Top Democrats are concerned President Donald Trump will try to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections, and they are already preparing for how to push back.
“Trump will do whatever it takes, and he has no honor and no credibility and no respect for law,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told The Associated Press Wednesday. “But, we are prepared for it, and we believe we will succeed.”
“We already have teams of both senators and lawyers looking at every way that Trump could try to screw things up, and we’re fighting against it,” Schumer also said. “We already have a team to make sure that they count the votes fairly.”
Democrats have been sounding the alarm for months that Trump could reprise efforts like those he made during the 2020 election, when he pressured officials to meddle with the results and his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers certified Joe Biden’s election win.
Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warned last month that the administration’s campaign of sending troops and masked federal agents to mostly Democratic cities could be a form of voter suppression.
“What he is going to do is send those troops there, and keep them there all the way through the next election, because guess what?” Martin told reporters. “If people are afraid of leaving their house, they’re probably not going to leave their house to go vote on Election Day. That’s how he stays in power.”
The White House has dismissed allegations it will try to interfere with the midterms as baseless “fear-mongering.”
White House chief of staff Susie Wiles told Vanity Fair in an interview published last month that allegations the president will use the military to suppress political turnout are “categorically false.”
Despite these assurances, state and local officials, who manage elections, are preparing for the worst.
“We have to plan for the worst and hope we get the best,” Carly Koppes, the Republican clerk of Weld County in Colorado, told NPR in November. “I think we’re all kind of conditioned at this point to expect anything and everything, and our bingo cards keep getting bigger and bigger with things that we would have never have had on them.”
The White House already has made multiple moves ahead of the elections later this year, where Republicans are expected to lose control of the House of Representatives.
In March, President Trump signed an executive order requiring proof of citizenship on the federal voter registration form and limiting when absentee and mail-in ballots could be counted.
Multiple federal courts have rejected parts of the order, including in a decision last week in Oregon.
“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, told Votebeat.
The president has also pushed Republican states to redraw congressional districts to add more likely GOP seats, a campaign that has touched off a national tit-for-tat redistricting war between red and blue states ahead of the midterms.
The president has welcomed officials into his administration who helped spread false information about the 2020 election, including Heather Honey, who has been appointed to a senior position overseeing all U.S. election infrastructure in the Department of Homeland Security.
