Around the country, election officials have already received death threats and packages filled with white powder. Their dogs have been poisoned, their homes swatted, their family members targeted. In Texas, one man called for a “a mass shooting of poll workers and election officials” in precincts with results he found suspicious. “The point is coercion; the point is intimidation. It’s to get you to do or not do something,” Al Schmidt, the secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, told me—to get you to “stop counting votes, or we’re going to murder your children, and they name your children,” a threat that Schmidt said he received in 2020.

Remember when Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” and everyone criticized her for being such a snob? She wasn’t wrong.