No, Trump can’t cancel the midterms. He’s doing this instead

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Anxious to lose unified Republican power in Washington and stunned by a lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump continues to talk of not holding the November midterm elections, in which Republicans could lose control of the House of Representatives, the Senate or both.

Trump doesn’t understand why his approval rating is underwater (and that’s on all counts CNN poll conducted by SSRS and published on Friday).

“I wish you could explain to me what’s going on in the public’s mind,” he told House Republicans earlier this month.

He later added: “I will no longer say, ‘Cancel the election. Let them cancel the election.’ Because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the election to be canceled. He is a dictator.'”

But Trump talked about canceling the election in an interview with Reuters this week. He said Republicans have been so successful that “when you think about it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “joking” about canceling the election.

If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. In his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last September, Trump said that Ukraine would not hold elections during the martial law period during its war with Russia, and expressed that he was a little jealous of this.

“So you are saying that elections cannot be held during war” Trump said. “So let me say this, three and a half years from now – you mean if we’re at war with someone there will be no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

People laughed.

Sometimes they’re jokes, sometimes they’re not

Trump routinely says things that sound like trolls until they don’t. Owning Greenland? No joke. But he appears to have backed away from the oft-repeated idea. unconstitutional third term.

For the record, unlike Ukraine, the United States held elections in the midst of many wars, including one occupied by Britain in 1812 and one at war with itself in 1864. He also held elections during the world wars in the 20th century, when millions of Americans fought abroad.

It makes sense for Trump to fear the November midterm elections

Trump knows that presidents rarely win seats in midterm elections. His administration is moving at breakneck speed to replace the government because, as his chief of staff famously said, they know that presidents expect to lose power after the first two years. For example, a net loss of just a handful of seats would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives, requiring them to agree to spending and giving them the power to investigate his administration.

Presidents have no authority to postpone or cancel elections

The Constitution requires the new Congress to be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Election Day is set by law, so it’s theoretically possible for Congress to change it, but not to cancel the election. Elections are supposed to be run by each state, so state governors and legislatures could theoretically hold their own elections to deal with a major disaster, but there is no precedent for this. To get into the details of all this, Read the Congressional Research Service report.

The president’s distrust of US elections is legendary

Trump also considered using emergency powers to interfere in the election. He recently told the New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.

He said that even the elections he won were rigged. Even after all these years of the Trump era, there is still no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

People are talking about doomsday election scenarios

Election officials say they’re thinking about all of this very carefully. Trump’s thoughts were asked at an event Sponsored by The Atlantic Arizona’s top election official, Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, said this week:

“The fact that we are going through these scenarios in the first place should tell you something about the health of our democracy,” Fontes added.

He did not provide detailed information about which scenarios they were preparing for this purpose.

“I don’t want to give the bad guys any ideas,” Fontes said.

What Trump actually does about the next election

Although Trump fantasizes about canceling the election, the reality is that the electoral system is already changing in some important ways. Some of these can be extremely important.

The redistricting battle started by Trump continues to rage

Republicans picked up nine more friendly seats across the country, while Democrats won six seats, mostly in California. Republicans see additional opportunities in Florida, while Democrats are planning a voting redistricting effort in Virginia in April. Read more.

If the Supreme Court decides to further gut the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could in theory redraw maps in many other states. Read takeaways from October’s oral arguments.

We expect a very different House in the near future

The long-term consequence of more and more political banter without protections for racial minority-focused districts could be a stifling of minority party delegations in multiple states, causing the House map to look more and more like the presidential map. There are far fewer Democratic districts in Texas. Although there are millions of Republicans and Democrats in both states, there are far fewer Republican districts in California.

Trump wants much more control over how states run elections

While most of those efforts have been blocked by the courts for now, Trump’s goal is to assert more administrative control over elections, which must be administered by Congress and states.

federal court on Thursday sided with California objected to the administration’s request that he release information on the state’s 23 million voters.

The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether ballots that were postmarked but arrived after Election Day could still be counted. The decision could have serious consequences for the country’s widespread adoption of mail-in voting in recent years. Trump is vociferously skeptical of the practice, even though he has personally voted by mail. His executive order will also mix up how states use voting machines; This is yet another response to fictitious voter fraud that could significantly slow down the counting of ballots.

Trump eliminated election oversight

Early on, his administration scaled back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was intended to help states protect their election systems from attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has canceled funding for an information-sharing network that helps states detect and fend off coordinated hacking attacks. CNN reported last year.

The Justice Department restructured the agency’s Civil Rights Division in a way that moved it away from its original core mission of addressing civil rights violations, including those related to elections. One of the department’s current focuses is to help “clean up” voter rolls in states; But a judge recently ruled that effort Misapplication of the Civil Rights Act.

The Trump administration has already tried to change how people vote through executive action and who they vote for by changing maps.

There’s plenty of time between now and November to further game the system, and it’s clear Trump is already thinking about the midterms.

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