfare, conspiracy thinking, and fantasies of retribution against Trump and his supporters.

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Christopher Roach is an adjunct fellow of the Center for American Greatness and an attorney in private practice based in Florida. He is a double graduate of the University of Chicago and has previously been published by The Federalist, Takimag, Chronicles, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Marine Corps Gazette, and the Orlando Sentinel. The views presented are solely his own.