There’s no point in denying the fact that midterm elections are usually awful for the party in power. If you were betting on the outcome of the 2026 elections, it would be a reasonably safe bet that the Democrats will do rather well. Maybe. I’ve been saying for some time now that the upcoming midterms will be decided more by voter perceptions of the economy, which is why Democrats are always talking it down. To that point, something tells me Democrats aren’t all that confident the elections will turn out in their favor and are already laying the groundwork to challenge the results of key elections.
For starters, the New York Times editorial board is warning the public that Trump could “interfere with the midterm elections.”
“Election integrity in the United States can be a fraught subject. Merely raising the prospect that a future election might be compromised makes many democracy experts uncomfortable,” they write. “It can undermine faith in our reliable, well-run election system and amplify the false claims about fraud that often come from President Trump. Even people who respect the sanctity of elections sometimes malign them. Many Democrats, for example, have wrongly suggested that voter-identification laws undermine the system by causing large declines in turnout.”
In truth, American elections have never been more reliable or accessible. For every election, thousands of principled election officials painstakingly update voter rolls, mail information to households, train poll workers, oversee voting and transport ballots with a documented chain of custody. Voter fraud is extremely rare, and voter turnout in the past two presidential elections reached higher levels than in any other over the previous century.
Do you see what they’re doing here? They threw a bone to Voter ID, which is overwhelmingly popular, and aim pretty much everything else that Republicans are looking to fix with recent legislation like the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) Act and the Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, all while claiming that elections are historically secure and reliable.
They said the same thing about the 2020 election, too. How’d that work out? The editorial board whines for more than 1,200 words about how Trump is the one threatening U.S. elections, and what the public can do to stop it.
But, it’s not just the left-wing media warning that Trump is gonna do something to steal the midterms.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) was on Meet the Press on Sunday, and also accused Trump and the GOP of trying to interfere with the midterms.
“I have confidence we will have an election,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “I believe they will use every tool in their toolbox to try to interfere with it.”
Khanna then explained how Democrats plan to respond. “But I believe that the American people will overcome it,” Khanna said, “will overcome it by having a battalion of lawyers at the polls like we did when we passed Proposition 50 in my state in California, like we did in New Jersey and Virginia when Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger won.”
Related: Even CNN Admits That Democrats Are Screwed
A “battalion of lawyers at the polls” is Democrat-speak for winning elections in the courtroom, not at the ballot box. Democrats spent years shrieking about “election denial” and “threats to democracy.” Now a senior House Democrat openly advocates deploying lawyers nationwide to contest election procedures in real time, all while blaming the GOP for trying to manipulate the outcome.
Khanna never said Democrats would accept the results if Republicans win. He never expressed confidence in the process itself. He expressed confidence in Democratic resistance above all else. Democrats have every intention of fighting the results of the midterm elections in court.
Democrats accuse Republicans of undermining democracy and then spin their own election denialism as defending democracy. This isn’t the first time they’ve planned to challenge the legitimacy of an election in advance, and it won’t be their last. The foundation is already poured. The excuses are already drafted. And it’s the same election denialism they claim to oppose.
