GD POLITICS

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On Monday’s episode we began to set the table for the 2026 midterms. Today we acknowledge that there’s something of a bull threatening all the fine china we’ve just laid out. Pardon the strained metaphor.
Put bluntly, the 2026 midterms will be the first nationwide federal election with Trump as president since 2020, when he pushed to overturn the results. Some recent developments have already caused a tea cup or two to wobble. I promise I’m done with the metaphor now.
This week, on Dan Bongino’s podcast, Trump suggested that Republicans move to nationalize elections in 15 unnamed states and later reiterated his push from behind the Resolute Desk at a bill signing ceremony. Last week, in an unusual move, the FBI raided a Fulton County elections office, seizing 2020 ballots and other voting records.
In the background of all of this, starting last year, the Department of Justice began requesting full voter rolls with private voter information from states, in an apparent attempt to create a national voter file.
Trump has also issued executive orders attempting to change the elections process nationally, including that all ballots be received by the time polls close on Election Day and that Americans show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship when they register to vote. For what it’s worth, he has also quipped about canceling the election, something he can’t do, and about ending mail voting.
Concerned about losses at the midterms, state Republicans, at Trump’s request, have already pursued mid-decade gerrymandering to try to buttress their majority. Trump’s latest comments about nationalizing elections came after a Democrat won a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, Texas, by over-performing Trump’s win in 2024 by 30 percentage points.
It doesn’t take a detective to put these pieces together. A president who has a record of only accepting election results when he wins is concerned about Republican losses at the midterms. He has told Republicans himself that he doesn’t want the ensuing consequences, which would be Democratic investigations into his administration. In an attempt to prevent that, Trump may sow doubt in the results in 2026 or try more serious interventions.
Today we dig into what that could look like and detail the ways American elections are designed to be resilient. After all, it’s not one bull in one china shop. There are more than 9,000 jurisdictions administering elections nationwide and no matter what Trump says, the constitution charges the states with running elections.
With me to discuss it all is Nathaniel Rakich, managing editor at Votebeat, and Jessica Huseman, editorial director of Votebeat. Votebeat is a nonprofit newsroom that covers voting and election administration.

This is our start-of-the-year, table-setting episode for the 2026 midterms. A flood of January news pushed it back, but the clock is now ticking. The primaries begin in just four weeks.
Republicans begin with control of the House by the slimmest of margins. To flip the chamber, Democrats would need to gain five seats. Republicans have a safer margin in the Senate, where Democrats would need to gain four seats, but in much redder territory than in the House.
In polls that ask Americans if they prefer Democrats or Republicans to control Congress, Democrats lead by five percentage points on average. When it comes to the president’s approval rating, Trump is at net -14, a rating that puts him just slightly below where Biden was at this point in his own historically unpopular presidency.
High-quality polling from the New York Times also shows that President Trump has given up his gains and then some with the voters who powered his popular vote victory in 2024 — a group that tended to be younger, lower propensity and less white than Republicans’ past coalitions.
History is clear about the challenges for Republicans. The incumbent party has lost seats in the House in 20 of the last 22 midterms elections, with an average loss of 32 seats.
With me to set the table are two friends of the pod: Jacob Rubashkin, deputy editor of Inside Elections and Leah Askarinam, elections reporter at the Associate Press.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.gdpolitics.com

The full episode is available to paid subscribers. Once you become a paid subscriber, you can connect your account to your preferred podcast player here.
Democrats are gearing up to turn the page on the Trump presidency and some 2028 hopefuls will likely announce their intentions by year’s end. At least a half-dozen candidates are, for all intents and purposes, already running.
Will California Gov. Gavin Newsom be able to ride the wave of his current support for the next two years or is he cresting now? Will voter outrage and a consolidation of the left flank of the party power New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the head of the pack or will a moderate prevail? And who is even likely to run in the first place?
In a live 2028 Democratic primary draft at the Comedy Cellar in New York City, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and I debated those questions and many more. (Make sure to reply in the comments with who had the best roster!)
As a heads up, we began the night on a more somber note, discussing Alex Pretti’s killing in Minneapolis and whether it is likely to serve as a turning point in our current political moment. As we moved to the draft, we got a little competitive and plenty silly. This is the second Democratic primary draft we’ve done on the GD POLITICS podcast. If you’d like to look back at our previous picks, you can do that here.

Call this something of an emergency podcast. I’d planned on airing an episode setting the table for the 2026 midterms today. We’re going to save that for another day, because on Saturday a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37 year-old Veterans Affairs hospital ICU nurse.
It’s the second killing by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis in less than three weeks — the first being Renee Good, a 37 year-old mother, who was shot while impeding traffic as part of a protest.
We’ll get into some of the details of what happened on Saturday, but I think it’s fair to say the public, many lawmakers, and even some Republicans have lost patience with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics.
In both killings in Minneapolis, the Trump administration rushed to brand Good and Pretti as domestic terrorists and fabricated events despite the shootings being visible in multiple videos. While there was plenty of pushback among Democrats, Independents and the press in the case of Good, this time a handful of Republicans, including the NRA, have joined that pushback as well.
As listeners well know, it’s going to take a minute before we can fully understand the impact of this weekend on American politics, but we’ll share what we know at this moment. With me to do that is head of research at FiftyPlusOne, Mary Radcliffe, and managing editor at Votebeat, Nathaniel Rakich.



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Trump has now been back in office for a year. To help make sense of the past twelve months, on Tuesday I hosted a live Substack conversation with friend of the pod and author of the Wake Up To Politics newsletter, Gabe Fleischer.
We began by assessing Trump’s accomplishments and failings by the standards he set at the beginning of his second term. We also discussed how Americans have reacted and took a closer look at the areas where Trump’s new assertions of presidential power have been allowed to stand and where they’ve been batted down.
One of the themes of the conversation was that there’s often so much going on that it can be hard to actually follow a single story from beginning to end. We try to tie up some of those loose ends where possible.


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.gdpolitics.com/subscribe