There are two basic stories to tell about the 2026 midterm elections.
The first, obviously, is the political collapse of President Trump and the Republican Party in the wake of authoritarian repression, economic mismanagement and a failed war of choice. That story explains the results of Tuesday’s elections, in which Democrats swept to victory across the country in a total repudiation of the president’s vision for American life. In addition to Congress, Republicans lost state legislatures and governor’s mansions, losing power up and down the ballot in the most stark rejection of a political party since 2010.
Those results are so striking that the second story might go by the wayside — dismissed as immaterial to the bigger picture. But that would be a mistake, because the second story is ultimately the most important one.
The core of the problem is that Trump turned the federal government against American democracy in a relentless effort to challenge, subvert and undermine the nation’s election infrastructure. All in an effort to disrupt the conduct of free and fair elections and hold onto power in the face of popular discontent.
Trump has always rejected the idea that he could legitimately lose an election. In 2016, he insisted that illegal voting by noncitizens had given Hillary Clinton her winning margin in the popular vote. In 2020, he blamed fraud for his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden and then started a monthslong attempt to overturn the election, culminating in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. There was, unsurprisingly no such complaint of fraud or illegal voting after the 2024 election, which he won. But that just proves the point.
Direct control of the election system was, along with mass deportations, border security, tariffs and an attack on civil society, a top priority for Trump at the start of his second term. In March of last year, claiming extraordinary authority over Congress and the states, Trump issued an executive order purporting to overhaul — and seize control — of federal elections. His decree would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote, decertified voting machines used in dozens of states, penalized states that count timely ballots received after Election Day, opened voter files and registration lists to both the Department of Homeland Security and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and conditioned federal grants and awards on whether states had worked with the Department of Justice to prosecute election crimes.
The president’s order was, from top to bottom, a lawless exercise of executive authority and a blatant violation of both federal law and the Constitution, which delegates the power to run elections to the states, with the caveat that “Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
Following a lawsuit, a federal court enjoined the executive order and in a final decision issued later that year, the court permanently blocked the president’s attempt to take control of American elections.
But Trump is nothing if not persistent, and he continued to look for ways to commandeer the voting system. He pressured Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which would have codified his executive order into law. He pushed the Department of Justice to validate his election conspiracies. In January, the F.B.I. raided the election office of Fulton County, Ga., a frequent target of Trump’s claims of voter fraud. The Department of Justice made repeated attempts to try to get access to state voter files, ultimately losing each time. “Put simply,” as the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia put it in League of United Latin American Citizens et al. v. Executive Office of the President, “our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures.”
And still, Trump was not deterred. In late March, he issued another executive order, this one aimed at the United States Postal Service, in which he ordered the postal service to determine who can vote by mail and deny ballots to anyone not deemed eligible. He also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to compile lists of eligible voters.
The ultimate aim of this order was to undermine mail-in voting — a frequent bête noire of the president — and effectively block millions of eligible voters from casting their ballots. To try to compel compliance, Trump also ordered the attorney general to investigate and prosecute state and local election officials who issue mail ballots to voters deemed ineligible by D.H.S.
As this order made its way through the courts, Trump administration officials also tried to put their thumb on the scale, threatening state and local election officials for not following the president’s dictates. In July, the Justice Department sent letters to all 50 states and Washington D.C., threatening criminal prosecutions if election officials counted ballots cast by noncitizen voters. In a similar move, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin alleged that over 250,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in four states, a claim that rested on a flawed system for seeking out noncitizen voters. Analysis by independent groups as well as the states themselves has found that noncitizen voting is practically nonexistent.
In September, the Supreme Court blocked the president’s attempt to use the postal service to undermine mail voting. But still Trump pushed forward. In a set of last-ditch efforts to undermine the midterms, the Justice Department has tried to make hay of ballot stacking in Alaska, using reporting from The Times to argue that the Democratic Senate nominee, Mary Peltola, broke the law when her campaign worked to recruit an independent candidate, Dan Sullivan, who shares a name with Peltola’s Republican opponent (an accusation that Peltola denies). It has also tried to force California to segregate suspected noncitizen ballots from the rest of the pool. In both cases, courts have smacked down the administration for overstepping its authority.
Most Americans who voted had a normal Election Day. Some, often those in majority Black or Hispanic precincts in states controlled by Republicans, faced the usual challenge of long lines and limited places to cast a ballot.
But the long effort to subvert the elections and keep the Republican Party in power, against the will of voters, fell flat. And while there are still avenues for chaos and disruption, the scale of Trump’s defeat at the ballot box makes it very unlikely that he’ll have anything more than token support from his party. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the elections.
That is no reason to breathe easy. What we know is that, if he thinks he might lose, the president is opposed to free and fair elections. He is opposed to the idea of electoral accountability. He rejects the fundamental republican principles of self-government and popular sovereignty. If he could act unimpeded, he would make the United States a Potemkin democracy.
This election cycle may be over, but as a threat to our freedom to govern ourselves, Trump still looms.
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