Currently, the California state effort to temporarily upend its current election redistricting process, initiated by the governor’s office, seems on track to be successful. We should not become complacent, however, and believe that the battle or the political war itself will be even close to being over after that very important but not decisive skirmish. The good guys may win a very important skirmish, but the game is long, and much more work must be done to ever get back to the “fair elections” standard most Americans are used to.
As some analysts understand, we are in the midst of a very sobering lesson of the “crows coming home to roost.” That is for much of the 1980s and 1990s, the idea that “everyone wins” and “everyone gets a prize” became a sort of mantra. Since nobody wanted to lose and losers feel bad, let’s give everybody a winning prize, the saying went.
Well, in politics, the Republican Party has expanded that notion. Their candidates now seem to believe that they cannot and should not ever lose. So rigging and gaming the system in their favor is not only legitimate, it is the right way to go.
So there is currently this spate of activity all over the country in which Republican candidates repeatedly challenge electoral defeats by going to court, claiming various forms of Democratic perfidy in mail-balloting, and other “crimes.” No, they do not generally win these appeals, but they make them nonetheless and the louder, the better. In one continuously tiring example, Donald Trump still publicly insists that he won the 2020 presidential race against Joe Biden, and that various state officials conspired to rob him of his just victory. Not being able to produce any real evidence to support that claim has not deterred the current POTUS.
Well, get ready folks! For the 2026 upcoming midterm elections, the Republican Party has been busy as hell priming the pump to make sure their candidates win, no matter what. Trump has already stated in his Truth Social channel that he intends to use the power of his executive orders “to get rid of all mail-in balloting” and he intends to commandeer the voting machines in Democratic-run states.”
Democratic analyst James Carville has already been telling the public to get ready for Donald Trump deliberately causing enough ICE-related protests to justify his declaring martial law in 2026, and thereby cancelling the midterm elections. Says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice recently, “the dramatic new factor in politics for this coming midterms is ”a weaponized federal government that might be deployed in ways that can disrupt or interfere in free and fair elections.”
Additionally, from Cleta Mitchell, a former Trump lawyer who helped the president try to overturn the 2020 election, and is currently leading a national network of election deniers (yes, they are there getting poised and ready for action), we get her recent prediction on a podcast that she expects Trump, if the Democrats are winning or even threatening to win, to “exercise some sort of emergency powers in order to protect the federal elections going forward,” since legally, where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States, the POTUS can cancel national activities unilaterally.
And in a strange, chilling echo of yesteryear in another context, another Trump acolyte said. “They will take what they want by any means necessary.”
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
