Free and fair elections this November should produce a Democratic wave, mass repudiation of Trump, and the possibility of a new impeachment. With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that Trump has only one strategy for averting that fate: stealing the 2026 midterm election. He can’t seem to deliver a speech without returning to his obsession that he actually won the 2020 election, most recently in a prime-time address filled with false evidence of supposed foreign interference.
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On January 6, 2021, Trump attempted to stage a coup and he will surely try again. Last time, only the integrity of a handful of Republican officials spared the Republic that fate. Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, rebuffed Trump’s demand to find exactly 11,780 votes, and Vice President Mike Pence refused to go along with Trump’s scheme, laid out in detail by John Eastman, to refuse to certify the results.
This time, Trump is relying on four possible strategies to steal the election. The survival of our democracy depends on whether each of them can be foiled, and how.
The first is to use executive orders and directives to gain control of voter rolls, which will then be purged using commercial databases that are rife with errors. These demands were spelled out in detail in Trump’s executive order of March 31. The order also required the U.S. Postal Service to deny mail balloting to states that did not comply with Trump directives.
This ploy has been complemented by threats from other Trump officials. Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin threatened local election officials with prison time if they did not comply with Trump demands. But as I wrote in this piece, so far the courts have consistently blocked every single Trump effort to take over elections. Just last Saturday, the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit blocked the Trump administration’s effort to move forward with mail-in voting restrictions in 23 states that sued ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Trump’s second strategy is to somehow get Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which could require proof of citizenship and photo ID for people to register and vote, and otherwise turn control of elections over to the federal executive. Trump has been willing to hold hostage one important legislative objective after another to try to compel Congress to pass this legislation. He has tied its passage to the renewal of a foreign surveillance law that expired last month, and refused to sign a bipartisan housing policy bill. The housing measure went into law without his signature.
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The SAVE America Act has passed the House but is dead in the Senate. As Senate Majority Leader John Thune keeps telling Trump, the votes are simply not there. The House stuck a mini-SAVE in a budget bill that can be passed without Democratic votes, but Senate rules may disqualify it and Thune doesn’t want to pass that bill at all, because it would force his vulnerable members to take a series of unpopular votes, as my colleague David Dayen explained.
In the run-up to the November elections, the focus will shift to strategy number three: voter suppression, intimidation, and election disruption, both before and on Election Day. Democratic state attorneys general have been having regular “tabletop” exercises to anticipate Trump tactics and counter them.
What if the FBI showed up to a polling place, demanding election materials or equipment? Suppose federal troops or ICE agents were deployed to intimidate voters or disrupt the election? What if Trump declared a national emergency? Attorneys general have been working with secretaries of state to anticipate and block these and other tactics.
One valuable memo has just been circulated by Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the Minnesota ecumenical progressive group ISAIAH, and one of the most savvy on-the-ground organizers in the progressive movement. Her memo, titled “Act Free to Be Free: A State and Local Pro-Democracy Framework,” summarizes all the possible Trump tactics, and strategies for anticipating and countering them.
She calls for “mapping the actual machinery of election administration,” finding the vulnerabilities, and “deploying organized people into the specific vulnerable spaces (county board meetings, legislative hearings, certification processes) well before November. The job is to pre-position the case against their power grab by naming their strategy in public, making it transparent, and going on offense.” The rapid response mechanisms, Schrantz writes, need to be political, legal, media, operational, and above all, organized, with massive grassroots deployment of large numbers of well-prepared citizens. The entire memo is worth a careful reading.
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The most alarming Trump tactic would be an echo of January 6, 2021: an effort to stage a coup by overturning the results. The Constitution provides in Article I, Section 5 that each house of Congress is the sole judge of its membership. But actual election results are certified by the states. Courts have repeatedly held that such certification is mandatory.
The process and legal requirements published by four legal defense-of-democracy groups, led by the Brennan Center. If a cabal of Republican secretaries of state or governors tried to stall or overturn actual results, the courts would quickly intervene. Only in the cases of extremely close elections, within a state’s legitimate rules for a recount, could certification be legitimately delayed.
Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center, told me, “Across all states, certifying election results is a mandatory duty. If an official improperly delays or refuses to sign off on the results, state officials and courts can step in to compel certification. Every attempt to refuse certification since the modern election denier movement began has been unsuccessful.”
But a more sinister scenario was posed in a widely circulated article last week by New York Times columnist David French, an anti-Trump conservative who is also a lawyer. French points out that the process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969. Under that act, a losing candidate has 30 days after certification by a state to challenge the certification, and the challenge is ultimately decided by a simple majority vote of the respective chamber.
French poses a coup scenario, in which “even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.” The incoming House would subsequently be flipped from majority Democratic to majority Republican. Because the Constitution is clear that each house is the sole judge of its membership, the courts could not intervene.
I’ve written about this risk, and something about French’s column struck me as off. I double checked, and confirmed that it is the new incoming Congress, not the lame-duck Congress (which expires on January 3) that certifies the new membership. I triple checked with Brennan’s Wendy Weiser, and she confirmed my finding.
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When I emailed French, he also confirmed my reading of the law, but said that he was posing this scenario because the challenge process begins in the old Congress and that Republicans might try to act under “bad-faith readings of the law.”
But if dozens of losing Republican candidates, in a coordinated effort, claimed that they had really won, the usual judicial deference to the political process might well not apply. Courts would likely step in to uphold state certifications, and the duly elected new Congress would be seated.
If this Republic survives, it will take a combination of citizen mobilization and vigilant courts that have increasingly lost patience with Trump’s efforts to govern as a dictator.
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