Presidential elections are certified on January 6th, a date that used to be anodyne but is now seared into the national memory. Congressional elections, meanwhile, reach their final stage on January 3rd, when members of Congress are sworn in and lawmakers have the opportunity to bring objections to the ascension of their colleagues.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been receiving a lot of questions about whether, even if Democrats win a House majority this November, it could somehow be stolen from them on January 3, 2027, when the 120th Congress will be sworn in.
I can understand why many of you have been asking: there has been a lot of media attention paid to this possibility. The San Francisco Chronicle has said that on January 3, Republicans could “keep the House without winning the midterms.” So has the progressive site Zeteo. In a pair of op-eds in The New Republic, former New York Rep. Steve Israel has referred to the “simple, legal way Trump could steal the midterms,” while retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig has warned that January 3 will mark the “final battle for America’s democracy.”
The New York Times alone has run (by my count) at least five news and opinion articles discussing this scenario, including one just this morning from former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and another by columnist David French saying that January 3 is what’s keeping him up at night.
So, I thought I owed you a deep dive into what exactly the fears are about the seating of the new Congress on January 3, 2027, and where they are and aren’t justified. The result is my latest YouTube video:
In the video, I explain exactly what happens after our midterm ballots are cast, as the results are certified at the state level and then transmitted to Washington. I break down the role of the House Clerk, a key figure in many of the nightmare scenarios floated by various commentators. I’ll also give some history: we actually have had a scenario where control of the House was in question at the beginning of a new Congress, in a mostly forgotten episode known as the “Broad Seal War” that I’ll explain.
And I’ll walk you through the places that some of the recent theories have been just plain misleading, including the idea that Mike Johnson or House Republicans have any special power in the chamber once the clock strikes noon on January 3, simply by dint of having been the speaker or the majority party in the last Congress. (They don’t.)
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released yesterday found that 70% of Americans are “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that President Trump will accept the results of the midterm elections if his party loses.
To be abundantly clear, I am in that 70%. This is not a partisan statement: it is merely a reflection of a decade’s worth of evidence, stretching all the way back to President Trump’s first political loss — the 2016 Iowa caucuses — which he said was the result of fraud perpetrated by Ted Cruz. He has reliably pinned every subsequent loss on election fraud since then, including the 2016 popular vote, the 2018 midterms, the 2022 midterms, and most famously, the 2020 election.
But Trump denying the results of the 2026 elections — which, again, I view as incredibly likely — is different than him actually being able to do anything about it.
To return to the 2020 example, I think something that is often under-emphasized about January 6th is, at the end of the day, how much of a failure it was.
Earlier this year, I was on a panel with The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell, during which she said that Donald Trump “overturned an election” in 2020. I had to remind her that, actually, he didn’t. No states (Republican or Democratic controlled) de-certified their election results. No judges (Democratic or Republican appointed) upheld Trump’s challenges. Congress counted the votes accurately, and even a violent mob failed to change the outcome.
This is a constant challenge when covering Donald Trump. January 6th happened, and it’s important to give space to that, but also, January 6th failed. Trump will likely try to sow doubt in the 2026 results, but also, the president has little power over elections and few (if any) avenues to change their outcomes. Both can be true, and important, at once, and I think some commentators can get a bit off-balance, putting too much emphasis on one or the other side of that equation.
Check out the video for my attempt at a clear-headed look at how January 3rd will work and all the things it would take for an attempt to overturn the election to actually work:
If you have other questions about the 2026 midterms as we get closer to Election Day, please don’t hesitate to send them my way. You can always do so through the anonymous link here, but you can also comment below or click “reply” to send an email that will go straight to my inbox. These are chaotic times: I want to serve as a resource as best I can in this final stretch.
Talk to you on Friday.
I don't like listening to podcasts (I can read much faster than most people can talk, and if you could talk that fast, I probably wouldn't be able to understand you), but your written outline has its usual commonsense tone. I seriously think that the NYT and others would absolutely LOVE it if Trump could somehow overturn the elections rather than just bloviate. That would allow them to *really* vent their hatred of him. I don't like the bloviation, either, but it is just air signifying (usually) nothing. Why people allow themselves to get into such a froth about all this gas is beyond me and makes me wonder why so few people have actual lives to live that they can spend so much time on it.
Thank you, Gabe, for a clear, concise and well-reasoned explanation of potential scenarios. Thank you also for helping us off the emotional ledge we’re pushed to walk by other media commentators.