The Big Picture

01/20/2026

Trump is preparing to challenge the midterm election results

We saw this in 2020, and we would have seen it again in 2024 had Trump lost. His default is to challenge election results he doesn’t like while crowing about those that go his way. To prepare the ground, Trump sows seeds of doubt early so his efforts to delegitimize the results will stick if he needs them to.

His tools are myriad: claims of fraud, voter panic over nonexistent undocumented immigrant voting, conspiracies over machine tallies, even personal attacks upon election officials. The GOP is likely to lose the House and may even lose the Senate in the next general election, and Trump’s efforts to tilt the results his way are failing. That almost certainly means he will pivot this year to undermining the results so he can claim they are illegitimate.

To prepare for this, we need to set some solid stakes in the ground, especially as he consolidates influence over major media outlets such as CBS.

There’s no evidence of election fraud, but Trump won’t care

The Trump election playbook in 2020 was clear: deploy widespread claims of fraud, cite random instances of tabulation errors and blow them out of proportion, and get enough of his followers to believe that the election was stolen that they would even stage an insurrection to keep him in power.

That effort failed in large part because there were enough guardrails, especially within the White House and the Justice Department, to keep him from involving the federal government directly in the amplification of fraud claims.

But those guardrails are now gone. Trump will have many DOJ and White House officials willing to go before the cameras and openly lie about widespread election cheating, even if not backed by any actual evidence. We are seeing test runs of this right now, where Trump’s White House lackeys are making verifiably false claims about ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s supposed injuries from being “struck” by Renee Good’s car, and the DOJ has been investigating bogus claims of criminality against Trump’s political enemies.

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Trump doesn’t need to “cancel” the midterms to corrupt them. We are seeing in real time what that corruption looks like: mid-decade gerrymanders, federal intimidation campaigns in blue states posing as “integrity,” and the early construction of fraud narratives to be deployed the moment results come in.

We are fortunate, however, that the bad faith of the White House and DOJ is matched only by their collective incompetence. We are also fortunate that the federal judiciary remains a bulwark against their worst excesses. As a result, most of Trump’s early attempts at election subversion have crashed and burned right out of the gate.

There are still dangers ahead, including a possible attempt to invoke the Insurrection Act to terrify voters into staying home, or a last-ditch and desperate attempt to seize the machines and ballots themselves.

Because we know this could happen, we can prepare for it. We can warn everyone that these remain in the Trump playbook and that, if history is any guide, he will attempt some version of them. But it is one thing to falsely claim, without evidence, that the will of his voters was thwarted, as he did back in 2020. It is another to disenfranchise the majority of voters through an authoritarian gambit that will not have the support of the courts, local and state officials, or the population at large.

In the end, Trump may realize that this isn’t a game he can win, and that he can handle impeachments and his agenda being blocked, just as he did from 2019-2020, while he works on his Golden Ballroom and Triumphal Arch.

One thing is clear: None of these threats to the midterms implies that we should not make victory a top priority. The November election is the best chance our democracy has to stop Trump before he can do further damage in the two years of his term that follow.

For this reason, we must insulate them against subversion, ready them against the inevitable claims of fraud, and protect the hard evidence of their results at all costs.