What D.C.’s election defense under occupation can teach us

Reporting by Waging Nonviolence

As we approach the one-year anniversary of the National Guard’s occupation of Washington, D.C., it’s worth pausing to learn what D.C. resistance has to teach us — especially heading into the midterms.

Many of us are carrying real fear about how far Trump might go to interfere with this election. Our fear isn’t unwarranted. But it doesn’t have to be ungrounded, either. Yes, he will say outrageous things. Yes, the heads of the Department of Justice and FBI are trying to keep power for their boss and intimidate voter rights groups. Yes, if Trump could stop elections he would.

But an authoritarian who has to sabotage an election is doing it from a place of weakness. Trump is not Narendra Modi, who steadily gained popularity (until a grassroots “cockroach” movement turned the tables). Trump is in political freefall with cratering poll numbers and is lashing out; his only path to retain power is undermining the will of voters.

Much of his weakness now has to do with how our movements have harnessed backfire. Trump’s use of ICE is limited by the fierce national resistance to his paramilitary. Backlash against the voter suppression of Callais brought Black voters in Alabama and other states to the polls in force. Trump’s power of controlling narrative isn’t as strong as it used to be. Even Fox News avoided re-airing his recent rant about the 2020 election. Admittedly we have more to do, but he is overreaching — his seizure of ballots in Fulton County in January to boost his Big Lie only woke up more people in the election protection space to the threat he posed.

So rather than let our fears run wild, we can ground them in what’s already happened and how people responded. That’s the idea behind my “Election Defense Scenarios” book. It’s an attempt to lay out the scenarios of election sabotage — from National Guard at the polls to disinformation, Department of Justice threats and last-minute rule changes. In many cases, we don’t have to imagine what might happen — we can look to very recent history.

D.C. is one of the clearest examples we have. The city faced a wide array of threats and prepared for the June 16 primary without letting fear set the terms. Here’s what they did.

Some of the challenges were the ordinary kind that come with any election reform. D.C.’s primary was the first election in the city’s history to use ranked-choice voting, after voters approved Initiative 83 in 2024. That meant there had to be a real voter education lift — organizers needed to teach people how ranking works. And there were the usual worries about longer lines as poll workers and voters adjusted to a new system.

But bigger issues loomed. By election time, D.C. had been living with a federalized National Guard presence for nearly a year, including a month-long federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department the previous summer. Ahead of the July 4 “America 250” celebrations, federal officials announced a “summer surge” that added roughly 2,500 more troops, bringing the total in the city to over 5,000.

The threat of the National Guard loomed large. At an estimated cost of over $1 billion per year for Trump’s domestic deployments, the National Guard has harassed citizens and decreased trust in the military. During the 2020 election, organizers say, National Guard troops had been deployed following Black Lives Matter protests and reportedly told people in line they had to get out of line to enforce the city’s curfew — an incident that went undocumented because no one had thought to film it in the moment.

Surprisingly, National Guards were deployed from Democratic-led states, including Michigan (and immediately after the election, Minnesota and Hawaii). At least Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has since removed its troops.

Using National Guards to interfere with elections was repeatedly threatened. As the Brennan Center reported, “It is illegal to deploy federal troops or armed federal law enforcement to any polling place.” Yet, Trump said, “We’re going to have sheriffs, and we’re going to have law enforcement” at polling locations.

Alongside the troops came fears of political interference — a worry sharpened by D.C.’s unusual constitutional position. Congress controls D.C.’s budget and has repeatedly attempted to gut the city’s local governance. When President Trump was asked what he’d do if Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George — a self-described democratic socialist whose campaign was frequently compared to Zohran Mamdani’s — won the mayoral primary, he answered, “I wouldn’t like it — and maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis. We won’t put up with it.” Organizers couldn’t dismiss the threat as bluster. It had legal teeth: Congress and the president hold unique levers over the city.

Each location has different conditions and scenarios. But no matter where you are, we can still learn a lot from what D.C. did to make their election a success.

Groups with get-out-the-vote chops, like grassroots movement Free DC, ran the playbook for turning out voters. They did things like matching voter files to canvassing tools, texting unregistered residents and working precinct by precinct to make the case for coming out to vote. Free DC in particular leaned into its base-building structure. It gave volunteers the tools to text out surveys asking people when they planned to vote, then follow up with 20 people closest to them whom they’d personally commit to reaching.