Will Democrats accept election loss? New report says no.

The answer set off a long trail of headlines: “Trump declines to say whether he will accept November election.” “Trump won’t commit to accepting result if he loses election.” “Trump not ready to commit to election results if he loses.” The president has continued to stir the pot since then, most notably with a tweet asking whether, because of potential problems with voting by mail, the Nov. 3 election should be postponed.

So there is much discussion of Trump and the election results. But there is another, equally pressing question: Will Democrats accept the results of the election if Joe Biden loses? A new report suggests the answer could be no.

The report comes from a secretive group called the Transition Integrity Project. A bipartisan, anti-Trump organization, TIP was created last year by Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks and historian and think tanker Nils Gilman, “out of concern that the Trump administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process.”

In June, TIP organized a meeting of 100 “former high-ranking government officials, senior political campaigners, nationally prominent journalists and communications professionals, social movement leaders, and experts on politics, national security, democratic reform, election law, and media.” The project originally kept the names of the 100 secret, but about 40 have now agreed to be publicly identified. (The rest remain anonymous.) Among the publicly known names are some of the most ardently anti-Trump voices in media and politics. Norm Eisen, who served as outside counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during impeachment, is part of the group, as is John Podesta, the former Hillary Clinton campaign chair who played key roles in the Obama and Bill Clinton White Houses, and former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Donna Brazile. There is former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, now seen denouncing the president on cable TV, and another former governor whose name remains secret. To make the group bipartisan, there are several members from Never Trump Republican and former Republican ranks: Reed Galen, a key organizer of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, David Frum, and others.

The purpose of the June meeting was to war-game scenarios for the 2020 election and its immediate aftermath. What would actually happen if the results were contested or not known for weeks after Election Day? Sixty-seven people took active part in the games, while the rest observed the action and offered feedback. The results are described in a 22-page report, “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” released Monday.

The TIP members divided into several groups. There was a Trump campaign group and a Biden campaign group. A Republican officeholders group and a Democratic officeholders group. A career government officials group. A media group. Finally, there was a group representing the public (played in the game by pollsters).

They worked through four election scenarios.

One of the scenarios involved Biden winning a clear victory in both the popular vote and Electoral College. In that scenario, Trump originally alleged voter fraud but spent most of the transition preparing to return to private business and pardoning family members. The short version of how the game came out was that Trump lost and left office. Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021.

Another scenario posited a narrow Biden victory, in which the Democrat’s popular vote margin was less than 1 percentage point, giving him a winning 278 electoral votes. In that case, Trump did not concede defeat and instead engaged in a “large and coordinated disinformation campaign primarily focused on the legitimacy of the mail-in ballots.” The Biden campaign organized massive street protests around the country, protests that included “violent skirmishes and vandalism.” Biden’s electoral victory was certified, but “Trump refused to leave the White House.” He spent his final days as president burning incriminating evidence and making plans to start a new network, TRUMP TV — two activities that suggested he planned to give up the presidency. On Jan. 20, 2021, the Secret Service escorted Trump out of the White House. That section of the report is poorly written, and it is not entirely clear whether the Secret Service actually had to escort Trump out of the White House or simply threatened to escort him out. In any event, Trump left. The report describes the transition as “uneasy and combative but ultimately successful.” The bottom line was that Trump lost and left office. Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021.

The project’s participants came up with a bizarre third scenario in which the election results came down to Michigan, Florida, and North Carolina. Florida went to Trump, and North Carolina went to Biden, leaving Michigan as the state that would decide the presidency. But at that point, in Michigan, “a rogue individual destroyed a large number of ballots believed to have supported Biden.” It’s not clear if that was decisive, but in any event, Trump was left with a narrow victory in the Electoral College. (The project’s report does not say who won the national popular vote in this scenario.) Then the Democratic governor of Michigan “used this abnormality as justification to send a separate, pro-Biden set of electors to DC.” At that point, “neither campaign was willing to accept the result, and called on their supporters to turn out in the streets to sway the result.” Neither side prevailed. At the end of the game, with the sides unable to agree on the legitimacy of the outcome, there was no clear president on Jan. 20, 2021. The report did not speculate on what happened after that.

The final scenario was the only one that posited a clear Trump victory. Biden, like Hillary Clinton before him, won the popular vote (in this case, the margin was a decisive 52% to 47%). But Trump won the Electoral College victory with 286 electoral votes. In other words, Trump was the clear winner of the presidency. Biden conceded defeat on election night but then withdrew his concession as Democratic anger grew over another election in which the winner lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. The Biden campaign pushed the Democratic governors of Michigan and Wisconsin to disregard Trump’s victory, overrule their state legislatures, and send Biden electors to Washington. House Democrats refused to recognize Trump’s Electoral College victory. The Biden campaign also came up with what appears to be a demand for concessions in exchange for recognition of Trump’s victory: Trump could take office if the Electoral College were eliminated, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico were given statehood, and California was divided into five states to create more Democratic senators. Otherwise, California, Oregon, and Washington state would secede from the union. In the end, the standoff “remained unresolved,” and Inauguration Day “arrived without a single president-elect.” The scenario ended with: “It was unclear what the military would do in this situation.”

So those are the four scenarios. In only one did a candidate win a clear victory and the opposing candidate refuse to accept the result. And the loser who refused to accept the result was Biden — not Trump. That is precisely the opposite of the Trump-won’t-accept-results speculation that has dominated the media in recent weeks. Even though Trump clearly won the presidency in that scenario, “the game play ended in a constitutional crisis, with threats of secession, and the potential for either a decline into authoritarianism or a radically revamped set of democratic rules that ensure the popular will prevails.”

The report gave some reasons why Democrats would be willing to defy the constitutional structure of American presidential elections to put Biden in the White House. The scenario game-playing “revealed that for many Democrats and key Democratic constituencies, this election represents an existential crisis, the last chance to stop a rapid and potentially irreversible U.S. decline into authoritarianism and unbridled nativism,” the report says. “Some participants in the exercises observed that if former Vice President Biden wins the popular vote but loses the Electoral College, there will be political pressure from the Democratic Party’s rank and file and from independent grassroots organizations to prevent a second Trump term.” Prevent a second Trump term, that is, even in the face of a clear and legitimate Trump victory.

When one side believes the stakes are so high as to be existential — a last chance to stop authoritarianism and unbridled nativism — then virtually any means are justified to prevent the other side from winning. One lesson of the Transition Integrity Project game-playing is that today, less than 100 days from the election, some of the president’s most passionate opponents believe Democrats might willingly throw the Constitution aside in their desire to put an end to the Trump presidency.