Expert says Trump is desperate to steal the midterms — but can't

President Donald Trump wants his federal government to seize control of the 2026 midterm elections so he does not lose power of Congress, but an elections expert just pointed out he does not actually know how to accomplish that.

“It is not clear to me at all that these laws would hurt Democrats,” Nathaniel Rakich, the Managing Editor at Votebeat, told Silver Bulletin’s Eli McKown-Dawson on Wednesday. “I do think that is Trump’s expectation. He’s basically all but said, 'if you get rid of mail ballots and have voter ID, then Republicans will never lose another election.' But I just don’t think the evidence is there. It’s highly uncertain. I think it’s important to have wide error bars on this.”

After explaining that Trump’s executive orders have usually failed because of the courts and that Congress is unlikely to have the power to help Trump change how elections are administered, Rakich broke down that Trump’s voter suppression efforts could hurt Democrats but are unlikely to destroy them.

“There are ways in which it hurts the Democratic coalition — people of color are less likely to have these documents,” Rakich argued. “But those voters, especially Latinos, have been getting more Republican. In addition, older and rural voters are two groups who would be uniquely hurt by proof of citizenship requirements specifically. And then for rural voters, one thing that is underdiscussed about proof of citizenship requirements is that they would functionally eliminate the ability to register to vote by any method other than in person.”

Rakich added, “In most states, you can register to vote by sending in a form via the mail or do it online. Now, you could send those forms in, but before your registration was finalized you would still have to go to an elections office physically and show them your documents. For people in rural areas who might live a two-hour drive away from their county seat, that would be a real hassle. So it is not at all clear to me that these laws would have the partisan impacts that Trump hopes.”

Of course, because Trump is determined to involve the federal government in the midterm elections, he has created a database to identify supposed non-citizens that are voting — and since non-citizen voting is a virtually non-existent problem, there are inevitable false positives in their data. Yet it will not be easy for Trump to simply purge voters en masse from being eligible to cast ballots.

“It’s important to note that states aren’t allowed to kick people off their rolls without notifying them, or at least giving them a chance to prove their citizenship,” Rakich said. “So it’s not as bad as it could have been — not mass voter purges — but the federal government is being used to at least try to take people off the voter rolls.”

Finally, although Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency and cancel the midterm elections, he lacks the power to do so.

“He could issue an executive order tomorrow that said the midterm elections are hereby canceled, and they would still happen — both because the Constitution does not give the president the right to set election laws, and because the president has no role in administering the election,” Rakich said. “That is run on the state and local level by people who are a mix of Democrats, Republicans, and nonpartisan election officials, and they are almost uniformly — from all my conversations with them and our reporting — committed to doing the election. They are also all legally obligated to do the election. States have their own laws that they have to follow. So there is no chance that the midterms will be canceled.”

If Trump has any real power to throw a wild card into the elections that work to his advantage, it is by sending federal troops to polling places. He could get away with doing that despite it being illegal, since it might be difficult to stop him, but the gambit would be a wild card in the truest sense of the term — no one can anticipate whether it would scare away anti-Trump voters or galvanize them to turn out en masse.

“We don’t really know what would happen if Trump tried to do something like that,” Rakich said. “There’s also a chance that, for instance, ICE agents could conduct a bunch of raids in the neighborhood on Election Day — that’s not at polling places, so it conveniently goes around the prohibition. But obviously that’s something that might depress turnout, and could be considered interfering with the election. That is a concern. But the administration has said repeatedly that they are not going to send troops or ICE to polling places.” If he tried to use National Guard troops for the same purpose, he would need sympathetic governors like Texas, which is run by the Republican and pro-Trump governor Greg Abbott.

“There are a lot of legal and practical barriers between us and a situation where there are federal troops at polling places,” Rakich observed. “But it is one of the bigger question marks, because even if you think it is unlikely — and I think it is unlikely — it’s not impossible. Obviously, if you’re an election official, you should be preparing for this scenario, even if there’s a 10 percent chance, because it would be a pretty bad scenario. If, for instance, National Guard troops impounded voting machines or ballot boxes, that raises questions about whether those ballots will be counted because the chain of custody is broken, which means you can’t ensure that they haven’t been tampered with.”

Ultimately, because Trump can only chip away at the edges of Democratic support rather than outright thwart the election, his only hope of rigging the 2026 midterms is if Democrats under-perform and fail to win the Senate and/or House of Representatives by sufficiently large margins.

“The 2020 election was challenged on extremely dubious grounds, and it was a concern for democracy, culminating in January 6,” Rakich said. “But at the same time, the system held. I would expect the same to be the case here. The only concerning scenario is if Democrats do a lot worse than they think they’re going to do, and the House comes down to one or two seats, and then those seats are really tight. Any close election is subject to litigation, and there could be recounts, and the validity of every ballot gets scrutinized. That’s always a concern if the election is super close, but that is such a specific scenario that I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about. But it’s something I’ll be keeping an eye on.”

As conservative columnist George F. Will recently wrote, Trump has a long history of falsely claiming elections were stolen from him simply because he does not get his way. In 2016, he falsely claimed to have won the popular vote against Hillary Clinton, even though his own commission eventually proved the opposite was true; in 2020, he filed 187 counts in 64 court challenges and prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, which involved “far too few votes to change the state’s result.”

Will summed up Trump’s arguments by saying, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”

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