Regardless of whether President Donald Trump’s legal challenges succeed, the hard truth that grassroots Patriots will have to face in elections going forward is that the deck is stacked against them — and it has been for a while.

In the wake of his “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms, Barack Obama’s administration sicced the Internal Revenue Service on Tea Party groups and other Patriots, blatantly harassing them and denying them the tax-exempt status needed for organizing and fundraising.

The results were quite clear: An American Enterprise Institute study found that the Tea Party added as many as six million new voters to the GOP during the 2010 midterms, and the author, in a later commentary, estimated that the Tea Party could’ve generated up to eight and a half million more votes in the 2012 presidential election, which would’ve flipped the popular vote (and, in all likelihood, the Electoral College) to Mitt Romney.

The 2016 presidential campaign saw Spygate and the phony accusations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia, which we’ve discussed a lot over the last four years. Trump won, of course, but his blue-collar billionaire appeal in the Rust Belt, and Hillary Clinton’s remarkably awful candidacy, caught the Democrats by surprise.

As for 2020, you’ve already seen plenty of coverage of what looks to be a highly suspicious election. In addition to this, we’d recommend a collection of responses that sci-fi author, blogger, and former accountant Larry Correia got from many other experts in his former field.

But here’s what else happened: Big Tech shamefully censored news harmful to the Democrats’ hopes, including the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and his family’s influence-peddling corruption. Call it an in-kind contribution to the Biden-Harris campaign — a contribution both massive and undeclared. There’s also clear evidence that election laws were flouted, which, while not conflated with vote fraud, is a problem in and of itself.

The Trump team’s litigation is proceeding, but the task is a daunting one. Even if the courts find in favor of Trump, it may well come down to the state legislatures in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin exercising their powers under Article II of the Constitution. And we should be under no illusions about what those state lawmakers would be risking, even if they’re presented with overwhelming evidence of fraud: They would be doxxed. Their businesses would be targeted for harassment, vandalism, and worse. Their families would also be targeted, including their children. These are not really hypotheticals. This is the modus operandi of the modern-day Left.

Already, lawyers who had been representing President Trump have dropped out due to harassment. The Trump haters at The Lincoln Project have vowed to do the same to those seeking to ensure the integrity of the election.

Should Biden prevail, it’s a fair bet that the 2022 midterms and the 2024 presidential race will also involve a stacked deck. This is a reality, but it doesn’t mean all is lost. There are ways to beat a stacked deck, and 2020 has already shown some of those ways to grassroots Patriots.