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In theory, Democrats received some good news over the past couple of days that seemed to make a victory in next year’s midterms more likely. First, a new Quinnipiac poll showed them taking a commanding 9-point lead over the GOP in the generic congressional ballot. Then, on Thursday, Virginia Democrats announced their plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps in a way to blunt the impact of Republican gerrymandering efforts across the rest of the country.

So why do we say that this is only good news “in theory”? 

Because none of this is going to matter unless the midterms (and subsequent elections) are at least somewhat fair… and it is becoming increasingly clear that this is not going to be the case. 

To understand why, beyond the simple fact that the US is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state, you need to put yourself in the shoes of Donald Trump.

Right now, he is presiding over the most lawless administration in American history — and even that is an understatement. At times, it resembles a criminal enterprise a lot more than a government. Trump is personally enriching himself at will, coercing businesses into doing his bidding, using the levers of power to go after his perceived enemies, and violating the Constitution on a daily basis in the most egregious manner.

Of course, it’s not just the president who is doing this. From Cabinet members on down to masked ICE goons, countless people are skirting and breaking the law at his behest or of their own volition.

And the reason why they are all getting away with it is that there is no oversight and no accountability.

The Supreme Court is dominated by right-wing justices who seem willing to find a justification for anything this administration does, no matter how unconstitutional it is. 

The Department of Justice does not even pretend to be impartial anymore and instead has become a political weapon that Trump wields at will. 

And the GOP-led Congress is not only rubber stamping anything the president wants, it’s also just looking on while he usurps powers the Constitution grants to the legislative branch. 

There is nothing that can be done about the first two. 

However, a win in the midterms would allow Democrats to conduct rigorous oversight and, more likely than not, impeach Trump again for some of his most blatant high crimes and misdemeanors (and there are a lot of actions to choose from). 

So, do you really think that the guy who staged a coup to stay in power after his 2020 election loss is going to allow that to happen now that he has total control of the government?

If your answer is “yes,” then we have a Qatari jumbo jet to gift you that comes with no strings attached… certainly not a security guarantee and an air base in Idaho (seriously, we could have chosen from a dozen examples here, like Trump’s crypto grifts or his various abuses of power).

Of course there won’t be a regular election if it looks as though the Democrats will win (at least) the House in spite of the GOP’s efforts to rig the electoral maps as much as possible.

The only question is how rigged the midterms will be and how Republicans are going to do it. The way things are going, they will have to be very rigged — and we believe that’s exactly what’s going to happen. 

Now, you may think this is fearmongering, but we’d like to point out that we predicted Trump’s coup more than a year before it happened.

Here is what we wrote back then (before laying out a series of events that would lead to January 6-style violence):

While many Americans are dreading the prospect of a second term for President Donald Trump, maybe they should be even more worried about a narrow Trump loss. All signs indicate that, in order to stay in office — and out of jail — he will take US democracy down with him.

More importantly, the president isn’t being subtle about what his intentions are. 

As we reported, Trump issued an executive order earlier this year that would, essentially (and illegally), federalize part of the election process. In addition, prompted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, he has vowed to get rid of mail-in voting.

This week, the president spelled things out even more clearly. 

On his social media site, he ranted about the 2020 election result. Now, you might say that this is hardly surprising since he never got over his loss to Joe Biden. However, this post has to be viewed in the context of Trump laying the groundwork for stealing the midterms, which is precisely what the president did on Tuesday. 

“We can never let what happened in the 2020 election happen again,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “We just can’t let that happen.” 

Since he has never been able to prove any substantial irregularities that would have changed the outcome in any of the states he lost, we assume that the thing that can never happen again is that he decisively lost the election and wasn’t able to steal it. 

Trump hastened to assure his followers that his enablers are hard at work.

“I know [FBI Director Kash Patel] is working on it, everybody is working on it,” Trump added. “And certainly [Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard] is working on it.”

That begs the question: Working on what? 

The president didn’t say. 

However, if we were to hazard a guess, we’d say that he is going to employ a tactic he has been using throughout his second term: find some pretense to declare a phony “emergency” and grant himself extraordinary powers.

That’s what he did to set the tariffs that have disrupted global trade and are jacking up prices for US consumers, and it’s what he did to send troops into cities where Americans are protesting (in overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations) his authoritarian actions. 

So, what would make anybody believe that he won’t follow the same playbook to “secure” the midterms?

It’s not as though it would be difficult for him to come up with some kind of pretense. For example, his administration has been pushing states to hand over voter information to compile a massive national voting database. 

However, many states, most of them run by Democrats, have declined to comply with the administration’s unconstitutional demands. Trump could use their refusals to conjure up an “emergency” and try to assume control over how elections are run in those states. 

Or, of course, he could simply claim that noncitizens are voting in huge numbers and that the federal government has to step in to combat this problem, which only exists in the minds of Trump and his lock-step conspiracy theorists. 

To put it bluntly, some version of this is almost surely going to happen, and Democrats better get ready for it now.

We may even get a preview of what’s to come in the coming weeks. The Trump administration announced that it plans to send election observers to California, which is going to vote on a new congressional map to counter the Texas gerrymander, and to New Jersey, where a Democrat is expected to prevail in a tight gubernatorial contest. 

What these “observers” end up “finding” will go a long way toward revealing how Republicans will end up justifying whatever strategies they are going to employ to ensure that they will not lose total control of Washington, DC, after the midterms.

Fortunately, there is a silver lining. 

In light of Trump’s historic unpopularity, rising prices, and an economy that is in real peril of taking a nosedive, lightly putting a thumb on the scale through subtle voter suppression techniques, i.e., the behind-the-scenes tactics that Republicans previously used to give themselves an unearned edge, won’t get their job done. 

Instead, as things stand now, the administration’s attempts to steal the midterms will have to be so massive and so blatant that they cannot be ignored.

We are already seeing this with the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts in Texas, Missouri, and North Carolina. These are desperate attempts to protect the congressional majority from a blue wave, and even those won’t be enough if the economy continues to sour and the wave turns into a tsunami. 

In that case, Republicans will have to take even more drastic steps to subvert democracy, which we hope will then make the large number of apathetic Americans realize what is at stake. 

Right now, we are still short of the point where a massive turnout of patriotic voters won’t save the day.

A year from now… we don’t know. 

What we do know is that the GOP’s chances of stealing the midterms are much higher if he catches the country unaware. 

That is why, over the next 12 months, all defenders of democracy — that means you and me and many of our friends and neighbors — will have to go all out to warn their fellow Americans of this danger and to make sure that the upcoming election truly will be too big to rig for Trump.