Is The 2026 Election Already in Danger?

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

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🗓️ 22 September 2025

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

“The Constitution gives the states the power to set the time, place, and manner of elections,” the election lawyer Marc Elias points out. “It gives the President no [such] power.” Yet, almost one year before the midterms, Donald Trump has called for a nationwide prohibition on mail-in voting, an option favored by Democrats, as well as restrictions on voting machines. The Justice Department has demanded sensitive voter information from at least thirty-four states so far, with little explanation as to how the information will be used. Will we have free and fair congressional elections in 2026? “I am very worried that we could have elections that do not reflect the desires and the voting preferences of everyone who wishes they could vote and have their vote tabulated accurately,” Elias tells David Remnick. “That may sound very lawyerly and very technical, but I think it would be a historic rollback.” Elias’s firm fought and ultimately won almost every case that Trump and Republican allies brought against the 2020 election, and Elias continues to fight the latest round of incursions in court. And while he rues what he calls “re-gerrymandering” in Texas—designed to squeeze Texas’s Democratic representatives out of Congress—Elias thinks states run by Democrats have no choice but to copy the tactic. “Before Gavin Newsom announced what he was doing, I came out publicly and said Democrats should gerrymander nine seats out of California, which would mean there’d be no Republicans left in the delegation. . . . At the end of the day, if there’s no disincentive structure for Republicans to jump off this path, [then] it just continues.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the political scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:16.1	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:23.7	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One constant of Donald Trump's
0:29.0	career in politics has been his belief that voting is rigged against him. He finds fraud
0:34.8	even in some elections that he wins, like in 2016 when he said that Hillary Clinton got the popular vote only because of people he called illegals casting ballots.
0:45.6	In 2020, the conspiracy theory of the stolen election led to the attempted insurrection of January 6th, and that conspiracy theory remains an article of faith
0:55.7	for many Republicans. After his comeback victory in 2024, Trump is once again sowing doubt. This time,
1:03.9	though, he has the absolute loyalty of the executive branch to pursue his every suspicion.
1:10.3	He's called for an end to mail-in voting everywhere.
1:14.2	Meanwhile, Pam Bondi's Justice Department
1:16.4	has demanded sensitive voter information
1:19.1	from at least 34 states so far.
1:23.0	Now, under the Constitution,
1:24.4	it's the states that have the authority to conduct elections. But the states
1:29.1	are now coming under pressure to do exactly what the executive branch tells them. Now, how big a
1:35.1	problem is all of this? And do we really have to worry now about having free and fair elections in
1:41.2	America? I brought those questions the other day to Mark Elias.
1:46.3	Mark Elias is a top election lawyer for the Democrats whose firm fought and won nearly every
1:53.1	case that Trump and his allies brought against the 2020 election.
1:59.6	Mark, we're going to be talking a great deal about fair and unfair elections, a subject that has a lot to do with the deep divisions in our political culture.
2:10.1	But to be more precise about it, we're talking in the wake of a horrific and tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk.
2:20.7	This is a tremendously tragic and really consequential event, and we're still learning more about the alleged killer.
	...

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