Trump is getting a lot of attention, as he should, for trying to steal House seats with mid-decade gerrymanders. But Democrats need to understand he has other dirty tricks up his sleeve, as I explained at New York:
It’s now evident that while Trump has indeed broken all norms in rushing his policies through Congress and asserting executive powers in 2025, he is determined to keep the GOP trifecta until the end of his term. The question is how far he’ll go to tilt the high odds against him. There are already signs that Trump is looking to bend or even break the rules to ensure that the Republican Party maintains control of the House and Senate through the end of his presidency.
The stakes for Trump
Hanging onto the Senate is a big deal for Trump since that chamber has the power to confirm or reject his executive and judicial appointees. Luckily for him, the 2026 Senate landscape is very positive for the GOP; the party would have to lose four net seats for Democrats to flip control.
The House, on the other hand, is on a knife’s edge: All 435 seats are up for grabs, and Republicans can lose only two net seats there if they are to maintain control. So even the smallest midterm breeze toward Democrats could take away Mike Johnson’s gavel.
A Democratic House would be a problem for Trump for multiple reasons. First, it would deny his party the power to enact major legislation on a simple party-line basis, as it did with the massive One Big Beautiful Bill Act and is continuing to do with clawbacks of existing spending. Second, a Democratic House could and would spend a lot of time investigating the extraordinary levels of corruption, cronyism, and illegal actions that are the real legacy of Trump 2.0. And it might even make him the first thrice-impeached president.
So in sharp contrast to his conduct going into the 2018 election, Trump is very focused on holding the House next year. He’s already working to raise tons of money, avoid destructive GOP primaries, and generally serve as party field marshal. That’s all pretty normal and entirely legal. But unfortunately, Trump being Trump, he’s also setting other schemes in motion.
Redrawing the map
This summer, Trump hijacked a special legislative session in Texas that was supposed to focus on flood relief to command a rare and unnecessary redrawing of U.S. House districts, which could give Republicans as many as five new seats. Texas’s Democratic legislators have thrown some sand in the gears of this power grab by fleeing the state to deny Republicans a quorum, but sooner or later the GOP will get its way.
The bigger question is what the national balance of power will be if an escalating war ensues between Democratic- and Republican-controlled states to change congressional maps prior to the midterms. Generally speaking, the GOP will be favored in any gerrymandering arms race, since the states it controls are less likely to have adopted nonpartisan redistricting reforms. Missouri, Indiana, and Florida have been the major sources of speculation over additional pre-midterm gerrymanders for Republicans.
Suppressing votes
While it hasn’t been quite as overt as his map-rigging attempt, Trump has not lost interest in a variety of old-school methods for reducing the number of “undesirable” people allowed to cast votes. Indeed, he has persuaded MAGA-land to subscribe en masse to conspiracy theories about Democrats opening the borders to tens of millions of vicious criminals who will instantly be herded to the polls to seize power for their “radical left” benefactors. The absence of any evidence whatsoever for significant levels of voting by noncitizens has not kept Trump and his supporters from proposing and enacting a variety of barriers to election participation by people too old or poor to show up on Election Day with a wallet full of identification documents. Most of these were incorporated into a Trump executive order issued in March, in which the president sought to usurp a variety of congressional and state powers over election administration in the guise (ironically) of vindicating voting rights.
One big theme is to enforce a “National Election Day” by restricting early voting systems, particularly those in states that allow for receipt and counting of mail ballots after Election Day if they’re postmarked earlier. But as the Brennan Center documents in a report on this order and its implications, three additional Trump ideas are to impose unnecessary identification requirements, to create federal supervision over state-financed and locally administered voting machines, and to give the Trump administration access to private data contained in voter files.
The potential for havoc in giving this particular administration greater control over the rules, machinery, and data involved in voting should be obvious from previous Trump/GOP efforts to discredit election results they don’t like. Another likely result of presidential interference in voting systems is an acceleration in the exodus of local election workers fearful of intimidation or attacks based on spurious fraud claims.
Lying about results
Perhaps the most predictable feature of any postelection period during the Trump era has been unsubstantiated claims of votes being illegally cast for Democrats or illegally taken away from Republicans. Trump claimed illegal voting robbed him of a popular-vote plurality in 2016, though he won the election. Congressional Republicans claimed fraudulent mail ballots in California cost them the House in 2018. And most famously, virtually the entire GOP has now bought into the Trump fable of the stolen 2020 presidential election.
If control of the House in 2026 comes down to a relative handful of close contests, and particularly if most of them are in states where Democrats control the election machinery (which is almost guaranteed to be the case, considering the importance of marginal seats in California, New York, and Pennsylvania), Trump will certainly claim Democrats have stolen or are in the process of stealing the election. Anyone who remembers late autumn 2020 can easily imagine the wave of White House-generated protests, lawsuits, investigations, “audits” and conspiracymongering in store for us in late autumn 2026.
Changing the results
In December 2020 and January 2021, Team Trump sought to prevent the naming of electors and their confirmation by Congress. In a midterm election, the key pressure points would be state certification of congressional results and then the seating of new House members. In the case of contested House races, Team Trump might discourage the certification of Democratic winners in Republican-controlled states and then fight it all out in the courts as judges seek to adjudicate the results.
The real election coup could happen when Democratic and Republican House-election winners present themselves in Washington as members of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s the House itself, not the states, that ultimately decides on the qualifications and credentials of its members. If the House and the trifecta hangs in the balance in January 2027, does anyone think Mike Johnson will pull a Mike Pence and resist demands by Trump that Republicans in contested races be seated while Democrats are sent home? No, I don’t either.
Democrats better work like hell to win a House margin in 2026 that cannot plausibly be overturned.
