Might Donald Trump try to rig the midterms?

It is unclear how much he cares about the midterms, given that he is not on the ballot, but he seems to view them in personal terms.
The Economist
Published 23 Apr 2026

“Basically, we just sort of rack our brains,” says Joe Morelle. “What would happen if this happened? Usually the answer is, well, that’s never happened before—but this is what we would do.” Mr Morelle is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration. In normal times, his team oversees matters of great importance to Congress, such as who gets a parking permit in the House garage. This being an election year, he is preoccupied with an even more existential question. What if Donald Trump tries to steal the midterms?


Mr Morelle’s committee is in charge of adjudicating disputed elections in the House of Representatives. He has spent months doing tabletop exercises and dreaming up worst-case scenarios. His list of finagles that Mr Trump might attempt is 150 items long. His what-ifs include the president ordering immigration agents to the polls, declaring that postal votes are invalid and seizing ballot boxes. “I’m looking at things that are high, medium and low probability and then asking what’s the impact” and what is the Democrats’ response, says Mr Morelle. It is a group effort: he has been conferring with lawyers across the country, state attorneys-general and secretaries of state (ie, the top election officials in each state). Come November, Mr Morelle and his colleagues will have been war-gaming for more than a year.

That would seem excessive but for Mr Trump’s attempts to steal the presidential election in 2020. It is unclear how much he cares about the midterms, given he is not on the ballot, but he seems to view them in personal terms. Losing the House, which The Economist’s election model deems a near-certainty, would scupper his legislative agenda. Worse for Mr Trump, it would herald two years of investigations and hearings and could lead to a third impeachment.

Against this backdrop Mr Trump is resorting to a go-to tactic: dangling Democrats’ supposed cheating as a pretence to intervene. “When you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election,” he said in January. At his state-of-the-union speech he spent several minutes excoriating fraud by Democrats, before promising, “We’re gonna stop it.” He talks of his desire for Republicans to “nationalise the voting” and for the federal government to “get involved” in election administration, a responsibility of the states. “If [states] can’t count the votes legally and honestly, then somebody else should take over.” He says he wishes he had sent the National Guard to seize voting machines in the battleground states he lost in 2020.

Who cares?

Elsewhere Mr Trump has tried to lower expectations for the midterms, knowing full well that his approval rating is in the toilet and that the party in power tends to lose ground (see chart 1). Or as he put it, “There’s something down deep psychologically with the voters that they want, maybe, a check or something?” Talk of him cancelling the vote is alarmism by the fake-news media, he says: “They always call me a dictator.” As so often with Mr Trump, it is impossible to know whether his critics are being paranoid or are preparing rationally. His interventions so far have amounted to nothing. He might believe that they are likely to fail, and so the point is to be seen trying something and to blame those who block him.

Mr Trump’s defeat in 2020 and his attempts to overturn it loom over everything. He relitigates his loss constantly while Democrats, fearing that past is prologue, expect him to try more chicanery this year. They worry about interventions on both the front-end and back-end—that is, during the vote-casting and during the vote-counting and tabulation.

The president has already tried to change the mechanics of voting, to no avail. He also engineered a mid-decade gerrymander in Republicans’ favour in several states. That seems to have backfired after Democrats countered with their own.

The most visible intervention that Democrats fear from the president is ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to suppress turnout by black and brown voters. “You’re damn right we’re going to have ICE surround the polls,” said Steve Bannon, a MAGA rabble-rouser, on his podcast in February. Their presence at airports has been a “test run” for the midterms, he says. The Trump administration denies this and calls it “disinformation”. Still, what if ICE arrives in swing districts—whether at polling places or not—in the run-up to the vote with the aim of intimidating Democratic constituencies?

In the minds of many Republicans, deploying ICE around the polls follows logically from their oft-repeated claim that many foreigners vote (illegally) in American elections. In truth, such fraud is vanishingly rare. But that has not stopped the Trump administration from linking immigration enforcement to election integrity. In January, while thousands of ICE agents and Customs and Border Protection officers were flooding Minneapolis, Pam Bondi, the attorney-general at the time, wrote to Minnesota’s governor implying that a detente could be reached if the state handed over its voter rolls. “Out of control fraud” by Somali immigrants in Minnesota—the pretext for ICE’s presence—“also implicates election security”, she wrote.

Federal law prohibits sending “troops or armed men” to the polls. “That would be stopped by courts immediately,” says David Becker, a former voting-rights lawyer at the Department of Justice (DoJ), who adds, “The feds don’t even have the capacity to do that at scale.” America, after all, has roughly 100,000 polling places.

Yet it would not necessarily take hundreds of thousands of agents to affect the outcome of an election and, even if courts quickly intervened, the damage might be hard to undo. In recent months big ICE operations in various cities seem to have prompted many Latinos to stay home as much as possible, even though they are citizens, for fear of being caught in the dragnet. Mounting a few such operations in states with swing districts around election time, or even simply threatening to, the Democrats’ fear runs, might suppress turnout in the Republicans’ favour.

This approach could well backfire, however. Much as the ICE surge in Minneapolis provoked an overwhelming public response, sending ICE to the polls could galvanise opposition and increase Democratic turnout. Everyone who is able to vote is a citizen, so in theory should have nothing to fear from ICE. In 2024 Mr Trump won over lots of Latino voters. Few things are likelier to turn them back into enthusiastic Democrats than images of ICE harassing law-abiding voters simply for having brown skin.

Who’s counting?

Meddling on the back end of the vote, with counting or certification, might be more effective. It would certainly be explosive. Much will depend on whether the results are close. If Democrats win the House by a dozen or so seats with wide margins across several states, there is not much to do but “throw a tantrum”, says Derek Muller, an expert in election law at the University of Notre Dame. Our model thinks there is a good chance this will be the case. It gives Democrats a 74% probability of winning at least 229 seats (218 makes a majority).

Things could get fraught, however, if control of the House or the Senate comes down to a handful of tight races. Narrow margins mean more counting and recounting. When protracted tallying of this sort delayed the declaration of a winner in the presidential race in 2020, Mr Trump demanded that the counting stop. His position had worsened as postal ballots—which take more time to review—were processed. This “blue shift” in Democrats’ favour is not unusual. Republicans are less likely to vote by mail, largely because the leader of their party disparages it so much.

Mr Trump warmed to postal voting when he was on the ballot in 2024. Now he is back to denigrating it (while voting by mail himself last month, in a special election in Florida). His bid to limit postal voting is the crux of a top-to-bottom effort to make voting more difficult, hoover up information held by states and fish for fraud. None of these gambits has worked so far. His latest, an executive order issued on March 31st, directs the US Postal Service not to send ballots to anyone not on a “state citizenship list” that his administration is supposedly compiling. A judge will almost certainly block it.

Meanwhile the DoJ has sued 30 mostly Democratic-run states to force them to hand over unredacted voter rolls with private information like Social Security and driving-licence numbers. It says it wants to ensure that states are pruning ineligible voters and duplicate registrations, and that non-citizens do not appear on the rolls.

Really, the administration wants to be able to “wave some files around” if and when Mr Trump cries fraud, says Justin Levitt, another former lawyer at the DoJ. Four courts have rejected these information grabs. Democrats worry that misuse of the data could deter people from registering. The prospect of improper disclosure is not far-fetched. Asked by a federal judge last month if ICE would get hold of it and use it to arrest people, a DoJ lawyer replied, “Good question, your honour, because the [DoJ] cannot promise what any other agency will or will not do.”

Mr Trump talks a big game about overhauling the midterms. He says states are “merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government” and “must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them”. But the text of the constitution is clear: it gives the president no role in election administration. That power rests with the states in the first instance. Congress can override state procedures if it chooses.

Recently, Congress chose to buck Mr Trump rather than impose new rules on the states. He had demanded that lawmakers pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as photo identification for registered voters. It stalled in the Senate, where it lacks a filibuster-proof 60 votes.

Even some of Mr Trump’s most ardent supporters admit he has no power to change the rules unilaterally. Last year Cleta Mitchell, an activist, conceded on a podcast, “The president’s authority is limited in his role with regard to elections.” Then came the kicker: “Except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States—as I think that we can establish with the porous system that we have.” Some election deniers cite a made-up story about Chinese involvement in the 2020 election. They want Mr Trump to declare a national emergency and ban some voting machines on the theory that they may be susceptible to foreign hacking.

Like Mr Trump’s executive orders, any attempt to declare a national emergency would see a quick rebuke from the courts. “Trump can say whatever he wants. If he tries to assert control based on an emergency, that’s not a thing in our constitution,” says Rick Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles. Asked by The Economist whether an emergency declaration is on the cards, Ms Mitchell dismisses such talk as “hysteria”, before adding, “I do think our elections are a national emergency. They’re a national disgrace.”

Ms Mitchell is the grande dame of election deniers. In 2021 she was on a notorious call during which Mr Trump urged Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to change the result in Mr Trump’s favour. Ever since she has been trying to get hold of election records in Fulton County, Georgia.

In January, the FBI did exactly that, seizing 700 boxes of material from the 2020 election in Fulton County. The agency appears to have relied on long-debunked conspiracy theories about counterfeit ballots. The raid ignited fears that Mr Trump might try something similar while votes are being counted after November 3rd.

Interrupting a count in progress would be more nightmarish than digging out six-year-old material from a warehouse. It could disrupt the “chain of custody”, making it difficult or impossible to know whether ballots had been tampered with. It could even necessitate a redo of the affected race. For that reason the DoJ has long had a policy of non-interference in pending elections. This is articulated in the section of its manual entitled “Federal Role: Prosecution, Not Intervention”.

The manual notes that ballot seizures could deprive state authorities and judges of material needed to “resolve election disputes, conduct recounts and certify the ultimate winners”. It instructs prosecutors not to take any overt steps “until after the outcome of the election allegedly affected by the fraud is certified”. Sometime in the past year the DoJ pulled the latest manual from the webpage of its Election Crimes Branch. An older version is still buried elsewhere on the DoJ site.

Any ballot seizure would first require a judge to approve a warrant, for which the government would have to show probable cause that a crime had been committed. If that happens (a big if), local officials should be ready to go to court immediately to regain custody, says Alexandra Chandler of Protect Democracy, an advocacy group. She suggests they pre-draft filings so they are not scrambling in the heat of the moment. “Disruption can be mitigated if you are prepared.”

Yet another concern is that the president might engineer a fight in Congress in January 2027 about seating winners of disputed races. The constitution gives each chamber the right to determine its membership. Typically this process is mundane; they seat whomever states have certified. The last time Congress rejected a state’s certification and seated someone else was in 1984, when an extremely fraught House race was decided by four votes.

What if states or counties delay or withhold certification? Mr Morelle has been planning for this scenario, too. He says he would go to federal court and seek a “writ of mandamus” compelling election administrators to get on with it. Courts have ruled that certification is a “ministerial” act, not a discretionary one. In 2020 and 2022 Republican officials in some counties refused to accept Democratic victories; their stonewalling failed. In Arizona an election official is awaiting trial on felony charges. “If folks want to face those penalties and incur those problems, then we’ll enforce the law,” says Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state.

The upshot is that subversion is unlikely to succeed. Republicans can delay and they can argue, says Mr Morelle. The president’s efforts in 2020 failed. Of the 62 lawsuits he and his allies filed, he lost all but one, and the exception had no bearing on the outcome of the race.

Who believes in that anymore?

What the president has managed to do is delegitimise Democratic victories—a majority of Republicans think he beat Joe Biden in 2020—and sow distrust among large numbers of Americans about the credibility of their elections. In a YouGov/Economist poll before the vote in 2024, 44% said they had quite a bit or a great deal of confidence that the election would be fair. That has since dropped to 25%, after Mr Trump raised the spectre of cancelling the midterms (see chart 2). This suggests many take him seriously when he spouts outrageous stuff—or take Democrats seriously when they accuse Republicans of “trying to rig” the midterms.

Mr Trump has also undermined faith in election workers. Secretaries of state and county clerks once operated in obscurity. No longer. Years ago Mr Becker, one of the voting-rights lawyers, commissioned a poll asking Californians to name their chief election officer. Only 7% answered correctly. The most popular answer was the state board of elections, which doesn’t exist. Now election workers routinely face threats and harassment, sometimes from Mr Trump himself.

Some politicians are “scared of the verdict of the voter”, Mr Becker adds. “Those people might think that they can intimidate voters to such a degree that they self-suppress, that they choose not to participate because they think voting is unsafe or inconvenient or does not matter.”

Mr Becker worries that he and his colleagues at other pro-democracy organisations will contribute to that fear by talking up nightmare scenarios of election interference. In fact the opposite is even more likely: that turnout this November surpasses that of 2018, which itself was the highest rate for the midterms in more than a century. Judging by turnout and results in elections over the past year, Democratic voters are fired up. The more Mr Trump fulminates against elections, the keener they seem to punish him in this one.