Trump Targets Mail-In Voting, and the Democrats Phone in Their Counter-Strategies

Casual followers of our politics can be forgiven for greeting the torrent of authoritarian power grabs engineered by the Trump White House as a disjointed series of passing obsessions—the antics of a supreme post-constitutional leader with poor impulse control. Unleashing federal troops and National Guard units in Los Angeles and Washington seems to appeal to Trump’s alpha leader fantasies, which had long marinated in his forays into football professional wrestling. Getting a mid-decade gerrymander on the books in the Texas legislature reflects a panicked bid for leverage in a 2026 midterm cycle that’s already shaping up badly for the GOP. And Trump’s threat to issue another executive order to abolish mail-in voting while shutting down voting machines he dislikes looks to be a reprisal of the conspiratorial greatest hits from the January 6 insurrection—another exercise in score-settling with Democratic candidates that, as Trump declared in his Truth Social rant on the subject, “CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE.”

Yet these disparate shows of MAGA strength are in reality all of a piece: They drive home a determination to continue depriving voters of basic ballot access, while intimidating the exercise of civic freedoms in Democratic cities led by Black mayors. “Washington, DC, is a dress rehearsal for Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta,” says David Daley, a longtime chronicler of Republican efforts to throttle the right to vote. On Election Day 2026, Daley says, “there will be National Guard troops and masked ICE to intimidate potential Democratic voters in force. You can’t intimate people through the mail.”

Lest that sound like one strain or another of Trump derangement syndrome, it’s important to recall that voter intimidation, under the flimsy guise of election monitoring, was one of the Republican Party’s most reliable tactics for suppressing the vote in heavily Democratic urban districts. A 1982 consent decree arising from the Republican National Committee’s mobilization of soi-disant election watchers in New Jersey had tamped down on the practice until a federal judge overturned it in 2018. Since then, aspiring intimidators of voters on the right have had a field day—during the 2024 cycle alone, Republicans dispatched 100,000 poll watchers, with heavy concentrations in swing states. In vowing to eradicate mail-in votes and shut down voting machines that can process ballots rapidly, Trump wants to dramatically ratchet up conditions for voter intimidation in future elections.

Trump’s threatened order is plainly unconstitutional—the Constitution clearly entrusts the states with the power to run elections in whatever ways they see fit. That’s why Trump’s Truth Social outburst also contained this bit of pseudo-legal sophistry: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.” In a sanely configured legal order, Trump’s claims would be laughed out of court. But under a hard-right Roberts court that’s extended all manner of unwarranted executive privilege to the Trump White House and has undermined basic voting-rights protections, Trump’s ballot putsch may not be as outlandish as it seems.

In all events, the Trump administration is gearing up to suppress and distort the vote by any means necessary in the 2026 cycle—and it has plenty of ammunition at hand. In addition to the president’s assaults on a high-functioning and reliable elections infrastructure, there’s the bald power grab under way in the Texas legislature, which is on course to approve the addition of five safe GOP seats to a congressional delegation that’s already drawn up to produce the extreme over-representation of Republicans. Two weeks after Democratic members of the legislature fled the state to block the new maps, they have returned, bolstered by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s vow to create a four-seat gerrymander to bolster his state’s heavily Democratic delegation in Congress.

Newsom and his supporters say that this move is a long-overdue instance of Democrats fighting fire with fire—meeting the threat of Republican enclosures on the vote with some state-level dirty trickery of their own. But as Daley notes, this tactic comes too late in the districting wars to create any significant advantage. “Now the Democrats are saying they’re going to fight, but they can’t win,” he says. “No one is willing to say it—you can’t win this fight. There’s zero chance of that.”

That’s because Democrats aren’t facing up to the real nature of the GOP’s ballot putsch—continuing in the same conceptual rut that’s kept the party flat-footed in the face of Republican voter-suppression methods that have fundamentally reshaped the political playing field over the past decade and a half. Just for starters, Californians would have to approve a ballot initiative to overturn the popular and effective state districting plan endorsed by a nonpartisan commission. “So Democrats there are going to have to spend $200 million, probably, to convince people that gerrymandering is suddenly OK,” Daley says. “Then they’re going to pretend that this is temporary, but what are they planning to do in 2030, when the California delegation is 48–1 Democratic, and New York is 28–1? At some point, you’re going to have to win elections someplace else.”

And that is not shaping up as a strength for Democrats heading into the next midterm cycle. The Democratic National Committee is being shellacked in what Beltway insiders call “the money primary.” As Politico reports, the DNC had $15 million on hand at the end of June, while the Republican National Committee’s war chest is $80 million—a gap that’s twice the size of what it was at this juncture in Trump’s first term, and the DNC’s lowest cash reserve over the past five years.

These money woes pale, however, beside the structural obstacles before Democratic candidates. Party leaders are mostly continuing to hew toward risk-averse strategies as the midterms loom into view—in thrall to the fantasy that somehow preexisting power arrangements will prevail if they eke out a win in the House. “I think they’re kidding themselves if they think this is going to be a wave election,” Daley says. “The generic ballot has Democrats just 2.1 percent, which is far behind where they were at this time in 2018.”

But what’s chilling is that even the 2018 blue wave did very little to alter the fundamentals of a right-skewing political system operating on gerrymandered maps and limited ballot access. “In 2006”—the last major Democratic midterm wave—“you won enough so that you could actually move the maps,” Daley says. “In 2018, they had a wave and the maps didn’t budge.” Indeed, Daley notes that the narrow wins that the Democrats clocked in 2018 were due largely to successful court challenges to gerrymanders in key states, together with an aggressive bid to flip seats in districts that the GOP had yet to gerrymander. But that all changed by the 2022 cycle, when Republicans instituted restrictive new maps, closing off Democrats from making conventional overtures to pick up formerly flippable seats. “A 2018 wave, if it happened today, would not turn the same number of seats,” Daley says.

And if you want to ponder true structural impossibilities, there’s the Senate map. “You’re looking at something like 19 Harris states, 24 red states, and seven that have been swing states,” Daley says. “In all of the Trump states, you have 100 percent Republican senators—that gets you to 48–50 right away. If Democrats even want to get within sniffing distance of a majority, they have to hold the two seats from Georgia and the two seats from Arizona. They can’t even get to 50 if the map holds.”

The only way to break through this doom cycle is for Democrats to undertake political persuasion in a different register—laying aside the twinned delusions of bipartisan comity and moderate-minded power sharing in favor of a robust defense of social democracy and actual democratic voting rights. Yet that involves acknowledging past failures and jettisoning the empty bromides of a consultant class that continues steering the party into debacle after debacle. It involves, in other words, meeting a genuine crisis with new ideas, an engaged moral imagination, and most of all, a grassroots politics that gives the party’s base something to vote for.

“This is the reality of American politics,” Daley says. “The Republicans have a stranglehold on the most important institutions that they don’t intend to give up.”