Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way
Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.
Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.
By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.
Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.
Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat the GOP candidates. Trump’s allies keep the House in a profoundly illegitimate election rejected by many Americans.
This is just one possible scenario. Is it too pessimistic? Perhaps. But at this stage of the election cycle in 2019, no one expected a crowd of Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. No one expected the president himself to explicitly lend his support to their efforts to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly no one expected that there would be calls to hang the vice president for his refusal to subvert the democratic process. If anything, when it comes to 2026, I worry more about the limits of my imagination than about the hazards of speculation.
Trump has made his intentions clear. At a rally last summer in West Palm Beach, Florida, he offered his supporters a promise. “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
We’ll have it fixed so good. It’s not hard to guess what Trump might do to fulfill this promise. He has, after all, already attempted to disrupt and overturn an election. In 2020, those efforts involved questioning results, asserting widespread fraud without evidence, pressuring local officials to overturn outcomes, filing spurious lawsuits, and ultimately inciting supporters to sack the Capitol. Now that he’s back in the White House, he will draw from this playbook again—perhaps adding new maneuvers, such as deploying armed troops.
As president, Trump has very little statutory power over elections, yet the office provides him with plenty of opportunities for chicanery. He also has powerful reasons to interfere next year. If Democrats recapture the House (by gaining three seats) or the Senate (four seats), they could stall his agenda, launch oversight proceedings, and potentially bring new impeachment charges against him.
Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins. Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18 House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes. Democrats won 11 of those.
To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026 contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then. “If you are not frightened,” Hannah Fried, the executive director of the voter-access group All Voting Is Local, told me, “you are not paying attention.”
Even so, the breakdown of the system is not a foregone conclusion. We can take some comfort next year in the fact that messing with 468 separate elections for House and Senate seats is more complicated than interfering with a presidential race. There will be more opportunities for shenanigans—but it will also be harder to change the overall outcome if one party leads by more than 10 or so seats.
It’s also worth remembering that courts have not looked favorably on recent challenges to elections. Scores of pro-Trump suits failed in 2020, and although the Supreme Court has sanctioned many of Trump’s executive-power grabs, most election cases are decided in lower courts, where Trump has fared poorly thus far in his second term. Finally, the decentralization of the voting system is both a weakness and a source of resilience. The patchwork of laws and offices that govern elections at the state and local levels ensures that some jurisdictions are fairer and more secure than others. It also means that nefarious actors might be able to access only small parts of the system.
Yet Trump has demonstrated that he is more effective at executing his will than he was during his first term. He has surrounded himself with aides whose loyalty is to him, not the rule of law, and who have learned from the flaws of MAGA’s 2020 plan. They are better versed in the inner workings of elections and eager to use the Justice Department as a tool for political gain.
Stopping any attempt to subvert the midterms will require courage and integrity from the courts, political leaders of both parties, and the local officials running elections. Most of all, it will depend on individual Americans to stand up for their rights and demand that their votes are counted.
I. Laying the Groundwork
Let’s get something out of the way: Donald Trump will not try to cancel the midterm elections. He lacks both the power to do so—a fact that offers only partial reassurance, with this president—and the incentive.
Modern authoritarians love elections. In Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and other countries, repressive leaders have kept the framework of democracy in place while guaranteeing that they always or usually win. Doing so helps them escape international condemnation and lends an imprimatur of legitimacy. Trump himself has warmly congratulated these leaders on electoral victories that much of the world has deemed unfair.
The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined the term competitive authoritarianism to describe a system that gives an all-but-preordained outcome the patina of democratic choice. “Competition is real, but unfair,” Levitsky told me.
Competitive-authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world offer models for how a leader might make it harder for his adversaries to regain power long before ballots are cast. For example, he might launch an effort to undermine the rule of law, which could be used to hold him accountable. He might seek to change or eliminate term limits. He might seek to co-opt and intimidate the press, rewarding friendly outlets to create a palace media and intimidating others into tempering their criticism. He might seek to pack the government with loyalists, replacing civil servants with political operatives and appointing allies to the judiciary. Finally, a competitive authoritarian might use the government’s powers to harass political rivals, weakening the opposing party well ahead of elections. When necessary, he might imprison rivals or even kill them; see, for example, the fate of Alexei Navalny in Russia. This is a last resort, though: Such heavy-handedness tends to attract condemnation, and usually isn’t necessary anyway.
Trump has already done a lot of this. He has coerced law firms into questionable agreements that aligned them with the administration. He has launched criminal investigations into officials who have tried to hold him to account. He has questioned whether the constitutional right of free speech extends to criticism of him. He has pressured social-media companies into ending their moderation of disinformation, of which he is a prodigious source. He has used lawsuits and the Federal Communications Commission to bully entertainment conglomerates and news outlets. His administration engineered a deal for the sale of TikTok, a major information source for younger Americans, to a group of investors that includes political allies.
Trump has directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the fundraising platform that raised more than $3.6 billion for Democratic candidates in the 2024 cycle. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, he issued an executive order that could target a range of left-wing political organizations. Trump has not yet arrested any high-profile candidates for office, but, as of this writing, his administration has launched an investigation into Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who led Trump’s first impeachment, and charged Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat, with assault after an incident at a migrant-detention facility in Newark. The Justice Department also charged former FBI Director James Comey with felonies for allegedly lying to Congress and indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud. (Schiff and James have denied any wrongdoing; McIver and Comey have pleaded not guilty.)
The cumulative effect in the United States is likely to be the same as it has been overseas: Prospective donors, candidates, and campaign workers or volunteers will wonder whether the benefits of participation outweigh the risks of harassment and persecution. By the time voting starts, the opposition party will already be at a steep disadvantage.
II. Changing the Rules
Over the summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the state legislature to Austin for a special session in which, among other things, it redrew congressional districts. The aim was to give the GOP five additional seats in the U.S. House. This was a brazen move. States normally redistrict only once a decade, after the census. Texas’s 2021 map was already engineered for Republican advantage, but the White House pushed the state to go further, hinting at retribution for anyone who resisted, according to The New York Times. This set off a chain of attempted copycats in red states and attempted payback in blue ones. Trump reportedly threatened primary challenges for Republicans who opposed him and sent the vice president to pressure Indiana lawmakers—all of which suggests that the president believes the midterms will be close.
Redistricting was an especially blunt and public effort to change the rules ahead of Election Day. Most of the other methods that Trump and his allies have tried or are likely to try will not be so overt, and may also be less successful. The problem for Trump is that power over elections rests with the states and, to a lesser extent, Congress, not the executive branch.
Nevertheless, Trump has simply asserted control and dared anyone to say no. In March, he issued an executive order that purported to make several changes to voting. It instructed the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal agency that helps states administer elections, to require proof of citizenship to vote. (Congress is also considering a bill that would do the same.) It also demanded that only ballots received by Election Day be counted, regardless of state rules. The executive order was largely blocked by two federal judges, one of whom noted that citizenship was already required to vote and added, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”
Trump has been trying to teach the American people to distrust elections since 2016, and many of his actions now are designed to create a pretense for claiming fraud later. For example, he has repeatedly suggested that millions of unauthorized immigrants are voting, although this is not true. Now the Justice Department has ordered many states to turn over voter-registration records with detailed private information, which it says it’s sharing with the Department of Homeland Security. Some states prohibit releasing this information, which is unlikely to either produce evidence of fraud or improve voter rolls. Previous attempts at matching voter lists against other databases have produced many false positives but few actual examples of illegal voting. An election-integrity commission established during Trump’s first term also tried to acquire voter rolls for the same purpose, but was rebuffed by states and tied up in litigation. This time around, the Justice Department is suing states that don’t comply, and could use their resistance as a pretext for future allegations of fraud.
Trump has consistently tried to spread distrust of voting by mail. Most recently, he reported that, during an August summit in Alaska, Putin told him, “Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.” Trump then announced on Truth Social that, in an effort to ban voting by mail and require paper ballots, he would issue a new executive order, adding, “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”
This is false, and no executive order has emerged yet, perhaps because plenty of Republicans vote by mail, and eliminating it wouldn’t have a clear partisan advantage. Even so, assailing mail-in voting is useful to Trump because it creates a justification to claim fraud after the elections. In 2020, Trump seized on claims about mailed ballots being stolen, altered, or dumped in a river, even long after those stories were debunked. And in 2024, he was preparing to do so again, until it became clear that he had won.
Similarly, Trump and his allies have insisted for nearly a decade—without ever providing proof—that many voting machines are not secure. In his executive order on voting, Trump instructed the Election Assistance Commission to decertify all voting machines in the U.S. within 180 days and recertify only those that met certain requirements. This would be impractical, in part because it’s unclear whether any voting machines that meet those standards could be available in time for the election. But again, the order may be designed to serve a different purpose: If races don’t go the way the president wants, he can point to the executive order and say that the voting machines didn’t meet the standards. The results, therefore, are not valid, or at least cannot be trusted.
The administration’s own actions are actually undermining election security. In past elections, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a part of DHS, assisted local officials. That might have meant providing protection from hacking or doing site visits to make sure door locks and electricity were secure. But Trump has held a grudge against CISA since Chris Krebs, then the agency’s leader, vouched for the security of the 2020 election. (Trump fired Krebs at the time and earlier this year directed the Justice Department to open an investigation into him.) The administration has cut about a third of CISA’s workforce and slashed millions of dollars of assistance to local officials, potentially exposing election systems to interference by foreign or domestic hackers. The big risk is not changing actual vote tallies, but disrupting the system to create chaos and doubt and to prevent people from casting ballots.
This summer, DHS appointed Heather Honey, an election denier involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election, to the newly created role of deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. Meanwhile, troubling examples of attempted interference with the system are popping up in swing states.
In a peculiar turn this July, 10 Colorado counties reported being contacted by Jeff Small, a Republican consultant, who told some of them he was working on behalf of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and requested access to voting machines. According to The Denver Post, Small connected at least one Colorado election official with a person at the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting that he was acting with the administration’s cooperation. (Small did not reply to interview requests. An administration spokesperson told CNN earlier this year that Small “does not speak for the White House” and was never “authorized to do official business on behalf of the White House.”)
In September, Reuters reported that Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. attorney for Nevada, had directed the FBI to investigate claims of voter fraud in that state, hoping that a probe would help Republicans keep the House. (Shortly thereafter, a court found Chattah’s appointment invalid.)
III. Election Day
Voter suppression has a long history in the U.S., but the methods have become more sophisticated and less obvious than in the days of literacy tests, poll taxes, and the KKK. Republican jurisdictions in particular have enacted rules that have made it harder for people to vote. They have placed restrictions on voter-registration drives by outside groups; required photo identification to vote (which is popular, although its effects are often discriminatory because Black, older, and poorer people are less likely than other voters to have qualifying ID); tried to limit the hours that polls are open; and, in Georgia, put restrictions on giving food or water to people waiting in line to vote.
The Justice Department recently announced that it would take the unusual step of sending poll monitors to observe elections in six counties in New Jersey and California this November. Both states have important elections—Californians are voting on a new congressional map that could eliminate GOP seats, and a Trump ally is trying to capture New Jersey’s governorship from Democrats. This could be a test run for broader use of monitors in 2026 to intimidate poll workers and voters around the country.
None of these things, in isolation, will prevent large numbers of people from voting, but they create barriers that might make a difference at the margins. They are likely to especially affect people who vote infrequently. Whether this is beneficial for Trump and his allies is a matter of debate among experts. (Traditionally, high turnout was thought to help Democrats, but Trump’s coalitions have included many irregular voters.)
In 2026, however, Trump could far surpass these small-bore measures. The fear I heard, again and again, is that the president will attempt to use armed federal agents to interfere with elections. In its simplest form, this could look like federal law-enforcement officers patrolling the streets in blue cities, a possibility that some influential people in Trump’s orbit have already embraced. “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s gonna be ICE officers near polling places,” Steve Bannon said in August. “You’re damn right.”
But many people now worry that Trump would go further and use the military. Not long ago, this would have seemed nearly unthinkable. In January, the Brennan Center for Justice, the University of Virginia’s Center for Public Safety and Justice, and the States United Democracy Center held a tabletop exercise to consider best practices for policing in a tense society. The participants imagined that the National Guard might be deployed to cities—by sometime in 2028. “Even our most unlikely circumstances were far passed in the first few months of this year,” Ben Haiman, the executive director of CPSJ, told me. “We got there real fast.”
Federal law specifically bans the presence of “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” But some of the experts I spoke with believe that military intervention is now not only possible, but likely. “They’re telling me that it’s really unconstitutional and illegal for them to be there, but that doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference to this administration,” Aaron Ammons, the clerk of Champaign County, Illinois, told me.
The administration could try to get around the ban on troops at polling places in a few ways. Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who was involved in “Stop the Steal” efforts in 2020 and remains influential in the White House, suggested in September that Trump could use emergency powers. “The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States,” she said on a conservative talk show. “I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Trump might allege foreign interference in the elections—asserting, for example, that Iranian hackers had changed voter results—in order to claim that national security required him to intervene.
Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center, told me that nothing like what Mitchell described exists: “There are no powers that give him the authority to do anything around elections, full stop.” But Goitein warned that Trump could try anyway. One possibility is that he could invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, by claiming it is necessary to enforce federal law or protect voters’ constitutional rights.
Mobilizing troops takes time and is hard to do without anyone noticing. Trump might find it easier to deploy troops between now and November and have them on the streets already when voting starts. During a meeting with top military leaders in September, he said, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”
He’s already started. In June, Trump federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and sent Marines into Los Angeles, putatively to maintain order and protect ICE agents. He has since deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and moved to send Guardsmen to several other cities. These deployments could accustom Americans to seeing troops in the streets well ahead of the elections.
A military or federal-law-enforcement presence creates the danger of intimidation. Right-wing figures tend to write this off as blather: If you’re not an illegal immigrant, you have nothing to fear. But ICE’s recent dragnets have arrested and jailed American citizens. Beyond that, the presence of police, or especially troops, could make it harder to reach polling places and could sap voters’ energy. Even a small presence of troops in a few cities might create enough media attention to affect turnout elsewhere.
In the worst-case scenarios, armed troops could be ordered to close polling areas, commandeer voting machines, or crack down on protesters. These orders would be illegal, and units might refuse to follow them, potentially producing a standoff between the president and his military brass. But it wouldn’t take more than a few officers complying to corrupt the election.
IV. After Election Day
As soon as the polls close, Trump and other Republicans will try to stop the counting of votes. Scholars have documented a phenomenon called the “red mirage” or “blue shift,” in which early results seem more favorable to Republicans, but as mail-in ballots, provisional ballots, and tallies in slow-counting Democratic-leaning cities and states trickle in, Democrats’ outcomes look better.
In 2020, with many states still counting, Trump spoke at the White House early on the morning of November 4 and demanded that no new votes be included in tallies. “Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election,” he said. “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”
In his blocked executive order on elections this spring, Trump instructed the attorney general to target states that allow the counting of votes that arrive after Election Day (but are postmarked by then), arguing that “federal law establishes a uniform Election Day across the Nation” and that any ongoing counting is thus illegal. Even if that goes nowhere, Republicans will use the same argument in lawsuits seeking to throw out any such votes. This will be only the start of the lawfare. A flurry of lawsuits in close House districts or states with close Senate races will aim to give Republican candidates an edge.
To see how this might look, consider a 2024 race for the North Carolina Supreme Court. Early returns suggested that the Republican Jefferson Griffin had defeated the incumbent Democrat, Allison Riggs, but once every ballot was counted, Riggs took a narrow lead, which was confirmed by multiple recounts. Griffin then filed suit seeking to throw out thousands of votes. Some were overseas ballots, including from military voters, that did not include photo ID; others were in heavily Democratic counties, from voters whose registration did not include a Social Security number. Everyone agreed that these ballots had been cast in accordance with the rules of the election at the time, but Griffin wanted to change the rules after the fact. He almost succeeded, with the help of favorable rulings from GOP-dominated state courts, before a federal judge shut him down.
In the days after the 2026 elections, Republicans will announce that Democratic victories are fraudulent. They may point to alleged deficiencies in voting machines, using Trump’s decertification mandate as a starting point, but many candidates have previously just relied on rumor and innuendo. Republicans will demand that elections be invalidated or rerun because they are tainted.
At the same time, Republican leaders—including Trump—will be working the phones, trying to recruit local and state election officials to help. In 2020, Trump called many local GOP officials seeking assistance, most infamously asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him almost 12,000 votes. Given that he was caught on tape doing so and has thus far faced no repercussions, Trump has no reason not to do it again. The pressure he exerted in 2020 didn’t work, in part because many Republican officials refused to abet his schemes, but in some places, these officials have been replaced by election deniers and MAGA loyalists. Trump might, for instance, call someone like Linda Rebuck—the chair of North Carolina’s Henderson County board of elections, who was reprimanded last year for sending false election information to state legislators—or leaders in Cochise County, Arizona, who recently asked Attorney General Bondi to investigate the results of the 2022 election, which they themselves failed to certify on time.
Even the best-intentioned official might bend under pressure from the White House, because it’s very hard to say no to the president of the United States when he asks for a favor—especially if the alternative is doxxing, harassment, political ostracism, or worse. And if that prospect doesn’t sway them, a threat from the Justice Department might. How many county clerks are willing to trust their own legal advice over an order from the attorney general?
Stephen Richer, a Republican who was elected the Maricopa County recorder in 2020, described to me what it was like when he and other GOP officials defended the integrity of local elections. Like other Republicans who contradicted Trump, he was chased from office, losing a primary to a MAGA-aligned candidate. “It is incredibly lonely,” he said. “Very few people will have your back, especially if you’re a Republican. There is no constituency.” Standing up to Trump can stymie a political career, as it did for Richer, or lead to criminal jeopardy, as it has for Krebs.
In 2020, Trump also contemplated seizing voting machines. The ostensible reason was to search for evidence of fraud, but taking possession of the machines creates its own huge risk of fraud, and would destroy any trust in results. Aides drafted executive orders instructing the Defense Department or DHS to seize machines, but, amid resistance from advisers, Trump never went forward with the plan. Now he’s surrounded by aides more likely to encourage his most outrageous ideas.
If all of that fails, Republicans could attempt to refuse to seat Democrats who are elected. The House is the arbiter of its own members, and on several occasions—in 1985, for example, during an election that came down to a handful of votes—the body has refused to seat the winner as certified by a state. With Trump blowing wind into flimsy fraud allegations, the House GOP caucus could try to use them to preserve a narrow majority.
The backdrop to all of this will be the possibility of violence by Trump supporters if they believe the election is being stolen. Just as the Krebs investigation is a warning to anyone who might publicly contradict Trump, the president’s mass clemency for people involved in the January 6 riot—including those convicted of violent attacks on police officers—is a signal to anyone who might act to assist the president’s cause that he will help them out afterward. The insurrection failed the first time, but the second try might be more effective.
V. The Way Out
The most important defense against losing our democracy is the same thing that makes it a democracy in the first place: the people. An engaged electorate, demanding clean elections and turning out in force, has been the strongest and most consistent bulwark against Trump. “It is going to require that every single American do everything in their power to ensure that elections happen, to ensure that they are free and fair, and to push back on this extremism,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told me.
The burden will fall especially on local election workers, who will be more prepared than they were six years ago but also more battered. In a survey this spring conducted by the Brennan Center, four in 10 local election officials said they’d received threats; six in 10 said they worried about political interference. They also worry about funding shortfalls. State and local governments are facing smaller budgets, and since 2020, many states have banned private donations for election administration.
Election officials are deluged by requests for information or demands that certain voters be removed from rolls—even when the law doesn’t provide for purges. Remaining apolitical has become next to impossible. “We have been asked to definitively say whether the 2020 election was fair and legitimate,” Natalie Adona, the registrar of voters in Marin County, California, told me. “I can say without a doubt that that election was fairly decided. Does that now mean that I have made a partisan statement?”
At a previous job elsewhere in California, Adona had to obtain a restraining order because of persistent harassment. In Detroit in 2020, a mob tried to break into a vote-counting center. Since then, poll workers have been doxxed, received death threats, and faced persistent verbal abuse. One result is that many experienced officials have left their jobs. Those who remain are forced to make plans for their physical safety—at polling places, but also at facilities where votes are counted, and even at home.
Despite all of this, there are reasons for hope. Even in a competitive-authoritarian system, recent examples show, elections can defeat incumbents. Scholars consider Poland one of the most encouraging stories in the cohort of the world’s backsliding democracies. Starting in 2015, the country saw a steady drop in freedom. The ruling Law and Justice party pursued many of the same strategies that Trump has now adopted, or might yet. But in the 2023 parliamentary elections, a coalition of pro-democracy opposition parties was able to defeat Law and Justice, carried to victory on the strength of an astonishing 74 percent turnout among voters.
The midterm elections could be a similarly pivotal moment for American democracy. Defending the system in 2026 won’t guarantee clean elections in 2028, but failing to do so would be catastrophic. Trump will exploit any weaknesses he can find; any damage to the system will encourage worse rigging in two years, and maybe even a quest for a third term. And if the president has two more years to act without any checks, there may not be much democracy left to save in 2028.
This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”
