Trump’s midterm challenges are unlikely to work | The Debrief with Clayton Allen

“The midterm results are going to hold,” says Eurasia Group’s Clayton Allen. But the fight over them could stretch well beyond Election Night.

The Trump administration is already challenging election procedures in Alaska and California. In Alaska, DOJ is seeking to block certification under certain outcomes in a Senate race featuring two candidates named Dan Sullivan. In California, a federal judge rejected its emergency request to set aside mail ballots from roughly 20,000 registered voters whose citizenship the department questions.

Allen explains why the administration has few viable options for overturning the results: resistance from the courts, Democrats’ projected House margin, and the difficulty of securing Republican cooperation. He also examines how the challenges could fuel distrust ahead of 2028, even if they fail to change who takes office.

Watch The Debrief.

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TRANSCRIPT:
Clayton Allen -
President Trump is laying the groundwork to contest midterm results, but he doesn’t actually have that many legal avenues to do so.

In Alaska, the Department of Justice is suing to preemptively block the electoral results based on the fact that there are two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. One of the two Dans, the one who’s not a senator, was reportedly recruited by Democrats to run in an effort to confuse voters.

In California, the DOJ is suing to block about 20,000 mail-in ballots, but that’s already been dismissed by a federal judge.

Taken as a whole, though, these efforts could potentially delay the results of the election and push our knowledge of who has a Senate majority further toward the end of the year.

So why is the administration doing this? It’s partially to create a narrative around electoral interference and lack of trust that really feeds into 2028.

Why won’t it work?

The first is the courts. We saw in California that many of these lawsuits are likely to be dismissed.

The second is simple math. Democrats are likely to secure a large enough majority in the House that efforts to try to change the results are going to run up against the simple fact that you can’t do that in enough states, or at least can’t do it successfully.

Lastly, Republican cooperation. You would need basically unanimous support from the GOP in Congress to make this work, and that’s not likely to happen.

A few things are true at once. The midterm results are going to hold. There are also going to be efforts to contest the election, efforts at recounts, and potential uncertainty about who exactly won that pushes this well through November.

Next year, Democrats are going to have a majority, but the rancor between them and Trump is not going away anytime soon.

This year is only going to make it worse.

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