Polls show Joe Biden with a double-digit national lead and a 6-11 point edge in key battleground states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin where Trump squeezed out his Electoral College victory in 2016. Yet Trump’s supposed political demise remains in question. Given the fickle state of politics during this coronavirus pandemic, the 2020 outcome is far from over.

Trump is now like a caged rabies-infected dog that refuses to take direction from anyone. Despite his current flailing about, however, he still holds several aces in the hole - the awesome powers of incumbency, an Attorney General and U.S. Justice Department that bends to his political will on any issue, and a level of control over the United States Postal Service (USPS) that no previous President has ever held.

Likewise, Trump has assumed dictatorial power over our nation’s political parties, forcing Republicans into public and private genuflection and bullying Democrats into deference by ignoring their constitutional powers of oversight even though they hold the House majority. While directing his staff to disregard subpoenas, Trump has stacked the Federal District, Appellate, and U.S. Supreme courts with over 250 young, right-wing judges, many of whom publicly flout Constitutional mandates.

He has exceeded the tenets of the imperial presidency and is modeling his office after Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping, while employing the hardball tactics of Philippines’s President Rodrigo Duterte and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, strongmen who have brutalized their citizens. Trump has also directed a small group of his advisors to devise a scheme to enable him to serve a third term, or more.

Those Democrats, who are predicting Trump’s November defeat because of his current standing in the polls, seem unaware of the plan he is implementing to dominate Democrats during the last months of the campaign. Sadly, they have not developed a counter-strategy to compete with Trump’s political onslaught. He is leading them in Party enthusiasm and unification as rank-and-file Republicans endorse his implacable hold over the electorate.

Republican officeholders fear Trump’s political retribution if they buck him on any portion of his agenda. His vicious public flagellation and defeat of the few dissidents brave enough to oppose him have resulted in his minions marching behind him in lockstep. Even when the candidates he has backed lose an election, other Republicans remain under his thrall.

Trump’s evolving and metastasizing voter suppression tactics are rapidly emerging in traditional blue and battleground states. The tried-and-true strategies of precinct closures, lengthy lines at the polls, voting machine malfunction, elimination and/or shortening of early voting, and increasing difficulties in voter registration have escalated and are now being embellished by arbitrary voter purges and targeted harassment of unsuspecting voters who arrive at the polls.

True the Vote, a conservative Republican-leaning, national vote-monitoring organization whose stated objective is stopping voter fraud, which has been found to be virtually non-existent, is also in play. The Republicans have set-aside tens of millions of dollars to implement this initiative in all the battleground and blue states in an effort to reduce Democratic turnout.

They have also allocated another $60 million to undo Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate based on race, color, or membership in one of the identified language minority groups). These maneuvers are designed to surround Democratic voters with a variety of barriers that inhibit their ability to vote. Republicans have appropriated $20 million for litigation to contest voting access in any manner as well.

By far, the most damaging approach is Republican interference with the timely response to absentee ballot requests and the judicious processing of ballots upon receipt. In the past six months, there have already been trial runs of these schemes in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Kentucky primaries. COVID-19 has further facilitated these actions as it has reduced the number of workers available to staff voting precincts.

Trump’s takeover of the USPS has provided him with additional leverage in controlling the distribution and counting of mail-in ballots. Given his already documented interference in government departments, we must ask: will he direct his handpicked U.S. Postmaster General to influence timely ballot collection and distribution on his behalf?

What are the Democrats doing to effectively respond to this incipient political crisis? The answer so far is that they are doing little or nothing. Many Biden supporters believe that he can continue floating above the political fray and proceed to victory unencumbered by the politics on the ground. This kind of thinking is what sank Hillary’s 2016 campaign, which assumed that Trump would defeat himself because of his misogyny, crassness, and political inexperience.

To our knowledge, Democrats do not have legal teams in the traditionally blue states or battleground cities where their voters are being challenged. Their Republican adversaries, conversely, are vigorously and systematically deploying multiple lines of attack on a significant segment of the Democratic voting franchise.

To date, only one Democrat has a grip on and an active response to these encounters, Stacey Abrams, an erstwhile candidate to become Biden’s VP. After having her Georgia race for governor stolen in 2018, she has turned her firsthand experience with the nefarious subterfuges of voter suppression into action, and she and her Fair Fight Action organization have been busy in the battleground states, filing lawsuits to push back against the recent Georgia primary debacle which showcased many of Trump’s voter suppression procedures.

If he is to prevail in November, Biden and the Democratic National Committee need to direct massive financial resources toward this political work. We have seen this movie before, and it is clear how Trump’s surrogates are gearing up to defeat Biden with their no-holds barred ground assaults. The time has come for the Biden campaign to engage the Trump subversives.

In 2000, Al Gore sat idly by while Florida Gov. Jeb Bush surreptitiously manipulated the state’s final vote through voter harassment and voter roll purges in majority-minority voting districts to deliver the state to his brother, George, by 537 votes out of millions cast. Similarly, John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, watched Ohio’s Secretary of State oversee voting machine breakdowns and long lines at the polls while offering no legal opposition even though he had the cash on hand to contest these actions.

After observing these failures, Barack Obama fielded an army of lawyers to protect his political flanks in 2008 and 2012, ensuring his victories. Hopefully, Obama will persuade his former VP to take comparable actions before it is too late.