One war Trump has planned down to the last detail: subverting the midterms

While war rages in the Middle East, midterm election season in Washington is in full swing.

At political consultancies around the capital, campaign slogans and attack ads are being honed. Between now and November, more than $10bn (£7.5bn) will be spent on advertising to sway the races that will decide the balance of power in Congress, and with it the trajectory of Donald Trump’s last two years in the White House.

“This is where the rubber meets the road,” said one Maga election strategist working with several Republican candidates. “No quarter given. People play this game to win, and they’ll do whatever it takes.”

That ruthlessness, which underpins every election, takes on a darker significance this year. Trump himself is not on the ballot, but every midterm is a referendum on the sitting president. As his approval rating has nosedived in recent weeks, Trump has threatened to “take over the voting”, while his allies have called for ICE agents or even troops to be deployed at polling stations.

The 2026 midterms are poised to be another stress test for American democracy. Determined to hang on to power at any cost, Trump is openly laying the ground to contest and subvert the will of voters under the pretext of defending it.

“The cheating is rampant in our elections,” the president told the nation during his State of the Union address last month.

“They want to cheat,” he railed at Democrats. “And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat, and we’re going to stop it.”

For Trump’s opponents, the effort to revive long-debunked claims of election fraud carried ominous echoes of 2020, when his bid to overturn defeat to Joe Biden climaxed in the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol. Trump’s attempt to cling on to power drove America to the brink of a constitutional crisis unseen since the civil war. Six years on, many fear American democracy is approaching another crossroads in November.

In recent interviews, Trump has lamented not going further in 2020, including sending in the military to seize voting machines. Speaking to NBC News, the president said he would only accept the midterm results “if the elections are honest”.

“The administration is already seeking to subvert the election. The president is doing what he always does – trying to intimidate people,” said Skye Perryman, president of the nonprofit legal group Democracy Forward. “But it is also the messaging of a person who has lost public support – and the only way he is going to be able to stay in power, and keep his allies in power, is by undermining the election.”

The president’s party commonly suffers losses at midterm elections. Since the second world war, the incumbent has lost an average of 26 House of Representatives seats and four Senate seats. Such a result in November would see Democrats flip both chambers, giving them a platform to launch sweeping investigations of the Trump administration and potentially impeach the president for a third time.

“Everybody’s afraid that this administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted,” Trump’s deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on Friday.

With so much at stake, Trump appears ready to go to extreme lengths to block a Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. The US constitution places control of elections in the hands of states, but the powers of the presidency offer Trump many opportunities for chicanery. As in 2020, a multi-pronged effort to influence the midterms has been under way for months.

On his orders, Republican-held states launched a redistricting scheme last year to carve out new GOP seats. Trump’s justice department is demanding that states hand over their voter rolls, raising concerns that the administration is building a national database.

Trump has demanded that Congress pass the Save America Act, new legislation that would require Americans to prove they are US citizens to vote. The law would demand that states turn over their voter data and restrict the use of postal ballots.

“It’ll guarantee the midterms,” the president told Republicans earlier this month.

The Save Act has stalled in the Senate, however, with Democrats arguing that the legislation will disenfranchise millions of voters.

Unlike in 2020, Trump has made no effort to conceal his plan.

“We should take over the voting… The Republicans ought to nationalise the voting,” the president said last month.

If the voting restrictions he desires are imposed, he added at a speech in Georgia, it would ensure Republicans victory for generations. “For 50 years we won’t lose a race,” Trump said.

Trump’s obsession with relitigating his 2020 defeat also offers a pretext to meddle in the 2026 race. In January, FBI agents raided an election office in Fulton County, Georgia, one of the key 2020 battlegrounds and a focus for Trump’s baseless claims of fraud. Trump lost Georgia by fewer than 12,000 votes and was infamously recorded pressuring state officials to “find” enough ballots to overtake Biden.

Watched by Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s national intelligence director, agents seized hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots and tabulator tapes from voting machines. An FBI affidavit said the investigation was based on alleged “deficiencies or defects” in the count.

The raid stunned election officials, signalling the White House’s readiness to use federal agencies to intervene in national elections.

“Prior to Fulton County, I would have been pretty measured. I would have said it’s very hard to disrupt national elections… There are different state laws, different election equipment,” said Stephen Richer, a former Republican election recorder in Arizona. Richer was targeted by Trump and his supporters after he denied the president’s claim that the 2020 vote was rigged.

“Post Fulton County, I think it reveals a willingness to do things that we would have previously thought unimaginable,” Richer added. “I’m pretty reluctant to jump to doomsday scenarios, but I guess I need to update my risk assessment.”

Further alarms are being raised. A group of Maga operatives has reportedly circulated a draft executive order that would claim China meddled in the 2020 election. That could allow Trump to declare a national emergency and seize executive power over voting in the midterms, including a ban on mail-in ballots and voting machines.

Opinion polls pointed to a heavy Republican defeat in November even before the Iran war sent petrol prices soaring and raised fears of looming economic catastrophe. Trump’s approval rating has plumbed historic lows, underwater by every metric. The broad coalition he built in 2024 is disintegrating, as Latinos, independents and young voters desert the GOP in droves. Millions were expected to take to the streets in anti-Trump No Kings protests across the country on Saturday.

Attempting to rally his party at a fundraiser last week, Trump claimed that the US was “winning so big” in Iran and predicted that Republicans would “have bigger majorities in the House and Senate” after November.

In private, few Republicans share that optimism. The GOP has suffered a string of defeats in recent elections as voters voice their anger at Trump’s failure to tackle the rising cost of living.

The latest warning sign came in the president’s own backyard. Democrats flipped two seats in Florida’s state legislature last week, including a Palm Beach district that includes the president’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

With Democrats expanding their list of target seats in November, some around Trump have called for even more radical options.

“We’re going to have ICE surround the polls come November,” Maga ideologue Steve Bannon said on his podcast last month. “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again.”

The White House has dismissed Bannon’s remarks, but election observers are wary. Targeted raids on election sites in swing districts could be enough to cast doubt on the results that will decide the majority in the House, some fear.

“As soon as the federal agents started going into a voting location and taking out ballots, there would be so many lawsuits filed. Emergency orders would be granted immediately, and the federal government would lose on every single one of those,” said Richer.

“But if the ballots are already in the trucks it would be hard to know what to do with that district, that House member.”

America’s institutions held in 2020. But rights groups already locked in litigation with the White House have warned that the second Trump administration poses a much sterner test. Packed with militant election deniers and hand-picked loyalists in every position of power, backed by a politicised justice department and a subservient Republican Congress, it will not back down like the first one. The results of the midterms could be decided in the courts and the streets.

“That threat would be met by swift legal action, and I think that it would be met with massive public pushback,” said Perryman. “It is going to take every single American doing their part to ensure that free and fair elections happen, that votes are counted.”

40 Trump’s average approval rating, down 2 percentage points since the war started, and 12 since the start of his second term.

3 Seats the Democrats need to win the House of Representatives.

4 Seats they need to win the Senate. Since 1945, the party of the president has lost an average of 26 House and 4 Senate seats at the midterms.

$193m Funds raised by the Democratic party.

$750m Funds raised by the Republican party.

30 Seats flipped from Republican to Democratic since 2025. Last week the Democrats won a Florida special election in the same district as Mar-a-Lago.

Photographs by AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, Nicole Craine/The New York Times, Mark Schiefelbein/AP