特朗普正为中期选举竞选造势 以下是具体情况

Trump is setting the stage to contest the midterms. Here’s how

2026-10-31T10:31:26.379Z

With only days to the election, time is running out for some of the more extreme pre-election doomsday scenarios that have percolated as a result of President Donald Trump’s chronic and unfounded rhetoric about widespread fraudulent voting.

He has not declared a national emergency to nationalize elections, something he refused to rule out.

His efforts to weaponize the US Postal Service against mail-in voting failed, at least this time. Millions of Americans have already voted early and by mail.

As the voters who want to vote on Election Day prepare to cast their ballots, the focus is turning to the casting of ballots and beyond.

Multiple recent news stories might have caused concern for voters.

Dolly Parton’s sister Stella, for instance, raised alarm in a social media post that a voting machine had changed her vote. Experts told CNN voters need to be paying attention to their ballots, but it’s usually a stray touch or a long fingernail — user error, in other words — that can cause this type of mixup. Occasionally a mistake can result from a machine being improperly calibrated.

A series of bomb threats, likely called in from outside the country, disrupted some voting in Georgia and other states in 2024. Such shenanigans are going to be high on the list of things election officials are prepping for this year — anything from bad weather to network outages to swarms of bees.

Election workers game out all sorts of things and state election officials generally speak with one voice when they say that votes will be cast and counted accurately.

While most Americans still have faith in the system, the president does not.

There has been a lot of conjecture and worrying — some of it justified and some of it fanciful — about how exactly the Trump administration might go about contesting results of the 2026 midterm election.

Asked this week if he would respect the results, Trump included a caveat.

“I will if they are honest elections, yeah.”

Since Trump has alleged fraud even in elections he has won, the operating assumption should be that he will not think they are honest, especially if Republicans lose control of the House, the Senate or both.

He has even offered $1 million rewards to anyone whose tip leads to a conviction for election fraud, something the Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg said he views comically.

“If there was evidence of fraud, uh, they would have found it already,” Ginsberg told CNN’s Brianna Keilar this week. “So I take it more as sort of performance art right before the election.”

The Department of Justice has launched a last-minute effort to call congressional elections in California and Washington state into question based on dubious theories of fraudulent voting.

From CNN’s report:

In California, the administration claimed there were 20,000 people who could be noncitizens on the rolls, while in Washington state, the administration alleged this week that 400 possible noncitizen voters had voted 1,500 times in past elections. The Justice Department sent letters to both states demanding they set aside the ballots of those the department claimed could be noncitizens — and sued California when the state said that the request ran afoul of its laws… The allegations have sparked questions about how the administration created its lists of voters who could be noncitizens — and criticism that its claims of tens of thousands of noncitizens voters have whittled down under scrutiny.

And, separately, the administration has ramped up its investigation of Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Somalia-born lawmaker from Minnesota, raising questions about whether Republicans could challenge her ability to be seated again in the next Congress.

Trump also directed the Department of Justice to get involved in Alaska’s Senate race, where he wants to weaponize Democrats’ efforts to game the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

The president got an apparent boost when the New York Times published a report that seemed to implicate Democrats in an effort to recruit a second candidate named Dan Sullivan to confuse voters. Never mind that the incumbent, Sen. Dan Sullivan, will be identified on the ballot as the incumbent and the Republican.

Ginsberg summarized the ensuing scandal for Democrats as “remarkably politically clumsy and embarrassing for (Democrat Mary Peltola’s) campaign. But Ginsberg added “there’s not an illegality here.”

That hasn’t stopped the DOJ from launching a criminal probe into how the second Dan Sullivan got onto the ballot, and Alaska’s Republican governor has said he might not certify results.

All of these cases are legal long shots, according to experts across the political aisle. And Trump’s election challenges have a poor record in court.

But all his efforts to allege fraud have some political currency.

“They’re just throwing all this stuff out there in an attempt to discourage people from believing in the system and trying to discourage people from coming out and registering to vote and then actually voting themselves,” Eric Holder, who was attorney general under President Barack Obama, told CNN’s Pamela Brown last week.

Unlike in previous elections, Trump now has a Department of Justice helmed by his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche.

While Blanche has said the DOJ has no plans to contest election results in any state, he also won’t rule it out, as Fox News noted.

“Of course, I’m not going to say that,” Blanche told reporters in Virginia in October. “But am I planning my days around the election to be somewhere to not certify? Of course not, no, not at all.”

He may have no plans, but the federal government is doing more than in previous years to keep an eye on the election.

_CNN’s Gabe Cohen, Jeremy Herb and Dugald McDonnell have an extensive report for CNN subscribers on how players in the Trump administration have alleged, without evidence, widespread cheating and problems with voting machines. It also looks at what they can still do as voters head to polls._Read it here.

The system by which DOJ lawyers are sent to monitor how states monitor polling places and guarantee people have access to ballot boxes is nothing new and has been utilized by both Democrats and Republicans. But the Trump administration is more than doubling — to over 1,000 — the number of election monitors it is sending compared with the most recent midterm election. It’s also going to all 50 US states.

One thousand monitors in a nation of 330 million people is not many, and these monitors should be barred from interrupting voting at any polling place. But they could gather information for potential federal government challenges to any state’s election. The RNC also plans to ramp up its monitoring of polling places. Both parties traditionally send monitors.

FBI agents will be standing by

Federal law prohibits the deployment of the military or armed federal agents to polling places. FBI Director Kash Patel, however, has refused to rule out sending FBI agents to polling places. “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it,” he said at a recent Senate hearing.

But Patel said FBI agents would be on guard on Election Day. “We’re going to house our agents and intel analysts in our field offices for election security,” Patel said, adding, “We have election crisis coordinators manned at all 56 field offices.”

It’s to be hoped that there is no crisis of any kind at election places. And it’s a good thing for the FBI to be prepared. But the administration has also made a point of making claims of voter fraud when there’s no evidence.

For the record, current House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump ally who helped him challenge the 2020 election in Congress, said questions about whether Republicans could block the seating of lawmakers were “silly; of course we’ll have a peaceful transfer.”

Johnson said he will follow the Constitution and seat lawmakers whose victories are certified in their states.

“I may not like some of those outcomes, but that’s our system, and for anyone to suggest otherwise is absurd,” Johnson told CNN’s Manu Raju. He also predicted Republicans will keep control of the House, which is a minority view among people paying close attention to the election atmosphere.

In the Senate, contested elections have delayed the seating of senators in the past, most recently in 2008, in an extremely close race between Democratic Sen. Al Franken, who was ultimately declared the winner, and Sen. Norm Coleman, the Republican who lost. Ultimately, it is up to senators to seat their colleagues.

In that regard, everyone should hope for clear winners after Election Day.

None of this is to say Trump’s unprecedented efforts to influence the election haven’t already had an effect.

Republicans’ efforts to gerrymander themselves some new seats were more successful than those of the Democrats, but some of that could backfire in states such as Texas and Florida, where Latino voters who supported Trump in 2024 might this year shun the GOP. It’s also not yet clear what will happen in Southern states where some voters are angry about the Supreme Court’s gutting of Civil Rights-era protections for districts meant to give minority voters a voice in Congress.

Redistricting is expected to expand next year, and so are Trump’s efforts to curb voting by mail. In that regard, 2026 could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next presidential election, in 2028, when Trump won’t be on the ballot but his legacy will be on the line.

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