2026 Congressional Elections

[chasfh]

I am frankly surprised no one has started one of these yet. I myself am less interested in the horse race aspect of it, although this would be a good thread to put all the poll updates we're going to be inundated with.

I will lead with this one table I see, indicating how competitive districts are considered to be by the Cook Political Report. This table is not an indication of how the 2026 election is specifically likely to go based on polling, but rather, how Cook rates the basic competitiveness of the districts based on their description below.

https://www.cookpolitical.com/ratings/house-race-ratings

About CPR House Race Ratings

The CPR House Race Ratings assess the competitiveness of all 435 House elections. Competitiveness is determined by several factors, including the district's political makeup, the candidates' strengths and weaknesses, the political environment in the state and nationally, and interviews with candidates and campaign professionals. When sourcing the CPR Race Ratings, please refer to our terms of use. To inquire about API access and licensing, please submit a request.

 

[romad1]

The GOP retirements plus the huge number of "run for something" candidates who are running will likely make a Dem majority in the House.  The Senate is the question mark.  

[chasfh]

3 hours ago, romad1 said:

The GOP retirements plus the huge number of "run for something" candidates who are running will likely make a Dem majority in the House.  The Senate is the question mark.  

That's progress for the Dems, who half a year ago looked like they had exact zero chance for the Senate.

[Motown Bombers]

Newsom should delay the special election as long as possible. 

 

[gehringer_2]

4 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Newsom should delay the special election as long as possible. 

 

maybe he should just pull a McConnell and not hold an election. Let the GOP sue and work its way through the courts, maybe till about Nov.

[Motown Bombers]

Just now, gehringer_2 said:

maybe he should just pull a McConnell and not hold an election. Let the GOP sue and work its way through the courts, maybe till about Nov.

That’s what I’m thinking. Let the voters in November decide. 

[Mr.TaterSalad]

How will this district be impacted by California's new redistricting? I assume it will get more blue/Dem favorable. If so, why bother holding the election.

[Motown Bombers]

22 minutes ago, Mr.TaterSalad said:

How will this district be impacted by California's new redistricting? I assume it will get more blue/Dem favorable. If so, why bother holding the election.

It’s probably the only safe republican district in California. It’s way in the NE corner. It’s basically Idaho. 

[Motown Bombers]

This is big. Peltola won state wide twice and only lost by 2 with Trump on the ballot. 

 

[CMRivdogs]

I find it interesting that my CongressCritter (bought and paid for by Newport News Shipbuilding) has been sending out a lot of emails about how he cares for families but still votes in lockstep with his fellow Trumpers on the issues. He also never sniffs this neck of the woods. In the 5 1/2 years I've lived in his I've only seen him (by happenstance) in a small town parade within a few miles of his house.

[Motown Bombers]

Keep an eye on Alaska. She’s won statewide twice. 

 

[romad1]

19 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

Keep an eye on Alaska. She’s won statewide twice. 

 

This is a very good get. 

[Motown Bombers]

 

[gehringer_2]

1 minute ago, Motown Bombers said:

 

we are all very concerned.

[romad1]

Tillis recent announcements appear to put him in the "might show a spine on the way out the door" camp. 

[romad1]

Good

 

[chasfh]

There has been open speculation, here and elsewhere, about whether Trump will try to cancel elections this November. I had been thinking for some time that maybe he can convince certain unified-Republican states where loss of seats could reasonably happen, such as Florida or Georgia or Iowa or Ohio, to cancel their elections.

That would be a bright red line to cross and might be difficult to sell even to the voters of those states, so now I am coming around to another distinct probability, which I will share in the post following this one.

In the meantime, enjoy an assessment by CNN (as things currently stand) as to why they believe Trump can't cancel elections so he won't cancel elections, even as he is laying groundwork for other pre-Election Day interference instead.

: No, Trump can’t cancel the Midterms. He’s doing this instead     Worried about losing unified Republican power in Washington and mystified at his lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump keeps talking about not holding the November midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of the House, Senate or both.   Trump doesn’t understand why his approval rating is underwater (and it is, on every issue, in a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS and released Friday).   “I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” he told House Republicans in a speech earlier this month.   Later, he added: “Now, I won’t say, ‘Cancel the election. They should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’”   But Trump did talk about canceling the election in an interview with Reuters this week. He said Republicans have been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “being facetious” about canceling the election.   If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. Told during an appearance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last September that Ukraine won’t hold an election during a period of martial law during its war with Russia, Trump expressed some envy.   “So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump said. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now – so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”   People laughed.   Sometimes they’re jokes, sometimes not Trump routinely says things that seem like trolls until they don’t. Owning Greenland? Not a joke.   However, he seems to have retreated from the oft-repeated idea of an unconstitutional third term.   And for the record, unlike Ukraine, the US has held elections in the midst of multiple wars, when the British had invaded in 1812 and when it was at war with itself in 1864. It held elections during world wars when millions of Americans fought overseas in the 20th century as well.   It makes sense that Trump would dread the November midterms Trump knows that presidents rarely pick up seats in a midterm. His administration has been moving at breakneck speed to change the government because, as his chief of staff famously said, they know that presidents expect to lose power after their first two years. A net loss of just a handful of seats would give control of the House to Democrats, for instance, requiring their buy-in for spending and giving them power to investigate his administration.   Presidents do not have the power to delay or cancel elections The Constitution requires that a new Congress be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Election Day is set in law, so it is theoretically feasible for Congress to move it, but not to cancel the election. Elections are supposed to be administered by each state, so state governors and legislatures could, in theory, move their own elections to deal with a major disaster, but there’s no precedent for it. To get into the weeds of all of this, read a report from the Congressional Research Service.   The president’s distrust of US elections is legendary   Trump has also mused about using emergency powers to meddle with elections. He told the New York Times recently that he regrets not directing National Guards to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.   Even the elections he has won, he has said were rigged. There’s still no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, even after all these years of the Trump era.   People are talking about doomsday election scenarios   Election officials say they are thinking very carefully about all of this. Asked about Trump’s musings at an event sponsored by The Atlantic this week, Arizona’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said this:   Look, you can’t cancel the election… We’ve got a whole bunch of scenarios that we’re playing through to make sure that we’re prepared for the types of processes that might be necessary to preserve our democracy so that if somebody tries to cancel something, if somebody tries to take some stuff they’re not entitled to, we can go to the courts, get the orders, and hopefully have the backup of law enforcement to make sure that we can move forward through this.   “The fact that we’re running through these scenarios in the first place should tell you something about the health of our democracy,” Fontes added.   To that end, he would not elaborate on what scenarios they’re preparing for.   “I don’t want to give the bad guys any ideas,” Fontes said.   What Trump is actually doing about the next election   While Trump might fantasize about canceling the election, the reality is that the election system is already changing in some key ways. Some of them may be enormously consequential.   The redistricting war Trump kicked off continues to rage   Republicans have drawn themselves nine more friendly seats across the country, and Democrats have ended up with six, mostly in California. Republicans see additional opportunity in Florida, while Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia in April. Read more.   If the Supreme Court decides to further gut the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could in theory redraw maps in many other states. Read takeaways from October’s oral arguments.   Expect a very different House in the near future   The long-term result of more and more political gerrymandering without protections for racial minority-focused districts could be the smothering of minority-party delegations in multiple states, making the House map look increasingly more like the presidential map. Far fewer Democratic districts in Texas. Far fewer Republican districts in California — even though there are millions of both Republicans and Democrats in both states.   Trump wants vastly more control over how states conduct elections   While much of the effort has been stopped, for now, by courts, Trump’s goal is to exert more executive control over elections that are supposed to be governed by Congress and states.   A federal court on Thursday sided with California against the administration’s demand that the state turn over information on its 23 million voters.   The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether mail-in ballots that are postmarked by, but arrive after Election Day can still be counted. The decision could have serious consequences for the country’s large scale adoption of mail-in voting in recent years. Trump is a loud skeptic of the practice even though he has personally voted by mail. His executive order would also scramble how states use voting machines, another response to phantom voter fraud that could actually drastically slow down the counting of ballots.   Trump has chipped away at election oversight   Early on, his administration scaled back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, which is meant to helps states guard their election systems from attack. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled funding for an information sharing network that helped states detect and ward off coordinated hacking attacks, as CNN reported last year.   His Justice Department has rewired the agency’s Civil Rights Division away from its original core mission of civil rights abuses, including those related to elections. One current focus of the division is to help states “clean” voter rolls, although a judge recently ruled that effort was a misapplication of the Civil Rights Act.   Trump’s administration has already tried to change how people vote through executive action, and who they vote for through changing maps.   There’s a lot of time for more gaming the system between now and November, and Trump clearly already has the midterms on the brain.

Edited 8 hours ago by chasfh

[chasfh]

So, my most recent thinking is that it would be, again, a bright red line to cancel elections this year since they had never been canceled before, not even during the Civil War itself. So it would be a really, really tough sell to do so even to some of the more ardent red hats who would love the one-party white nationalist America that many of their recent ancestors enjoyed. (The most ardent red hats would prefer to force the entire planet to live in a fascist hellscape using means about which I don't want to speculate here.)

So, rather than canceling elections aforethought, I think the more likely way for the Trump administration to subvert this particular election would be after the fact: allow elections to run as normal, let the chips fall where they may, and once they've been completed and Democrats are shown to have won enough seats to control Congress, simply dispute the results in all the swing districts they lost, no matter how high the margins of victory; file lawsuits all over the country to officially contest those results in court; refuse to seat newly-elected Democrats in the meantime; and use the National Guard and/or military to enforce the refusal to vacate action on the ground at the Capitol itself. Allow all other representatives, including incumbent Democrat winners, to be sworn in on January 3rd by Mike Johnson as "house leader", on schedule, as they choose, and proceed from there.

This would mean we'd have a hobbled partial Congress in the meantime, and many or most or even all the other Democrats may refuse to take their seats at the pleasure of illegitimate leadership, in a show of party unity, if the new members were to not be seated by proper newly-elected leadership. But that would serve only to create a one-party, if feckless, body of elected legislators attempting to act as a congressional unit, as though it were a completely constitutionally-sound process to do so. Of course it wouldn't be a real Congress, but that might not stop them from pretending they are. Everyone else would regard them as an illegitimate body, if that would matter. Call it an "anticongress" if you like (in the manner of the old antipopes of the medieval church days). But I could totally envision them going this route.

They could take it even farther than that: many now-unified Republican states that end up losing their governorships and legislatures to Democrats in their elections could file their own lawsuits to dispute those results, refuse to vacate their capitols, and request that Trump send National Guard and military troops to enforce their refusals to vacate while their lawsuits wend their way through their courts.

This would create the undisputed greatest constitutional crisis in the history of the country, since it would go to the very core of democracy, that of the sanctity of leadership through due election by the people. At that point, Trump could choose to invoke any number of Acts from American antiquity to declare martial law, take control of governing (or, more exactly, ruling) the entire country, including state and local jurisdictions, and use the military to enforce all that.

Sounds fantastic, doesn't it? (By which I mean literally fantastic, the original definition meaning "imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality", and not the modern version of fantastic meaning "very good".) Sounds like just another case of my "Alarmist Non-sense", does it? Perhaps even completely impossible?

Well, consider this alternative, then: elections run as normal; Democrats fulfill expectations of winning the House, perhaps even the Senate, flipping governorships and legislatures in numerous states as well; the various Republicans around the country who lose their seats concede the results as is custom; and in January, the newly-elected Democrats are sworn in to their seats around the country, the defeated Republicans vacate their seats peacefully and without the slightly hint of drama, and we move into a revised era of politics in America.

Now: which of these two scenarios do you consider more likely?