Editor's Notes: Gaming Out Antidemocratic Tactics

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On Friday, The UnPopulist's Andy Craig (who has written for us as well) wrote about the potential ways in which the Trump administration might interfere with the 2026 elections.

The analysis is quite good. On the scenario everyone is most reasonably worried about—DHS agents directly disrupting polling sites—he writes:

One concern is that this might work on a relatively smaller scale, targeting only deep blue urban areas to tip competitive races. But the political geography of the 2026 elections makes this more difficult than you might expect. Of the Senate races up this year, only one, Jon Ossoff’s reelection bid in Atlanta, is in a competitive state where targeting a deep blue urban area could, in theory, flip the outcome. On the House side, competitive races are by definition not in deep blue urban areas. Rather, control of the House will depend on two or three dozen swing districts, across a large number of states. These districts are predominantly middle-class suburbs, mostly white, and where roughly half of voters are Republicans. Chaotic disruption in these districts would be more politically risky, impacting their own voter base and local officials, and would still exceed the scale of available federal resources.

We have been looking for someone to write something like this for us. Andy covers a lot of what I'd like to publish on the topic, but I think we will keep looking. I would like to game out in more granularity, for example, how much disruption one could cause through a concentration of forces in a few districts, based on reasonable assumptions about different district level electoral outcomes there would be in the absence of interference.

A few weeks ago I had a phone call with Nils Gilman, one of several people who ran the Transition Integrity Project. He said there are four broad categories of methods for stealing an election, divided by the part of the process you are in.

Prior to the election, you try to disqualify people who might vote against you from being able to vote at all. This is the classic disenfranchisement, voter suppression playbook. The Republican Party has been playing this game for my entire adult life and then some, turbocharged since Shelby v Holder and even moreso since 2020. You purge the voter rolls, mandating voter IDs while also making it differentially difficult to obtain one, gerrymandering so that your vote counts less for the overall outcome than it otherwise would—the playbook is long, and it is well known. It is also the one I am the least worried about. As ugly as it is, as wrong as it is, it's a known quantity. They've been trying it for ages and Democratic countermobilization has proven robust at organizing to surmount these sorts of barriers. Everywhere we gain power we need to crush these barriers into dust, but I do not foresee them being a major impediment to defeating Republicans this year.

The biggest danger zone is the next step, where people are already registered to vote, the election is going on, and you try to stop them from casting their ballot. One way to do this, again, is to make it hard. You shut down polling places so that the remaining ones (especially in the areas that are most heavily Democrat voting) have extremely long wait times (ideally you have also, prior to the election, made sure to end any early or mail-in voting measures you had in place). Fewer polling places also means fewer targets for ICE to disrupt, and I do expect ICE to try to do just that. Like Andy I am cautiously optimistic that this will prove too unreliable a tool, for too shorthanded a force, to actually throw the election one way or the other. But that doesn't mean they won't try, and an unpredictable result means the possibility of a bad outcome for us.

In her recent essay, Samantha Hancox-Li suggested that, following the Minneapolis model of public mobilization, "We must be ready, with citizens actively following federal agents and monitoring election facilities." This is an approach that needs to be fleshed out but I do think it is promising. There are so many more of us than there are of them. Minneapolis truly did show that that matters. Andy also observes:

States generally have laws restricting activity within a certain distance of polling places, other than authorized poll workers and of course voters themselves coming and going. Some legislators are considering strengthening these protections. State attorneys general must also be prepared to seek emergency injunctions against voter intimidation by federal agents, including possibly on election day.

I will not lie and say I am not afraid of this. The thought of masked thugs descending upon polling places terrifies me, just as the thought of masked thugs descending upon my community, upon my children's elementary school, terrifies me. But I do not think they have a reliable path to victory through that method. I stand by my prediction that it will hurt, but we will win.

The third method of stealing an election that Nils mentioned was to stop votes from being counted even after they have been cast. The most obvious method here is grabbing mailed in ballots that arrive the after election day, something that the Trump people have repeatedly said they regretted not doing in 2020 and have telegraphed their intention to do the next time they get the chance. Again I think the scrupulousness of local officials where it can be relied upon will need to be combined with civilian mobilization to keep an eye out for feds behaving badly.

The final method of stealing an election is the one I am the least worried about. It is attempting to overturn the results once you have already lost. I do not actually think their capacity to do this has meaningfully changed since 2020, when all of their garbage court cases did not even pass this Supreme Court's laugh test. Andy also discusses the implausibility of refusing to seat the next Congress. I think I would like to see someone game this out a bit more, however, how they might try to muddy the waters through a combination of the outgoing Congress and the executive branch. But on the whole I am not worried about this one. If we get to this point, especially if they have lost big in the election, it is very unlikely that major institutions are going to help them unring that bell.

Disqualify, stop people from voting, stop votes from being counted, and overturn the result. Those are the four broad areas Nils discussed with me. Andy talks about each to a degree, and I really do recommend reading his analysis. But we'll be working on publishing some analysis of our own as well.

Don't panic. Don't give up. But do prepare, both mentally and through on the ground organization.