How to overcome election rigging beyond anything you’ve imagined

What brought Trump to power twice were the things you would never bother to imagine.

Trump asking for and receiving Putin’s help in 2016. James Comey reopening the Clinton email investigation eleven days before the election. Elon Musk buying X in 2022 and turning it into a GOP Super PAC. Then spending $291 million and running his campaign like a crypto pump-and-dump, with contradictory ads targeting Arab and Jewish voters simultaneously, a “lottery” paying a million dollars a day to registered voters in swing states, four fake brands engineered to suppress the votes of people who had every reason to stay home. None of that was in anyone’s model. None of it was supposed to be legal. And most of it wasn't until the FEC ruled in 2024 that super PACs could run a campaign's ground game with the campaign's own scripts, and Musk's America PAC became Trump's savior.

And every one of those interventions only needed to shift a tiny sliver of the vote in a few states.

This is the pattern that actually produces a President Donald Trump, something only The Simpsons imagined. Of course, that isn’t possible without the structural advantages the GOP spent half a century plotting and rigging, though those are real and getting more real by the day. But the difference between a Trump and a Romney isn’t just a few wives, orange clown paint, and a few billion dollars. It’s the unpredictable, the shamelessly ruthless thing that breaks the model, that no fundamentals-based analysis sees coming, landing on top of a map already tilted just enough that a few thousand votes is always exactly what’s at stake.

Heading into November, I have two worries. Ok, I have a trillion worries, but two worries that I need every American who cares about freedom to understand. The first is that we lose outright. The second is that we win and it destroys us. Understanding both is not pessimism. It is the only thing that makes winning possible.

Worry one: The unimaginable

Last September, Ari Berman published a piece in Mother Jones cataloging ten ways Trump and his allies were already rigging the 2026 midterms. Everyone should have read it then. But it’s even more worth reading now, nine months later, to see how much of it has already proven true.

The DOJ’s civil rights division — historically the “crown jewel” of federal voting rights enforcement — has lost roughly 250 lawyers, 70 percent of its total. Political appointees removed all senior managers in the voting section and dismissed every major active case, including litigation challenging restrictive voting laws and gerrymandered maps in Arizona, Georgia, and Texas. The acting head of the voting section came from a conservative group that has spent years spreading unfounded claims about voter fraud. Democratic officials have been arrested. Rep. LaMonica McIver still faces charges for doing basic congressional oversight. Brad Lander was detained by ICE a week before the New York City primary as he was escorting a migrant out of court. ActBlue — which has raised $16 billion for Democratic candidates since 2004 — is under federal investigation. The cybersecurity agency that protects election infrastructure from foreign interference has lost a third of its workforce. The FBI task force charged with combating foreign election interference has been disbanded.

And then there’s maps.

Trump pressured Texas to redraw its congressional districts mid-decade to add five Republican seats. Missouri followed with one more. North Carolina with one more. Ohio. Florida. Tennessee. On one side of the ledger: up to 14 additional seats Republicans believe they can win from new districts. On the other: up to 6 Democrats might gain from California and Utah. This is a structural annexation of the House, conducted in broad daylight, with the explicit purpose of preventing Democrats from winning a majority, regardless of how the country votes. And it’s impossible without a systemic destruction of Black voting power, which has been John Roberts’ life work.

In late April, a 6-3 ruling in a Louisiana case effectively gutted what remained of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. This blasted open the door for Republican states to redraw maps specifically to eliminate majority-Black districts. Virginia voters passed a constitutional amendment last month to counter some of those gains. The Virginia Supreme Court found a procedural pretext to kill it. The U.S. Supreme Court let it stand.

Tuesday, the Court went further. In an unsigned emergency order, over the dissent of all three liberal justices, it allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that three federal judges had found was “tainted by intentional race-based discrimination.” Alabama had already held its primaries under the old map. The Court blessed the new one anyway. Justice Sotomayor wrote that just as Alabama “doubled down on racial discrimination,” the Court “doubles down on chaos.” The majority didn’t write a word in response. It didn’t have to.

Democrats start from a 218-213 House majority deficit. The redistricting math—even before Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and South Carolina finish their own rigging— already pushes the net toward Republicans. Democracy Docket, which tracks this more carefully than anyone, puts the potential Republican gain at 18 seats if every pending redraw holds up.

Consider what any historian with a sense of American history actually sees here: The most openly anti-Black presidential candidate of the post-Brown v. Board era—a man whose entire political career was built on the claim that the first Black president couldn’t possibly be American—stumbles the country into an unprecedented pandemic and racial crisis, loses, attempts a coup, is effectively absolved by a Supreme Court majority half of which he installed, and watches that same majority reverse the civil rights era’s voting rights protections in a final ruling that, in Sotomayor’s own words, just as Alabama “doubled down on racial discrimination,” the Court “doubles down on chaos.” All to save one sorry ass.

Just about everything Ari Berman saw coming is now here. And it arrived without any major national alarm from our living Democratic presidents or ex-or-future-presidential candidates, breaking through the noise of 2026’s daily 200-car pile-ups.

Now let’s add in what cannot be predicted.

The suppression operation Musk ran in Dearborn in 2024 — the contradictory mailers, the fake brands, the spear-phishing of an entire community’s political identity — is already running again. Virginia voters received mailers with KKK imagery and Civil Rights photos in April, telling them that Obama and Spanberger opposed a redistricting referendum both publicly supported. The mailers came from Peter Thiel’s dark money, routed through PACs chaired by a defeated Republican delegate. Virginia’s Attorney General called it a deliberate effort to “exploit the history of Jim Crow to mislead Black voters and suppress participation.”

The FEC has been without a quorum since April 2025. It cannot hold meetings. It cannot enforce the law. Fifty billionaire families have already pumped $430 million into the 2026 cycle. Andreessen Horowitz is the largest single donor — bigger than Musk was at this point last cycle — and its co-founder said on a podcast the day after the 2024 election: “My conclusion is this has to be a permanent role that we play.”

The AI content operations targeting voters this fall will make what Musk deployed in Dearborn look artisanal. We’re already seeing deepfake revenge porn about a Republican candidate Trump targeted.

Trump, Musk, Andreessen, the Nerd Reich, they don’t see politics the way Democrats and Republicans used to, where you try to target a sliver of the population to hit the mythical swing voters. You operate like cyber criminals and scammers do. First, you target everyone, as spammers do. There’s almost no cost, so why not? Hit everyone with the email, the text, the ad. Fuck with their head. Create urgency, confusion, rage. Then target exactly who you need to sway with an overwhelming barrage of mis and disinformation.

Yes, Democrats should be winning, easily. We’ve even identified the way to overwhelm right-wing media, at least at some points, with an activated base of concerned neighbors rising to oppose authoritarianism. But that’s hard. It’s draining. All the incentives and power are against you. And too many leaders of the Democratic Party are caught up in the old world of politics where appearing “centrist” could be seen as canny triangulation. It is now dispiriting and dangerous collaboration.

The Democratic Party tends only to play defense and only from the rule books written in 1992 and 1996, when a weirdo billionaire Texan who actually seemed to care about the deficit warped all the math. This leads us to be conservative, restrained, and focused almost entirely on ads, which Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg have proven don’t mean much unless you build up candidates and campaigns that actually inspire people.

This is how we possibly lose outright. Not because the country wants four more years of this. Trump’s approval is in the forties, the economy is grinding, the Iran war is a disaster, Medicaid cuts are landing in communities that voted for him. The fundamentals all favor us.

The fundamentals all favor us. Trump's approval is in the thirties, the economy is grinding bones into dust, the Iran war is an incomprehensible disaster, Medicaid cuts are landing in communities that voted for him. Even the oil companies are begging Trump to wake the fuck up.

The country does not want two more years of this.

The whirlwind doesn't care. Fundamentals get laughed out by a Supreme Court that will not miss a chance to lock in white minority rule. It blessed Alabama's racially discriminatory maps without writing a single word of explanation. An FEC without a quorum since April 2025, unable to hold a meeting or enforce a law. Fifty billionaire families, rich beyond gods on earth, aiming the algorithms jacked into our brain stems, already $430 million into a cycle that hasn't hit summer.

Worry two: Losing by winning

The second worry is quieter and in some ways more durable. It’s what happens if Democrats win but bring the attack inside the walls with them.

AI companies are now spending more money building data centers than the federal government spends on transportation. That money is inherently political. AI, crypto, and prediction markets are structurally incompatible with democracy, which is precisely why the Trumps fell in love with them, and why these industries only want Democrats who will abet them or who can be so tarred by their money that they’re easy to beat. The question is whether the Democratic Party understands that, or whether it’s already decided the answer doesn’t matter.

On Monday, Governor Gretchen Whitmer stood on 250 acres of overruled Michigan farmland with Sam Altman and called a $16 billion OpenAI data center campus “the largest economic project in Michigan history.” The Saline Township board had voted 4-1 to reject the project. The township dropped its opposition only after being threatened with litigation that would have financially destroyed the local government. Whitmer did not take questions from reporters. Rashida Tlaib called it “disgustʼing,” which it was.

Whitmer’s office had reached out to OpenAI in February 2025, the month Trump was inaugurated, weeks after the Stargate announcement, to shop Michigan as a site, which meant the township’s objections were not a constituency to be heard but a problem to be managed. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, co-leading the House Democratic AI commission, explained the centrist theory of the case this week: Bernie Sanders, he said, “would like to put AI in a box and lock it up and make it go away.”

Sanders’ actual proposal was a 50 percent public stake in the nation’s largest AI companies, ownership that would make them accountable to the people whose land, water, and electricity they consume. Still, Gottheimer called it “incendiary,” which is what centrists call any idea that actually threatens the people funding their campaigns.

This is a preview of what a Democratic majority looks like if the party decides the way to beat concentrated billionaire power is to become its more responsible steward. You swap the party in control without changing what controls the party. Or you give the people no one party that can stop the consolidation of artificiality and its insidious influence from drowning out humanity and decency.

Humans need one party to be on their side. And if there isn’t, they’ll just assume that America belongs to those who see people—their needs, their desire to work, their creativity—as obstacles to the future.

What people who see this clearly do next

Here is what the pessimist’s read of all this misses: every one of these attacks has a known counter, and we have proof.

In April 2025, Building America’s Future — the same Musk-backed dark money operation that ran the Dearborn suppression campaign — used the same playbook in Wisconsin, with deceptive ads and texts that appeared to come from the Democratic candidate for the state Supreme Court. And it didn’t work. Nearly $20 million of Musk’s money, like a bag of walnuts to most of us, flushed down the loo.

Susan Crawford won her seat in 2025 by 9 points on a campaign that named the specific harm—abortion rights, gerrymandered maps—and named the specific people responsible for it. The suppression operation could not manufacture a neighbor, in person, with a true story.

In April 2026, Péter Magyar won the Hungarian election in a landslide. Orbán had controlled 80 percent of traditional media for sixteen years. Russian AI ran coordinated personas on TikTok. Private Facebook networks with 100,000 members flooded the algorithm. Magyar won with YouTube and people knocking on doors in villages Orbán thought were permanently his. The machine could not manufacture a neighbor with a true story and the guts to tell it.

Elizabeth Warren named what that strategy requires at the electoral level. These midterms will be fought over “whether the government is just a toy of the billionaires, or it’s actually a vital force that sets the rules so that working families have a real chance to build a future.” Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to give taxpayers a 50 percent stake in the largest AI companies. Brian Schatz, poised to be the next Senate Democratic whip, said he’s intrigued by public ownership of AI platforms.

Rep. Greg Cesar of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, whose ten-bill affordability agenda explicitly names the villains, has the right idea.

“Trump villainized immigrants, Trump villainized the LGBT community,” he said. “If Democrats want to fight back against that scapegoating, we need to take on the real villains taking your money.”

The obstacles are real. The gerrymandering is real. The election interference operations are already running. The FEC has no quorum, and the Supreme Court is signing off on racial discrimination without bothering to offer a rationale.

Your brain needs to make this attack on our very humanity feel normal. That is what brains do with things they cannot immediately fix. They sand the edges down until the emergency feels like weather. It makes the unpredictable feel inevitable.

Don’t let it. The people who beat Orbán saw his machine clearly and exposed it for their neighbors. The people who elected Susan Crawford over Musk’s placeholder named the villain out loud. The people who will win in November are the ones who understand exactly what they’re up against and knock on a door anyway.

Because the one thing $44 billion+ and a court without a conscience cannot manufacture is a neighbor, in person, with a true story, who keeps showing up.

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