Doomsday Preppers: Survivalist strategies for a year of political pressure in a still-smoking battleground

Art by Cassondra Jones

As the first order of business here, I would like to file an official protest against the arrival of 2024. 

Must we, really? Already? Another year of Donald Trump ranting through campaign stops on his way to a rematch with Joe Biden. Josh Hawley’s sneering face popping up in ads all around Missouri as he campaigns to keep his U.S. Senate seat. The lies, the hate, the sheer exhaustion of an election year.

Initially, I was going to reveal a plan to spend the next 10 months at least, pending Election Day outcomes, closeted at home with crime novels, chips and dip, and cats.

But that won’t work. The stakes are too high. 

Have you seen the news reports about Trump’s plans to unravel American democracy should he win a second term? Are you following the governor’s race shaping up in Missouri, where Republican candidates are announcing plans to dismantle public schools in favor of educational “choice” and end physician-approved transgender health care for children and teenagers? Did you know that the current Missouri attorney general, who will be campaigning to keep his seat, is off-the-charts batshit crazy, and a guy running against him may be worse?

All of which is to say, we cannot take a pass on 2024. It is upon us, and we need to get to work. 

But first, let’s take a quick look back at 2023.

Don’t stop the carnival

As always, the year gone by produced glaring winners and losers. To avoid turning this into a lengthy tome, I’ll stay close to home.

Losers first. And not for the first time, we find Jackson County government leading this parade.

For the second time in four years, the process of reassessing properties was a train wreck. Owners of homes and businesses saw their assessments rise by amounts that seemed arbitrary and steep. Reporter Angie Ricono at KCTV5 found hundreds of homes in wildly different neighborhoods and conditions assessed at the same random value—$356,270. The county repeatedly copped to getting things wrong but never got everything right.

There’s more. Frank White’s administration prepared an estimate on the costs of a new ballpark for the Kansas City Royals that turned out to be a transparent scare job, and erroneous at that. The county’s handling of negotiations with both the Royals and the Chiefs on stadium leases is an exercise in posturing and chaos. Also, voters resoundingly smacked down the county’s request for a new tax on out-of-state online purchases, mostly because nobody could figure out what they were asking for.

Runners up in the losers parade: Prairie Village, where voters, through their city council choices, told the world that affordable housing units and the people who would potentially live in them are not welcome in their pristine suburb; the Country Club Plaza, which loses a little more of its luster every day; and the aforementioned Kansas City Royals, who are seriously pissing people off with their location shopping for a new ballpark that may not even be needed. 

Fortunately, the list of winners overshadowed the losers in 2023, starting with Kansas City itself maintaining its vibe as a chill destination. 

In local politics, the big winner was KC Tenants Power, the political arm of the housing rights group, Kansas City Tenants. It bypassed the city’s moldy power structure and went directly to voters’ doorsteps to place its candidate, Johnathan Duncan, on the City Council. And it came within a breath of getting another member, Jenay Manley, elected as the first Black person to represent Kansas City’s Northland on the City Council. 

KC Tenants Power and Kansas City Tenants give a voice to people who, up until now, have been accorded no respect in this town—renters, students, immigrants, people without connections or money. Their growth as a movement is changing Kansas City for the better. 

Other winners: George Guastello, for his magic touch in making Union Station an integral part of the NFL Draft and nearly every other Kansas City success (has anyone thought of putting this man in charge of The Plaza?); the Kansas City Current, for putting women’s soccer on the map right here in the Heartland; the new KCI; and whoever those people are who planted a gigantic Ferris wheel in the southwest corner of downtown. I have no idea how that will work out, but the way they just went ahead and built the thing is nothing short of thrilling. 

Preparation is everything

It’s nice thinking about 2023. I hope we don’t remember it as the last relatively normal year before everything falls apart.

There is no shortage out there of terrifying predictions about what could, or likely *would*, happen if Trump prevails in the deeply flawed Electoral College and takes back the presidency. I prefer for the moment not to dwell on these prophecies—or polls, either. Action beats hand-wringing by a mile, and there is a lot we can do. 

So, a few ideas, just for starters.

Get your voting credentials in order. Yes, this is obvious, but it’s the backbone for everything else. If you’ve moved recently or changed your name or gender marker, you may need to update your registration. This page at the Missouri Secretary of State’s office will get you started, and this site from a non-governmental group can help with trickier issues.

And once you’re confident in your own ability to vote, go out and register someone else. The Republican grip on statewide offices in Missouri won’t change until more Democrats in Kansas City and Jackson County get registered and cast ballots. Wyandotte County also needs a concerted effort to pump up registration and turnout. Many groups are working on this, but if you’re looking to get started, there’s no better resource than your local League of Women Voters chapter.

Lawyer up. If things go badly in November, the ACLU will be called upon to defend our legal rights to free speech, protest, and other activities that we now take for granted. This would be a good time to get familiar with the chapters in Kansas and Missouri, as well as with groups such as Legal Aid of Western Missouri and the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, which provide pro bono assistance to people who can’t afford to pay a lawyer. 

Befriend a newcomer. Immigrants and refugees would bear the brunt of a second Trump presidency. He’s already said as much. Don’t wait until Trump’s agents are raiding workplaces in search of undocumented people to start standing up for new arrivals. MORE2, the social justice group, is looking for volunteers willing to get involved on a number of fronts, such as accompanying people to their check-ins with ICE, the federal immigration service. Other nonprofits, including refugee resettlement agencies, are also looking for help. I’ve even heard of churches and families preparing safe rooms in case they need to take people in. That’s proactive.

The Missouri morass

Presidential election years have become even more dreadful in these parts because they overlap with the campaigns of all Missouri statewide officeholders except the auditor. (Kansas elects its governor and others in the midterm years.)

And so, alongside a poisonous presidential race, we are going to have to endure statewide primary races that will feature Republican candidates desperate to prove themselves the most MAGA of the lot.

The governor’s race and the contest for attorney general will be the worst. 

The contest for governor features Jay Ashcroft, who has used his current job as secretary of state to intimidate librarians and delay initiative petitions through deceptive ballot language. It’s scary to think what he would do in a job where he had more executive authority. 

And Ashcroft isn’t even the most extreme candidate in the race. Bill Eigel, a state senator, describes medical care for transgender children as “mutilation.” And while Ashcroft wants to restrict what books can be displayed in libraries, Eigel has said he’d be happy to burn books he finds objectionable on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion. A third Republican contender, current Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe, is conservative but not crazy.

For those of us who thought the state of affairs in the Missouri attorney general’s office could not get worse after the tenures of Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, it has. And we may not even have hit bottom yet.

Andrew Bailey, who was appointed to the job by Gov. Mike Parson, has pursued headlines by trying to limit transgender care and subvert the democratic initiative petition process. His most recent outrage was a ham-handed signal that he might sue Media Matters, the Washington-based journalism watchdog group, for accurately reporting on the proximity of advertising from major companies and anti-semitic content on X, Elon Musk’s social media platform.

Bailey thinks the way to get elected is to establish himself as a MAGA attorney general. But his primary opponent, Will Scharf, is way ahead of him. Scharf, former policy director for disgraced ex-governor Eric Greitens, is currently working for one of Trump’s legal teams. It doesn’t get much more MAGA than that.

Missouri, which had been trending Republican, plunged into a deep red morass in 2016 when voters overwhelmingly supported Trump and also elected Greitens as governor.

So what’s to be done?

Never lose hope. Democrats have a dynamite candidate, Crystal Quade, running for the nomination for governor. A legislator from Springfield, Quade is the leader of the House Democrats. She has traveled to every corner of Missouri, stumping for candidates and raising funds for the party. She has an appealing life story and can articulate the damage the Republicans are doing to the state. Any Democrat running for a statewide office is an underdog in Missouri, but Quade has the tenacity and star power to make a race of it.

Knock on doors. Democratic candidates for Missouri legislative seats have made some inroads in recent elections, flipping seats in Lee’s Summit and Parkville and holding on in tight races in eastern Jackson County and the Northland. Any Democratic seat won or kept in the heavily Republican legislature is a victory, and candidates in the suburbs, in particular, need money and willing volunteers.

Stay vigilant. Campaigns have casualties. In Missouri this year, with Republican candidates trying to outdo one another in extremism, those are likely to include transgender people and their families, public school educators, immigrants, and women seeking to terminate pregnancies.

It’s crucial for those of us not on that list to act as allies for those who are. We should all have poster boards and markers at the ready should we be called to the protest lines. 

Let’s look out for each other in 2024.