How Trump Plans to Steal the Midterm Elections
President Donald Trump is pulling out all the stops to prevent fair elections in November. He is running scared, because he is badly underwater in the polls on his two signature issues, the economy and immigration. Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House, and the Democrats have a very good chance of ousting them in the midterms. If they win, Trump won’t be able to rule as an absolute monarch.
The President is resorting to extraordinary measures to block a Democratic victory:
· Gerrymandering election districts outside the usual cycle
· Deploying ICE to terrorize voters, especially Latinos, in Democratic cities
· Raiding state election offices to:
· intimidate election officials
· get confidential voter information for pinpointing ICE sweeps
· lay the foundation for seizing voting machines
· Arresting journalists to intimidate the free press
This is a comprehensive blueprint for establishing a fascist, one-party regime, and Trump is moving fast. But his brutal tactics have triggered a backlash, which may help the Democrats, and there are ways to fight back.
Stacking the Deck in Elections
Gerrymandering is a uniquely American problem, the Achilles heel of our body politic. However, politicians have usually redrawn election districts only after new census results come out, that is, every 10 years. But Trump unleashed a “nuclear arms race” between the parties a few months ago by demanding that Republicans in Texas and several other states revise their electoral maps immediately, to put Democratic candidates at a disadvantage.
Most state legislators complied with Trump’s demands. In Texas alone, the Republicans might win an additional five seats. (Republicans in Indiana deserve praise for refusing to follow Trump’s orders.)
Democrats Fight Back
In return, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, orchestrated a referendum in which California voters approved suspending the state’s independent election commission until 2030 and redrawing five seats to favor Democrats.
I opposed Newsom’s campaign in an article last August Should Democrats Go Tit for Tat On Gerrymandering? because California had set the gold standard for conducting fair elections However, I have concluded, reluctantly, that Newsom was right; Democrats had to fight back.
The net effect of all this reshuffling is that Republicans might win a few more seats in the midterms and keep their majority in the House. But they have also angered voters, especially Black and Hispanic Americans, so their egregious gerrymandering could backfire.
In any event, the redistricting games may further weaken some Americans’ faith in the fairness of our elections. That is another blow to the legitimacy of our system.
The Big Chill—Dumping ICE on Democrats
Trump is using ICE and Border and Customs Patrol agents as his private army to occupy Democratic-led cities and harass their citizens and local officials. The Administration is deploying military-style units in our own cities, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and long-standing tradition…and getting away with it.
Even worse, Administration officials are escalating their war on American cities, sending bigger units and using increasingly violent tactics. Compared to the carnage and murders in Minnesota, the ICE incursions in Los Angeles and Portland were mere warm-up acts.
One of Trump’s primary missions is to round up and deport undocumented immigrants, on the specious grounds that many are criminals. However, Trump is also using the massive crackdown on immigrants as a pretext to suppress voter turnout. Trump wants to intimidate Democratic voters, especially Latinos, in advance of the midterm elections. It is not accidental that ICE and BCP agents often accost people who are American citizens but have brown skin or speak with a Spanish accent.
ICE—Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You? /photo: Getty Images
Trump: Republicans Should “Nationalize” Elections
On Monday, February 2, Trump explicitly linked his two goals, in a dangerous escalation of his rhetoric about elections. On a podcast with Dan Bongino, who was until recently the deputy FBI director, Trump called for Republican officials to “take over” voting procedures in 15 states:
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many-15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Trump claimed that Democrats are helping undocumented immigrants to vote:
“If Republicans don’t get them (undocumented immigrants) out, you will never win another election as a Republican. It’s crazy how you can get these people to vote. If we don’t get them out, look, Republicans will never win another election.”
Once again, Trump is lying… and laying the foundation for claiming that the midterms will be marred by fraud. He wants to use this as an excuse to deploy ICE (and the National Guard, perhaps) in Democratic-led cities during the elections.
Undocumented immigrants cannot vote, of course, and Democrats do not try to subvert the election laws by registering them.
Latinos Turning Against Trump
Trump won the 2024 election partly because his support increased dramatically among Latino men (not women). But now, the pendulum has swung back sharply. Almost 70% of Hispanics say that their lives have become worse since Trump returned to power, according to Pew Research. That is very bad news for Trump and Republicans, but it is not surprising.
Like other Americans, many Latino men voted for Trump because they thought he would stop inflation and secure the border. Many Latinos are lower income and are suffering because of the higher prices caused by Trump’s tariffs. The labor market has weakened, too, hurting their job prospects. And, again like most Americans, Hispanics did not vote for the massive, violent raids on immigrant neighborhoods that have ripped families apart.
Their attitude might have been naïve, given Trump’s promise to launch the biggest deportation campaign in US history, but Hispanics have been shocked by the Administration’s brutal tactics.
Here’s Trump’s response to the drop in Hispanics’ support: intimidate Latinos and other minorities and discourage them from voting. Trump has also been losing support from Black men who voted for him in 2024, for the same reasons, so he’s also prepared to harass Black voters…such as Somali Americans.
Trump is also fine-tuning his approach. Previously, he sent his troops into heavily Democratic cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, where Republican candidates for the House don’t have a prayer of winning. Now, Trump will probably focus on cities in swing states, such as Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Michigan and so forth. More bang for the buck, or more buck for the bang, if you will.
FBI Raid in Georgia
Last week, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who used to focus on fighting actual crimes, raided the offices of election officials in Fulton County, Georgia. The County, which includes Atlanta and some other towns, is heavily Democratic and has a large Black population. The County voted for Joseph Biden in 2020, which helped him to carry the state of Georgia.
In the raid, FBI agents seized “truckloads” of ballots from the 2020 election, according to the New York Times. The Department of Justice justified the search by saying it is investigating possible criminal fraud by Fulton County officials in the 2020 election.
Of course, it was Donald Trump, not Georgia officials, who committed election fraud in 2020. Trump called Brad Raffensberger, the Georgia Secretary of State, and demanded that he “find 11,700 votes” so that Trump would win the state. In a better world, Trump would be cooling his heels in prison because of his brazen attempt to subvert the election.
Now, Trump is engaging in a Stalinist rewriting of history to justify his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. We can assume that the Georgia raid will not be the only one. Trump also claimed, falsely, that he won in several other states, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The search in Fulton County may be a dress rehearsal for raids in other swing states.
Trump Directly Involved
There are other deeply troubling aspects to the raid.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence (DNI), participated in the search. However, Gabbard’s mandate is to help protect the US against foreign interference in our elections, not domestic fraud. Will the Trump administration claim, somehow, that foreigners interfered in the 2020 election? (Not the Russians, of course.)
Furthermore, the DNI’s role is to gather intelligence and advise the President, not to take part in FBI operations. It turns out that Trump ordered Gabbard to take part in the search.
While in Georgia, Gabbard arranged a call in which Trump spoke to FBI agents conducting the search.
In other words, the President is participating in a criminal investigation in which he has a personal stake.
Here is the reaction of David Laufman, a former senior DOJ official, as quoted by the Times:
“It is extremely dangerous to our democracy and a shocking abandonment of years of sound policy for the president to be directly involved in the conduct of domestic criminal investigations, especially one that seeks to redress his personal grievances and to make the director of national intelligence an instrument of his political will”.
Intimidating Election Officials
The raid in Georgia is a major escalation of Trump’s efforts to bring state and local election officials under his thumb. He wants to scare them, so that they will not resist his inevitable challenges to Congressional midterm races that Republican candidates lose.
The search is also part of Trump’s drive to get confidential information on voters. His Administration has sued half of the states (Democratic-led ones) to obtain access to their voting records. The DOJ’s rationale is that they want to ensure the integrity of elections, but that is a bogus pretext. Voting fraud in the US is extremely rare.
States guard the confidentiality of this information very carefully, as their records include voters’ names, addresses and, in many jurisdictions, their party affiliation. Historically states have not shared this information with Federal officials, because of the obvious potential for abuse.
The Administration wants to build a massive database on voters as it pursues its dream of creating a police state. However, states have sued to protect their records, and the issue is bogged down in the courts. The raid on Fulton County represents an end run to obtain voting records. The seizure of Fulton County’s five-year-old ballots and voting records could be a useful precedent for Trump, enabling his minions to grab voters’ information in other states.
Intimidating Voters
If Trump officials obtained detailed information on voters, they could use the data to pinpoint neighborhoods and homes for ICE sweeps: registered Democrats, voters with Latino surnames, and so on. The government could deploy ICE and BCP units in targeted areas, in the weeks leading up to the midterms. Some voters, especially minority voters, might decide to stay home, rather than risk confrontations with ICE.
Seizing Voting Machines
Trump wanted to deploy the National Guard to seize voting machines in 2020, but his senior advisers dissuaded him. The President recently told the New York Times that he regretted that he had not followed his inclinations in 2020. We can assume that he will try to take this step if the midterms seem to be going badly for his party. And if his Administration can get access to voting records ahead of the election, his officials can seize voting machines in election districts that are likely to produce “fraudulent” (i.e., unfavorable) results.
Harassing Journalists
The Department of Justice has made strenuous efforts to arrest Don Lemon, a former CNN anchor, and Georgia Fort, a prominent Minnesota reporter, who covered a protest that took place inside a church in Minneapolis. Anti-ICE activists disrupted the religious service because the pastor is also an ICE official. Lemon, now an independent journalist, conducted interviews in the church during the protest, while Fort filmed the proceedings.
The DOJ brought a criminal indictment against the journalists, claiming that they had participated in the protest and had violated the civil rights of the congregants, interfering with their right to worship. However, a judge ruled that neither Lemon nor Fort had engaged in any criminal activity and refused to issue the arrest warrants. The DOJ took the unprecedented step of asking an appellate court to overrule the judge’s decision, but the higher court refused.
Covering a public protest is a classic role for journalists. By seeking criminal penalties, the DOJ is trampling on the First Amendment and threatening journalists. The Administration is taking extreme measures to intimidate what remains of a free press in the US.
What Can You Do?
The heroic citizens of Minneapolis are on the front lines defending our civil liberties. You could donate to one of the organizations helping immigrants in Minneapolis.
Here are two possibilities, among many worthy groups:
· Immigrant Defense Network (https://immigrantdefensenetwork.org/)
· Immigrant Rapid Response Fund (https://www.wfmn.org/funds/immigrant-rapid-response/)
You could volunteer as a poll monitor during the midterms, to watch out for inappropriate tactics by ICE, BCP or other Federal units. This would be a particularly useful role if you live in a swing state.
You could donate to nonpartisan groups that help to protect election officials and safeguard the electoral process:
· The Election Official Legal Defense Network (https://eoldn.org/) provides pro bono attorneys to advise officials on how to respond to threats and lawsuits
· The Campaign Legal Center (https://campaignlegal.org/) focuses on ensuring that election rules remain fair
And please support the Democratic candidate for Congress running in your district.
The battle to save our democracy is not over yet. We can still beat these tyrants.
The Wall Street Democrat