Bill Scher addresses a question of growing concern, “How Worried Should Democrats Be About Trump Stealing the Next Election?” at Washington Monthly: “President Donald Trump betrayed his panic about the 2026 midterm elections when he vented at Dan Bongino, formerly the number two official at the FBI and now a podcaster, about his baseless conspiratorial thoughts about immigrants and voting. After glazing his “landslide” 2024 victory (in which he defeated Kamala Harris by a 1.5 percent popular vote margin), he asserted: “You’re never going to have that again if you don’t get these people out. These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegaly.”…He complained about his party’s handling of election laws: “Amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting in at least—many—15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.” …Trump’s call for a partisan takeover of the electoral apparatus understandably triggered reciprocal panic in Democratic circles about voter suppression and outright vote stealing. Considering how far Trump was willing to go to steal the 2020 election—from disparaging mail ballots to pursuing dubious litigation to egging on an unruly mob hellbent on obstructing the Electoral College count—every American committed to free and fair elections must remain on the highest alert until Trump has fully left the political sphere….”

Scher continues, “Last March, the president issued an executive order imposing restrictive voting rules on states. The Justice Department has been trying to piece together a national voter database from unredacted state voter roll data, which the Brennan Center says is an “attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls based on incomplete and likely inaccurate information.” Last week, FBI agents, with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard creepily looking over their shoulders, seized 2020 voting records from Fulton County, Georgia. Trump, based on what he told Bongino (“you’re going to see something in Georgia”), is planning to use the records to further his gaslighting claims that Joe Biden stole the election in Georgia when we have plenty of evidence that Trump was plotting the theft. And considering how Trump has already abused his power with National Guard and ICE deployments designed to punish Democratic-run cities, we can’t discount the possibility that he will try to send armed agents to election sites with the intent of intimidating voters…  But, as with any bully, these real and potential acts of force and intimidation mask underlying weakness. A president simply doesn’t have the power to take over a Constitutionally designed, decentralized, 50-state managed election system. And as with any bully, the way to respond is to have your eyes wide open, but also have no fear…  That’s what we’ve been seeing. Most states aren’t turning over their unredacted voter data. Trump’s Justice Department has sued 24 of them, and last month, federal judges dismissed the cases involving California and Oregon. Also, last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to pressure Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to turn over the data, suggesting that compliance would end ICE’s Operation Metro Surge, but Walz has not budged. In Georgia, the Fulton County government has sued to recover its voting records.” More here.

Greg Sargent and the New Republic report that “Trump’s New “Prison Camp” Threat Unleashes Fury Even in MAGA Country.” An excerpt: “Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity…Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggestingonly a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale…Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri, and Salt Lake City, Utah, are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales…Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”…The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:…Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?…Favor: 35 percent…Oppose: 64 percent…Trump’s overall approval on the issue is in the toilet, and ICE has become a pariah agency. Majorities oppose deporting longtime residents with jobs and no criminal record and view immigration as a positive good for the country. In that Pew poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose pausing visa applications for the 75 countries Trump has singled out, apparently in keeping with his hatred for “shithole countries,” and two-thirds oppose ending asylum applications for people fleeing horrors abroad.” More here.

Carroll Doherty, former director of political research at Pew Research Center, writes in “Is the Time Finally Right for Real Immigration Reform?” at The Dispatch that “Americans are making a distinction between the stability at the border and the chaos and violence they have seen on the streets of Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has surged its enforcement agents. Thus, a New York Times/Siena University poll last month found that Trump’s approval rating for handling the U.S.-Mexico border was 50 percent, 10 points higher than his rating for immigration overall… What do Americans want from immigration policy?…  Recent national polls have focused mostly on the two killings of American citizens in the past month at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol agents and their heavy-handed tactics more generally. The movement to rein in ICE—or even “abolish” the agency, in the dreams of some liberals—has spread from the halls of Congress to the citadels of American popular culture…Yet there has been less attention paid to the complex, unresolved question that has long been at the heart of America’s immigration predicament: what to do about the estimated 14 million people living in the United States illegally… Trump’s maximalist approach—the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” as he put it during the 2024 campaign—has retained a fair amount of popular support, despite the backlash over the tactics employed by ICE and Border Patrol agents…The same January New York Times/Siena poll that showed that Trump was underwater on immigration policy, and ICE even further underwater at 36 percent approval, found an almost even split on the administration’s mass deportation policy: Fifty percent of respondents supported it, and 47 percent opposed it…That’s consistent with other recent polls that ask respondents only about their views of the current deportation policy. Yet it’s often overlooked that, when given the opportunity, consistent majorities of Americans express a preference for finding a way to deal with illegal immigrants in the U.S. without resorting to mass deportations.” More here.