Election 2028

I Played a Game Simulating the Aftermath of the 2028 Election. Here's How It Went.

The Democratic nominee won five swing states by less than one percentage point. Then things got crazy.

Eric Boehm | 8.14.2026 11:30 AM

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(Illustration: Adani Samat/Midjourney)

It was mid-November 2028, and American democracy was hanging by a thread. 

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland was the president-elect, barely. He had won five key swing states by less than 1 percent each. The current occupant of the White House, his political party, and the broader nationalist-conservative movement disputed those results amid unproven allegations of widespread voter fraud in major cities.

Dark clouds loomed. The vice president, who had been Moore's opponent in the election, was preparing to reject electors from swing states in a potential execution of the power grab that was attempted after the 2020 election. National Guard units that had been deployed in Washington, D.C., for years under the guise of maintaining public order were now being bolstered by militia groups loyal to the president's party. Other units had been dispatched to surround Moore's home—the official story was that he was under "military protection," but it sure looked a lot more like house arrest. There are nine weeks until Inauguration Day, and nothing is sure.

None of this has happened, of course—except within the confines of a trendy Dupont Circle office where, last month, I was one of about two dozen participants in an unsettling role-playing game about the future of American politics.

We'd been brought together by Dmitri Mehlhorn, a Democratic political strategist who fears that many Americans are underestimating the risk of what could unfold during the crucial weeks between the next presidential election and Inauguration Day: January 20, 2029.

He is not particularly subtle about it. Visit the website for the Atoll Society, the organization Mehlhorn cofounded last year and the entity that hosts these gaming salons, and you'll be greeted by a disconcerting declaration: "We don't know whether democratic institutions will survive the next decade."

The role-playing games are less an attempt to determine whether they will, and more an exercise in preparing for how they might all fall apart. As of August, the group has run versions of this game 30 times—in major cities in the U.S. and Europe—with attendees drawn from academia, politics, tech, finance, and media. Each round is more or less a tabula rasa; at the game I attended, only two participants had played previously.

The goal of the exercise, Mehlhorn says, is to move "conversation toward more longer-term scenario planning so that the rule of law can be more resilient in the face of possible future threats."

Gaming Out a Constitutional Crisis

Over glasses of wine and platters of hors d'oeuvres, we were divided into three teams.

The "Institutionalists" and the "Nationalists" represent the two factions competing for political power in a lightly fictionalized version of the United States, where President Wickson is struggling through a second term with an ugly approval rating amid an unpopular war of choice in the Middle East, persistently high inflation, and an ongoing immigration crackdown.

I was, fittingly for a libertarian, part of the third group: the "Capitalists," who are not vying for political power but seeking to maximize profits.

In an era when politics is increasingly intruding into the private sector (and when money can exert at least some power in the political arena), the seven of us assigned to the Capitalist faction faced some difficult choices. Victory for the Nationalists could mean more investment steered toward favored industries, but it also carried the tremendous risk of nationalization and the loss of property rights or profits for those deemed enemies of the regime.

And a civil war in the wake of the 2028 election would be very bad for the bottom line: an outcome to be avoided at all costs.

The game begins in the lead-up to the 2026 midterms and proceeds through several rounds set months apart, with each team given roughly half an hour to decide which moves it wants to make in each round. There are very few limits, and negotiations between the teams are encouraged. After each "round," the moves are fed into........

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