President Donald Trump arrives to deliver remarks in Clive, Iowa, on January 27, 2026. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Ever since the United States entrusted its presidency to a would-be insurrectionist in January 2025, many Americans have feared for the integrity of their nation’s future elections.

And not without reason. President Donald Trump made his contempt for democracy clear on January 6, 2021. Shortly after retaking office last year, he pardoned the rioters who’d stormed the Capitol in his name, gutted the agency that protects America’s voting infrastructure from cyberattacks, attempted to unconstitutionally deter the counting of many mail-in ballots, and threatened to prosecute officials who had faithfully administered the 2020 election.

If concerns that Trump might unduly influence the 2026 midterms aren’t new, however, they’ve grown markedly more plausible over the past two weeks.

Key takeaways

• Trump has said he regrets not ordering the military to seize voting machines in 2020.

• The president has called for Republicans to “take over the voting” in at least 15 places.

• The FBI’s seizure of ballots and voter information from Fulton County, Georgia, sets an alarming precedent.

• Despite these threats, experts believe election interference attempts will likely fail due to institutional resistance.

In late January, the FBI seized 2020 election records — ballots, voter rolls, and scanner images — from a government facility in Fulton County, Georgia. This raid represented a new frontier in the president’s use of federal law enforcement to advance his conspiratorial claims of electoral impropriety.

Meanwhile, as ICE agents brutalized and killed protesters in Minnesota, US Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote a letter to that state’s governor, Tim Walz, in which she appeared to propose a bizarre quid pro quo: If Walz wished to see “an end to the chaos in Minnesota” — and, implicitly, a pullback in ICE operations there — he should give the Department of Justice access to his state’s voter rolls.

If the subtext of these actions was unclear, the president spelled it out this week. In an interview with his former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, Trump said that Republicans in Washington, DC, should “take over the voting” in at least “15 places.”

These developments came amid a decline in the GOP’s poll numbers. And they have intensified fears that the president may try to preserve his party’s control of Congress through undemocratic means.

“For anybody who doubted that this administration is laying the foundation to interfere in elections, the deluge of activity over the last two weeks should lay those doubts to rest,” said Wendy Weiser, vice president of democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal think tank at NYU Law School.

This interference could take many forms. But recent events have increased experts’ level of concern about two possibilities in particular:

Below, I explain how recent events have made these hypotheticals more thinkable — and why the administration’s efforts to unduly sway the midterms in its favor are, nonetheless, unlikely to succeed.

The nightmare scenario

The “nightmare scenario” for this year’s elections has long gone something like this: Control of the House comes down to a small number of close races. Republicans lead on Election Day in many of these contests, but their advantage steadily erodes as mail-in ballots arrive. The White House........

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