Is the 2026 Election Already in Danger?

Pay attention and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You ListenSign up for our every day publication to get the perfect of The New Yorker in your inbox.“The Structure offers the states the facility to set the time, place, and method of elections,” the election lawyer Marc Elias factors out. “It offers the President no [such] energy.” But, nearly one 12 months earlier than the midterms, Donald Trump has referred to as for a nationwide prohibition on mail-in voting, an choice favored by Democrats, in addition to restrictions on voting machines. The Justice Division has demanded delicate voter data from a minimum of thirty-four states thus far, with little clarification as to how the data can be used. Will we’ve got free and truthful congressional elections in 2026? “I’m very frightened that we might have elections that don’t replicate the wishes and the voting preferences of everybody who needs they may vote and have their vote tabulated precisely,” Elias tells David Remnick. “That will sound very lawyerly and really technical, however I feel it could be a historic rollback.” Elias’s agency fought and finally gained nearly each case that Trump and Republican allies introduced towards the 2020 election, and Elias continues to combat the most recent spherical of incursions in court docket. And whereas he rues what he calls “re-gerrymandering” in Texas—designed to squeeze Texas’s Democratic representatives out of Congress—Elias thinks states run by Democrats haven’t any selection however to repeat the tactic. “Earlier than Gavin Newsom introduced what he was doing, I got here out publicly and stated Democrats ought to gerrymander 9 seats out of California, which might imply there’d be no Republicans left within the delegation. . . . On the finish of the day, if there’s no disincentive construction for Republicans to leap off this path, [then] it simply continues.”New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop each Tuesday and Friday. Observe the present wherever you get your podcasts.The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.