The Six-Month Warning: What Republicans May Attempt Before Election Day
The Six-Month Warning: What Republicans May Attempt Before Election Day
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #893: Saturday, May 9th, 2026.
The honest answer to what Republicans will try…between now and November…is that we already know a fair amount…because much of it is already underway.
The midterms are six months off…and the GOP…facing an unpopular president…a soft economy…and a string of off-year losses…has been busy.
Some of what’s coming is familiar political hardball. Some is genuinely new.
And…a piece of it looks like what political scientists who study democratic backsliding describe when they describe democratic backsliding.
The redistricting war was no accident: It was planned before Trump took office, and it’s mostly working
The most consequential thing Republicans have done since Donald Trump’s second inauguration is engineer a mid-decade redistricting wave.
This was not improvised. According to recent reporting, planning began before Trump even took office…with White House aide James Blair coordinating with Adam Kincaid of the National Republican Redistricting Trust.
Trump signed off in April of last year, and the operation has rolled out state by state ever since.
The scoreboard, as of this month: Texas drew five new Republican-leaning districts. Missouri…North Carolina, Ohio, and Utah have new maps.
Tennessee just signed legislation eliminating the state’s only Democratic-held district by carving up Memphis and dispersing its Black voters into surrounding GOP districts.
Florida, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi are moving in the same direction, energized by the Supreme Court’s late-April ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act provisions that had prevented exactly this kind of racial gerrymandering for sixty years.
Democrats have pushed back where they can…California passed a counter-map, Virginia voters approved one in April…but the Virginia Supreme Court struck the Virginia map down on Friday…and a New York effort was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court in March.
The Cook Political Report’s Carrie Dann estimates Republicans have built a structural advantage of perhaps five to seven net seats from redistricting…with theoretical upside of as many as thirteen.
Democrats remain favored to retake the House, she says…“just no longer overwhelmingly so.”
More maps are coming, and Trump is threatening Republicans who won’t fall in line
Expect more before November. Mississippi’s governor has called a special session.
Indiana’s effort died in December when 21 state senate Republicans broke with their governor…but…Trump has threatened to back primary challengers against any Republican who doesn’t fall in line…which means the pressure is not going away.
Watch for additional Southern states to test how aggressively they can redraw majority-Black districts now that the Voting Rights Act has been hollowed out.
And…watch the federal courts…where…every map is being litigated in parallel…often on emergency timelines…that favor whoever holds the map when filing deadlines hit.
The Trump administration figured this out early: control the calendar…and you don’t always need to win the case.
Trump’s mail-ballot executive order is almost certainly unconstitutional, but that isn’t the point
On March 31, Trump signed his second executive order on elections…this one purporting to give the U.S. Postal Service…the power to refuse delivery of any mail ballot not on a federally pre-approved list of voters.
The order tells the Department of Homeland Security…working with Social Security… to compile state-by-state citizenship lists…and instructs USPS to send ballots only to voters on those lists.
It threatens to withhold federal funds from non-compliant states and authorizes the attorney general to investigate…and possibly prosecute…local election officials who give ballots to people the federal government deems ineligible.
(Pam Bondi, AG when the order was signed, was fired two days later; Todd Blanche is acting attorney general now.)
Twenty-three states…plus a coalition of voting-rights groups…have already sued.
The order is almost certainly unconstitutional…Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution gives election authority to the states and to Congress, not to the president…and Rick Hasen of UCLA and others have noted there is no way the order’s machinery could be built and integrated with state systems by November even if it weren’t blocked.
So why bother?
Because the goal isn’t really implementation. The goal is the chilling effect.
Read. That. Again.
The order signals to election officials in red states…that the Justice Department is watching them.
It signals to mail voters…especially elderly and disabled voters who depend on mail ballots…that there’s a reason to be uncertain about whether their ballot will arrive or be counted.
And…it provides a pretext, after the fact…for refusing to certify results in places where the administration doesn’t like the outcome.
This is the pattern worth understanding.
A lot of what’s coming between now and November…will be theater whose practical effect is confusion. Confusion suppresses turnout. Confusion sets up post-election challenges. Confusion is the point.
The boring tactics matter more than the flashy ones: Cuts to early voting, fewer drop boxes, aggressive purges
The flashier moves get the headlines…but…the more effective tactics are the boring ones.
Marc Elias has made this point for years: you don’t need to change the law to suppress votes. You just need to make voting really, really inconvenient. Cut early-voting hours. Reduce drop-box numbers. Move polling places. Purge voter rolls aggressively and let people find out at the polls.
Each of these, taken alone…looks like an administrative choice. Taken together…they’re a strategy.
Several of these are already in motion.
The Justice Department has demanded voter rolls from 29 states and Washington, D.C….and sued the ones that refused.
State-level Republican officials in Michigan…Georgia…and Arizona…have been pushing aggressive purge programs.
Project 2025’s election chapter recommends moving prosecutions of election workers from the Civil Rights Division to a more punitive posture…a recommendation the administration has begun to implement.
The threat to election workers is underappreciated, and it’s going to get worse before November
The chilling effect on election workers is real and underappreciated.
Local clerks have been resigning at unusual rates since 2020…and the threat of federal prosecution for routine administrative decisions is going to accelerate that.
By November…some jurisdictions will be running elections…with workers who have less experience than at any point in living memory. That is not an accident.
ICE agents at polling places? It’s no longer paranoid to take it seriously
This is where the analysis gets uncomfortable…because it requires taking seriously …something that until recently…would have sounded paranoid.
Will the administration deploy ICE agents…federal marshals…or even National Guard troops to or near polling places in November?
A Votebeat survey of 37 election experts last month found 28 of them rated physical threats to voters or polling places as at least somewhat likely; 11 rated it very likely.
Experts were divided on whether such threats would actually deter voting..but the consensus that the threats themselves are coming was striking.
These are not activists.
These are election administrators and academics…whose default is institutional confidence. When that group says armed intervention at polling places is a serious possibility, something has shifted.
We already have signals.
Trump has openly mused on Truth Social about canceling the midterms…expressed regret that he didn’t order the National Guard to seize voting machines after 2020…and demanded that Louisiana hold its primary twice if necessary…so Republicans can finish redrawing the map.
The administration’s expanded ICE authority…including the rescinded prohibition on enforcement at houses of worship…creates the operational capacity for the kind of intimidation experts are warning about.
You don’t have to round up voters at a polling place to suppress turnout in immigrant-heavy precincts. You just have to make people believe it might happen.
This is where I’ll stop hedging.
Sending armed federal agents anywhere near polling places to influence turnout is the kind of thing this country used to condemn in other countries.
If it happens in November…even in a small number of precincts in a small number of states…it will be a turning point…and pretending otherwise because the scale was limited would be a profound mistake.
The line is not how many voters are intimidated. The line is whether the federal government uses its enforcement apparatus to shape an election outcome at all.
A few things probably won’t happen: Trump can’t cancel the midterms, and the SAVE Act won’t pass in time
A few things worth ruling out, or at least discounting. Trump cannot cancel the midterms; he lacks the authority and the support, and most Republicans in Congress would balk.
The SAVE Act…which would impose strict proof-of-citizenship requirements that millions of married women and rural voters would struggle to meet…is stalled in the Senate and won’t pass in time to affect November.
The most apocalyptic scenarios making the rounds online generally aren’t where the real damage will be done.
The real damage will be done at the seams: Watch certification fights, post-election lawsuits, and the Supreme Court’s emergency docket
The real damage will be done at the seams.
Watch for refusals to certify results by Republican county commissioners and state boards in close races…this happened in scattered places in 2020 and 2024 and the people who tried it have not been chastened.
Watch for lawsuits filed after the election demanding that legally cast ballots be thrown out on technicalities.
Watch the Supreme Court’s emergency docket…which has been remarkably receptive to administration arguments.
Watch what happens if Democrats narrowly take the House…and the administration decides the result is illegitimate.
And one more thing: The press needs to stop covering this as a both-sides story
And…watch the press coverage.
One thing that frustrated me in 2020 and again in 2024…was how often serious threats to election integrity got covered as horse-race news…with each side’s claims dutifully balanced. In short, it was unadulterated horseshit.
The redistricting wave is not a both-sides story…even though Democrats have responded with their own gerrymandering where they can.
The mail-ballot executive order is not a both-sides story. Armed federal agents at polling places is not a both-sides story. Reporters who treat them that way are not being fair. They’re being useful.
The good news, if there is any…is that none of this is happening in secret…and most of it is being fought.
Democrats remain favored to retake the House…though by a narrower margin than before Friday.
Trump’s approval is below where Bush’s was before he lost 30 House seats in 2006, and where Obama’s was before he lost 60 in 2010.
If turnout holds…the wave probably comes anyway. The question that ought to keep us up at night is what happens between Election Day and certification if it does.
We have six months. Plan accordingly.
#HoldFast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. If you're reading this and thinking "someone should do something," you're someone.
Find your local Democratic Party, your county election office, or a voter-protection group like Election Protection (866-OUR-VOTE) and ask what they need between now and November.
Poll workers. Drivers. Lawyers. Translators. Witnesses. The infrastructure that holds an election together is built by ordinary people, and right now it's understaffed.
Sources
“How the Republicans pulling ahead in the redistricting war affects the midterms” — CNN, May 8, 2026
“Efforts to game the 2026 election intensify as Republicans draw new maps” — CNN, May 7, 2026
“2025-2026 Mid-Decade Redistricting Map” — Cook Political Report
“Trump signs executive order limiting mail-in voting ahead of 2026 U.S. elections” — CNBC
“Trump issues executive order seeking to limit mail-in voting” — The Washington Post
“Trump’s Order Restricting Mail-In Voting Rebuked by States” — TIME, April 1, 2026
“Explainer: Executive Order on Mail-in Ballot Rules and Federal Voter Eligibility Lists” — Issue One
“Lawsuit: Trump mail voting executive order usurps state election powers” — Votebeat
“The President’s March 2025 Executive Order on Elections” — Brennan Center for Justice
“The Threats to Nullify (or Ignore) the US Midterm Elections are Very Real” — Review of Democracy
“Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act of 2025” (S.2912) — Congress.gov
“What the people who run elections are worried about ahead of the 2026 midterms” — Votebeat
“What are high-leverage tactics for US election protection in 2026?” — EA Forum
I received in the mail a flyer looking to hire "U.S. Postal Inspectors". The picture is of an armed agent with the words "U.S. Postal Inspector POLICE FEDERAL AGENT" on his back. It touts "positions available nationwide" and promises you can "make a difference". My first thought was that the ICE crew would be sent to steal mail-in ballots. I'm thinking there aren't enough ex-Jan6ers or ICE agents to interfere in enough local sites to make a difference. I honestly believe the National Guard and our (OUR) thoroughly DEI armed forces would largely balk at attacking their neighbors.
HOWEVER, I think it not beyond the pale to wonder if Bibi's boys, or Putin's special ops people might be helecoptered in.
Please tell me to chill my fevered imagination and that none of the above is possible.
Jack is correct that the most important sentence in this piece is not about redistricting or executive orders. It is this one: the goal isn’t implementation — the goal is the chilling effect. Students of democratic backsliding will recognize the pattern immediately. Governments that intend to hold power do not need to execute every threat. They need citizens to believe the threats are real enough to alter their behavior in advance. File the date the mail-ballot order was signed — not because the order will survive the courts, but because the people it was designed to reach do not follow the litigation. They see the order. They feel the uncertainty. They stay home. That is the mechanism. It has worked before, in places that also believed their institutions were strong enough to absorb it.
Jack is correct, too, that what happens between Election Day and certification is the question that should be keeping people awake. Note which of the tactics described here require winning: none of them. Redistricting shifts the baseline. Purges reduce the eligible pool. Confusion suppresses turnout. And if the wave comes anyway — if the arithmetic of a genuinely angry electorate overcomes the structural advantages built into the map — the certification fight is already being prepared. The people who refused to certify in 2020 and 2024 have not been removed from office. They have been watching. We have six months to understand that this is not a campaign story. It is a story about what a minority government does when it calculates that the rules no longer protect it. If you are reading this and something in you has shifted — if the pattern is now visible to you in a way it was not before — that is not the end of the work. That is the beginning of it. Find the place where your presence changes something. The history of moments like this one is not written by the people who understood what was happening. It is written by the people who understood what was happening and then did something about it.
#HOLDFAST