Democrats are running drills for a potential doomsday scenario if President Donald Trump makes good on his promises to interfere with the midterm elections this fall.
Trump’s election-denying speech last week renewed fears among Democrats that the president could try to rig the 2026 election in the face of record-low approval ratings.
Potential scenarios could include purging voter rolls in key states, deploying National Guard troops and immigration agents to polling places, and calling on election deniers who hold state and local office to overturn results he doesn’t like.
Democratic lawmakers met for two hours on Wednesday to run through three hypothetical scenarios, which included videos generated by artificial intelligence that could be used to spread fake information on and after Election Day, MS NOW reported.
“We have to prepare for it,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told MS NOW. “What these so-called tabletop exercises teach us is when you’re prepared in advance, you can stop a lot of bad, bad things from happening, a lot of the stealing that [Trump] will do. But if you just wait for them to do it and then try to react that day? Not good.”
Veteran voting rights lawyer Mark Elias also participated in the session, along with nearly a dozen senators.
“What we’re doing is preparing for the fact that Donald Trump, in 2020, lied about the election in advance, lied about it in the aftermath, went to court… and then he instigated a violent insurrection in this very building,” he told MS NOW.
The Democratic Party’s top prosecutors and state attorneys general have been meeting virtually and in-person for months to try to predict how Trump might try to undermine the November midterms and game out various responses.
Wednesday’s meeting was the second gathering that Schumer has organized for lawmakers specifically, according to MS NOW.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Elias told the network that Trump’s speech last week did not provide any new information about the 2020 election, but that it did offer a blueprint for Democrats trying to anticipate the administration’s moves.
“I learned something there, right?” he said. “That fundamentally, after all of their digging and all of their lies, they don’t actually have anything new.”
Trump used his 26-minute speech to announce declassified intelligence reports from government agencies that supposedly revealed that voter registration fraud in Michigan, the presence of non-citizens on voter rolls, and interference by China had all contributed to President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The intelligence reports, however, actually showed that Russia’s Vladimir Putin was behind a proxy effort to boost Trump’s campaign.
They also revealed that China had downloaded publicly available voter data and considered—but did not deploy—a campaign to influence the election outcome, according to FactCheck.org.
And in Michigan, employees of a voter-registration company tried to defraud their employer by faking voter-registration applications, but no one actually voted improperly as a result of the alleged scam.
ABC News, NBC News, and CNN all declined to air the speech because of Trump’s history of making false statements about the 2020 election.
