Can Trump Cancel the Midterms?
Plus: The prospects of the SAVE Act, ICE agents at the polls, and more.
Happy Friday, everyone! I’ve received a lot of questions lately about potential threats to the midterms, enough that it felt necessary to dedicate a whole mailbag column to walking through this specific issue.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll cover:
What President Trump can (and can’t) do to meddle with the midterms, including:
Whether he can cancel the elections
His executive order on elections, and how it’s fared in the courts
Whether he can send troops or ICE agents to the polls
What Congress can do to change election law, including:
The impacts of the proposed SAVE Act
The likelihood of the measure becoming law
Whether a device known as the “talking filibuster” could usher it to passage
If you have questions on any of these fronts, I think you’ll find this newsletter helpful.
I: Can Trump stop the midterms?
Q: What do you make of the rumor that Trump will find a way to cancel the midterms?
Q: Can Trump cancel the midterm elections? Is there some law he can use?
Q: With the midterm elections coming up later this year, how can voters be assured there will be no monkey business with vote counting and reporting?
Q: Trump has threatened to cancel next November’s mid-terms. Does he have any legal grounds to do that, or is it just desperate bluster? Could he send ICE goons to intimidate voters?
President Trump has no power to cancel the midterm elections, but that hasn’t stopped him from musing about it. “We had the worst president, did the worst job. They had the worst policy. We have to even run against these people,” Trump told House Republicans last month. “Now, I won’t say ‘cancel the election, they should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say ‘he wants the elections canceled, he’s a dictator.’ They always call me a dictator.”
The next week, he told Reuters that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the president was “simply joking,” adding: “He was saying, ‘we’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything the American people thought, maybe we should just keep rolling,’ but he was speaking facetiously.” The controversy was somewhat reminiscent of Trump’s comment to a group of Christian conservatives in 2024:
Christians, get out and vote. Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians, my Christians. I love you. Get out. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.
Facetious or not, presidents cannot cancel or reschedule midterm elections. Election Day is set in stone by 2 U.S. Code § 7:
The Tuesday next after the 1st Monday in November, in every even numbered year, is established as the day for the election, in each of the States and Territories of the United States, of Representatives and Delegates to the Congress commencing on the 3d day of January next thereafter.
That language leaves absolutely no room for presidential intervention. Article I of the Constitution states that representatives “shall be…chosen every second Year,” the 17th Amendment states that senators “shall be…elected by the people [of their states], for six years,” and the above statute sets the date of those elections for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November every even-numbered year. That means elections will be held on November 3, 2026, and Trump has no legal avenue to stop it.
Short of canceling the midterm elections, Trump has also recently suggested that he should wield more power over how they are administered. “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over,’” Trump told his former FBI director Dan Bongino in a recent podcast interview. “We should take over the voting, the voting in at least many — 15 places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.”
Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution gives states the power to oversee elections, with an ability for Congress to make national adjustments:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Once again, there is no room for presidential involvement. There is no indication that congressional Republicans plan to adopt Trump’s proposal to nationalize election administration: Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), for example, responded that he is “not in favor” of Trump’s idea as a “big believer in decentralized and distributed power.” Thune added, “That’s a constitutional issue.” (We will get to the elections bill Republican lawmakers are considering below.)
If anything, Trump’s suggestion is more reminiscent of proposals that have come up on the Democratic side of the aisle in recent years. In fact, the liberal UCLA legal scholar Rick Hasen — who wrote a book in 2012 calling for a national election system — recently wrote in Slate that Trump’s threats had “changed my mind” on the issue, making him realize the potential dangers of the system he’d proposed.
As I wrote recently, this all aligns with a trend of each party calling for more federal power … when they’re in power, and then realizing that might be unwise as soon as they lose control. (I also wrote last year: “When proposing changes to the constitutional order, politicians would be well-served to apply a version of John Rawls’ veil of ignorance: Design a political system such that you would find it fair if you were in either the majority or the minority.”) But I digress.
Without any chance that an elections-related bill will make it past the Senate filibuster (or any indication that Republicans plan to eliminate the filibuster — more on that below), Trump has decided to take matters into his own hands, trying to make changes to elections via executive action. Can he do that? Let’s look at what he’s tried, and how it’s gone.
Last year, Trump issued Executive Order 14248, “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections.” That order contained five major directives: