Dirty Election Tricks: The Plan to Control the Midterms

Send us Fan Mail The federal, state, and local efforts to tilt the 2026 midterms, and the fight to stop them Overview Democrats lead in all nine Senate races that will decide the chamber, and they need just three seats to win the House. When the races are this close, small changes in who votes can decide who controls Congress. Trump can't afford to lose, and his administration and his allies are working to make sure he doesn't. This episode follows those efforts from Washington to your polling place. It asks three questions: Will you be able to vote? Will your vote get counted? And will the results be allowed to stand? It also covers what's being done to push back, and what you can do. What's in This Episode All Senate polling averages are from Decision Desk HQ, checked on October 13th. Where the Races Stand. Democrats lead all nine Senate races. They need four seats to win the Senate, and Decision Desk HQ gives them a 56% chance. In the House, Democrats need a net gain of three seats. Cook expects them to gain between nine and nineteen. Washington's Official Tools. The Justice Department sued thirty states and D.C. for their full voter rolls and has lost twenty-six straight cases. The SAVE Act, which would have required proof of citizenship to register, failed in the Senate. The FBI seized more than six hundred boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, Georgia, and a judge let it keep them. The Fallback. Asked about declaring a national emergency or invoking the Insurrection Act, Trump said, "I'm not committing to anything." Tina Peters, the former Colorado clerk whose sentence was commuted, met Trump in the Oval Office on October 5th. Her lawyer says she proposed seizing ballots nationwide. He added that Trump "is not going to relinquish control again." The Federal Agencies That Protect Elections. CISA lost nearly a third of its staff. The Federal Election Commission can't enforce campaign-finance law. Political appointees who deny the 2020 results now hold key election-security jobs. Utah's Republican lieutenant governor says the threats are "mostly from our own government." Federal Reach Into Voting. The Postal Service tried to impose a mail-ballot rule that a whistleblower says could reject 10,000 ballots over one bad barcode. The Supreme Court kept it blocked for 2026. Meanwhile, DHS agents with a quota of forty people a day are checking voter rolls in every state. In Texas, the citizenship database they rely on flagged hundreds of eligible citizens as possible noncitizens. The States. Missouri's secretary of state defied his own Supreme Court to push a gerrymandered map, and the U.S. Supreme Court kept the old map in place. At least thirty-three election deniers are running for offices that oversee elections. Your Polling Place. Tarrant County, Texas, cut ninety-two polling places. ICE agents have already appeared near voting sites in Texas and California, despite official promises they wouldn't. DOJ plans to send about a thousand election monitors. A California sheriff seized 650,000 ballots, and the state Supreme Court ruled the seizure illegal. Selling It. A dark-money group runs fake local news sites. Mailers in Ohio push a socialist candidate to split Sherrod Brown's vote. And taxpayers have now spent nearly $22 million on pro-Trump TV ads. The Response. States are passing laws to keep armed agents away from the polls, and local governments are suing. What you can do: check your registration, confirm your polling place, vote early, and ask for a provisional ballot if your name is missing. Why It Matters Many of these efforts have already been exposed or stopped by courts, reporters, and whistleblowers. Many of the rest are designed to make voters give up and stay home. Knowing how they work is how we make sure every vote counts on November 3rd. Support the show Bella Goode is a pseudonym — but the voice, research, and mission are all real. A Republican turned Democrat advocate in 2016, I was raised by middle class parents in Pennsylvania.  I’m a former marketing executive, entrepreneur, and lifelong learner with an MBA from Wharton and a Master’s in Psychology from Penn. I spent decades telling stories in the business world; now I use those skills to connect the dots in American politics. I’m here because the truth matters — and because the stakes have never been higher. Surviving Trump isn’t lighthearted. It’s clarity, evidence, and a fight for the future of our democracy. Follow my blog on Substack https://survivingtrumppodcast.substack.com