Thus far, the U.S. mid-term election year of 2026 is defined by two competing trends: Trump’s stochastic attacks against the election process itself vs. a surging Democratic party on a special election win streak.
Trump Muses About Nationalizing Elections
Last week POTUS Trump guested on Dan Bongino’s podcast and said something about “we ought to nationalize the voting” that got quite a bit of attention, helping Bongino to draw 3.3 million viewers on Rumble.
Bongino, returning to podcastland after his tenure as Deputy Director of the FBI ended in December, got Trump talking about elections:
President Donald Trump: I won in a landslide. I won every swing state. I won the popular vote by millions. I won everything. I won a thing called counties, the counties that were, it’s such a big vote.
That’s why the map was entirely red when you looked, it had two little purple lines or two blue lines on each side, but it was all red.
And counties I won by 2,750, think of this, to 550, 2,750 to 550. It’s becoming a very good count because it’s accurate. You know, it covers the whole country. It’s like a landslide.
But you’re never gonna have that again if you don’t get these people out. These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. And the, you know, amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it.
The Republicans should say, “We wanna take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many, 15 places.” The Republicans aught to nationalize the voting.
And then we have states that are so crooked and they’re counting votes.
We have states that I won that show I didn’t win. Now you’re gonna see something in Georgia where they were able to get with a court order and the ballots, you’re gonna see some interesting things come out. But, you know, like the 2020 election, I won that election by so much. Everybody knows it.
This is the latest of many Trump attacks on American election integrity. The New York Times chronicled his transgressions:
In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that tried to make significant changes to the electoral process, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship and demanding that all mail ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day. But that effort has largely been rebuffed by courts.
On social media, Mr. Trump has pushed for even more drastic changes. In August, he wrote that he wanted to end the use of mail-in ballots and potentially the use of voting machines.
Trump’s Truth social screed about mail-in ballots is worth a peek just to get a feel for Trump’s paranoid style in full bloom.
Tulsi Gabbard Teams Up with the FBI
Last week Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) sent the FBI to search a Georgia election center, per the NYT:
F.B.I. agents executed a search warrant on (January 28) for an election center in Fulton County, Ga., seeking to seize ballots in a significant escalation of the administration’s efforts to investigate a jurisdiction that President Trump has continued to criticize over his 2020 defeat in the state.…The search warrant authorized F.B.I. agents to search for all “physical ballots from the 2020 general election” in the county, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times, as well as all ballot images produced by scanning ballots, all voter rolls from that year, and all tabulator tapes, which serve as a kind of voting machine receipt for election results.…In an unusual twist, the prosecutor listed on the warrant is not from Georgia, but the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, Thomas Albus. It is unclear what would connect prosecutors in Missouri to Mr. Trump’s longstanding complaints about how the 2020 election in Georgia was conducted.
The raid featured a special guest star, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, who is running her own separate investigation into the 2020 elections (“she’s doing her own thing” one administration official said), but came along to watch the FBI raid in Georgia, per The Guardian:
The review led by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI), authorized on the basis that it is assessing election integrity, has been focused for months on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines and the possibility of foreign interference.
As part of that effort, Gabbard has been briefing Trump and senior White House advisers every few weeks. Officials said Trump directed her to travel to Fulton county, Georgia, so she could observe the FBI executing a search warrant on Wednesday.
The raid itself was overseen by Andrew Bailey, the deputy FBI director, who was also sent by Trump to Georgia.…The ODNI review was initially overseen by the Director’s Initiatives Group, or Dig, a taskforce that Gabbard established within her agency, which focused on vulnerabilities with voting machines used in the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the matter.
But Dig was dissolved late last year after it misidentified the person who placed pipe bombs outside Democratic and Republican party headquarters before the January 6 Capitol riot, the person said. In December, the justice department charged a different individual over the pipe bombs.
CNN chronicled six different explanations from the Trump administration as to why DNI Gabbard was down in Georgia.
There’s also a super-double extra incredibly top secret whistleblower allegation against Gabbard, per the WSJ:
A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.…The complaint was filed last May with the intelligence community’s inspector general, according to a November letter that the whistleblower’s lawyer addressed to Gabbard. The letter, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, accused Gabbard’s office of hindering the dissemination of the complaint to lawmakers by failing to provide necessary security guidance on how to do so.In a statement, a spokeswoman for Gabbard’s office confirmed that the complaint concerned Gabbard but dismissed it as “baseless and politically motivated.”
Today the NYT had some new details:
Members of Congress were briefed this week on a whistle-blower report about an intelligence intercept of a call between two foreign nationals discussing a person close to President Trump, according to people familiar with the material.
It is not clear what country the two foreign nationals were from, but the discussion involved Iran. The whistle-blower report was drafted last May, around the time the Trump administration was deliberating about a strike on Iran. Mr. Trump ordered a military attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in June.…The whistle-blower accused Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, of limiting who could see the report and of blocking wider distribution among the nation’s spy agencies, according to people familiar with the complaint.
People who have reviewed the whistle-blower report have differed about the importance of the underlying intelligence, which was collected by the National Security Agency.
As always, it’s challenging to parse disputes between Trump, Gabbard and the incumbent intelligence agency staffers. Neither side is trustworthy or well-intentioned and both are constantly pre-occupied with nonsense.
While the specific investigations may go nowhere and most of Trump’s various musings about what “Republicans ought to do” don’t amount to much, the net effect is pretty damaging.
Some might even call it a stochastic attack on American elections.
American Election Officials Quitting in Droves
Politico has the latest on the impact of Trump’s vociferous election skepticism on the people who monitor American elections:
Increasingly violent threats toward and harassment of public officials — from county clerks up to the president — are driving more and more of those figures out of their jobs, a particular concern among local election officials, who have struggled with attrition for years.
In the years since the 2020 election, roughly 50 percent of top local election officials across 11 western states have left their jobs since November 2020, according to a new report from Issue One, a bipartisan organization that tracks election issues and supports campaign finance reforms.
The election administration world has been grappling with a significant brain drain since the one-two punch of the 2020 pandemic and threats arising from conspiracy theories surrounding that year’s election. But the new report — which focuses on election offices in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming — is particularly concerning because it shows departures haven’t tapered off, marking a 10 percentage point uptick since the group’s 2023 report survey.
The new data on election officials comes at the same time as another report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue — shared first with POLITICO — found a more than 200 percent increase in violent rhetoric toward public officials when comparing Oct. 2021 to Sept. 2022 with Oct. 2024 to Sept. 2025.
As dispiriting as all of the above may be, Bill Scher at the Washington Monthly reassures his liberal readers it will all be ok:
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.
But what Trump precisely said, how the White House is cleaning it up, and what congressional Republicans are doing, suggests less of a coordinated plan to commandeer the midterms and more of a Republican Party in disarray amid a rising Blue Wave.…
Why—aside from respect for democracy—should Republicans refrain from voter suppression tactics? Because, as I detailed for the Washington Monthly four years ago, 21st-century voter suppression tactics have been repeatedly shown to flop.
An academic study analyzing 10 years of strict voter identification laws found that they had “no significant negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any subgroup defined by age, gender, race, or party affiliation.” And we have anecdotal examples of Democrats cannily exploiting attempted voter suppression by Republicans to galvanize base turnout. Look at President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election or Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election in Georgia, which came one year after the GOP-controlled state government enacted a flurry of restrictive voting policies, prompting Democratic outrage that was wisely channeled into get-out-the-vote efforts.…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.
Now About that Blue Tide
I posted last week about the 31 point swing away from Republicans in a Texas State Senate special election.
This weekend saw a special state house election in Louisiana go the Democrats’ way:
Louisiana Democrat Chasity Verret Martinez defeated her Republican opponent by double digits in the special election Saturday night for a state House seat in a district President Trump won by 13 points in 2024.
Martinez won 62% of the vote compared to 38% for her Republican opponent, Brad Daigle, according to unofficial results from the Louisiana Secretary of State.
…
Martinez’s win is not a flip since Democrats already held the seat, but Republicans had seen it as a prime pickup opportunity since Mr. Trump won the district three times. Her win was a 37-point swing from the 2024 results, although the district has voted for Democrats at the state and local levels previously.
Trump’s collapsing popularity is likely playing the biggest role in these Dem wins, since the contending elements within the party have come to no accord.
AIPAC Steps on a Rake
A special election in New Jersey didn’t have much partisan significance, since there was no hope of a Republican winning the race, but it was significant in terms of the Democrats’ internal battles over Israel.
Responsible Statecraft wrote it up:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, launched a $4 million campaign to discredit former Rep. Tom Malinowski, a moderate Democrat who has entertained the idea of placing conditions on aid to Israel. The group hoped that its investment in countering Malinowski would help elevate more staunchly pro-Israel candidates in the race. But the effort appears to have had the opposite effect, bolstering the campaign of left-wing candidate Analilia Mejia, who has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide.
Now, with more than 91% of votes tallied, Malinowski and Mejia are nearly deadlocked with roughly 28% of votes each. AIPAC’s preferred candidate, former New Jersey Lieutenant Governor Tehana Way, is in a distant third, winning 17% of votes counted so far. The winner of the Democratic primary is widely expected to win the special election against Republican candidate Joe Hathaway.
Politico had more on the reaction to the election results and AIPAC’s role:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee uncorked $2 million to try to sink a mainstream Democrat in a multi-candidate special House election primary in New Jersey — and it’s infuriating mainstream Democrats and some of the pro-Israel lobby’s supporters.
“It’s pissing people off,” said Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist and former Obama campaign adviser, who described it as “maddening.”…AIPAC’s interventions in the New Jersey special election for Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s House seat was the first test of the group’s muscle ahead of the 2026 primary season, when they are expected to spend millions on Democratic primaries across the country. AIPAC’s super PAC is expected to weigh in on House primaries, starting in Illinois’ March primaries. Democratic candidates and strategists are also bracing for them to potentially wade into contentious Senate primaries in Michigan and Minnesota.
And their first foray of 2026 backfired spectacularly.
Matt Bennett, the co-founder of the center-left think tank Third Way, called their efforts “one of the greatest own-goals in American political history,” and warned that “It hurt everybody in the moderate movement” as they head into a competitive primary season.
Thais kind of blowback illustrates why AIPAC is using stealthier strategies in many races.
Drop Site News has the deets:
AIPAC road-tested its stealth approach in a 2024 House primary in Oregon that pitted Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), against physician Maxine Dexter. Dexter raised relatively little money throughout much of her campaign, then saw a last-minute deluge organized by AIPAC coupled with outside spending through super PACs, which themselves turned out to be funded by AIPAC. The timing of the donations meant that there was no meaningful transparency before voters went to the polls, and Dexter expressed a mixture of ignorance and umbrage when her opponents suggested the money actually came from AIPAC.…the same pattern is emerging in three competitive House primaries in Illinois. The pieces of the puzzle can be found in the campaign disclosures of House candidates Laura Fine, a state legislator running in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District for the open seat vacated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky on the North Side of Chicago and its northern suburbs; Donna Miller, a Cook County commissioner running in Illinois’s Second District to replace Rep. Robin Kelly on Chicago’s South Side and southern suburbs; and Melissa Bean, a banker and former member of Congress making a comeback in Illinois’s Eighth District in the western suburbs of Chicago. Bean is also running for an open seat to replace Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who like Kelly is running for Senate.
Putting the pieces together, it is clear that AIPAC is again funding super PACs in order to secretly funnel money to its preferred candidates, while also coordinating donors to give to those candidates directly.…A look at Miller, Fine, and Bean’s filings betrays an impressively coordinated operation at work. Sixty-five donors who previously gave to AIPAC or its affiliated super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP) have given to both Miller and Fine. These donors delivered $88,066.66 to the Fine campaign. They also contributed $119,746.33 to Miller. A whopping 237 former AIPAC/UDP donors have given to both Miller and Bean, contributing $396,288.01 to Bean and $429,083.00 to Miller. Forty-four of these donors have given to all three candidates, sending a total of $208,753.33 to them.
Time will tell if AIPAC can get back to their winning ways in American elections.
