2026 is showing us the future of American politics.

Tuesday could mark the end of the Trump era. That was Nate Silver’s read on Ezra Klein’s podcast.

“He’ll still be president for two more years,” Silver said. “But the minute the election, the votes, are counted … the 2028 election campaign begins, and if Trump has a bad night, as polls show, then he’s a super-lame duck.”

Silver compared the political landscape to the George W. Bush administration after 2006.

Trump will “still be president for two more years,” Silver said. “But the minute the election, the votes, are counted … the 2028 election campaign begins, and if Trump has a bad night, as polls show, then he’s a super-lame duck.”

Nate Silver

The map already looks like “a different regime,” Silver said. “Kansas is competitive, Texas is competitive.” Charlie Cook called it “a unicorn election,” unlike any of the 22 he’s covered, per the Cook Political Report. The swing group isn’t suburban independents but “normally reliable Republicans,” many in farm country, who think Trump made “colossally bad decisions” on Iran and trade.

This cycle has also rewritten some of the rules for 2028.

For one, district maps are now redrawn mid-decade. President Donald Trump pushed Republican legislatures to redraw, and after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling, the South did just that.

The next redistricting round is already on the line Tuesday. Democrats could win a majority of governorships for the first time since 2010, and Cook noted that states like Georgia, Ohio, Nevada and Iowa “could be critical when it comes to upcoming redistricting fights and battles over election integrity in 2028.”

Democrats have moved on Israel. A dozen Biden-era officials who resigned over Gaza released a pledge Wednesday morning asking 2028 candidates to reject both Joe Biden’s and Trump’s Israel policies and not to hire the officials behind them, per The Washington Sun. Roughly half of Democrats now say Israel committed genocide in Gaza. One Democratic fundraising source told the Sun that 2028 campaigns were “waiting to see if [Democratic nominee] Abdul [El-Sayed] wins” in Michigan before deciding how much Biden’s Gaza record matters.

The attention economy has come to dominate politics. “Politics is the alchemy of turning attention into power,” El-Sayed said, per The New York Times. Vice President JD Vance, a MAGA standard-bearer in 2028, played the same game.

In a press gaggle Tuesday, Vance called El-Sayed “a bit of a psychopath” with “a lot of weird friends” and would not say whether he’s a jihadist, per CBS News. Basically, the thinking is that conflict gets attention, and attention gets power. Not everyone is playing, though. The Times split Democrats into two camps: “electric” and “normal,” and the normies are doing fine. “When was the last time you saw a viral clip from Roy Cooper?” the outlet asked. (Cooper is cruising in North Carolina.)

Heterodoxy is back for Democrats. Wins by Democrat James Talarico in Texas or Mary Peltola in Alaska would put pro-oil Democrats from red states back in the Senate, where the current number is “a caucus of zero,” per Politico.

“All of the above is back, baby,” one Democratic strategist said.

Iowa’s Rob Sand, who is running for governor, “eschews Democratic norms,” opening town halls with a prayer and a rendition of “America the Beautiful.” He leads by 7 percentage points, according to FifityPlusOne polling averages. In Washington state, the party is wide enough to include both Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez — a former Congressional Progressive Caucus chief and a Blue Dog Coalition co-chair, respectively — who, despite very different records on transgender issues, have united to oppose a ballot measure forcing girls “to prove their sex to the state every year,” as Gluesenkamp Perez put it, per MS NOW’s Julianne McShane.

Politics could be headed for a nationalists versus democratic socialists divide, à la Europe. On the left, Democratic Socialists of America insurgents won high-profile primaries throughout the country, driven by youth enthusiasm, general anger at the Democratic establishment and a sense that these are outsider candidates with normal, non-politico backgrounds.

The economic case is populist: A plurality of battleground voters say the biggest corruption problem is “greedy billionaires and corporations using their influence to rig the rules,” per Cook.

On the right, the closing message is about belonging.

“America belongs to those who love it,” Trump said in Lubbock, Texas, per the Times.

“Michigan belongs to those who love it, not those who hate it,” Vance said in Howell, Michigan, per WDIV.

Vance also accused El-Sayed of “explicitly anti-white racial hatred,” and at the rally said he “allegedly came from Egypt.” (El-Sayed was, in fact, born in Oakland County, Michigan, where Mitt Romney grew up.)

Politics is increasingly nationalized. Trump’s gravity pulls every race toward him.

“Just close your eyes and pretend I’m on the ballot,” he has told crowds, per The Associated Press.

Even Republican Sen. Susan Collins called this the hardest race of her career. And the lack of local media outlets (213 counties have no local news source left, and 1,524 more have only one, per Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism) means that more and more, politics is presented and consumed through a national prism. (Which is another reason it’s important that pols compete in the attention economy.)

Artificial intelligence is disrupting everything. AI-manipulated videos, likely from the Russian network Storm-1516, are spreading fake allegations about Ohio Democratic Senate nominee Sherrod Brown and Talarico.

And a Princeton researcher used roughly $20 in AI credits to reconstruct the order of nearly all in-person ballots in the Georgia counties he studied, and he could match some voters to their ballots. Data centers have become a closing message from Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District to the Kansas and Texas governor’s races. Silver thinks AI “could be the biggest issue of 2028.”

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One week before the midterms, President Donald Trump has a new offer for anyone who can help him prove what he has been insisting for years.

“Anybody reporting Voter Fraud in the past Elections, or the upcoming 2026 Midterm Election, will be paid $1,000,000 upon the arrest and conviction of those that created the Fraud!” Trump posted Monday.

The White House didn’t say where the money would come from, and Congress hasn’t authorized any such fund, according to The Washington Sun. The offer appears designed to generate headlines. Rick Hasen, a UCLA law professor and one of the country’s foremost election law experts, called it “part of a larger project … to generate distrust of the election system.”

It’s tempting to dismiss this as old news. “Trump cries fraud” has been a familiar headline for a decade. But that misses how much groundwork has already been laid. Trump’s “stolen election” narrative for these midterms is prewritten.

The president and his allies have spent the final weeks of the campaign “showering his supporters with a relentless stream of doubt about the legitimacy of the election, priming them to question results if Republicans lose,” according to a Washington Post analysis published Tuesday. Nearly 600 high-profile right-wing accounts, podcasts and outlets have published more than 7,000 statements this year questioning the election’s integrity, per the Post. Claims about noncitizen voting and mail ballots are twice as common as they were in the 2024 cycle. Trump himself has made nearly 300 such statements in his second term.

The message is landing. Just 45% of Republican voters are confident noncitizens will be kept from voting, compared with 90% of Democrats, a Pew Research Center survey found. Only 28% of Americans are confident Trump will accept the results if Republicans lose, according to a Washington Post/ABC/Ipsos poll.

To see how this works, rewind to June. Who would have imagined it would take Spencer Pratt losing the Los Angeles mayor’s race to show it?

‘Not possible’

By the morning after the June 2 primary, Pratt, the former reality TV star running as a Republican, was comfortably in second place. He had about 30% of the vote to Councilmember Nithya Raman’s 22%, and he was on track for a November runoff against Mayor Karen Bass.

Then Los Angeles kept counting. Five days later, Raman passed him.

In itself, that was not surprising. Democrats make up a supermajority of the city’s electorate. Bass is a Democrat, and Raman ran to her left. Los Angeles also counts slowly, checking signatures and examining ballots by hand.

None of that takes fraud to explain. And yet.

“Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections!”

At the time, Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman wrote in The New York Times that Trump was giving “an unusually clear preview of how he could greet any disappointing results for his party in November, when control of Congress is at stake.”

Swap out Pratt’s name for a Republican House candidate in Orange County, suburban Detroit or South Texas, and it’s easy to see how this could work.

Trump hasn’t stopped previewing. On Monday, he said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s comeback win “looked like another rigged election.”

You may reasonably ask: How is this new? Trump has sown distrust about elections for years, after all. What’s different this time?

What’s different is that Trump has help. In 2020, he had the “fraud” narrative but not a federal government willing to act on it. Now he has both.

‘I work for President Trump’

The institutions that pushed back last time have been rebuilt around Trump’s wishes.

Start with the Department of Justice. Bill Barr, Trump’s attorney general in 2020, stood up to him, saying publicly that the department hadn’t seen fraud on a scale that could have changed the outcome of that year’s presidential election. Would Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and now his attorney general, do the same?

“I work for President Trump,” Blanche said on a New York Post podcast last week, addressing questions of his department’s independence from the White House.

The next day, reporters asked whether there was any scenario in which the Justice Department would try to block states from certifying their results. Blanche said the department had no intention of improperly interfering, but invoked a hypothetical “doomsday scenario” and wouldn’t rule it out. “To say that there’s no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course, I’m not going to say that,” he said.

Blanche isn’t alone in leaving the door open. Consider Jay Clayton. In June, while he was still the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Clayton went on CNBC and declined to endorse or rule out widespread fraud, saying “the opportunity for fraud” exists. At his confirmation hearing to become director of national intelligence, he wouldn’t directly acknowledge who won the 2020 election. The Senate confirmed him in July.

And there’s Bill Essayli, the hard-charging Trump appointee who runs the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles. After Pratt’s loss, Essayli announced he had “multiple election fraud investigations underway.” (To his credit, he also knocked down at least one of the false claims about the race, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time.)

Now Essayli is out front on the administration’s push to get California to set aside mail ballots from voters it says are noncitizens. “We believe it’s at a minimum of 20,000,” he told Fox News Digital. The Justice Department has said its list came from purchased voter data analyzed by third parties. California officials say an initial review of a sample found that 1 in 4 people on the list were born in the U.S.

On Monday, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined, 2-1, to rule on the department’s request. A Trump appointee on the panel wrote that the administration appeared to lack the constitutional power to demand it.

None of that has slowed the spin. “BOMBSHELL: Trump exposed that 20,000 noncitizens flagged on California’s rolls are just ONE batch!” Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier posted to his 1.2 million followers.

Trump’s Justice Department files a suit, influencers tout it as a “BOMBSHELL” and the base gets more convinced the system is rigged, making the next claim easier to sell. The courts may keep saying no, but the new filings keep feeding the story.

The DOJ is already promising a postelection fight. Its observers “will be eyes and ears for any violations, and may take legal action afterwards. Stay tuned!” Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, posted Friday on X. Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired from the Election Assistance Commission, expects the department to act as “the administration’s personal law firm,” according to The Washington Post.

Back in June, the risk was that the Justice Department had gone from a guardrail against baseless election fraud claims to a participant in fanning them. A week from Election Day, that’s no longer hypothetical.

‘Something is wrong here’

The bellowing isn’t just coming from Trump.

It’s coming from Congress. “Some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it is impossible to prove,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said about the elections in California after Pratt’s loss. “Everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.”

It’s coming from governors. “California keeps dumping votes,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tweeted in June as Pratt’s odds of making the runoff dropped. “Count until you get the result you want?” DeSantis, notably, never explicitly endorsed the “stolen election” rhetoric in 2020.

In today’s Republican Party, suggesting election fraud is the price of admission, and nobody has to produce evidence to pay it. Every time a speaker or governor makes such a claim without evidence, the Overton window shifts, making the claim sound a little more “reasonable.”

Johnson was a relatively obscure member of Congress in 2020 when he led an amicus brief supporting Texas’ bid to invalidate the election results in several swing states. Now he’s House speaker, which puts him within arm’s reach of a little-noticed step in the transfer of power. The House clerk assembles the roll of members-elect, the official list of those who will be sworn in when the new Congress convenes in January. If Johnson moved to fire the clerk, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., told The Washington Post, it would be “a ‘break glass’ scenario.”

Democrats aren’t assuming the best. “We’re making the presumption that the president will not accept the results,” Himes said.

‘As steadily as a metronome’

California shows why there’s no winning this argument.

Perhaps no state takes longer to count its votes. And California is poised to matter enormously again. In 2024, nearly a week after Election Day, nine of the 16 uncalled House races that would decide control of the chamber were in California, the Times reported. This year, the state’s newly drawn districts include several of the most contested races in the country.

In June, a Democratic consultant told the Times that the most effective way to speed up California’s count would be to eliminate security measures such as signature verification and provisional ballot checks. The “fix” for the problem Trump described would require gutting the safeguards he says are missing.

So a slow count that ends in Democratic gains becomes evidence of fraud. A fast count that would require stripping out protections becomes evidence of fraud. A steady count doesn’t help, either. In a filing Sunday, the DOJ complained that California’s counties “continue to process tens of thousands of ballots as steadily as a metronome, willfully indifferent to the fact that upwards of 20,000 of those ballots may have been cast by noncitizens.” There is no outcome that doesn’t feed the narrative.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, voters will choose between Bass and Raman on Tuesday. Pratt won’t be on the ballot.

The count will take a while. It often does.

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