Democrats Expect a 2026 Comeback. But Will Free Elections Even Exist?

President Donald Trump and his allies are doing plenty of damage right now—from firing hundreds of air traffic control staffers to pushing an obscene federal budget bill that slashes Medicaid while expanding tax breaks for the wealthy. All of which is deservedly grabbing attention, and starting to prove unpopular, as even Republican congressmen are learning during angry town halls in their districts.

Many mainstream Democrats are reassuring themselves that momentum is shifting and the party will stage a rebound in the 2026 midterms. Which is frightening, because that thinking naively assumes Trump doesn’t try to change the election rules.

Elon Musk’s bedazzled chain saw and other daily administration antics are obscuring the next ominous frontier in the Republican attempt to hold on to power: warping voting procedures and laws.

The offensive is quietly underway now, and it is likely to follow a familiar blueprint. “Trump and the Republican Congress changing the mechanics of voting and the certification of elections—it’s more than me making an educated guess,” says Bill Burton, a Democratic strategist who was a White House adviser to President Barack Obama. “It’s in Project 2025.” That right-wing agenda includes such steps as moving election law prosecutions from the Department of Justice’s civil rights division to its criminal division and giving the federal government greater access to state voter rolls—a change that opponents see as a precursor to a purge of hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters.

Trump is already putting some of the building blocks in place. He tried to pressure California into requiring voter ID in exchange for federal wildfire aid money. He moved to fire the chair of the Federal Election Commission, Ellen Weintraub, though she refused to leave. He has nominated Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election results, as an assistant attorney general. He has backed the SAVE Act, congressional legislation that purports to crack down on noncitizen voting, an infinitesimal problem, by requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration—something that would likely disenfranchise millions of legitimately eligible college students, as well as Black and Latino voters. The SAVE Act may come up for a House vote as soon as next week.

Much of the key action, however, will take place on the state level. Georgia Republicans want to eliminate early in-person voting, no-excuse absentee balloting, and motor-voter registration. In Missouri, Republicans are trying to make it harder for citizen-led initiatives to appear on the ballot and be approved.

“In Utah, they have a pretty independent Supreme Court that operates a little bit above politics. Last year it struck down a gerrymander,” says David Pepper, a former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and the author of Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines. “So the Republican legislature is talking about, ‘How can we change the way our courts are selected?’ You will see other really concerted efforts to not allow Democrats to win any state Supreme Court races, because that’s a frontline democracy-protecting position.”

Indeed, North Carolina Republicans have stalled the certification of a Democratic state Supreme Court judge, Allison Riggs, for four months by claiming irregularities in voter registration forms. “This is their playbook,” Burton says. “In places where they don’t win elections, they’re going to claim fraud and not certify the winner.”

Fighting back against such a multipronged effort is highly complicated and expensive. One locus of the counterattack is Democracy Docket, a voting rights platform launched by Marc Elias, an election lawyer who worked with the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, and who in 2020 went undefeated in 64 cases where Trump tried to contest the presidential outcome.

On Tuesday, Elias’s firm scored another win, defeating a provision in an Arizona law that required documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration in presidential elections. “Right now we are litigating nearly 50 voting and election lawsuits in nearly 20 states. We have a broad reach, and we’re anticipating more litigation if and when some of these new state laws are enacted,” says Aria Branch, a partner in Elias’s firm. “At some point Trump said he would be considering a third term, and I think that captured the public’s attention. Authoritarians and dictators, historically, try to disenfranchise people and make it more difficult to actually hold free and fair elections. And so I don’t think that issue is lost on anyone.”

That’s the hopeful view. There are plenty of other reasons to be pessimistic.

“People are so caught up in the whirlwind of the day-to-day bullshit that the actual big stuff that’s foundational to democracy are fights that people aren’t really getting prepared for,” Burton says. “And by the time we get to the next election, it’s going to be too late.”