Donald Trump plainly intends to either win or steal the 2026 midterms. The man has never accepted an electoral outcome he doesn’t like, whether he’s won or lost. That’s held true in general elections and in primaries, Republican and Democratic alike. Trump has made little effort to mask his intent this year. He routinely hyperventilates about the prospect of massive illegal voting, and he recently urged his own voters to “cheat like hell.”
Predictions abound about what electoral mischief the president might attempt this time. Maybe he’ll seize voting machines, or declare martial law, or install a loyalist House clerk who refuses to seat a new Democratic majority. Whatever his specific methodology, Trump surely will do something (or some things) to maintain Republican control of the Senate and House — by dubious or even unlawful means if necessary.
As we saw during Trump’s calamitous effort to steal the 2020 election, he’ll have his mindless enablers (think Rudy Giuliani, Josh Hawley, or the January 6 rioters). He also will face resistance from principled institutionalists of his own political party: Mike Pence, Brad Raffensperger, and Liz Cheney, among others.
But if and when Trump makes his move on the 2026 midterms, he’d be foolish to expect the Supreme Court to facilitate an attempted electoral theft. In fact, the Court’s recent rulings have made clear it will reject any effort by the president to usurp the proper electoral process envisioned by the Constitution.
It has become exceedingly easy to bash the Supreme Court and soak up the plaudits: “The conservative justices reflexively do Trump’s bidding! The Court is illegitimate! They’re all corrupt!” (Hold for applause.) In a new Economist-YouGov survey, 31 percent of all respondents say they approve of the Court, including only 12 percent of Democrats (with 79 percent disapproval from the left). Perversely, the only person who has been more ferociously critical of the justices than Democratic leaders and liberal scholars is Trump himself, who reliably throws a public tantrum every time he loses.
But overwhelmingly negative perceptions of the Court are built on misguided emotion, not hard facts. I recently hosted a talk with Yale Law School Professor Akhil Amar, a fiercely intellectually honest constitutional historian and a liberal icon who frequently (but not reflexively) criticizes Trump. When I asked Amar about the overwhelmingly negative public perception of the Court, especially on the left, he responded simply, “Well, they’re wrong.”
Indeed, the Court has delivered a recent series of momentous defeats to the president and his agenda: birthright citizenship, emergency global tariffs, deployment of the National Guard in American cities, interference with the Federal Reserve, restrictions on access to the abortion medication mifepristone. Trump has won major cases before the Court as well, of course: criminal immunity, executive power over quasi-independent federal agencies, aggressive immigration enforcement. That’s not a hopelessly partisan, pro-Trump Court; that’s a mixed bag (and, on balance, worse than that) for the president.
If we narrow the aperture to election-related cases, we get even more lopsided results against Trump. The Court gave the Republican Party a major victory in a Louisiana redistricting case, which prohibits states from considering race in gerrymandering (to either the benefit or detriment of minority groups). Last week, the Court allowed the administration to add Social Security information to a database both parties have used since 2005 to confirm the citizenship status of voters; despite overheated headlines about “voter purges,” the ruling will have little immediate practical effect, as the law prohibits use of the database for systematic voter purges within 90 days of an election.
On the flip side, the Court in June rejected the administration’s effort to prohibit states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, reinforcing the states’ constitutional power to determine the “times, places, and manner” of voting. Earlier this month, the Court blocked Trump’s executive order that would have empowered the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Postal Service to effectively determine who can vote by mail. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that it would be “arbitrary and capricious” to apply the rule in this year’s elections, as local officials wouldn’t have enough time to implement it. The Court also recently declined to intervene when Texas redistricted (in favor of Republicans) and when California and Virginia did the same (or tried to) to bolster Democratic candidates. Last week, the Court rejected for the third time Missouri’s effort to tweak its electoral map in favor of Republicans. And, of course, the Supreme Court denied and decisively ended Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 presidential election.
Neither side has celebrated every one of the Court’s decisions — and that’s exactly what we’d expect from any reasonably fair arbiter. On the whole, the Court has held strong to core constitutional and jurisprudential principles governing voting and elections. The states (and Congress), not the federal executive branch, run elections. States set their own electoral maps and procedures for distributing and counting ballots. Voting processes shouldn’t be changed shortly before Election Day itself. And voting results shouldn’t be disturbed after the fact based on reckless speculation or patent falsehoods.
Make no mistake, Trump will try to steal (or at least undermine) the 2026 elections if his party doesn’t win. And he will have his share of facilitators in that effort. But an objective look at recent outcomes demonstrates that, if and when Trump tries to subvert the midterms, the Supreme Court will serve not as an enabler but as a guardrail.
