Last Saturday I was at a restaurant with my daughter when I ran into a friend of a friend. With little preamble she said, her voice choked with panic, “He’s going to win again.” She told me, I think half-facetiously, that she was finding it hard to socialize, because she could scarcely talk about anything but her horror of Donald Trump and her suppurating fear that he could be re-elected.

Pundits sometimes address Democratic primary voters as if they were complacent about the chances of another Trump term and need a harsh dose of reality. The primary campaign, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote recently, “has proceeded in blissful unawareness of the extremely high chance that Trump will win again.” But if there are Democrats out there who think beating Trump is going to be easy, I’ve yet to meet them. I’m deeply scared, and so are most progressives I speak to.

According to the polls we’re not alone; in one recent survey, 67 percent of Democrats said they feel anxious about the election. Reports from Iowa suggest that Democratic primary voters, desperate to find a silver bullet against Trump, are wracked with indecision. “Nobody knows what to do,” one member of a county Democratic committee told The Associated Press. “They’re all afraid.”

Obviously, fear makes sense, given the stakes of this election. But too much of it can be demoralizing, even disabling . “Democrats are particularly prone to toggling between overconfident jubilance and terrified paralysis,” said Ben Wikler, who was elected Wisconsin Democratic Party chair in June after years with the progressive organizing group MoveOn.