It’s been a bleak time: the hollowing out of the federal workforce, vital institutions decimated, ICE and Border Patrol enforcing martial law, and the international order upended.
For anyone opposed to the Trump regime, three years until the next election seems like an eternity.
Polling, at first glance, suggests that the Republicans are beatable. Trump’s “approval rating stands at 37%, down from 40% in the fall”, and “Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year,” according to Pew Research.
As of this article’s writing, polls indexed by Real Clear Politics showed that most voters disapproved of the Republican Party. Two-thirds of Americans, according to one poll, believe the administration’s immigration round-ups have gone too far.
With congressional elections set for November, Democrats see some hope. But liberals and leftists alike agree that we are suffering not from an extreme conservative presidency but from an authoritarian and fascistic destruction of the constitutional republic, to be reborn in a post-democratic era where autocracy, cult of personality and Hobbesian fear are no longer relics of the past.
Trump has achieved some of this through capturing the courts and media, the destruction of universities and purges of disloyal government workers. A Rubicon to be crossed is the destruction of the cornerstone of democracy itself: the vote.
“If voting did anything, they’d make it illegal” is a quote often attributed to anarchist Emma Goldman, deployed by hardened revolutionaries against squishy reformists at election time. Yet increasingly, it seems this is what the right wants to do to ensure Republican longevity.
“We need to get the House in a situation that is permanently defendable by the MAGA movement,” former Trump advisor Steve Bannon told The Economist. “You move a maximalist strategy with a sense of urgency and you seize the institutions.”
Such sentiment was echoed by George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove, who, according to CNN sought to “usher in a permanent Republican majority,” or as the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lemann put it, a “Republican majority that would be as solid as, say, the Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt created—a majority that would last for a generation.”
We’ll return to Rove in a moment, but Bannon was talking about new Texas redistricting that was approved by the Supreme Court, creating a new congressional map for the state that the SCOTUSBlog said was “favourable to Republicans in the 2026 elections despite a lower court’s ruling that the map unconstitutionally sorts voters based on race”.
Bannon has also threatened to have ICE patrol voting sites this year, reportedly saying, “We’re not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen.”
The danger here, of course, isn’t just that the administration would deploy federal troops to interfere with the vote, but that Bannon continues to stir up the right-wing base to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump and that undocumented immigrants are voting.
Trump has called for a nationalisation of the vote, a radical departure from the tradition of states running elections themselves: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof,” the Constitution states.
The “FBI, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the Election Assistance Commission” are scheduled to speak with state election officials about the upcoming election, reported NBC, raising tensions about the midterm vote.
The Brennan Center noted that Republican legislative efforts to reconfigure voting rules could block millions of people from the polls, mandating “voter roll purges every 30 days, placing enormous burdens on election officials and ending the 90-day quiet period that protects voters from being mistakenly thrown off the rolls right before Election Day” and “prohibit universal mail voting”.
While conservatives claim that these measures are meant to combat voter fraud, there is little evidence to show that this is actually a problem in the country.
Republicans also want a Kafkaesque world of documentation for voting, reminiscent of how Southern states once used poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses to keep Black people and other marginalised groups out of the polls.
For example, today Republicans want to prohibit “the use of student IDs (even those issued by state universities)” while accepting “tribal IDs only with an expiration date, even though many tribal IDs do not contain them”, the Brennan Center said.
At the same time, the Supreme Court looks ready to “abolish Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a provision that prohibits any discriminatory voting practice or election rule that results in less opportunity for political clout for minority groups,” The Conversation explained.
Recently, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard assisted FBI agents in a raid of a voting centre for Georgia’s Fulton County, the state’s biggest county in terms of population, where Black people outnumber whites and where Trump has been clobbered at the polls.
These developments have Americans wondering if the US will have a free and fair midterm election cycle. If we’ve learned anything about the Trump Administration, it’s that we have to believe its threats and take these matters seriously, no matter how far-fetched they sound.
Worse, this is all happening as grassroots far-rightists and conservative intellectual frameworkers are openly questioning fundamental notions of democratic representation.
Social media is awash with commentary about the need to repeal the 19th Amendment of the Constitution, which grants women the right to vote. Nick Fuentes, the mouthpiece of the fascist and racist Groyper community, said according to Media Matters, “I would just take away the right to vote for tons of people,” including women as well as men under 25, especially those who don’t own their own homes, on grounds that those who don’t manage property are ignorant of the so-called real world.
Tech oligarch Peter Thiel, a key capitalist ally of the Trump Administration, wrote in a libertarian blog in 2009, “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Why shouldn’t Americans worry about something catastrophic at the polls this year? ICE and the Border Patrol have already shown willingness to deploy sadism against citizens and immigrants alike at the urging of the regime, and to spread fear generally.
The United States is still reeling from the fact that Trump supporters attempted to violently overturn the results of the 2020 election, and those jailed for their participation in the failed coup were pardoned when Trump returned to office in 2025.
If federal agents pull non-white people and anyone with a foreign-sounding accent out of voting lines this year, the nation will have admitted that its democratic guardrails have truly crumbled. If state and local authorities send police or the state guard into polling sites as a protective measure, then the nation will come closer to real civil conflict.
Now, remember how Bannon’s vision for a Republican lock on the vote mirrored that of Rove’s? Keep in mind that for all of the insanity Trump has brought since announcing his candidacy for president, it was the Republicans in the 2000 election whose legal antics and violence through the Brooks Brothers Riot led to the dubious victory of Bush II over Al Gore.
In the 1990s, congressional Republicans schemed endlessly to find a scandal to oust Bill Clinton. Trump helped lead the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a natural-born citizen and then perpetuated the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged for Joe Biden.
In other words, the mounting threats against the 2026 midterms aren’t just about the Republicans needing to cheat because of bad polling numbers right now.
Since the Republican revolution of 1994, when the party took over Congress after decades in the minority, the operating logic of the conservative base isn’t that Democratic presidents are just bad politically, but that they are not legitimate.
“The United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.” This is a sentiment one might have heard on shortwave radio shows or on dusty leaflets a quarter century ago. Now it has crept into the mainstream of the ruling Republican party.
Given how much blood has been spilt in this country over the right to vote, an all-out federal assault on a midterm election sounds like the thing that could actually push the nation toward a real civil war.
Will that happen? We have to consider it as a possibility.
Photograph courtesy of Chad Davis. Published under a Creative Commons license.
