President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2026 midterm elections is in trouble, at least if the most relevant election results are to be believed.
“After Democrats snagged a likely House seat in Salt Lake City County, Utah, in February, the GOP was furious,” The New Republic’s Finn Hartnett reported on Thursday. “Republicans control all four House districts in Utah, and despite about 40 percent of residents voting Democrat in 2024, they considered losing even one unacceptable.”
Then when Republicans tried to use a local referendum to overturn the gerrymandered district, it “flopped,” although the results were close, Hartnett added. Despite spending $4.35 million on “professional signature gathering” and exceeding the 141,000-signature threshold by almost 30,000, “the petition also needed at least 8 percent of signatures in 26 out of Utah’s 29 state Senate districts, to show that voters across the state wanted the issue brought to the ballot. It was here that Republicans failed. After a nonprofit backing the new maps, Better Boundaries, convinced about 7,000 voters to remove their names from the petition, it fell just short of the 26-district threshold.”
In addition to boding poorly for Utah Republicans, the failure also has ominous implications for Trump overall.
“Since 2025, Republicans have redistricted in an attempt to add seats in Texas, North Carolina, and Missouri,” Hartnett explained. “Dems have countered through redistricting in California and now, officially, in Utah. Trump may add an extra layer of complication to the midterms by suppressing the vote before them and attempting to overturn the results if his party loses.”
Hartnett concluded, “We can only hope the public’s general lack of support for the Trump administration will be strong enough that Democrats can pull through.”
Veteran journalist and author Michael Wolff also argued during a Wednesday episode of his podcast for The Daily Beast that Trump is intentionally sowing misinformation about the election and trying to pass unnecessarily restrictive legislation because he knows that it will help him discredit any results that do not work to his advantage.
“It’s just what is to his advantage is just the narrative that the election system in the United States is broken,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “And chaos is to his advantage, and to create a bubble of uncertainty and controversy around that, no matter what happens, reverts to his advantage.”
Wolff continued: "Let’s assume this [bill] is not going to pass. So why is he doing this? The reason he is doing this is to set up and to continue the narrative when he loses the midterms. This then becomes the reason he lost the midterms, and he lost the midterms illegitimately… we’ve set up the enemy here."
Trump’s claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him has been definitively discredited. A conservative think tank called The Heritage Foundation tracked election fraud cases for more than two decades and found a rate of 0.0000845 percent, with no cases of ballot fraud ever changing a result. Similarly a 2022 report by eight conservatives — including two former Republican senators, a former Republican solicitor general, three former federal appellate judges and two Republican election law specialists — examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed by Trump and his supporters during their 2020-2021 coup attempt. He only succeeded in .016 percent of those cases.
