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(Dobbs) It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over
“President Trump will use any tool, legal or not, to try and make sure he gets the results he wants this year.”
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It’s just a week from today, the climax of the 2026 midterm elections. As of late yesterday, according to the University of Florida Election Lab, more than 30 million Americans already have voted, but as history is our guide, the majority will vote Tuesday next week.
Most signs say, the prevailing sentiment is to give the boot to every politician who has ever said a nice word about Donald Trump, especially the ones who still do. If they haven’t seen through him by now, they don’t deserve to govern us.
Those positive signs come from the polls, which keep measuring Trump’s standing as much as each state’s candidates’ because he has made the midterms a referendum on himself. Which might be a boneheaded strategy. His approval ratings are at an all-time low in his political life. If you can believe the polls, his rankings in every category keep dropping. Americans don’t like him and they don’t trust him. They are upset by the cost-of-living, and by the unnecessary costs of his war.
And they even finally seem to be saying they’ve had enough with his self-enriching corruption. In Fox News’s poll two weeks ago— Fox’s— nearly 90% of registered voters said that government corruption has become the number one issue on their minds, and government corruption these days flows from Trump. A CNN poll only last week put the figure at just 19%, which is probably closer to reality, but I welcome even the suggestion from Fox that the figure is much higher.
The upshot is, it looks like voters want to throw the bums, Trump’s bums, out. But…. and there always is a “but” in life…. will they? Are the polls right? The past decade has given us plenty of reason to be skeptical— even, despite all the corrections pollsters have tried to make in their process, polls in the primary portion of these midterms. There is plenty of reason to question them.
That’s why a few days ago The Economist ran this headline: “Polls suggest a sweeping Democratic victory. History suggests caution.”
It took a look at the history of modern congressional polls and found that the more lopsided the state, the more likely it was that polls underestimated the strength of the party that dominates it. Could that happen again in states where Democrats are pinning their hopes, like Texas, Kansas, Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Alaska, and elsewhere?
Then there’s the question of turnout next Tuesday. There might seem to be an enthusiasm edge for Democrats, but there is still a financial edge for Republicans. Thanks to the $445 million that Elon Musk has pumped into Republican races, and to the $277 million that Trump’s political action committee MAGA Inc. has poured in with another $164 million on tap (not to mention dark money that doesn’t have to be documented), there must be tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions, left over even after the flood of Republican TV ads and internet appeals and mailbox mailers in the swing states.
If one side can turn out a higher percentage of its voters than the other side, that could make a difference.
And finally, the biggest wild card: will Trump cheat? As former Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin wrote in an essay last week, “There is a chance— some would argue a likelihood— that the midterms will proceed smoothly and honestly, with the winners seated in a straightforward manner. There is also the possibility that the election will be, like so much else over the past two years, chaotic at best and lawless at worst.”
Trump has been setting the stage to call the midterms illegitimate for some time, all under the banner of “election integrity.” He has been warning of foreign meddling. He has questioned the sanctity of voting machines. And now the latest scheme, and that’s all it is: his appeal yesterday on his website for Americans to go to a tip line to report fraud, which will earn them $1 million “upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the fraud.”
With the precedent of prior elections, it won’t turn up much fraud but it might turn up tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of tips, which he would then use to make people skeptical and justify his interference with the election results. Redux of 2020.
He also tried to take control of mail-in ballots, although the Supreme Court did shut that one down. Which leads to a positive prospect: if Trump takes any of his “election integrity” complaints to court, they will likely make their way all the way to the Supreme Court and at least on election issues that have come before it, it has not always kissed his ring. Remember what he said about his own three appointees when the Court blocked his plan for mail-in ballots? “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”
Still, given the history of the man, there is plenty to worry about. Democratic senator Mark Warner worries. He told The Washington Post earlier this month, “President Trump will use any tool, legal or not, to try and make sure he gets the results he wants this year.” He could seize ballot boxes. He could seek, as he did after 2020, to deny certification to Democrats who win seats in the new Congress before the old Congress, with its Republican majority, is retired.
Given what we’ve already seen after 2020, and given what’s at stake for him politically and personally if he has a hostile Congress next year, is there really anyone who thinks he wouldn’t?
But probably the scariest possibility of all is that he might literally bring in the troops. Back in August, a conservative commentator told the president on the air, “You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections.” Trump’s response? “Let me just say that stranger things have happened. I’ll leave it at that.”
In other words, he wouldn’t rule out the option of sending in the troops, or at least agents from Homeland Security, under the guise of the Insurrection Act. He has said it before and he has said it since. A month ago Time Magazine asked him, “Would you rule out declaring a state of emergency in the lead up to the midterms unless there’s widespread violence in the streets?” His answer: “I don’t rule anything out or in. We’ll see.”
The Insurrection Act dates back almost to the American Revolution. Its slightly updated version “authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations.” Anything short of those conditions would make the implementation of the Insurrection Act an illegal act. Not that such concerns have ever meant much to Donald Trump.
What Trump will be ignoring if he tries to insert himself and the federal government into the elections is the language of the Constitution. Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 explicitly says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
The president, the head of the executive branch, has no brief in how elections are run.
It is impossible to predict, if you’re not privy to the inner sanctums of the White House, what Donald Trump will do if despite his money and any foreseeable dirty tricks, Democrats win the midterms and take both houses of Congress back. Maybe what will carry the day will be that because he has been pushing Republican voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” enough who are now disenchanted will do just that, but not in the way he hopes.
So will voters throw the bums out? The only real conclusion anyone can reach is, “It ain’t over til it’s over.
© 2026 Greg Dobbs