No, Trump cannot cancel the midterms. He’s doing it instead

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Concerned about losing unifying Republican power in Washington and puzzled by his lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump continues to talk about skipping the November midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of the House, Senate or both.

Trump doesn’t understand why his approval rating is underwater (and it is, for all intents and purposes, in a CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released Friday).

“I wish you could explain to me what’s going on in people’s minds,” he said in a speech to House Republicans earlier this month.

Later, he added: “Now, I’m not going to say ‘cancel the election,’ they should cancel the election, because the fake news says, ‘He wants to cancel the election. He’s 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 don’t even have to have elections.”

White House press secretary Carolyn Levitt later said the president was “joking” and “bumbling” about canceling the election.

If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. In a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last September, Trump expressed some jealousy when he said Ukraine would not hold elections during martial law during its war with Russia.

“So you say in a time of war, you can’t have an election,” Trump said. “So let me tell you, three and a half years from now—so you mean, if we’re at war with somebody, there’s no election anymore? Oh, that’s great.”

The man laughed.

Sometimes they are jokes, sometimes not

Trump regularly says things that sound like trolls until they don’t. Own Greenland? Not a joke. However, he seems to have retreated from the idea of ​​an unconstitutional third term as he has repeatedly repeated.

And for the record, unlike the Ukraine, America has held elections in the midst of several wars, when Britain invaded in 1812 and when it was at war with itself in 1864. It led to elections during the World Wars when millions of Americans fought overseas even in the 20th century.

It makes sense that Trump will fear the November midterms

Trump knows that presidents rarely pick up seats in the midterms. His administration has moved at an alarming pace to change the government because, as his chief of staff famously said, they know that presidents expect to lose power after their first two years. A net loss of just a handful of seats would give Democrats control of the House, for example, requiring their buy-in for spending and giving them the power to scrutinize their administration.

Presidents do not have the power to delay or cancel elections

The Constitution requires the new Congress to be sworn in on January 3, 2027. The day of the election is fixed in law, so it is theoretically possible for Congress to move it, but not cancel the election. Elections must be administered by each state, so state governors and legislatures could, in theory, move their own elections in the face of a major disaster, but there is no precedent for this. To get into the weeds of it all, read the report by the Congressional Research Service.

Presidential distrust in American elections is legendary

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

He says that the election he won was also rigged. After all these years of the Trump era, there is no evidence of any widespread voter fraud.

People are talking about a doomsday election scenario

Election officials say they are thinking very carefully about all this. Asked about Trump’s musings at an event sponsored by The Atlantic this week, Arizona’s top elections official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said:

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

For that, he doesn’t elaborate on what scenarios he is preparing for.

“I don’t want to give bad people any thought,” Fontes said.

What is Trump actually doing about the next election?

Trump may fantasize about canceling elections, but the reality is that the electoral system has already changed in some key ways. Some of them can have great consequences.

The redistricting war started by Trump continues to rage

Republicans picked up nine more friendly seats across the country, and Democrats finished with six, mostly in California. Republicans see more opportunities in Florida, while Democrats plan to put a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia in April. Read more.

If the Supreme Court decides to give more effect to the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could theoretically redraw the maps in many other states. Read the takeaways from October’s oral arguments.

Expect a very different home in the near future

The long-term result of more and more political gerrymandering without protections for ethnic minority-centered districts could be the smothering of minority-party delegations in many states, with House maps increasingly resembling presidential maps. Very few Democratic districts in Texas. California has very few Republican districts — even though there are millions of Republicans and Democrats in both states.

Trump wants more control over how states conduct elections

While many efforts have been blocked, for now, by the courts, Trump’s goal is to exercise more executive control over elections governed by Congress and states.

A federal court ruled Thursday in favor of California against the administration’s demand that the state provide information to its 23 million voters.

The Supreme Court has agreed to rule that postmarked mail-in ballots can still be counted if they arrive after Election Day. The decision could have serious consequences for the country’s large-scale adoption of mail-in voting in recent years. Even if Trump votes in person by mail, the practice is highly questionable. His executive order will also tighten how states use voting machines, another response to phantom voter fraud that can actually slow the counting of ballots significantly.

Trump is far from election oversight

Initially, his administration rolled back the Cyber ​​Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, which helps states protect their election systems from attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled funding for an information-sharing network that helps states detect and prevent coordinated hacking attacks, CNN reported last year.

His Justice Department has distanced the agency’s civil rights division from its core mission of investigating civil rights abuses, including those related to elections. The division’s current focus is helping states with “clean” voter rolls, though a judge recently ruled that the effort is a misapplication of the Civil Rights Act.

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

There’s plenty of time between now and November for more gaming, and Trump already has the midterms on his mind.

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