Trump’s Big Attempt To Be Savvier About Stealing the Election This Time Around Failed

Hello, and Welcome Back to the Franchise

Just over a week since the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s effort to take over and/or break mail-in voting, I still don’t think the magnitude of the president’s loss has been recognized.

One of the primary failures of President Donald Trump’s 2020 crusade to overturn the results — that the White House seemed determined to remedy this time around — was increasing its interference on the front end, rather than just filing a bazillion lawsuits to get ballots tossed after they were cast. This is really the story of the entire Trump second term: more malignant creativity applied to how the organs of the federal government could be turned to his anti-democratic ends.   

In the election context in particular, this strategy makes a lot of sense. Republicans have been spectacularly successful in their mid-decade gerrymandering push (aided by a major Supreme Court assist in Callais), allowing them to steal formerly competitive House seats without needing to concoct some conspiracy theory for the courts about why ballots from [insert your chosen group of habitual Democratic voters here] are deficient. 

On the federal level, the tip of that spear was Trump’s mail-in ballot executive order, which would have weaponized a combination of the Postal Service and Department of Homeland Security to create citizenship lists with the aim of getting absentee ballots rejected — and restricting who can get them in the first place. Trump has demonized mail-in voting for years (with brief hiatuses when Republicans worry they’re hurting themselves by taking voters off the board). That rationale made more sense in COVID-inflected 2020 when the chasm between which party’s voters used absentee ballots was enormous. Democrats still use it more, though the gap has shrunk significantly (37% Democrats to 24% of Republicans in 2024, down from 60% of Democrats to 32% of Republicans in 2020, per MIT’s Election Lab). 

It was the administration’s best plan to get huge swaths of ballots tossed at once, rather than having to go major blue metropolis by major blue metropolis with election fraud hysteria after ballots are cast. And it didn’t work. The careful dance of keeping the order’s execution theoretical enough to shield it from judicial review, but developed enough to start weaponizing it backfired, with at least one concurring justice (Brett Kavanaugh) writing that he would have greenlit the order if it wouldn’t have unleashed chaos so close to the elections.  

The administration has a few other irons still in the fire: an active request to the Supreme Court to let it use a citizenship status verification system (the faulty database my colleague Khaya Himmelman has covered extensively, which is meant to be used to determine eligibility for certain federal benefits) to force states to remove alleged noncitizens from their voter rolls; a DHS push to punish alleged noncitizen voters; and cryptic plans to have ICE carry out immigration enforcement at polling places, all in the hopes of scaring off minority voters. And they will undoubtedly run back the 2020 retroactive gambits (does anyone think they’d let a 10,000-vote Abdul El-Sayed victory stand unmolested?), despite their marked lack of success last time. 

But this was the big one. And it doesn’t detract from the reality that the Supreme Court is corrupt or that the Trump administration is acutely dangerous to take some relief in the administration’s bungling of its biggest threat. 

Seeding Chaos: Tracking the Trump Admin’s Attempts to Mess With the Midterms 

1. The Trump administration continues its attempts to scare immigrants (or anyone who, by the White House’s lights, looks or sounds like one) off of participating in the election by publicizing its arrests of noncitizens who allegedly illegally voted. Noncitizen voting is not and never has been a real problem, but it nicely marries Trump’s smear campaign against immigrants with his attempts to put ambient doubt about the midterm election into the ether. The Justice Department announced new charges against 16 individuals Friday. Shockingly, those allegedly nabbed hail not from, say, France or Norway, but mostly from Mexico, Venezuela and a smattering of African countries. Curious. 
2. A new survey from UC San Diego reports that only 49% of respondents answered affirmatively when asked: “Do you expect that the upcoming midterm elections held in November 2026 will be free and fair elections?” And re: Trump’s efforts to convince minority voters that the cost of exercising their fundamental right might be too steep, “39% of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, 31% of Hispanics, 24% of Black respondents, and 9% of white respondents agreed with the statement ‘I worry that going to the polls could put me at risk of being questioned by federal immigration officers, despite being a US citizen.’” 
3. In a seemingly unintentional chaos seeding, election officials discovered that a Texas Department of Safety error kept an unknown number of voter registrations from being sent to their proper counties, per the Texas Tribune. Election administrators are working to fix the issue just two weeks out from the registration due date.

Unseeding Chaos: Pro-Democracy Efforts to Insulate Elections From Trump Interference 

1. Another lawsuit has been filed in federal court to ensure the Trump admin doesn’t violate federal law by sending armed federal agents to voting sites, this time led by the NAACP. It follows a similar lawsuit filed earlier this month by good government groups in conjunction with the city of Denver. Interestingly, while the Denver suit is pegged to violations of the Administrative Procedure Act, the NAACP is using one of the last remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act, which says: “No person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, shall intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote…” I’ll keep you updated as both cases develop.
2. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) in recent days signed a package of 13 new laws aimed at protecting his state’s elections. They include making it a felony to seize ballots or voting technology before an election is certified, and prohibiting law enforcement from making arrests within 200 feet of a polling place, unless it’s related to disrupting the voting or a crime against a person or property.

Post-Callais Fallout: Tracking the Various Fronts of the Redistricting Wars

The insanity out of Missouri continues, as Republicans and their allied judges go to absurd lengths to jam through a gerrymander that would net the GOP an extra seat by annihilating the Kansas City district represented by longtime Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO). At the time of publication, we’re still waiting on the Supreme Court to weigh in a third time after twice rejecting Missouri Republicans’ asks. To underscore what legal observers expect out of this latest trip to the Court, one Twitter user joked that Kavanaugh, the justice who handles cases from that part of the country and who summarily rejected the Republicans before, “is gonna attach a pipe bomb to the stay he mails to the 8th Circuit at this rate.” 

Dessert: A Little Treat after the Heavy Stuff

Race rating changes from a couple of the major prognosticators have Republicans wetting themselves this week, a further vindication of extremely rosy polling for Democrats. 

In the University of Virginia Crystal Ball’s writeup, some shifts of note include moving the Michigan Senate race (Abdul El-Sayed vs. Mike Rogers) from toss-up to leans D, the Iowa (Iowa!) Senate race (Josh Turek vs. Ashley Hinson) from leans R to toss-up and the Kansas (Kansas!!) Senate race from likely R to leans R. They also moved the Florida and Texas governor races from likely R to leans R, a sign of Trump’s quickly eroding support from Hispanics that could finally, at long last, deliver Democrats their white whale, Blexas. 

Cook Political Report chimes in, also moving Kansas to leans R, shifting Georgia Senate (Jon Ossoff vs. Mike Collins) from leans D to likely D and, a cherry on top, moving South Carolina Senate (Annie Andrews vs. the gaffe-prone Darlene Graham Nordone) from solid R to likely R.