It Was Failed Election Meddling, Not Absence of Election Meddling

Walter Olson

President Trump, who often campaigned on the slogan “too big to rig,” has told reporters he will accept rather than try to overturn the midterm election results. That would be welcome. If so, he might want to offer a token of seriousness by asking the Department of Justice to drop the meritless litigation it is still pursuing, seeking to overrule the state of Alaska’s authority to certify a winner in its Senate race. 

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is already suggesting that there was no need for “all the hyperventilating about what Mr. Trump might do” to meddle with the midterms—after all, they went forward without incident. The “wildly speculative nightmares about mass election theft,” it avers, were “another partisan panic attack, promoted to gin up interest and enthusiasm”—that is, were promoted insincerely.

The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms. 

The signs were clear with his multiple executive orders beginning in March 2025 that asserted sweeping powers over elections that neither the Constitution nor Congress has assigned to presidents. These efforts were to mature, if that is the word, into elaborate plans, pursued through dozens of lawsuits and threats of criminal prosecution, intended to compel states to submit their voter rolls to federal inspection and subsequently purge particular names at Washington’s direction. The administration continued with Trump’s abortive plan to install his appointees at the US Postal Service as deciders of who would be permitted to vote by mail. And it further continued with his meritless last-minute litigation seeking to interfere with vote tabulation in California and certification in Alaska. 

No, we did not imagine these things, nor did the nation’s election administrators, who’ve had to spend this time studying supposed new federal obligations and devising new contingency plans. Nor did the courts when they, to their immense credit, blocked virtually all of the administration’s efforts. As late as Monday, in a moment all the more devastating for its quietness, the US Supreme Court denied, without explanation, a call for response or noted dissent of the administration’s request to keep alive its absurd suit seeking to interfere with California tabulation. 

Almost none of this history makes it into the Journal’s editorial. Nor do the various other ways Trump set the stage, including relentlessly sowing doubt about the system’s honesty and issuing penalty orders intended to destroy law firms and particular lawyers who had previously bested him and his allies in court on election matters.

The editorial does concede that Trump instigated a push for mid-cycle gerrymandering, which at one point looked as if it would move a dozen or more House seats into the GOP column. Yet the authors then seem to absolve him on the grounds that (to general surprise) it mostly didn’t work, as Democrats racked up such high margins that they won many of the redrawn districts in Florida and Texas. Curiously, the Editorial Board is not willing to wait and see whether Democrats’ shabby but probably legal recruitment of a same-name Dan Sullivan made any difference in the Alaska Senate outcome before pronouncing it the year’s worst election misconduct. (I try to avoid the word “stealing” when referring to shabby but legal election conduct, which typifies both gerrymandering and recruiting dummy candidates.) 

The editorial is particularly dismissive of fears that the Trump administration would go so far as to seize voting machines or ballots, with or without invoking emergency powers. Many state election agencies around the country, including agencies led by Republicans and conservatives, went to extensive lengths to prepare for this possibility. Were they misled? The Department of Justice had already seized and raided ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, based on highly dubious affidavits, albeit not during a live election, and Trump himself had famously expressed regrets over not seizing voting machines in 2020. In recent months, his administration had also gone to some lengths to manufacture pretext for last-minute interventions on a national security rationale. Key election advisers were known to have promoted emergency declarations and the use of extraordinary powers. 

These attempts were not acted on in the event, and it is too early to know how far they may have gotten in internal discussions within the administration. As Bob Bauer points out in a perceptive analysis of why Trump’s plans failed: “Historians or reporters with access in the future to papers and reliable witness accounts may one day be able to piece together why none of this happened.” One factor may be that the courts had shown themselves hostile to both the emergency power claims and attempts to manufacture pretext. Another factor may be that no site was attractive enough for a test intervention. Would hoking up some stunt involving machines in, say, Harris County have been enough to win Texas? 

The notion that Trump did not try to meddle improperly with the midterms is revisionist history that we should emphatically reject from the day it appears.