(CNN) — Democrats are reaching DEFCON 1 levels of alarm about President Donald Trump’s efforts to influence the coming election.
“All the signals are flashing red,” wrote Democratic strategist and CNN political analyst David Axelrod in a post on X.
“On the square, the @GOP would take a beating this fall, largely because of Trump’s unpopularity,” Axelrod said, “So he’s setting up Plan B–do whatever you need to do to win. Anything. Anyone who says ‘Well, he wouldn’t do THAT’ hasn’t paid attention.”
Use your imagination, in other words, and don’t be surprised at anything Trump does in the four months until Election Day.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida Democrat, told CNN’s John Berman on Friday that people in her overwhelmingly Democratic district are frightened about what might happen in November.
“For the first time in my whole career, John, I have voters telling me that they’re worried that the president’s going to cancel elections, that he’s going to declare martial law. There are people who are actually have said to me that they’re worried that they’re not even going to have elections in November,” Wasserman Schultz said.
She said she tries to reassure her constituents about their more alarmist fears.
Republicans already drew themselves an advantage
Wasserman Schultz is running in a congressional district redrawn as part of the GOP’s larger effort to adjust maps to their benefit before November. Democrats countered with their own new maps in states including California, but Republicans were more successful in courts and could net as many as 10 seats in November from new maps drawn during the redistricting war, according to CNN’s most recent assessment.
What else is the White House doing to help Republicans in November?
In the US, states are tasked with running their own elections, but Axelrod ticked off a litany of actions that the Trump administration has undertaken to influence them.
The most recent example is Trump’s firing on Thursday of three of the four commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission, an agency Congress set up in 2002 as an independent bipartisan resource to dole out federal money to help states conduct secure elections. It’s not the only election-related entity to be hobbled. The Federal Election Commission, which handles campaign finance issues, also lacks a quorum of commissioners to operate.
The EAC firings are just one piece of evidence Axelrod offered. I’ve added context to each of his points below.
(Trump temporarily installed Bill Pulte, a wealthy businessman-turned-housing official, as Director of National Intelligence. While overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac he controversially targeted Trump’s political opponents with accusations of mortgage fraud. Pulte lacks intelligence experience, but does have deep ties to the GOP. CNN has reported Trump wants Pulte to focus on election security issues, a nontraditional mandate for the spy chief.)
(An election denier is president, after all, and he has appointed people who share his views of the 2020 election, which he refuses to admit he lost, throughout the US government.)
(Trump has tried to seize control over mail-in voting from states in some key ways, including by creating a national database of voter registrations. States on the right and left have fought the effort, however, and a court this month rejected his attempt to order the US Postal Service to only send mail-in ballots in states that had complied. The court battle will continue on multiple fronts before Election Day.)
(Trump has loudly complained about Republicans’ inability to pass an election security bill that voter integrity groups largely say is unnecessary. He has demanded that senators nix he filibuster to pass the bill, but Republican senators have refused. This week Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill out of pique at lawmakers’ failure to pass the election bill, which he calls the SAVE America Act. The election bill will continue to languish and the housing bill will become law without his signature.)
(There is no evidence of widespread election fraud, but there is indeed fear that Trump will use claims of fraud, perhaps aerated by Pulte at DNI, to do something extraordinary before November. Mullin was asked at his confirmation hearing about the possibility of dispatching ICE agents to polling places and did not reject it out of hand. But there is no publicly reported concrete plan to do anything like this.)
There are other things Axelrod did not mention
Last year, CNN reported about how the Trump administration, as part of supposed government efficiency efforts, had worked to starve or dismantle election security networks by which the federal government helps states.
This latest effort — firing commissioners at the EAC — likely won’t have much of an impact on the coming election, according to watchdog and good government groups. But it is alarming to some of them nonetheless.
Warnings of a slow-moving takeover
“Although the EAC doesn’t play a direct role in running elections, we must view this as part of a broader pattern of efforts to centralize control over election administration and tilt the playing field,” wrote Michael McNulty, director of policy at Issue One, which describes itself as a “crosspartisan political reform group.”
McNulty, whose background is in working in elections overseas, has warned that Trump’s efforts amount to a slow-moving election takeover playbook about which everyone should be on guard.
Trump’s efforts to exert influence of the coming election have been clear, but they have also been faulty. The Supreme Court recently ruled in favor of states that count mail-in ballots postmarked on time but received after Election Day, for instance, the most high-profile election-related loss for Trump and his allies in court.
There have been multiple other obstacles put in front of Trump by lower courts.
States are taking matters into their own hands
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten recently wrote about efforts in blue states to pass laws shielding their elections from federal meddling, either by barring the sharing of voter registration data or barring the presence of federal law enforcement.
Votes will be cast. Votes will be counted
For all of Trump’s efforts, Americans should be confident that the coming election will be sound, according to David Becker, founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.
By that he means that people will be able to vote and those votes will be counted accurately.
“I’m not even sure the dismissals rank in the top 5 election-related stories this week,” he said of the EAC firings. “A Trump-appointed judge quashing the DOJ’s subpoena attempting to collect sensitive personal information on poll workers was far more impactful, for instance.”
Read CNN’s story on that court loss for the Department of Justice.
The EAC firings, Becker wrote, are indeed overreach, but “we shouldn’t make too much about the effect this will have on the elections, this year and going forward.”
Elections are still run by states, as the Constitution requires, he argued, “and they are executing that mission exceptionally well.”
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