On the heels of last weekend's special election in Texas, President Donald J. Trump has called for his administration to take over the polls before the 2026 midterm elections. On Saturday, Democrat Taylor Rehmet flipped a state Senate seat in Texas that had been held by a Republican since the early 1990s, and he did so by a margin of 14.4 points in a district Trump won in 2024 by 17 points. The 32-point flip has Republicans "in full-out panic mode," as reporter Liz Crampton put it in Politico yesterday.
Trump ally Steve Bannon said yesterday on his podcast: "You're damn right, we're going to have ICE surround the polls come November. We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want, but we will never again allow an election to be stolen."
Last week's release of some of the Epstein files has shown just how thoroughly Bannon plays his audience for power. Even while he was portraying himself to his audience as a populist defender, he was working closely with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to launder his image and craft political messages.
On Tuesday, Bannon echoed Trump's lie that undocumented immigrants corrupt the polls, saying that only about 20% of real voters select Democrats. This lie about undocumented immigrants voting has been part of the Republicans' rhetoric since 1994, the year after Democrats under President Bill Clinton passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, the so-called Motor Voter Act, which made it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. In 1994, Republicans accused Democrats of winning elections by turning to "illegal," usually immigrant, voters.
Republican candidates who lost in the 1994 midterm elections claimed that Democrats had won only through "voter fraud." In 1996, Republicans in both the House and the Senate launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that Democratic voter fraud was a serious issue.
Trump and his allies have put this political myth into hyperdrive. Political operative Roger Stone launched a "Stop the Steal" website during the 2016 Republican primaries to argue that a "Bush-Cruz-Kasich-Romney-Ryan-McConnell faction" intended to steal the Republican nomination from Trump. After Trump got the nomination, the Trump camp wheeled out the "Stop the Steal" idea for the 2016 race against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and have used it ever since to spread the idea that Trump, and other Republicans, can lose only if Democrats cheat.
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in on the game. In 2024 he told reporters, "We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections." Yesterday, defending Trump's demand for federal control of elections, he went further: "We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on Election Day in the last election cycle, and every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost…. It looks on its face to be fraudulent." Then he added the same caveat Republicans have used since 1996: "Can I prove that? No."
And there's the rub: there is never any proof of such claims. In 2016, fact-checkers established that, for all of Trump's insistence that the 2016 election was marred by voter fraud—he claimed "millions" of undocumented immigrants voted illegally—there was virtually no voting by undocumented immigrants in that election. Douglas Keith, Myrna Pérez, and Christopher Famighetti of the Brennan Center reached out to 42 jurisdictions across the nation with the highest population share of noncitizens in the states Trump claimed had returned fraudulent numbers.
Election officials in 40 of those jurisdictions told the journalists that they had had no instances of noncitizen voting. Two said they referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting. If all of those were, in fact, illegitimate votes, it means that out of 23.5 million votes cast in their jurisdictions in the 2016 general election, about 30—or 0.0001 percent—of those votes were problematic.
The MAGA furor over undocumented voting reflects something different than a genuine concern that undocumented immigrants are flooding into U.S. polling booths. It shows that MAGA leaders realize that the white nationalism they use to turn out their supporters is increasingly unpopular across the nation and that the only way to stay in power is to define those who vote for the other party as illegitimate voters.
For decades now, Republican politicians have used racism and sexism to turn out voters, claiming that the growing economic divisions in society were the fault of Democrats who wanted to redistribute the tax dollars of hardworking white Americans to undeserving Black Americans, people of color, and women. Once in power, those leaders rigged the economy to move money not downward but upward, moving nearly $80 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% from 1975 to 2023.
But now the extremes of the racism that are driving raids by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol are horrifying most Americans, while the open looting of the system by a few very wealthy individuals, led by the president, at the same time Republican lawmakers are killing public programs has proved too much for all but the firmest MAGA supporters.
MAGA leaders' solution is to reject the results of any election that doesn't put them in charge.
In North Carolina in the 1890s, a fusion movement brought together members of the Populist Party, who tended to be white, and Republicans who, in that post–Civil War era, tended to be Black. While the two groups didn't agree on everything, they did agree on economic reforms to address a growing concentration of wealth, investments in education, and protection of voting rights. In response, the Democrats in charge of the North Carolina legislature in that era tried to kill the movement by cracking down on voting rights and passing a law that gave the legislature more authority over local governments.
It didn't work. In 1896 the Fusionists won control of the state legislature, the governorship, and statewide offices. Out of 120 House members, only 26 were Democrats. Out of 50 members of the state Senate, only 7 were Democrats.
In the 1898 elections, the Democrats ran a full-throated white supremacy campaign. "It is time for the oft quoted shotgun to play a part, and an active one," one woman wrote, "in the elections." They threatened Black voters to keep them away from the polls, and when even that wasn't enough, they tampered with the election results.
Blocking Fusion voters from the polls and threatening them with guns gave the Democrats a victory, but in Wilmington the biracial city government had not been up for reelection and so remained in power. There, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew the Fusion government. They agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that the men voters had put in charge had no idea how to run a government.
In a "White Declaration of Independence," they announced that they would "never again be ruled, by men of African origin." It was time, they said, "for the intelligent citizens of this community owning 95 percent of the property and paying taxes in proportion, to end the rule by [Black men]." They accused the white men who had worked with the Black Republicans of exploiting black voters "so they can dominate the intelligent and thrifty element in the community." Indeed, the Democrats later maintained, they had not had to force the officials to leave their posts; the officials recognized that they were not up to the task and left of their own accord. As many as three hundred Black Americans were killed in this "reform" of the city government.
This coup made its way into American culture. Three years after it, North Carolina writer and Southern Baptist minister Thomas Dixon popularized this revision of the past with his book The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, which portrayed Black voters as tyrants out to redistribute all the wealth and power in the South from white landowners to themselves.
At the climax of the novel, a gathering of leading white men echoed the Wilmington coup when they issued "a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of [Black] domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever." The book sold more than 100,000 copies in its first few months. In 1905, Dixon published The Clansman, which was even more popular than its predecessor.
In 1912, film director D.W. Griffith turned The Clansman into The Birth of a Nation, and the recasting of a white nationalist coup as a heroic defense of the people of the United States was underway.
When Bannon says "we will never again allow an election to be stolen," the echoes from the past are unmistakable. But it seems significant that the coup leaders in 1898 issued their declaration after they had already won. Issuing it ahead of time in 2026 seems more like an attempt to rally flagging supporters while terrorizing opponents to keep them from turning out to vote. It is one thing to overthrow a town government in a time before modern communications could organize resistance; it is quite another to overthrow a nation of 348 million people who are forewarned.
Today the Supreme Court ruled that California may use the new congressional maps voters adopted as a response to the Texas legislature's partisan gerrymandering of that state to favor Republicans. The Trump administration pushed the Texas redistricting but opposed California's. Now, based on the 2024 election results, the two states could cancel each other out, although the Republicans' Texas gerrymander assumed that Latino voters who swung to Trump in 2024 would stay there.
Latino support fueled Rehmet's win on Saturday, bringing that assumption into question.
—
