Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker often warns that President Donald Trump may deploy military-style forces during the midterms to intimidate voters. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., has said Trump is signaling to supporters that he would forgive political violence on his behalf in future elections. And California Gov. Gavin Newsom has cast doubt on whether those elections will occur at all.
For months, the Trump administration has surged immigration agents and National Guard troops in Democratic-run cities, citing emergencies tied to crime or immigration. But leading elected officials on the left have increasingly speculated something far darker is afoot: a plan to undermine future elections.
“They clearly are looking to do everything to discredit elections, to sow distrust and claim fraud when they lose in 2026,” Pritzker said in an interview. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think like one. But it’s hard to avoid the evidence here. … When you put all this together, it’s hard not to wonder and think seriously that there is something in this about the 2026 elections for Donald Trump.”
Speculation that Trump may try to protect his power at all costs has become a central tenet for Pritzker and Newsom, both widely viewed as potential 2028 contenders, in their counter-offensives against the president. Republicans have rejected Democrats’ accusations, calling them irresponsible and dismissing them as scare tactics without evidence.
It all amounts to an escalation in pointed Democratic allegations of Republican election-meddling, which in the past had centered on voter access issues and an overall warning that democracy was at stake. Republicans, led by Trump, accused the left of “rigging” the 2020 election, and before the 2024 presidential race, he repeatedly insisted that Democrats were trying to cheat.
For years, Democrats railed against those contentions, saying conservatives were undermining faith in democracy by casting doubt on the electoral process. Now, however, Democrats are the ones raising some of the loudest concerns.
On Nov. 4, just after California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot question greenlighting a Democratic effort to draw a new congressional map, Newsom stood before reporters and issued a warning about what he believed was to come.
“This is a pattern; this is a practice. Donald Trump’s efforts to rig the midterm election continue to this day,” Newsom said on Election Day. He was referring to Trump’s actions since the start of the year, including deploying 700 Marines and the National Guard to Los Angeles and battling to send more troops to other states.
In an interview on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in September, Newsom went as far as to say, “I fear that we may not have an election in 2028. I really mean that in the core of my soul. Unless we wake up to the code red, to what’s happening in this country.”
Among the potential 2028 field, Pritzker and Newsom have had some of the most direct confrontations with the Trump administration, pushing back on the president’s deployment of federal troops and immigration agents into their states.
Pritzker said aggressive tactics on immigration, including frequent scenes of federal authorities deploying chemical agents on residents of cities like Chicago, have led him to believe that the administration is testing the limits of what can be carried out before next year’s elections.
Mayor Daniel Biss saw immigration agents clash with onlookers and protesters in his city, Evanston, Illinois, on Halloween. He accused Trump of purposely targeting blue cities and unnecessarily exerting excessive force.
“They’re trying to figure out what they can get away with and what works,” Biss, who is also running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th District, said in an interview. “So maybe today in Evanston but next October in Portland, Maine. Maybe next October in Atlanta. Maybe next October in Cleveland. Maybe next October in Milwaukee.”
On Nov. 4, elections in several states went off essentially without any unusual or notable problems. An ICE spokesperson said at the time that the agency had no plans to conduct arrests in or near polling places.
The 2026 elections may be critical to how much Congress checks Trump’s executive power in the second part of his term. Because midterm elections have historically favored the minority party, voters could shift power to Democrats from a Republican-led Congress — which could open Trump up to investigations and even impeachment efforts.
The White House has countered that Democrats are recklessly painting a doomsday picture with no evidence, saying their rhetoric was akin to “fearmongering.” A White House spokesperson said one of Trump’s goals is to curb potential cases of voter fraud and pointed to incidents in which local authorities have referred alleged irregularities in voter registration for prosecution. The examples represent a tiny fraction of instances, while research shows voter fraud is rare, as are instances of non-U.S. citizens on voter rolls.
“Newscum, Murphy, and Pritzker ought to stop fearmongering to score political points with the radical left flank of the Democrat party that they are courting ahead of their doomed-to-fail presidential campaigns,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “And NBC should think twice before characterizing baseless conspiracy theories and Democrat talking points as anything other than fodder for the left’s radical base.”
Matt Crane, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association,
said each party has taken part in dangerous rhetoric that he called irresponsible.
At the same time, Crane said, elections officials have been monitoring chatter about potential disruptions to elections and have been looking into what recourse, if any, they can take if “ICE agents start pulling people out of line.”
“There’s an attempt from both sides where they’re just going to throw a whole bunch of stuff against the wall and hope something sticks,” Crane said. “The way they get people to the polls right now is to scare people.”
While the issues of border security and immigration helped secure Trump’s win a year ago, there are signs that support is slipping. In a recent NBC News poll, 54% of those surveyed said the administration’s “deployment of federal agents and National Guard troops to various cities around the country to fight crime and immigration” is largely not justified, while 44% said they were. In a July CNN poll, 55% said Trump has gone too far when it came to deporting immigrants who were in the country illegally. That number was up 10 points since February.
Pritzker also offered as support that in Trump’s first term, a draft executive order, which was made public in 2022, would have authorized the defense secretary to send National Guard troops to seize voting machines around the country in the weeks following the 2020 election. Trump didn’t sign the order.
“They could go seize the ballot boxes. Why do I think that’s possible? Because that’s what Michael Flynn suggested to Trump back in late 2020, early 2021,” Pritzker said.
For months, Pritzker railed against the Trump administration for calling Chicago a “war zone” and asking the Supreme Court for authority to deploy the National Guard into the state despite the city’s having seen significant declines in violent crime across the board.
He said he welcomed specialized forces like agents of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for targeted missions but said he and Trump haven’t conferred at all on the topic. The last time the two spoke with each other, Pritzker said, was in 2020.
Democratic officials point to a series of other steps the Trump White House has taken that they say sets the stage for an electoral challenge. Trump named a key 2020 election denier to the role of deputy assistant for election integrity. The Trump administration has demanded that states turn over their voter rolls and ordered the National Guard in all 50 states to set up “quick reaction forces” to quell potential future civil unrest. They also point to Trump himself suggesting he could serve a third term, though he recently acknowledged it wasn’t legally possible, saying, “It’s too bad.”
On Friday, Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, joined in. He referenced the same theory at an event during the Texas Tribune Festival, about what was behind Trump’s pardoning all of those involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
“What he is very clearly signaling is that if you are on the inside of the election system and trying to maneuver the election illegally towards Donald Trump, he will protect you,” Murphy said. “He is signaling to his rank and file, MAGA acolytes and sycophants that if you engage in violence in my name, you will be protected and let off the hook. And we are being set up for an election, whether it be in 2026 or 2028, that may be an immediate, simmering crisis.”
Amid the flurry of assertions by Democrats, conservatives offer up their own warning: The left poses a danger by repeating scary rhetoric to buttress its own political aspirations.
“It is ultimately a disgusting scare tactic that’s being used by folks in their party, primarily those looking to run for president in 2028,” said Nathan Brand, a Republican strategist who has worked on Senate and presidential campaigns. “It’s very funny how it’s the same group of people who are all doing this. You’re not seeing some of the more moderate Democrats in Congress and governors saying this kind of stuff. It’s all the folks who have to appeal to the most radical elements of the Democrat base.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, widely viewed as having Senate aspirations, has told supporters not to use Dominion Voting Systems, which made the machines Trump once falsely accused of rigging votes against him. Crockett, without evidence, said the company could no longer be trusted because Scott Leiendecker, a former Republican election official, purchased it. Leiendecker rebranded it as Liberty Vote. Leiendecker did not return a request for comment for this article. But in an interview this week with CNN, he said he wasn’t on anyone’s side, said he wasn’t a 2020 election denier and that the machines would not be misused by either political party.
“That is so far from the truth of what’s actually happening with that company. But again, why care about facts when you can scare people to the polls?” Crane said, specifically referring to Crockett.
The Boulder County clerk, a Democrat, also came to Leiendecker’s defense in a statement last month, saying she was “fully confident in the security and integrity of the voting equipment” after she said he met with the state’s clerks twice.
“I want to address the growing spread of misinformation,” Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick said in a statement last month. “Alarmist claims that this acquisition somehow means our elections will be ‘rigged’ are irresponsible and unfounded.”
A spokesperson for Crockett did not respond to a request for comment.
For Democrats, the messaging is an escalation from the days before the 2024 presidential election, when the party warned voters that democracy was at stake if Trump were re-elected to the White House. In his victory, Trump ended up winning both the Electoral College and the popular vote.
“Democrats couldn’t even be bothered to hold a primary last cycle, yet Newsom, Pritzker and Murphy have the gall to rant about democracy. They smear basic law enforcement as ‘militarization’ because they’re fundamentally opposed to keeping Americans safe,” Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kiersten Pels said. “And if Newsom actually believed the garbage he’s peddling, he wouldn’t be quietly plotting a 2028 run. They know their agenda is poisonous at the ballot box, so they’re already making excuses.”
Jessica Johnson, a co-chair of the political law practice group at Lex Politica, a law firm, called Democrats’ language rich, considering that some in the party tried to implement masking requirements during the Covid pandemic in 2020, which she characterized as making up rules to dissuade Republicans from voting.
“It’s just ironic to me that now, seemingly out of thin air, you’ve got Democrats questioning whether there will be an election, which is absolutely ridiculous and so hyperbolic. Talk about scare tactics,” she said. “To say that there won’t be an election is truly pointing fingers at some imaginary boogeyman and can’t be done for any other reason other than to incite panic.”
