It is tempting to imagine that Donald Trump’s campaign was so abusive and noxious that we won’t experience anything like it again. But the hard reality is this: Most presidents seek re-election, and they usually win. Only once since Franklin Roosevelt died has one party reclaimed the presidency from the other and then failed to control it for two terms, and that presidency was Jimmy Carter’s.

Whoever Democrats nominate for the presidency in 2020 will almost certainly be running against Trump, and they won’t necessarily be running from a position of strength. Whatever Trump’s governing failures turn out to be, we know to near certainty that over the next four years, Republicans will pass more voter suppression laws to make the electorate whiter and more right-wing. We know that in 2018, Trump will have an opportunity to appoint a new chairman of the Federal Reserve, who will in turn have the power to juice the economy ahead of the election.

In between, Trump will run the White House as unconventionally as he campaigned for it. This will confound Democrats whose opposition tactics have evolved over time to counter normal Republican politicians.

It would thus behoove Democrats to update their playbook to account for the fact that Trump is an authoritarian, and that authoritarians engage in a different kind of politics than even the most underhanded Republicans who’ve run for president in the past.

On some level, Democrats understand that Trump has upended their party’s strategic approach. The unexpected results of the election have forced the party into an irresolvable pattern of recriminations. The narrowness of Trump’s victory (100,000 votes across three states) makes this blame game particularly unproductive because all explanations—from the idea that Clinton lost due to political sabotage to the idea that Clinton lost because the Democratic Party isn’t left-wing enough—have surface plausibility. None of these diagnoses, however, grapple with the possibility that running against an authoritarian requires a less algorithmic, paint-by-numbers approach to politics than most campaign professionals typically employ.