Dmitri Mehlhorn — Democratic strategist, Atoll Society co-founder, and author of the new novel Archipelago of Light — joins the Chuck ToddCast to walk through the war games he runs simulating a contested 2028 election. Three teams: Institutionalists, Nationalists, and Capitalists. The Nationalists win a lot of them, and the mechanics are grimly instructive — they pump up progressives to generate backlash, offer carrots and sticks to capital, and find that every norm broken makes the next break easier. Mehlhorn argues the midterms are the rehearsal: get voters accustomed to challenging results now, delegitimize the process before 2028, and exploit a speaker's latitude not to seat delegations if things are close. His core warning is that our biggest failure has been a failure of imagination — and that taking power back has to be the singular issue in 2028. 

Timeline:

00:00 Dmitri Mehlhorn joins The Chuck ToddCast 

01:00The simulation, the three factions, and how it works

04:00 Why the Nationalists keep winning

08:45 The predictable playbook of authoritarians

12:15 What happens if 2028 is disputed

20:30 Building the game with AI and historical autocrats

23:15 The midterms as practice for 2028

29:15 The next 75 days and seating the winners

32:00 Texas, Hungary, and what actually deters authoritarians

42:15 The urban/rural divide and echoes of pre-WWI

46:45 Is the constitutional period already over?

54:30 Alarmism vs. vigilance — and what gives him hope