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I try not to make predictions, but I’m about as confident as I can be that I’m right about this: Republicans will undertake a real effort to deny Democrats a free and fair shot at winning the 2026 midterms.

Beyond that, I can’t claim much confidence as to who and how. I don’t know if the effort will be diffuse and disorganized or choreographed from on high like Donald Trump’s failed 2020 coup. I don’t know if Republicans will abuse power to ratfuck Democratic candidates (as Trump attempted when he tried to extort Volodmyr Zelensky in 2019) or try to overturn elections they lose (the way Trump attempted in 2020, and North Carolina Republicans are attempting right now, with a state Supreme Court seat on the line). Some combination of the two would be a safe bet.

This has been an obvious point of concern since Trump won the 2024 election, but I’m increasingly alarmed, and for many reasons. I’ll go into greater depth below, but most obviously, Trump has rooted his entire presidency in lawbreaking and abuse of power. He extorts. He accepts bribes. He flouts court orders. He fabricates national emergencies to unlock king-like powers, and then wields them like a mad tyrant. He’s fully politicized the Justice Department. His party in Congress, which holds slim majorities, contains vanishingly few dissidents. Republican members are overwhelmingly supine or gleeful fascists. They mostly seem done with elections. Trump, of course, does not abide the results of any elections he loses, and his party is remade in his image.

This raises blocking and tackling questions for Democrats. They should of course proceed defiantly, because we don’t have dictators in America. They should recruit candidates who can put tough races in play. They should resist Trump, without riding to the rescue when he (through malice or incompetence) causes survivable harm. They should exploit his failures. But organizing opposition around maximizing the odds of victory in 2026 as though it were a regular election, without playing real procedural hardball and nurturing the nascent street resistance, would be a waste of time.

THE GOOD NEWS

Republicans can’t just snap their fingers and steal elections, and Democrats aren’t totally powerless. If anything, at the moment, Republicans are drunk on hubris, and Democrats are recalibrating to the existence of an existential threat:

• Notwithstanding the slow start, and some missteps, Democrats have not been entirely complacent, and seem to grow less so each day.

• We have a strong tradition of elections in the U.S. This is not to say we had a perfect democracy before Trump (far from it) or to say that enough Americans take their civic duties seriously (they don’t). But even on the right—and notwithstanding Trump’s efforts to subvert faith in elections—most people treat basic democratic ideas as truisms: “It’s a free country.” “One person one vote.” “We settle our differences at the ballot box.” People who disagree with these assertions represent small minorities. Even Trump understands this. The narrative basis of his plot against America isn’t (as his tech-world loyalists say) that democracy is outmoded; it’s that democracy is sacred and Democrats are the real election stealers.

• Notwithstanding Trump’s obvious contempt for the courts, he still tries to fabricate narratives of compliance with the courts. To some extent this is just trolling, but it also suggests he’s uncertain what would happen (to America and his presidency) if he dropped the ruse and told John Roberts to fuck off. Even in wiping his ass with the 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he and his aides have maintained an artifice of compliance—lying about what the ruling says, stonewalling—while appearing before and responding to the lower-court judge overseeing the case on remand.

• A real and durable protest movement appears to have awakened.

• Trump really is misgoverning himself into toxic unpopularity.

• Elections in the U.S. are decentralized so even a top-down effort to cheat in 2026 can’t really be too systematic.

• Democratic litigators have lots of experience defeating Republicans in frivolous election cases.

• Special elections so far have been mostly uneventful, except insofar as Democrats have dramatically overperformed.

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THE BAD NEWS

On the other hand…

• One of those elections was in Wisconsin, where Democrats control state government and enjoy a Supreme Court majority. Nevertheless, Elon Musk gave cheating the ol’ college try, committing multiple election felonies, without encountering any interference by state authorities. His interventions appear to have shaved at least a few points off Susan Crawford’s large margin of victory...