How Trump could undermine the midterms

‘It’s reckless that the president will continue to do what he’s doing, and that the folks around him will continue to let him do what he’s doing.’ Photograph: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘It’s reckless that the president will continue to do what he’s doing, and that the folks around him will continue to let him do what he’s doing.’ Photograph: Portland Press Herald/Getty Images How Trump could undermine the midterms The president really has no power over elections – but that hasn’t stopped Trump from laying the groundwork to challenge results in November When Donald Trump commandeered primetime US television last Friday, he delivered a familiar, but still extraordinary, message. The president argued once again that the results of the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, were illegitimate. US elections are “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen”, Trump alleged, claiming that “the trust of the American people was lost” when he was defeated. Historically, incumbent parties underperform in midterm elections and with the president’s popularity sagging – he has an approval rating of just 37% – Republicans appear on course to lose seats in the US Senate and House of Representatives, as well as in state and local elections, in November. Trump’s latest intervention, in which he accused China of interfering with the 2020 election, is viewed by US voting rights activists as just the latest escalation of a bid by the White House to influence, and potentially alter, the results of the 2026 midterm elections. “The number one threat facing American elections is the continued lies coming out of the White House,” said the Arizona secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, the official responsible for overseeing the state’s elections. The president is fighting to persuade Congress to approve legislation, the Save Act, that would allow the US federal government greater control over elections. Trump has also called for the federal government to take direct control of elections in some states, falsely claiming that his defeats there in 2020 were illegitimate. View image in fullscreen A broadcast of Trump’s address on 16 July. Photograph: Aaron Schwartz/EPA There’s just one snag. “We have an election system that is not run by the federal government,” said Ben Berwick, who leads Protect Democracy’s election law and litigation team. “It’s run by states and local jurisdictions.” The president, he added, “really has no power over elections”. So what can Trump actually do? Republicans in a handful of states have already scrambled, at Trump’s urging, to redraw their congressional maps in the wake of a landmark decision by the US supreme court – controlled by a conservative supermajority – that effectively gutted a major section of the Voting Rights Act. Louisiana led the way, tearing up its old map of four Republican and two Democratic districts in favor of a new one, which will probably give Republicans five of the state’s six congressional se