President Trump is turning his attention to the voting process for next week’s elections. That’s alarming some Democrats who believe Trump will make unsubstantiated claims of fraud.
After months of extraordinary steps to ensure his party maintains control of the U.S. House of Representatives in next year’s midterms, President Donald Trump is turning his sights toward the voting process in next week’s elections.
That pivot is raising alarm among Democrats and others who warn that he may be testing strategies his administration could use to interfere with elections in 2026 and beyond.
Late last week, Trump’s Department of Justice announced it was sending election monitors to observe voting in one county in New Jersey, which features a race for governor that Trump has become deeply invested in, and to five counties in California, where Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing a ballot measure to counter the president’s own effort to rejigger the congressional map to elect more Republicans.
That announcement was followed with a pre-emptive attack by Trump on the legitimacy of California’s elections. The post on his own social media platform echoed the baseless allegations he made about the 2020 presidential election before he and his allies tried to overturn his loss in a campaign that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Watch how totally dishonest the California Prop Vote is!” Trump wrote last weekend on Truth Social, referring to Proposition 50, the lone issue on the state’s special election ballot. “Millions of Ballots being ‘shipped.’”
The combination has prompted responses from several prominent Democrats, who were already bracing for Trump to use his presidential powers to tilt next year’s midterms to his side.
“It’s a bridge they’re trying to build the scaffolding for, all across this country, in next November’s elections,” Newsom said in a video in which he also predicted the administration will send masked immigration agents to polling stations next week.
During early voting so far, there has been no indication that troops or federal officers have shown up near polling sites or ballot drop boxes in any state. Despite the warnings from some Democrats, millions of voters already have cast ballots through early in-person or mail voting, a process that has produced no significant problems.
Trump has long accused the Biden administration of trying to interfere in last year’s presidential election after the Justice Department filed federal charges against him related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 results and his retention of classified documents after leaving office.
