Secret Dems Radical Ideas to Overhaul US Government Revealed

The document is an artifact from a dangerous time: Warning that Trump would surely not concede defeat to Joe Biden, it advised Trump’s opponents to “assume the worst” would follow. It urged them to gird for a struggle not only with the president but with “institutions controlled or influenced by the GOP, including the courts.” The document forecast “militia and white supremacist activities through the inauguration — and, very likely, accelerated activity in the early months of a Biden administration.”

Plan D is sobering reading even today. It is a catalog of the defects in America’s electoral process and political culture that made it vulnerable to a rampaging demagogue— defects that some Democrats wanted to fix with drastic measures.

Should Biden lose narrowly, the report said, “layers of illegitimate structures and interventions will have contributed to it.” It closed with a warning against complacency even if Trump were to be defeated.

“A Biden win will not prove that our democracy is healthy,” the document argued, continuing: “Win, lose, or draw, we should perceive ourselves not in a singular moment of crisis but rather in what may be an era of existential challenge for American democracy.”

I first read the report soon after it was composed, when a source shared it as an off-the-record analysis to inform my thinking about 2020. At the time, I thought it was a creative assessment of potential worst-case scenarios, some of which struck me as rather remote. The January 6 insurrection was still months away.

In any event, I found Plan D more compelling than contemporaneous Democratic planning exercises that seemed more like high-concept role play for political elites. My colleague Sam Stein, then at The Daily Beast, reported on one “simulation” that foresaw the Biden campaign urging the entire West Coast to secede in a unit known as “Cascadia.” Simulation indeed.

Plan D was no game. It was devised as a battle plan. Reviewing the report years later, it is impossible not to be struck by the sense of urgency in the text — and the speed with which the impatient demand for fundamental change to American politics has dissipated among most Democrats.

So, I returned to my source and obtained permission to write about it now at a safe distance from 2020.

Back then, the group behind Plan D saw deep reform to the political system as a survival imperative for Democrats. If the party controlled government after 2020, the report said, Democrats must treat it as a “fleeting-once-in-a-generation (or perhaps lifetime) opportunity” to revise the political system. Among the targets of that proposed overhaul: a Senate biased toward rural red states, a Supreme Court stacked with right-wing appointees and an Electoral College that overruled the popular vote twice in two decades.

“First and foremost, we must rewrite the rules of our democracy. That’s doing much more than just the voting, corruption, and money-in-politics reforms in HR1 or the VRA renewal,” the document stated, referring to the centerpiece legislative offerings of the Democrats’ pro-democracy agenda. “We must commit to structural reforms that, at a minimum, include DC and Puerto Rico statehood and expanding the federal courts.”

Liberals must also “embrace more aspirational goals of ending the Electoral College and establishing a constitutional right to vote,” it continued, plus more basic aims like the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Should Democrats fail to achieve those aims, the report proposed divisive and punitive measures, like denying certain federal assistance to sections of the country that consistently reject Democrats and yet hold a veto over legislation because the system is tilted in their favor. Perhaps, it suggested, brute fiscal coercion would extract concessions from Trump country.

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