In the last few elections in the United States – by-elections, renewals of local assemblies, special constituencies left vacant – something has cracked at the very heart of Republican America. Not mere physiological fluctuations, but sharp defeats, in some cases resounding, in those very strongholds that only a little over a year ago had handed Donald Trump plebiscite victories in the presidential elections, with double-digit margins and a seemingly granite electorate.

The fact that emerges from these results is not only numerical, but political and symbolic: constituencies that were considered ‘armoured’, taken for granted, were suddenly overturned. The Democrats have not only held on, but have won where no one, until recently, would have bet a dollar. It is a signal that alarms the Republican leadership, but above all one man: Donald Trump.

Congress as the Piave Line

The fear in Mar-a-Lago is clear. Should this trend consolidate, the House of Representatives is in serious danger of returning to Democratic hands. And for Trump, this would not just be a parliamentary defeat: it would be a political nightmare. A Dem-led House would mean aggressive commissions, sweeping investigations, public hearings. In a word: impeachment.

Trump knows this, and has never hidden it. Indeed, he has said it openly, with that almost childlike recklessness that accompanies him: he will do ‘whatever it takes’ to avoid an election result unfavourable to him. The problem is that, when Trump says ‘everything’, there are no implicit limits.

Delegitimise first, challenge later

The strategy is already visible. Delegitimising the vote before it happens, undermining trust in electoral institutions, re-proposing – in an updated version – the narrative of rigged elections, systemic fraud, internal enemies. It is a script we have already seen, but today set in a more fragile, more polarised, more tired context.

Should the results confirm the Republican loss of ground, the options on the table for an American president determined not to give up power are many more than imagined. And not all of them reassuring.

The instruments of presidential power

Formally, the President of the United States has a number of extraordinary levers, designed for real emergencies but potentially bendable to political forcing. From contesting election results at the state and federal level, encouraging chain court appeals, to political pressure on governors and secretaries of state (responsible for elections in individual states) to delay or invalidate certifications; from the extensive use of executive order to restrict or interfere with election operations, to declaring a state of national emergency, expanding federal powers.

Passing through the federalisation of the National Guard in the event of unrest, real or presumed, the invocation of theInsurrection Act, which allows the use of armed forces on national territory and, in an extreme scenario, the recourse to martial law, a hypothesis never formally ruled out by the American legal system, although politically explosive.

Instruments designed to protect democracy that, in the wrong hands, can become weapons against it.

Who would follow Trump all the way?

The crucial question at this point is not only what Trump might do, but who would follow him. His ‘magic circle’ appears united in public, much less so in private calculations. Figures like Marco Rubio, once rivals and now allies for convenience, measure every word. And then there is JD Vance, the most ambitious dauphin.

Vance knows that 2028 is not far away. He also knows that a loyal but uncompromising vice presidential candidacy is much easier than running on the rubble of a forced democratic system. If Trump were to go too far, loyalty could suddenly become selective, and it is not hard to imagine a Vance who every day imagines how much easier it would be to achieve the nomination in 2028 as an incumbent president.

A test for American democracy

Local elections, often ignored outside US borders, are becoming a valuable thermometer. They tell of anAmerica less monolithic than Trumpian rhetoric would have us believe, but also of an institutional system under unprecedented pressure.

If Trump really tries to bend the rules to save himself politically, the issue will no longer be left versus right, Republicans versus Democrats. It will be an endurance test for American democracy itself. And then the real unknown will not be the outcome of the ballot box, but the ability of the country – and its political elites – to accept it.

The democratic crossroads: choose the right candidate or waste the opportunity

If the cracks opening up in the Republican strongholds tell of a Trump more vulnerable than he wants to admit, the other side of the coin concerns the Democrats. Because an opponent in trouble is not enough: you need someone capable of actually winning. And here the risk of error is enormous.

The Democratic Party is at an historic crossroads. On the one hand, there is areal, deep political energy that comes from the youngest, most urban, multi-ethnic, precarious America: it is the ultra-progressive soul that in recent years has found a voice in figures such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib and, more recently, in New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the expression of a left that speaks without filters about inequality, public health, student debt, minimum wage, climate justice. This current intercepts real unease and has the merit of not sweetening social conflict.

On the other hand, however, there is a country that is not just Brooklyn, Oakland or university campuses

There is the America of the hollowed-out industrial counties, of the impoverished self-employed, of the middle classes who voted Obama, then Trump, not out of ideology but out of anger, out of frustration, out of the feeling of having been left behind. It is that electorate that in 2016 and 2020 chose Trump from a populist, not necessarily reactionary, perspective, and that today appears disappointed, but not automatically ready to go democratic again.

Herein lies the crux: the Democrats cannot afford a candidate perceived as morally superior but socially distant, nor one who speaks only the language of rights without knowing how to articulate that of work, economic security, and material dignity. At the same time, they cannot deny the progressive thrust without extinguishing the enthusiasm of a base that has been decisive in many local victories.

The circulating profiles tell this tension well.

There is Gavin Newsom, governor of California, a skilled communicator, capable of confronting Trump on the terrain of direct confrontation, but perceived by many as an expression of a liberal elite distant from deep America.
There is Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, perhaps one of the most interesting figures: pragmatic, rooted in the Midwest, capable of speaking to both workers and progressives, without ideological excesses.
There is Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, a moderate, institutional, solid profile, but one that is unlikely to enthuse the left wing.
And then there is the hypothesis, more symbolic than real, of a strongly identitarian candidacy, closer to the demands of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, which could, however, prove indigestible to that very floating electorate that today looks at Trump with growing distrust.

The challenge, in other words, is to find a synthesis: a figure capable of holding together social justice and popular language, civil rights and economic concreteness, radicalism in objectives but pragmatism in tone. A candidate who does not speak against the America that voted for Trump, but to that America, without justifying its authoritarian drifts.

If Trump appears increasingly tempted by illiberal shortcuts to preserve power, the Democrats have a mirror responsibility: to show that there is a credible alternative, not only more democratic, but also more understandable, closer, more concrete. Because recent history teaches a simple and brutal lesson: when populism is only defeated morally and not politically, it comes back stronger than before.