The most important political event of 2026 will be the mid-term elections, determining whether Donald Trump’s contemptuous domination of Congress will continue. At the moment, Democrats appear likely to take over the House of Representatives (taking the Senate is a long shot), giving them power to affect budget and tax policy, investigate Trump’s management and multiple scandals—and possibly impeach him. Given the stakes, though, Trump has already begun repeating his 2020 performance of trying to steal the election.
Various critics anticipate he might go so far as to claim that street protests against his policies justify invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act and using federal troops to seize ballot boxes, thereby raising doubts about results of the election. He has often claimed he has the “absolute right” to invoke the law.
(Stealing the election is just one of the outrages Trump and his administration are committing this year. I’ll cover more of them in columns to come. Many readers have said they prefer shorter Outrage columns arriving oftener.)
Historically, when a president’s approval ratings are as low as Trump’s (in the high 30s to low 40s and similar results on satisfaction with his management of the economy), his party loses 30+ House seats (up to 50) in mid-term elections. Polling on the 2026 generic Congressional ballot (asking who voters would support for House seats) vary widely, from Democrats +14 to Democrats +2.
Odds-makers give Democrats just a 36% chance of taking control of both the House and Senate, but a 68-70 % chance of carrying the House. Analysts, given the low number of tossup races, predict that Republicans will hold the Senate, but lose the House.
There are caveats to such predictions: the election is still 11 months away and circumstances could change. But citizens mainly should never forget all the legal and illegal maneuvers Trump took to reverse his 2020 election loss. He pressured state election officials to change their tallies, mounted a campaign to substitute pro-Trump electors for those actually selected. And he incited the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot designed to upset Congress’s certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
In a speech on the Ellipse that day, he urged thousands of his supporters to march to the Capitol— “peacefully and patriotically,” he said, though he also said they should “fight like hell” in full knowledge that many were armed. He watched the riot unfold for three hours before yielding to pleas from his family, officials in his administration and Congressional Republicans to call it off.
As rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” he criticized his vice president for failing to declare him the winner. He sat watching the riot unfold on TV for more than three hours before calling on his supporters to go home.
Since then, he has repeatedly claimed that 1/6 was a “day of love” or a “peaceful” protest of a “fraudulent” election. And one of his first acts on being inaugurated in 2025 was to award clemency to nearly 1,600 “patriots” convicted of 1/6 crimes, including assaults on police trying to guard the building and prevent Members of Congress from being killed. Twenty-three of those pardoned have since been arrested for serious crimes, including rape and attempted murder.
Trump began trying to steal this year’s election by urging Republican state legislatures to redraw their Congressional district maps to create more GOP-leaning seats and fewer Democratic seats. Texas immediately did so to pick up five seats, but that set off a California-led Democratic counterattack. Other states have either gerrymandered their districts or are considering doing so. A few have refused. The Cook Political Report estimates that the redistricting war will end up a wash in terms of net pickups and losses. But analysts say that fewer seats will be competitive so that a Democratic “wave” such as occurred in 2018 (a Democratic pickup of 41 seats) is unlikely to occur. To gain control of the House, though, only four seats need to “flip.”
Trump is working to block even that result. The White House has just created a website utterly rewriting the history of 1/6, blaming Democrats for inciting the riot by refusing to agree that the 2020 election result was fraudulent, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whom rioters shouted should be killed) for failing to call in the National Guard, and the Capitol Police for injuring innocent protesters. Whoever believes these outrageous lies should watch videotapes of the event.
Even though the Constitution assigns management of elections to the states and Congress (making no mention of the President), Trump has written “remember that the states are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”
He has issued an executive order calling for states to require proof of citizenship, demanded that only votes arriving by Election Day be counted and urged states to abandon mail-in voting. His executive order calls for recertifying all voting machines, a task that states may not be able to perform by Election Day. Trump has long tried to sow distrust in the election system and can use any failure to comply with his wishes as reasons to declare an unwelcome result is fraudulent.
The Department of Homeland Security has appointed a 2020 election denier to be in charge of insuring “election integrity” and, according to an exhaustive piece in The Atlantic magazine, several individuals claiming to be acting for federal officials have requested access to voting machines.
Republican jurisdictions have established rules making voting difficult, particularly for minority, aged and poor voters. Some have politically purged their voting rolls. With or without invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump could order troops to police voting places, intimidating voters. Or MAGA thugs could respond to a Trump hint to do the same. According to one survey of election workers, 40% have received threats and 60% said they were worried about election interference.
Democrats are recruiting armies of lawyers and poll watchers to combat Trump’s strategies to steal the election. They’ll need to work very hard.
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