But as November approaches, the most serious threats posed to free and fair elections no longer come from the White House itself. Instead, they are local, where much of the power over elections actually resides, and they stem from the continuing absorption of Trump’s Big Lie into our political culture. In statehouses and county offices, a cohort of election deniers has taken control of significant parts of the nation’s electoral infrastructure. Some of its members have replaced the officials and legislators who rejected Trump’s push to corrupt the 2020 race. A grassroots movement of Big Lie believers has meanwhile been organized and trained as poll workers or informal observers to sound alarms over local elections they deem suspect in any way.
The November elections represent something new in American politics: For the first time, a coalition of partners at the local, state, and federal levels is ready to pull off the kind of election heist that eluded the president back in 2020. At the very least, the midterms could serve as a trial run for this coalition ahead of the 2028 presidential race, when much of Trump’s legacy will be at stake.
Nowhere is the threat of election subversion more evident than in Georgia, the state Trump lost by the slimmest margin in 2020 and the site of his most brazen efforts to overturn the results. Trump’s hourlong phone call on January 2, 2021, urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse his loss is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. By the time of that call, the president and his allies had spent weeks pressing local lawmakers and election officials to throw out votes, delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, and lay the groundwork for an administrative coup. On Thanksgiving Day, Trump had called Raffensperger an “enemy of the people” and falsely accused him of engaging in illegal election practices. The secretary of state’s security had to be beefed up—as did that of his colleague Gabriel Sterling, then–Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, and others—following death threats. The Fulton County poll workers Ruby Freeman and Wandrea “Shaye” Moss were publicly accused by Trump-campaign allies of pulling fake ballots from suitcases to help Biden, a false allegation that elicited more death threats.
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https://electionlawblog.org/2026/the-election-deniers-long-game/
“The Election Deniers’ Long Game”
