Trump Is Screwing with the Midterms. Will He Succeed?
Trump’s efforts to steal the midterms have hit a wall of legal resistance. So what’s his next play?
With ICE terrorizing Minneapolis, the Justice Department giving murderers a pass while investigating the Fed Chair, and Trump now threatening to attack our allies over Greenland, only one question matters: How do we stop him?
The GOP could, of course. Along with the Democrats, they could vote to impeach him in the House, convict him in the Senate and remove him from office. His cabinet could remove him under the 25th Amendment; his bonkers letter to Norway, in which he justifies going to war with NATO for not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, would suffice to find him unfit to hold the office of president.
There is no indication Republicans will find their spine and do any of this. Democrats can throw sand in the gears by withholding funding or attaching conditions to it, but so long as they are out of power, they can’t do much to rein in the President himself.
That leaves it to the people, namely, the voters. The November midterm elections seem an eternity from now, but 2025 is now behind us, and we made it this far, albeit not without significant trauma. As we look ahead to our chance to remove the GOP from power and put real checks on this rogue White House, a few nagging questions persist: Will Trump screw with the midterms? Will they be free and fair? Will we even have them?
Without a more disciplined way to think about these questions, they can leave us feeling fearful, even paralyzed. These, after all, are democracy-ending developments. So let’s break these questions down and separate real threats from speculative ones. Through fact-based analysis, we can focus on the main threats to our elections while categorizing others as less likely and therefore lower risk.
The Trump regime is already messing with the elections
While much of the fear and even panic has been focused on whether Trump will “cancel” the midterm elections this year, the more pressing and realistic threat is that he will try to rig them, as would-be dictators have traditionally attempted. There are many examples of this, but three stand out: gerrymandering efforts, executive orders around voting procedures, and Justice Department efforts to interfere with state elections, including by demanding voter data.
Gerrymandering fails to move the needle
Trump and his cronies saw one clear path to keeping the House under GOP control and holding accountability for Trump and his cabinet at bay: forcing unprecedented mid-decade redistricting, even without a new census to justify it. This nakedly partisan move would create new gerrymandered maps that would eliminate blue seats by ruthlessly cracking and packing Democrats into new districts.
That effort has not gone as planned, at least so far. A grossly partisan move by Texas to shift five seats to the GOP was met tit-for-tat by California voters in a referendum led by Gov. Gavin Newsom. That shifted five seats to the blue column in that state.
Moves by North Carolina and Missouri to add a couple GOP seats are being countered and could be undone thanks to a bold move by Virginia, which has a new Democratic trifecta, to shift four of its seats blue. And in the Midwest, Ohio Republicans struck a deal with Democrats over redistricting, while Indiana state legislators told the White House to take a hike, despite or perhaps in direct response to overt and disgusting threats against the lawmakers and their families. Even if a state like Florida succeeds in its next session in making its map redder, this could fall apart in a blue wave election.
The net result is essentially a wash, not nearly the ten or so seats the White House had hoped to net out of its efforts.
Trump’s executive orders around voting have been blocked
Marc Elias’s Democracy Docket has been faithfully tracking Trump’s sweeping attempts to rewrite election rules by Executive Order. Trump has attempted to impose, by decree, the following changes, among others:
Proof-of-citizenship requirements via federal registration forms;
Loss of election funding for states that do not go along; and
A national “received-by-Election-Day” rule disqualifying even timely postmarked mail-in ballots
Many of these orders have been blocked by federal courts. Indeed, as Democracy Docket reported just over 10 days ago,
A federal court blocked core provisions of President Donald Trump’s anti-voting executive order Friday, ruling that the president had no authority to impose new election rules that threatened to disenfranchise voters and override state law.
In a sweeping order, District Judge John H. Chun, appointed by President Joe Biden, ruled in favor of Washington and Oregon, permanently halting enforcement of key sections of Executive Order 14248 — Trump’s March 2025 directive aimed at reshaping how states run elections.
The court found the order violated the Constitution by attempting to concentrate election power in the presidency, a move the judge warned posed a direct threat to democracy.
As the Associated Press noted, that ruling followed “similar rulings in a Massachusetts case brought by 19 states and in a Washington, D.C. case by Democratic and civil rights groups. In the latter case, per the ACLU, the judge had issued a “decisive ruling” in League of Women Voters Education Fund v. Trump,
permanently blocking a provision of President Trump’s March voting executive order that sought to add a requirement to show a passport or similar document proving citizenship when registering to vote with the federal voter registration form that would disproportionately impact voters of color.
That ruling found the President lacks authority to unilaterally alter election procedures. Those powers rest with the states and with Congress.
Like the other district court judges adjudicating these matters, in his decision 11 days ago, Judge Chun was clear and unsparing.
“In the framework of our Constitution, the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker,” the judge wrote. “Accordingly, the Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections.” He added, “Whenever the President issues an executive order, the power to issue the order must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself. If the President lacks a statutory or constitutional basis the act is unlawful.” (Internal quotation omitted.)
This is, of course, the beginning and not the end of judicial review of these orders. But even this SCOTUS conservative majority might find it hard to get five justices to agree that the Constitution’s assignment of the management and conduct of federal elections to the states allows the White House on its own to impose new and universal rules, without even an act of Congress.
Trump’s goal here extends beyond the rules themselves. He wants to intimidate state officials, confuse voters, and lay the groundwork for claims that the states somehow cheated to achieve results that he doesn’t like.
Justice Department demands for voter info have stalled
Unsatisfied with new gerrymanders and new executive orders, the regime has sought to harvest voter data to put pressure on state election officials. The DOJ has made demands upon state officials to turn over their voter files unredacted, including versions that include sensitive personal information and identifiers.
As The Guardian reported,
The department has asked at least 43 states for their comprehensive information on voters, including the last four digits of their social security numbers, full dates of birth and addresses….
Eight states (all red ones) turned over that information, but dozens of others refused.
The Brennan Center for Justice explained that the DOJ believes this voter information is somehow necessary to ensure compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act. But both laws already require states to conduct voter roll list maintenance, including reasonable efforts to remove those who should no longer be voting. Moreover, a single snapshot of those rolls, as the DOJ has demanded, doesn’t provide sufficient information to evaluate a state’s list maintenance programs.
What the DOJ is really after is more nefarious. It aims to create distrust in our election systems, chill people from registering, and thereby depress voter turnout. Along the way, it would create serious privacy and security risks over a vast and centralized collection of personal information that would be a prime target for hackers.
This could also lead to manipulation of data to support bogus claims of voter fraud, a familiar authoritarian play. First they demand the data, then use it to cast suspicion over the voter rolls, and finally cite “integrity” as the pretext for surveillance and selective enforcement. (This same playbook is being used to undermine support for Medicaid and SNAP benefits, for example.)
Per The Guardian, state election officials in blue states have pushed back against these efforts. “Our position on this starts and ends with the law. We looked at state law and federal law regarding disclosure of this very sensitive personal information on millions of people, and what we discovered, or at least the way we’ve concluded, is that the law protects voters from this kind of disclosure under these circumstances,” said Steve Simon, the top election official in Minnesota, one of the states sued by the DOJ.
Arizona’s Secretary of State, Adrian Fontes, was blunter. “Pound sand,” he tweeted in response to the DOJ lawsuit against his state seeking voter data.
Federal judges agree and are growing wise to the DOJ’s true motives. In dismissing the case the DOJ filed against California, for example, Judge David O. Carter stated,
While the DOJ has told this Court that its purpose for demanding the sensitive voter information of Californians is ‘voter roll maintenance enforcement and compliance,’ representations made by the DOJ elsewhere paint a starkly different picture that this Court cannot ignore.
Judge Carter concluded,
the DOJ’s campaign to collect sensitive voter data . . . paints an alarming picture regarding the centralization of Americans’ information within the Executive Branch — without approval from Congress or Americans themselves.”
David Becker, the executive director for the Center for Election Innovation & Research, summed up the stakes concisely. “The federal government does not have the right to collect information on hundreds of millions of American voters unless Congress has authorized it. It has not.” Becker added, “This appears to be more focused on amplifying false narratives about problems with our election system and preparation for elections that candidates aligned with the president might lose.”
Trump is preparing to challenge the midterm election results
We saw this in 2020, and we would have seen it again in 2024 had Trump lost. His default is to challenge election results he doesn’t like while crowing about those that go his way. To prepare the ground, Trump sows seeds of doubt early so his efforts to delegitimize the results will stick if he needs them to.
His tools are myriad: claims of fraud, voter panic over nonexistent undocumented immigrant voting, conspiracies over machine tallies, even personal attacks upon election officials. The GOP is likely to lose the House and may even lose the Senate in the next general election, and Trump’s efforts to tilt the results his way are failing. That almost certainly means he will pivot this year to undermining the results so he can claim they are illegitimate.
To prepare for this, we need to set some solid stakes in the ground, especially as he consolidates influence over major media outlets such as CBS.
There’s no evidence of election fraud, but Trump won’t care
The Trump election playbook in 2020 was clear: deploy widespread claims of fraud, cite random instances of tabulation errors and blow them out of proportion, and get enough of his followers to believe that the election was stolen that they would even stage an insurrection to keep him in power.
That effort failed in large part because there were enough guardrails, especially within the White House and the Justice Department, to keep him from involving the federal government directly in the amplification of fraud claims.
But those guardrails are now gone. Trump will have many DOJ and White House officials willing to go before the cameras and openly lie about widespread election cheating, even if not backed by any actual evidence. We are seeing test runs of this right now, where Trump’s White House lackeys are making verifiably false claims about ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s supposed injuries from being “struck” by Renee Good’s car, and the DOJ has been investigating bogus claims of criminality against Trump’s political enemies.
The limits of what Trump can do with false fraud claims
The good news is this: election challenges still have to be adjudicated by the courts. Trump’s “evidence” will still be nonexistent if and when the losers file lawsuits. Trump will need to find another avenue to use these bogus claims to cling to power.
Trump may attempt to use claims of “fraud,” for example, to assert vast powers he does not have. He may try to pressure Speaker Johnson, if he is still in his position, to not seat winners. None of these efforts is likely to change the outcome.
For example, the Speaker cannot exclude a member who meets the constitutional qualifications and was properly elected under state law. While Johnson may try a feint, such as keeping Congress “out of session” to prevent seating new members, that can’t hold up for long once a decisive election has granted the other side power.
False claims of election fraud carry a longer term risk, however. They poison a democracy by calling legitimacy into question, raising the risk of increased polarization, radicalization, and even domestic terrorism. For these reasons, we need to keep a close eye on Trump’s wild claims and stamp out the fires as they are lit. It won’t prevent many from being taken in by his lies, but it could prevent a repeat of January 6.
It’s not so easy to “cancel” federal midterm elections
In response to calls to get out the vote for the midterm elections, it’s common to see a few folks grumble, “If we even have elections…”
While that fear is understandable, suggesting that we might not have midterms at all plays into the hands of the Trump regime. It suggests that Trump has some magic wand he can wave to make the midterms not happen, and that we ought to prepare ourselves for that eventuality.
Trump makes a lot of noise about canceling the midterms, but he simply can’t do it. It’s beyond his power as president, no matter how many “executive orders” he brandishes.
The states run federal elections on the dates set by Congress
The Constitution assigns to the states the responsibility for running federal elections in the first instance, while giving Congress (not the president) the power to alter the “times, places, and manner” for congressional elections. Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1 states,
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
The election date for House races is set by federal statute:
The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress commencing on the 3d day of January next thereafter.
Changing it would require an act of Congress, not a presidential order. There is no “presidential exception” to this. Any “order” by the president to move the date of the election forward, perhaps in light of some “emergency” he has decreed, would lose in the courts. Yes, even with this Supreme Court extremist majority, it would lose.
There are state-level races that would be affected
People often overlook the fact that more than federal elected offices are up for grabs this November. There are also statewide races. In 33 states and three U.S. territories, for example, voters will select their governors. Trump can’t tell these states not to elect their governors, not to mention their state legislatures and city and county elected officials, simply because he’s got a problem with losing Congress. The states would tell him to take a hike, just as many have told the DOJ to “pound sand” when it demanded their voter rolls.
A federal attempt to cancel the “election” therefore runs into a hard reality. Election Day is a decentralized, 50-state, county by county operation. While running our elections locally leaves certain districts vulnerable to harassment and confusion, it would be incredibly hard to stop all of them at once.
That hasn’t stopped many, including Trump, from imagining ways to do it.
What about the Insurrection Act?
The Insurrection Act is Trump’s ace, or so he believes. It’s an 1807 law that he’s repeatedly threatened as a way to assert federal military power over domestic affairs. It is in fact a rare exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which I’ve discussed often before. But once again, it is not some all powerful spell he can cast over Election Day.
Trump needs a rebellion against federal authority before he can act
There are preconditions that would need to be met for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act—specifically rebellion, widespread obstruction of federal law, or a breakdown that state authorities can’t or won’t control. That’s likely why the Department of Homeland Security is acting as abusive as it can right now in Minnesota; it wants a confrontation so Trump can order in the military.
Any claim of a statutory precondition being met would be contestable in court. And so far the regime’s record isn’t strong here, even when trying to federalize and deploy the National Guard in response to “rebellions” in Portland and Chicago. He lost those cases, and the more he tries to get around the preconditions, the more the courts smack him back.
Local instances of unrest wouldn’t justify national deployment
Even if in some cases Trump could cite resistance to federal authority sufficient to call in the military, that doesn’t mean a nationwide military presence would ever be justified. “Unrest somewhere” is not “unrest everywhere,” no matter how many times Fox shows an image of a burning Waymo car.
Any attempt to scale local disturbances into a national rationale would look like what it is—pretextual, opportunistic and geared toward intimidation rather than public safety. Courts have seen through such efforts already when Trump sought to deploy forces in Portland and Chicago, and the White House couldn’t even convince judges that there was a local rebellion underway that required the military. That he could somehow convince judges that a national deployment was needed in response to local unrest is highly unlikely given the record.
Close House races are in suburban swing districts, not cities
If Trump sent the military in, it would presumably be to hang on to the GOP House majority, which hangs by a thread already. But the reality of the map makes the military an unlikely tool to achieve this result.
Control of the House will be decided in a relatively small number of competitive districts. Many of these are suburban or mixed metro areas rather than densely populated “urban war zones” that Trump, Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem remain fixated on. Military-style disruptions of such city precincts may be legally and morally deplorable, but they’re also irrational and unlikely to work if the goal is to sway suburban turnout in the swing districts.
A bigger threat comes from the atmospherics of it all: soldiers with guns, threats against vulnerable communities, election conspiracies, selective enforcement, and administrative chokepoints, all designed to depress turnout. But this could also backfire badly, especially if independent voters in those swing districts don’t like the heavy hand they are seeing and protest by sending in those mail ballots early.
A nightmare scenario we should actually keep in mind
I don’t want to unnecessarily alarm anyone. But a recent statement by Trump hints at one other tactic that could have devastating consequences: the forced seizure of voting machines and ballots.
Trump mulled over this in 2020, and he was egged on by the likes of Ret. Gen. Michael Flynn (a traitor to our democracy if ever there was one). Cooler heads in the White House prevailed, and Trump did not order this to happen.
I do not believe he would hesitate to issue such an order after a decisive GOP loss in November that he would almost certainly claim was fraudulent. He would cite fake reports of election fraud, backed up by his captive Justice Department and some red state officials, to justify this action.
This could happen after unofficial results were released. Those who lost in close races would not be able to have their challenges adjudicated without going through the feds, who would now be in control of the machines and paper ballots. Given this DOJ’s conduct to date, tampering with or loss of evidence cannot be ruled out.
Blue state governors and secretaries of state would be wise to prepare for this possibility and file suit immediately to block the federal government from seizing voting equipment and ballots. This is just what temporary restraining orders were designed for. Military officers would have to think long and hard about violating a court order, and at the very least it would give local officers legal cover for why they are not sending forces in immediately.
The pause would also give election officials time to audit and certify results, which January 6 made clear is critical to moving forward with the transfer of power.
The key takeaway
As the above discussion shows, Trump doesn’t need to “cancel” the midterms to corrupt them. We are seeing in real time what that corruption looks like: mid-decade gerrymanders, federal intimidation campaigns in blue states posing as “integrity,” and the early construction of fraud narratives to be deployed the moment results come in.
We are fortunate, however, that the bad faith of the White House and DOJ is matched only by their collective incompetence. We are also fortunate that the federal judiciary remains a bulwark against their worst excesses. As a result, most of Trump’s early attempts at election subversion have crashed and burned right out of the gate.
There are still dangers ahead, including a possible attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act to terrify voters into staying home, or a last-ditch and desperate attempt to seize the machines and ballots themselves.
Because we know this could happen, we can prepare for it. We can warn everyone that these remain in the Trump playbook and that, if history is any guide, he will attempt some version of them. But it is one thing to falsely claim, without evidence, that the will of his voters was thwarted, as he did back in 2020. It is another to disenfranchise the majority of voters through an authoritarian gambit that will not have the support of the courts, local and state officials, or the population at large.
In the end, Trump may realize that this isn’t a game he can win, and that he can handle impeachments and his agenda being blocked, just as he did from 2019-2020, while he works on his Golden Ballroom and Triumphal Arch.
One thing is clear: None of these threats to the midterms implies that we should not make victory a top priority. The November election is the best chance our democracy has to stop Trump before he can do further damage in the two years of his term that follow.
For this reason, we must insulate them against subversion, ready them against the inevitable claims of fraud, and protect the hard evidence of their results at all costs.
