Will the November midterm elections be free and fair? That’s the question I asked a number of political scientists over the last week, and their answers did not necessarily make me feel better. And, to be clear, even asking the question gives me heartburn. Half a decade ago, a lot of my work revolved around understanding and explaining exactly why the Republican conspiracy theories about a stolen election were false. Now, in another reality, I find myself trying to understand and explain how America’s vaunted electoral system might not be as resilient as we should hope.
When it came to 2020, the conspiracy theories were false. Voting machines were not hacked, fake ballots were not inserted into the system, and dozens of investigations revealed that the 2020 election was free and fair. Trump simply lost. During that saga, though, I came to understand how important our shared faith in the ballot box is, and how destructive it was that more than two-thirds of Republicans came to believe the baseless conspiracies.
Then Trump returned to office, still bearing a grudge about the election which was not actually stolen from him in 2020, and determined to never be restrained by the voters again. In the last few weeks, he has repeatedly suggested canceling the midterms, which would allow him to keep complacent Republican majorities in Congress and continue ruling by decree. As I wrote last week, it’s not clear how the president would cancel the midterms, but there are several ways he can tamper with them, or attempt to steal them outright.
After publishing last week’s column, I still had questions, so I set out to find answers – feeling like a crank and a conspiracist the whole time, worried that I was becoming what I so loathed, even though there are miles of road between the false claims about 2020 and the actual realities of what Trump could try in 2026. I reached out to political scientists around the country, asking them about the scenarios I laid out in last week’s column, and the possibility of the midterms being stolen. I did my best to compose my questions carefully, to point to actual flaws and gaps in the system which might be exploited, and to gently ask, am I crazy, or…? Still, I had no idea if the scholars I reached out to would even answer, or if they would lump me in with the whackos and weirdos.
Then they started responding, and my stomach dropped a little bit. Across a handful of conversations and email exchanges with academics, all of them agreed that some concerns are justified. While a few of them are hopeful that political and economic incentives would stop the worst from coming to pass, none are necessarily confident that the actual systemic guardrails would hold. One political scientist I spoke with even sees the possibility of a “doomsday scenario.”
“I worry about this same scenario, honestly,” Dr. Vanessa Baird, associate professor of political science at CU Boulder, told me, responding to a scenario I laid out (as in last week’s column) in which dishonest election officials collide with unenforceable court rulings during an attempt to steal the midterms. Baird, who studies courts and political psychology, emphasized that she was not an elections expert – “at all,” she said – but that she teaches her students that “the rule of law is not self-enforcing.”
“I teach that we hold dear to a myth of legality,” she said, “and the fact that it is a myth does not make it bad; indeed, I think that there are good myths and this is one of them.”
The point Baird was making was that the role courts will play in a chaotic election aftermath might not be one of savior, even if they try: the law is not self-enforcing, and courts have no way to enforce it. She also noted that public opinion on the courts has moved dramatically, and that “the overwhelming majority of Americans…want Congress to reduce the Court’s power.” In an environment like that, ignoring court rulings might not come with the kind of political blowback rule-following Americans might expect.
Baird was not the only political scientist who noted the court’s general unenforceability. “Should Republican secretaries of state decide to [lie about results] and violate a court ruling, there aren’t a lot of formal structures in place to stop this,” the University of Denver’s Dr. Phil Chen told me.
In the absence of formal structures to prevent an autocoup – or self-coup, or autogolpe – Chen thinks that the best defense against stolen midterms will come from economic and political backlash. “Actively stealing an election moves the U.S. from democratic backsliding into full-on authoritarianism without free and fair elections,” he told me. “That is a deeply volatile situation for investors and would potentially lead to countries calling in their U.S. debt, crippling the economy.”
“The public opinion backlash would also be intense,” Chen noted, adding that the virtual impossibility of Republicans attaining a filibuster-proof majority means that Senate Democrats could essentially shut down governance in such a scenario. In short, Chen thinks that it’s structurally possible for the midterms to be stolen, but does not believe it’s worth the political risk for Republicans.
The most illuminating – and, ultimately, hopeful – conversation I had was with Dr. John Mark Hansen of the University of Chicago.
“I’m really worried about whether we’ll have a free and fair election,” he told me.
Hansen, who is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a former coordinator of the research task force on the federal election system for the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, believes the administration will attempt to influence the midterm elections in any number of ways.
“We’ve already seen a willingness to launch completely flimsy investigations of people for no other reason than to harass them,” he told me. “Once we know who the Democratic nominees are in competitive districts, we will see some investigations,” he predicted. “We’ve already seen some moves in this direction, in the investigations that they’ve launched into Democratic fundraising organizations like ActBlue and Democratic contributors like George Soros.”
Hansen also worries that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers – ICE – could be deployed in an effort to suppress voter turnout.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see ICE in a lot of different communities, particularly Democratic communities, during the early voting period or on election day, supposedly doing immigration enforcement but actually out there just to intimidate people,” he told me. “And I think that’s part of what’s going on now, already, is that they’re trying to demobilize people by making them fearful.”
“I don’t think we have to say that this is all in the future,” Hansen said. “I mean, it’s kind of our current reality.”
While some of the experts I spoke with felt that stealing an election would require a great deal of coordination, Hansen sees a potential “doomsday scenario” which would only require Republicans in the House of Representatives – a ploy which starts with the executive order Trump signed last year, purporting to impose voter identification laws nationwide. Though the executive order cited no statutory authority, Hansen wonders if it could be used to prevent winners in Democratic states from being sworn into Congress next January.
“If you look at the constitution, Article I, it says that the two Houses of Congress control their own membership, which means that they determine the qualifications of their own membership. And so, if there’s a dispute about an election, it’s up to the House or Senate to decide that dispute,” Hansen told me. “Well, my doomsday scenario is, what happens if the Republicans in Congress basically say, ‘well, our president has issued an executive order that everyone has to show IDs, therefore anybody who is elected in a state where they don’t have to show IDs is not legitimate.’”
Like I wrote last week, Hansen agrees that the courts are an unenforceable backstop against an administration that chooses to ignore them.
“When the Supreme Court makes a decision, it’s ultimately the federal marshals who enforce that, and they’re Justice Department employees,” he said.
In the end, I took two major conclusions away from my conversations with the experts. First, there is no guarantee here. We cannot be sure that the midterms will be free and fair.
“We have a president who feels like he’s completely immune from any consequences of his actions,” Hansen told me, “because his party will prevent him from being impeached, and the Supreme Court will prevent him from being prosecuted for anything he does to violate people’s civil rights, and he has pardon power, so he can pardon his attorney general who might otherwise be deterred from going along with him, and from there on down.”
“So yeah, I think we’re in a pretty bad spot,” he said.
But it was also Hansen who delivered the second, more hopeful conclusion I took away from this self-inflicted project: that we cannot let the possibility, or even likelihood, of attempts to tamper with the election stop us from doing what we need to do.
Despite the number of unfortunate possibilities he sees coming down the pike, Hansen also sees ways that local officials and average citizens can decrease the likelihood of those possibilities becoming actualities.
“One thing local officials could do is say that ‘the people who are actually charged with keeping order on election day are state and local police. They will keep order on election day.’ And you know, ‘if some ICE agent comes up and breaks your car window, call us, we want to hear about it,’” he said, emphasizing the role local officials can play in defending people’s rights from federal overreach or intimidation. Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser recently launched a state website to facilitate reporting similar to what Hansen described.
Others can help too. They can know their rights, and help others know their own rights. “I think all there is is to advise people about their rights, assure people that those rights are active, and that state and local officials are committed to defending those rights,” he told me.
In the end, all we can do is all we can do, so we had better do it, no matter what they do. Or, as Hansen put it:
“I think it kind of comes down to all of us basically deciding that we’re not going to be deterred, that we’re going to go and do what we do as citizens,” he said, “and if they try to repress us, that’s on them.”
