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Concerned about the loss of unified Republican power in Washington and puzzled by a lack of public support, President Donald Trump continues to talk about skipping the midterm elections in November, 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 is going on with the public’s mind,” he told Republicans in a speech earlier this month.
He later added, “Now, I’m not going to say, ‘Cancel the election. He should cancel the election,’ because fake news will say, ‘He wants the election canceled. He’s a dictator.’
But Trump talked about canceling the election in an interview with Reuters this week. He said Republicans have been so successful that “when you think about it, we shouldn’t even have elections.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “joking” 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 would not hold elections during a period of martial law during its war with Russia, Trump expressed some envy.
“So you’re saying during wartime you can’t have an election,” Trump said. “So, let me say, three and a half years from now—so you’re saying, if we happen to be at war with somebody, we’re out of choices? Oh, that’s good.”
People laughed.
Sometimes they are jokes, sometimes they are not
Trump routinely says things that sound like trolls until he says them. Do you own Greenland? Not a joke. However, he appears to have backed away from the oft-repeated idea of an unconstitutional third term.
And unlike Ukraine, the US held elections in the midst of multiple wars, when the British invaded in 1812 and when they were at war with themselves in 1864. They held elections during world wars when millions of Americans fought and overseas in the 20th century.
It makes sense for Trump to fear the mid-November mandates
Trump knows that presidents rarely take seats midterm. His administration moved at breakneck speed to change the government because, as the famous chief of staff said, they know presidents expect to lose power after their first two years. A net loss of just a few seats would give Democrats control of the House, for example, requiring them to pass on spending and giving them the power to investigate his administration.
Presidents do not have the power to postpone or cancel elections
The Constitution calls for a new Congress to be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Election Day is set by law, so it is theoretically possible for Congress to move it but not cancel the election. Elections are supposed to be administered by each state, so state governors and legislatures could theoretically move their own elections to deal with a major disaster, but there’s no precedent for that. To get into the weeds of it all, read a report from the Congressional Research Service.
The president’s lack of confidence in US elections is legendary
Trump has also considered using emergency powers to interfere in the election. He recently told the New York Times that he regrets not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.
Even the elections he won, he said, were rigged. There is 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 thoughts at an event sponsored by The Atlantic this week, Arizona’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, had this to say:
“The fact that we’re going through these scenarios in the first place should tell you something about the health of our democracy,” Fontes added.
To this end, he did not explain what scenarios they are preparing for.
“I don’t want to give the bad guys a clue,” Fontes said.
President Donald Trump speaks during the House Republican Party retreat at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC on January 6, 2026. – Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
What Trump is actually doing about the next election
While Trump may fantasize about canceling the election, the reality is that the electoral system is already changing in some key ways. Some of them can be extremely important.
Trump’s redistricting war continues to rage
Republicans picked up nine more friendly seats across the country, and Democrats ended up picking up six, mostly in California. Republicans see additional opportunity in Florida, while Democrats are planning a redistricting initiative in Virginia in April. Read more.
If the Supreme Court decides to further gut the Voting Rights Act, Republicans could theoretically redraw maps in many other states. Read the conclusions from the October oral arguments.
Expect a very different home in the near future
The long-term result of more and more political gestures without protections for racially concentrated districts could be to choke minority party delegations in more states, making the House map increasingly resemble the presidential map. Far fewer Democratic districts in Texas. Far fewer Republican districts in California – even though there are millions of Republicans and Democrats in both states.
Trump wants much more control over how states conduct elections
Although much of the effort has been halted, for now, by the courts, Trump’s goal is to exert more executive control over elections that should be governed by Congress and the states.
A federal court on Thursday sided with California against the administration’s request that the state turn over information about its 23 million voters.
The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether mail-in ballots that are postmarked but arrive after Election Day can still be counted. The decision could have serious consequences for the country’s widespread adoption of postal voting in recent years. Trump is a strong skeptic of the practice, even though he has voted in person by mail. His executive order would also affect how states use voting machines, another response to ghost voter fraud that could dramatically slow down ballot counting.
Trump has given up on overseeing the election
At first, his administration scaled back the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, which is meant to help states protect their election systems from attacks. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled funding for an intelligence-sharing network that helped states detect and prevent coordinated hacking attacks, CNN reported last year.
His Justice Department has rewired the agency’s Civil Rights Division from its original primary mission of civil rights abuses, including those related to elections. A current focus of the division is to help states “clean up” voter rolls, though a judge recently ruled that the effort was a misapplication of the Civil Rights Act.
The Trump administration has already tried to change how people vote through executive action and who they vote for by changing maps.
There’s plenty of time for more system gaming between now and November, and Trump clearly already has the midterms on the brain.
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