The midterms are not being canceled.
But here are the ways Trump will definitely try to screw with them
Folks—you’re not getting out of voting this year. I hope that comes as good news to all of you.
Trump floated canceling November’s midterm elections in an interview with Reuters this week, in a discussion about how he’s going to lose them. “It's some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don't win the midterms,” Trump said, adding that he has accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”
It’s very new for Trump to acknowledge how unpopular he is and how badly he and the Republicans are losing. Just three weeks ago, he claimed all the polls showing his tanking approval numbers were fake and that the “real” polls show two-thirds of the country loving his presidency. “The polls are rigged even more than the writers,” he wrote on Truth Social on December 30. “The real number is 64%, and why not, our Country is ‘hotter’ than ever before.” (Only true in the climate change sense.)
In reality, Trump’s poll numbers are in the toilet on every single issue, including immigration and the economy, which used to be his best issues. Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how he’s handling the economy, per an Associated Press poll released Friday, and his approval on immigration has dropped from 49% to 38% since last March. It’s alarming that more than a third of the country see ICE murdering women in the streets and tear gassing 6-month-old babies and think, this is what I voted for, but some people are just incapable of empathy and critical thought.
When asked about Trump’s comments about canceling the midterms on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters he was joking. “He was saying ‘we’re doing such a great job… maybe we should just keep rolling.’ But he was speaking facetiously,” she said.
The joke wasn’t funny, so let’s check on the job he’s doing. We’re less than three weeks into the new year and an untrained, hastily recruited secret police—essentially, masked Proud Boys on government welfare—is literally terrorizing the country. In addition to murdering Renee Good and gassing infants, they’ve permanently blinded two protesters, disappeared three Native Americans, dragged a disabled woman through her car window on her way to a doctor’s appointment and killed four men in ICE detention.
Trump is also alienating our (former) NATO allies to try and bully them into giving us Greenland, sending Canada into the arms of China, and charging $1 billion per head for a seat on his “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which intends to finish the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and turn the land into a Trump resort. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. has flipped the food pyramid upside down, defunded Alzheimers and cancer research, brought back the measles, is trying to run horrific Tuskegee-style medical experiments on African babies, and is pushing a video campaign for drinking whole milk that looks like a horror film about 19th-century children in a basement.
Trump’s bizarre priorities this term, undoubtedly driven by psychopath Stephen Miller, are not really popular with anyone. They’re both highly motivating to the Democratic base and depressing to the Republican base, per a new CNN poll, which shows that while Dems have a 5-point edge on the generic ballot, “among those who say they’re deeply motivated to vote, that advantage expands to a massive 16 points.” Only 29% of Independents approve of Trump’s job performance, which may be the most glaring warning sign for him ahead of November.
And because some people really seem to think that Trump can just invoke the Insurrection Act or declare Martial Law and cancel the midterms: There’s no world in which that happens, for several reasons. A full 10% of the House of Representatives have announced their not running for reelection, putting a record number of seats up for grabs in November. This means that if you were to “cancel” the elections, those seats would just remain open and those districts unrepresented. Trump can’t just shrink the size of Congress on whim. And the members of Congress who are running for reelection undoubtedly would not go along with just giving up their seats and going unpaid this year because the president is afraid of getting impeached.
Also, elections are run by the states, and some of these midterm elections include state-level races, like the governorship. Trump would have to convince every single state board of elections to cancel all their races and refuse to elect anyone this year. That’s not within the realm of possibility.
Instead, here’s what he and Republicans are doing or are likely going to do:
Station ICE and potentially the military around polling places in contentious districts and heavily non-white districts to intimidate voters. He will frame it as ICE making sure that “illegals” aren’t voting, which they already do not. And he will encourage ICE to be violent toward anyone brown or with an accent, demand identification and cause as much chaos as possible to deter people from showing up at the polls.
Fuck with election certification, mail-in voting and ballot counting across the country, thanks to a very bad new Supreme Court decision this week that allows any political candidate to challenge election laws before voting or counting starts
Gerrymander the hell out of as many states as possible, starting with Texas, to squeeze out as many new seats for Trump as they can
Claim election fraud by the Democrats no matter what happens
It’s important for democracy-minded folks not to get distracted by the “if we even have any more elections” and start thinking proactively about how to get people to the polls safety and confidently amid certain ICE fuckery. Because the state-sponsored violence is going to get worse over the next nine months, by design. They are trying to become such raging cartoon monsters that they terrify U.S. citizens into giving up and staying home. And I’m starting to talk about this in January, because otherwise the hopelessness of sitting around watching this country turn into 1939 Germany would be too much for me to bear.
…
On that note, a streaming recommendation, because we need joy and dissociation in order to sustain our resolve: I binged Ponies this weekend in two days and loved it. It’s a funny, suspenseful, surprisingly hot Peacock series about two women in 1970s Moscow who become spies to try and figure out what really happened to their dead spy husbands. Haley Lu Richardson and Emilia Clarke are excellent in it, and watching their friendship chemistry develop is really the best part of the show.
If you want more streaming recommendations for me, sound off in the comments!