One of the most frequent questions I get from readers — especially when they find me at social gatherings — is whether I think there will be elections in 2026 and 2028.
My answer has been the same for six months now: Yes, but they will be almost impossible for Democrats to win enough of them.
This is the pattern in other countries led by right-wing strongmen. There are elections in India, Hungary, even Russia and China. But autocrats make it difficult, if not impossible, for their opponents to win them, through a combination of intimidation, legal machinations, and corrupt loyalists in positions of power. In this way, the appearance of democracy is retained, but underneath that façade, the structure which makes it possible has been hollowed out.
Only in extreme cases are elections formally “rigged” or, as in the United States and Brazil, met with insurrectionist violence when the demagogue actually loses. Usually, the simulacra of civil society are maintained, legitimizing and normalizing autocracy even after it has long since come to resemble an open secret. Democracy becomes a kind of glass closet: everyone knows the secret, but if the show can go on, we can imagine that we don’t.
This is true even in extreme cases. In 1936 Germany, for example, there was a “parliamentary election” which was actually a single-issue referendum on whether the Nazi party should take over the entire Reichstag. The Nazis won with, they said, 98% voting in favor — obviously falsified results. Yet even then, the Nazis made a show of the nation turning out to vote, with publicity stunts and celebratory headlines in Fox News, The Daily Wire, CBS News, Der Stürmer. Likewise in the Soviet Union and in totalitarian regimes across the world.
I’ll return to the fascinating psychological, political, and even spiritual reasons for this curious pattern at the end of this post. For now, the point to take in is that authoritarianism sits easily alongside elections, judicial review, and other superficial indicia of democracy. Absolutism is rarely absolute.
Which brings us to 2026 and 2028. It’s highly unlikely that the president will issue some sort of edict canceling the election outright. There will be voting booths, ballots, and elections. Instead, as in later-stage autocracies, the Trump administration has already rolled out an array of tactics that will make it very hard for Democrats to regain control of Congress – which, polls tell us, they would likely do today if a free and fair election were held. Trump is very unpopular.
Some of these tactics are new, some are old. But their plurality is important: in addition to its “belt and suspenders” prudential value, the sheer number of actions makes it harder to say that Republicans stole the election. It’s the death of a thousand blows. And, of course, since MAGA Republicans have been claiming stolen elections for eight years, the charge is now empty of meaning. They have cried wolf so many times, that now crying wolf itself is meaningless. In retrospect, it looks quite brilliant.
What are some of those “thousand blows”? Here is a provisional list, in order of severity.
1. ICE Intimidation. We’ve seen this already: due to ICE’s random arrest and detention of anyone who looks Latino (or, increasingly, Asian), entire neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles have fallen silent, legally-documented construction and agricultural workers are afraid to go to work, and kids are being harassed at baseball practice. What happens when ICE shows up (or threatens to show up) near a polling place next November? Does anyone imagine that Latino voters won’t be intimidated? And why wouldn’t ICE (which, remember, will be three times larger in 2026 than it is now) expand its harassment campaign to anyone they deem to be suspicious, including you and me? Are you prepared to spend four days in an ICE detention facility simply to cast a vote? It’s unclear what, if anything, can prevent this from happening, unless state governments are willing to risk armed clashes with heavily-militarized federal officers. And if you feel safe from this threat, you are either (a) deluded or (b) part of the problem. Any suggestions?
2. Election Certifications. An extensive New York Times investigation published in October, 2024, found that in four battleground states, 2020 Election Deniers had taken over county and state boards that oversee elections. That same investigation found that many of those Deniers had an almost religious, patriotic belief that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 election was in danger. It’s hard to repeat, time and time again, that there is absolutely no evidence for this, but that’s like saying there’s no evidence for Noah’s Ark. And given that core belief, any confirmatory evidence, no matter how insignificant (e.g., a single typo on a single mail-in ballot address) counts as proof that the fundamental myth is true, as does any far-fetched conspiracy involving Serbia, Venezuela, or any number of other foreign malefactors. As the Times’ Jim Rutenberg put it in his report,
although the Stop the Steal movement of 2020 has evolved into the considerably more sophisticated “election integrity” movement of 2024, its success is still premised on persuading election administrators of two things that are not true: that widespread election fraud is a real and present threat to democracy and that they have not only the authority but also the legal duty to do something about it — that they must “do their duty” and deny certification.
And thus empowered, these local officials have the ability to deny certifying elections — which was, until the 2010s, a simple administrative function — or delay doing so for weeks or months, sowing chaos and confusion. I remember, in the runup to the 2024 election, expecting widespread chaos as these processes unfolded in every swing state in the country. Funny how those profound concerns about election integrity evaporated when the Deniers’ favored candidate won, isn’t it? But in 2026, there are over a hundred swing districts. Imagine what is going to happen.
3. Replacing Civil Servants with MAGA Loyalists. Does this sound familiar? It was a core plank of Project 2025, which DOGE has now accomplished using the bogus goal of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse.” Really, the goal was always to fire dedicated civil servants and replace them with political loyalists – again, straight out of the authoritarian model. This is also taking place on the local level, as professional and volunteer election officials – meaning not the certification boards and state committees but the pollworkers and local election officials that are on the front line of democracy – are being hounded, harassed, and dismissed, only to be replaced by MAGA hacks. Here’s Rutenberg again:
Tens of millions of dollars flooded into “election integrity” groups, and a new strategy came into view: purge the party of those Republicans who resisted Trump’s 2020 scheme, find true believers who would do what needed to be done and put them in control of the administrative machinery well in advance of the next election.
Recently, a newly noxious form of this effort has taken shape: Trump’s loyalist enforcers at the Justice Department are exploring bringing criminal charges against state or local election officials who have been deemed not to have sufficiently safeguarded their voting systems. Once again, think about it: would you willingly risk doxxing, violence, harassment from law enforcement, malicious libel (like that endured by the Georgia election workers smeared by Rudy Giuliani) and now the possibility of criminal penalties just to do your job? Or would you find another job? Between MAGA-loyalist review boards and MAGA-loyalist pollworkers, there are going to be districts where only a MAGA victory will be regarded as a valid result.
4. Lawfare. And if somehow a Democratic (or sorry, Democrat – it’s amazing how Republicans just cannot call people by their names) candidate prevails, there are enough ‘Trump Judges’ in the system to entertain substantively frivolous challenges to various elections. This was unthinkable only ago, but we have returned to the era of Jim Crow judges who rule out of misbegotten patriotism rather than impartiality. Am I exaggerating? Just imagine if Aileen Cannon (the judge who unconscionably tipped the scales for Trump in the Classified-Documents-in-the-Mar-A-Lago-Bathroom case) is tapped to review the results of an election. I’m old enough to remember the scandal of Bush v. Gore, when the Supreme Court’s “states rights” conservatives voted to stop Florida’s legally-mandated recount of its votes in 2000 and install a Republican in the White House. I expect a dozen such cases in lower courts in 2026.
5. Gerrymandering and Voter Suppression. Admittedly, this is an old one, which I personally have been writing about for over a decade. But newly empowered by the Supreme Court, such tactics have grown increasingly bold, with Trump saying overtly that the GOP would pick up five seats by redistricting in Texas. And let’s remember that North Carolina’s gerrymander in 2024 swung the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Here, at least, Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened retaliatory gerrymandering in California to counteract anything Texas does — kind of a dreadful response, but better than doing nothing. And in terms of voter suppression, Republicans are doing the same stuff as always – eliminating early voting and mail-in ballots, setting up roadblocks to voting that affect likely Democratic voters disproportionately, and continuing to spread the entire Big Lie that our elections are unreliable.
6. Culture, Media, Religion, Distraction. Finally, we have already seen the regime’s shocking (though perhaps not unexpected) attack on core institutions of liberal democracy: the press, media companies in general, law firms, and institutions of higher education. To get the government to approve its merger with Skydance, Paramount has promised to install an “ombudsman” to review allegations of bias at CBS news — rumored to be the professional grifter Bari Weiss, who takes millions of dollars of right-wing billionaire money and pumps out right-wing agit-prop, all the while continuing to cosplay as a concerned liberal centrist. (Paramount has also agreed to run millions of dollars of Trump-aligned ‘public service announcements’ on the network.) And now universities will be pressured to follow my alma mater Columbia’s example and pay off the government and sacrifice their independence to avoid being functionally bankrupted — just like Viktor Orban did to once-proud universities in Hungary, which have now been diminished into agents of state patriotism.
All of these attacks create conditions wherein, even if an election is technically ‘fair’, it is impossible for opposition voices to be heard clearly. The Putinesque propaganda and lies of MAGA will be omnipresent, transmitted not via Orwellian Telescreen but by corporate media that has sold itself out to the regime. This has already happened: right-win hysteria about immigration has led to the construction of concentration camps and children having to defend themselves in courtrooms — despite, yet again, the complete absence of evidence. (Immigrant crime rates are lower than citizen crime rates.) And despite Fox News having to pay $787 million in its defamation settlement, media lies about “election integrity” persist.
And finally, there’s the rest of us: exhausted people who want to distract ourselves and ignore the news. I’m this person sometimes, as I’ve written about in these pages, and to be honest, I’m feeling that way right now. I’m not judging it. But as M. Gessen discussed in this Times interview, this is exactly how we accommodate ourselves to the new authoritarian normal, bit by bit, until the way we used to live is extinguished.
As long as it is, this is, of course, a partial list. (Please post any additions you’d make in the comments.) But it is my answer to the question I posed at the top. Yes, there will be an election, but I can’t imagine it will be a fair one, if by “fair” we mean the choices of voters determining the election of members of Congress. (In the case of gerrymandering, fairness is more structural than individual.) You will have the opportunity to cast a vote next November. But whether it counts depends on where you live, and what you’re willing to risk.
Upon reflection, it's strange that authoritarians do all of this. It’s remarkable that the desire for the appearance of legitimacy endures even when power has been completely consolidated. Why go through the performance of electoral democracy at all? Perhaps the illusion of elections provide complicit elite collaborators with at least a pretext, even a flimsy one, of legitimacy and order. (The Senate met during the Empire for a while.) The performance of democracy is a kind of counterpoint to the authoritarian reality. Apparently a glass closet is better than none at all.
Or perhaps it creates an alternative reality. Even a fake election can create a consensus that “everyone” supports the leader: scholars of Soviet authoritarianism, for example, have suggested that Stalin held sham elections to buttress his cult of personality. The sham election acts as a kind of terror; the leader’s power is absolute that he can say black is white, Eurasia has always been at war with East Asia, there are five lights in the torture chamber. The strongman has power even over reality.
Or maybe the reasons are more internal: perhaps the real audience for sham elections are the supporters of the strongman. They are, after all, true believers. They believe that the Fatherland is in danger, and deep in their hearts, they know that they will do whatever they can to save it. Chatter about the rule of law or democratic norms pales in comparison to this profound patriotic imperative. That is the core of their faith; elections are just another doctrine. So, again as with religious doctrine, who cares if the details are preposterous; the faithful mind is ready to accept — no, unconsciously desperate to accept — that elections are happening, that the courts and legislature are operating, that the country is in good hands.
And with enough state influence of media, the construction of a consensus reality is relatively easy to accomplish. The actual fraud ceases to be fraud; the purported fraud, though devoid of evidence, is now accepted as fraud; “election integrity” now means what it says. Faith triumphs over fact; the denial is complete; the facsimile of democracy has come to seem as real as it needs to be for the believers who prop up the autocracy. Only later, often decades later, do historians look back and realize that it was all a facade.
And then when the next dictator arises, he tells us not to pay attention to historians.
Thank you for reading.
This has been a difficult week, between the multiple fronts of horrifying news and my continuing recovery from my injury. To paid subscribers: thank you for making this work possible. I do still feel the “optimism” I described last week, only of course it isn’t really optimism but a reframing of the tragedy.
There’s been a lot of insightful work done this week on our current crises.
On Israel/Palestine,
has done a profound job not only digesting the recent (also profound) commentaries by Omer Bartov and Yuval Noah Harari, but taking them a step further. His disturbing and thought-provoking essay is here. I also commend to your attention Rabbi Jill Jacobs’ ringing demand that Jewish organizations and leaders loudly protest the horrifying situation in Gaza. My own newest article in this area is about the exploitation of antisemitism by American anti-liberal authoritarians.I also think the Epstein saga is important for progressives to amplify. Not only is it politically important, it also represents a profound moment of recognition within the MAGA base that Trump is indeed a con man — and perhaps guilty of (more) sexual crimes himself. This is important.
wrote a fascinating piece on the problem of ‘sticking the ending’ of conspiratorial narratives like the Epstein files. It also has a helpful conglomeration of quotes from MAGA folks insisting that this is the most important thing that must be revealed and we will reveal it — until we won’t. also provided an excellent catch-up on the current state of affairs in the Epstein saga — really helpful reading. I’ll be on the State of Belief Podcast this coming week talking about this.On fascism, I recently had occasion to revisit the New York Times’ Fall 2024 interview with legendary fascism scholar Robert Paxton. I highly commend it to your attention, principally for the clarity Paxton brings to historical and contemporary fascism. Like the word genocide, the word fascism may bring more heat than light to public discourse, but both describe real situations in ways that are important to conceptualize.
Finally, I am marking the passage and celebrating the life of dharma-poetry-ecological pioneer Joanna Macy, who died this past week at age 96. Here is a beautiful and comprehensive obituary by Joan Duncan Oliver in Tricycle magazine. I leave you with some of Macy’s words:
It is painful to agree with you so deeply, not because I am a recent convert to all you say, but because it is painful already. Thanks for the Joanna Macy quote: spot on. Long time I have watched the principles with which I was raised become eroded by narcissistic powers. My father was under General Patton in WWII; he was one of the liberators of Mauthausen; he was in Korea in that conflict. I grew up with the painful memories and reminders of fascism and the costs of resistance. I watched him collapse in disgust and betrayal when he saw what was happening in America. There is more blood yet to be spilled. We will not be able to vote our way out of this one, IF all you and I believe happens. The lure of the golden calf is never far from the glams of salvation.
This is dark and not what I’ve come to expect from you. Frankly I couldn’t finish the article.