My New One in the NY Times on How States, Courts, and the Public Can Combat the Risk Trump Poses to the 2026 Midterm Elections

authoritarian threats in US, election subversion risk

I have written this guest essay for the NY Times (free gift link). It begins:

With Republicans potentially losing their current seven-vote majority in the House in next year’s midterm elections (or, less likely, their six-vote majority in the Senate), President Trump has been sending clear signals of his intent to interfere with the fairness and integrity of those elections.

After saying in a social media post on Monday that “DEMOCRATS … CHEAT AT LEVELS NOT SEEN BEFORE,” he promised to sign a new executive order aimed at “MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD” in order “to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 midterms.” Mr. Trump also promised to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN ballots and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial Voting Machines.” He also claimed that the United States is the only country using mail-in balloting. (In fact, it is used in Canada, Britain and many other countries.) Mr. Trump’s claim that “the States are merely an ‘agent’ of the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes” is as legally wrong as it is politically dangerous. That can also be said about his plans to issue an executive order interfering with how states run their elections.

The fear that Mr. Trump will try to subvert the 2026 elections is real — after all, he tried to overturn the results of the first presidential election he didn’t win. But even if Mr. Trump fails to keep the House and the Senate in Republican hands, he will have delegitimized future Democratic victories in the eyes of his MAGA base….

For decades, I argued that the United States should join other modern democracies in having national nonpartisan administration of elections. What we have instead is a hyper-decentralized system that gives states the primary role in running elections, and states in turn give their counties the authority to conduct elections and count ballots. I had thought that the variety of voting rules, machines and personnel was inefficient and particularly dangerous in polarized times, when every local mistake becomes evidence of some claim of a stolen or botched election.

What I had not factored into my thinking was that centralizing power over elections within the federal government could be dangerous in the hands of a president not committed to democratic principles. It is among the many things I had thought about American democracy that have been overturned by the advent of Mr. Trump….

States can serve as the primary bulwark against this attempted election subversion. States are not federal “agents.” They control election systems and can assert their longstanding rights to run elections. This is no longer a red state-blue state issue: Either all states have the power to run elections, despite the president’s make-believe grievances, or none of them do. The Republican Party objected when President Joe Biden issued an executive order to federal agencies to encourage more voter registration. Mr. Trump seeks to exert far greater authority than anything Mr. Biden had in mind.

Courts are the second bulwark against presidential meddling in elections. Federal courts have already issued orders blocking parts of Mr. Trump’s earlier executive order that infringe on state sovereignty. Although courts, including the Supreme Court, have not been strong in recent years on voting rights protection — and things seem poised to get worse on Voting Rights Act enforcement after the court returns in October — so far they have amassed an admirable record in stopping attempts at election subversion. The most recent example was when Judge Richard E. Myers, a very conservative Federal District Court judge in North Carolina, blocked an attempt by a Republican candidate who tried to get North Carolina’s Supreme Court to retroactively change the rules for voter eligibility, after the election, in an attempt to turn his election loss into a win….

n the end, the American people also have a key role to play in pushing back against Mr. Trump’s meddling. People will need the courage to go vote even in American cities that may have federal agents swarming around them. “Voter protection” in recent decades has not meant protection from government-led violence and intimidation, but it may come down to that. Democrats, Republicans and other members of the public should monitor voting procedures, as allowed by state law, to make sure that state and county election officials stand up to federal pressure and do the right thing as they conduct elections and tabulate ballots. Local civic and business leaders need to back our election administrators, who may find themselves subjected to pressures to bend or break the rules. All of this organizing needs to happen now, not next November. To keep us from sliding further into autocracy, it is civil society we must make great again.

This remains true because even if Mr. Trump refrains from trying to run for an unconstitutional third term, he isn’t finished working to manipulate election results in his favor. To counter this, we will have to rely on the resilience of our commitment to democracy, which is far stronger than the rantings of a would-be strongman. Seen in this light, the diversity of our rules for running elections becomes our strength.

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“Texas House to take up GOP congressional map delayed by Democrats’ walkout”

redistricting

Texas Tribune:

The Republican-led Texas House on Wednesday was set to advance a new congressional map crafted to hand five additional U.S. House seats to the GOP over fierce opposition from Democrats, who cast the plan as an attempt by President Donald Trump to stack the deck in next year’s midterm election.

Republican lawmakers are pursuing the unusual mid-decade redistricting plan, which has set off a national map-drawing war, amid pressure from Trump to protect the GOP’s slim majority in Congress. The effort comes just four years after the Legislature last overhauled the state’s congressional map following the 2020 Census.

Democrats in the Texas House staged a two-week walkout over the plan in a bid to stall the map’s passage and rally a national response among blue states, where lawmakers could launch their own retaliatory redistricting efforts. The roughly two dozen Texas Democrats who returned to Austin on Monday said they were starting the next phase of their fight: putting the screws on their Republican colleagues and establishing a record that could be used in a legal challenge to the map.

Republicans have said the new districts were drawn purely to maximize their partisan advantage, arguing that the GOP’s margins of victory in 2024 supported new lines that entrenched their hold on power. They have also framed the effort as a response to Democratic gerrymandering elsewhere…

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“The Democratic Party Faces a Voter Registration Crisis”

political parties

NYT:

The Democratic Party is hemorrhaging voters long before they even go to the polls.

Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot.

That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from….

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“Elon Musk Pledged to Start a Political Party. He Is Already Pumping the Brakes.”

third parties

WSJ:

The billionaire Elon Musk is quietly pumping the brakes on his plans to start a political party, according to people with knowledge of his plans.

Musk has told allies that he wants to focus his attention on his companies and is reluctant to alienate powerful Republicans by starting a third party that could siphon off GOP voters.

Musk’s posture marks a shift from early last month, when he said he would form what he called the America Party to represent U.S. voters who are unhappy with the two major political parties.

As he has considered launching a party, the Tesla chief executive has been focused in part on maintaining ties with Vice President JD Vance, who is widely seen as a potential heir to the MAGA political movement. Musk has stayed in touch with Vance in recent weeks, and he has acknowledged to associates that if he goes ahead with forming a political party, he would damage his relationship with the vice president, the people said.

Musk and his associates have told people close to him that he is considering using some of his vast financial resources to back Vance if he decides to run for president in 2028, some of the people said. Musk spent close to $300 million to support Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election. 

Musk’s allies said he hasn’t formally ruled out creating a new party and could change his mind as the midterm elections near.

But Musk and his team haven’t engaged with many prominent individuals who have voiced support for the idea of a new party or could be a crucial resource to help it get off the ground, including by assisting with getting on the ballot in crucial states. His associates canceled a late-July call with an outside group that specializes in organizing third-party campaigns, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Participants were told that the meeting was canceled because Musk wanted to focus on running his businesses, the person said.

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ELB Book Corner: Karen Sebold: “Make the Federal Election Commission Great Again”

campaign finance, ELB Book Corner, federal election commission

I am pleased to welcome Karen Sebold to ELB Book Corner, writing about her new book, Evaluating Campaign Finance Oversight: An Assessment of the Federal Election Commission. (Use that link with code LXFANDF30 for a 30 percent discount). Here is the third of three posts:

I want to thank Rick Hasen for the opportunity to post about my new book, “Evaluating Campaign Finance Oversight: An Assessment of the Federal Election Commission.” My posts discuss the main themes of the book using edited excerpts from the book.

Today’s post examines one of the book’s primary themes: how to improve the Federal Election Commission (FEC). President Trump pledged to rid the political system of corruption during the 2016 presidential election, but by 2017, many Americans perceived the situation as worse than before he entered the White House (Norris, Cameron, and Wynter 2019). Instead, Trump and the Republican led Senate kept the FEC shut down for most of Trump’s first term by refusing to appoint commissioners to lead the agency. As of May 2025, it remains shut down again due to a lack of a quorum (four commissioners out of six must be present), following the exit of two Republican commissioners, Sean Cooksey and Allen Dickerson, and the firing of a Democratic commissioner, Ellen Weintraub, by Trump. The only silver lining of the FEC shutting down again is that it stops the Republican commissioners from killing the investigations against Trump. According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the GOP commissioners blocked 29 investigations or taking action against President Trump (https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/gop-commissioners-have-single-handedly-blocked-fec-action-against-trump-29-times/).

The exploitation of the campaign finance system and the FEC’s failure to hold violators accountable are evident in the frequent news stories of improper use of campaign funds by politicians recently, and make it clear that campaign finance laws and rules are not self-executing and require a functioning agency. Yet, the agency is hobbled by a lack of resources, and the process of appointing commissioners has become politicized. The budget and full-time employees have not kept up with the astronomical growth of election finance activities. The rate of campaign spending doubles with each passing election cycle, resulting in a corresponding increase in the workload of the FEC. From processing the campaign finance reports to serving the number of filers of these reports, the work of the FEC is increasing tremendously as campaign finance activities increase at a phenomenal pace. In my new book, I illustrate how a decrease in full-time staff and budget at the FEC corresponds with a decline in fines and penalties. To effectively oversee the significant amount of campaign finance activities in the U.S., the FEC requires additional resources and the timely appointment of commissioners. Lastly, the political gridlock at the FEC must also be reduced.

One possible solution to achieving this goal is to increase the number of commissioners on the panel to seven while retaining the same requirement of four commissioners for quorum decision-making. Given the immense workload of the FEC, there is a legitimate case for adding more commissioners. Increasing the number of commissioners allows the panel to absorb the loss of a commissioner due to an untimely appointment or recusal. The extra commissioner could also be an independent to help reduce polarization. Adding one more commissioner to the panel makes this proposed reform to the FEC one of the politically easiest to pass. It requires little cost and does not change how decisions are made. It would allow the commissioner panel to proceed with agency business more flexibly when one or more commissioners are unable to vote or unwilling to agree with a decision. Additionally, if the president and Congress are unable to replace an FEC commissioner in a timely manner, perhaps the FEC could appoint an interim commissioner to serve until a commissioner is confirmed. However, given that the president and Congress are the primary targets of FEC investigations, it is unlikely that they will fulfill their responsibilities and repair the FEC.

References:

Norris, Pippa, Cameron, Sarah, and Thomas Wynter. 2019. Electoral Integrity in America:           Securing Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

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