David Daley examines Donald Trump’s recent threats to “nationalize” this November’s midterm elections and Steve Bannon’s recent warning that ICE agents will surround polling places — all driven by MAGA’s false claims of massive voter fraud. He shares his views on what steps could and should be taken now to implement safeguards to protect the nation from these threats and ensure we have a free and fair election.
SCOTT HARRIS: And right now I’m very happy to welcome back to our program, David Daley, senior fellow in communications with the group FairVote. He’s the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Anti-Democratic Inside the Far Right’s 50-Pear Plot to Control American Elections. David, thanks so much for making time for us tonight.
DAVID DALEY: Always a pleasure, Scott, and great to be played on by Billy Bragg.
SCOTT HARRIS: Oh, absolutely. He has a new song about Minneapolis, I think it’s called …
DAVID DALEY: It’s fantastic.
SCOTT HARRIS: City of Heroes.
DAVID DALEY: It’s great.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, David, just say a quick word if you would, before we begin on our conversation about the elections and concern about where everything’s headed. Say a word about FairVote and the work you and others do there.
DAVID DALEY: Sure. FairVote is a nonpartisan organization. It works towards reforms that give us better elections that offer voters more choice, more meaningful elections for everybody. Two big priorities are ranked choice voting and also a more proportional U.S. House with the larger multi-member districts that would defeat gerrymandering and really ensure that every election around the country was truly a swing election.
The Fair Representation Act is really our gold standard reform. It’s been co-sponsored by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia that would get us towards a House that actually did a better job of representing all Americans. You can find more about all of this fairvote.org.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, David, one of the first overt acts that Donald Trump took after he returned to the White House in January, 2025 that signals his intent to interfere with the 2026 election was his demand some months ago of Texas and other Republican-controlled states to undertake unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering. But Democrats have worked over the last bunch of months to counter that Trump strategy and since then there’s now much more serious Trump threats to the 2026 midterm elections that we’ll be talking about tonight. But just to sort of maybe start off where Trump did, I wondered if you would give us an overview of where the Trump GOP gerrymandering gamut is today.
DAVID DALEY: Sure. It’s a great question. I think a really important question as we head towards the midterms, Republicans hold a pretty slender 2-9, 2-16 advantage in the House. The Democrats are trying to pick up three seats and the trouble with that is the map is pretty tight and gerrymandering has made the map tighter still. Trump made that call down to Texas, picked up five seats on a new map that has been approved all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans then went into Missouri and picked up one extra seat. They went into North Carolina and grabbed one and up to Ohio where they picked up two. There is still the strong likelihood that Florida is going to move on this probably not until March or April, but they could pick up somewhere between three and five seats in Florida. Democrats have countered this in California where they retaliated against Texas with a map that picked up five additional blue seats and from there Democrats begin to run out of steam.
It becomes a little bit tougher to find any place on the map to move. Virginia right now is talking about a 10-1 Democratic gerrymander that would have to be approved by voters in the spring—which California approved it, whether or not Virginia would, I think those are two different states. We’ll have to see. There have been some efforts in Maryland where it doesn’t look at this moment that it will make it through the state Senate, and there is some litigation underway in New York that could lead to the possibility of a new map. But I think that’s probably a “Hail Mary” up there. The bigger question when it comes to the 2026 midterms becomes a case that’s at the U.S. Supreme Court right now out of Louisiana. It’s called the Callais case, and it involves a challenge to the Voting Rights Act and whether or not it is constitutional for states to draw majority minority districts.
Essentially, these are the districts that currently protect black voters, Latino voters, especially across the South, the two black seats in Alabama, the two in Louisiana, Mississippi, the seat in Memphis, Tennessee, St. Louis, Missouri. , a reason why Republicans in those red states have not gone after those districts because they’re protected by the Voting Rights Act. And white voters in Louisiana are saying that that essentially the Voting Rights Act in the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments the Constitution are discriminatory against white voters and with this Supreme Court, that could be a winning argument. So the question becomes when will the Supreme Court rule on this case and how sweeping will the decision be if the decision comes down this month or next month? There’s still a chance that some of those southern states could draw additional Republican districts ahead of 2026. If not, they’d likely have to wait until 2028.
SCOTT HARRIS: I see. And I’ve read that if the Supreme Court demolishes Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as they did Section 5, that it could get the Republicans 12 to 19 more seats nationally. Is that the ballpark you’re talking about too?
DAVID DALEY: That’s about the number, yes. And the timing of this would really be everything. If the Supreme Court doesn’t rule on this case until June when most of its major decisions come down, you’d be too close to this year’s elections to go ahead and cause much mischief. But if that decision comes down when the court comes back into session sometime after Feb. 20, you could still meet deadlines in any number of states. You might even see Texas go back and do an additional gerrymandering and go after a handful of those seats that are currently protected if those protections go away. So it’s a very consequential case, not only for the illegal decision, but in terms of what day it’s announced.
SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Its effects on the election, as you said. We’re speaking with David Daley, senior fellow in communications with the group FairVote. In recent weeks, David, Donald Trump has urged Republicans in Congress to “nationalize” the 2026 elections and take over the running of elections in 15 Democratic party- controlled states. Clearly, Donald Trump doesn’t want the House to be taken over by Democrats. It’s reported one of his biggest fears is being impeached for a third time. And right now, the way things look in the country, Democrats are on the rise and could take over both the House and Senate, which would give Donald Trump a lot of cause for concern, given all the lines of the Constitution and rule of law that he and his administration have crossed over his first 12 months in office. Tell us about your view of what Trump is asking Congress to do and if it’s legal or not to have the Republicans just shove some rules and regulations down states’ throats, where the Constitution seems pretty clear that states run their own elections.
DAVID DALEY: That’s right. I think what’s important to state at the outset of this conversation is, I don’t want to sound alarmist or defeatist. Trump can’t do this. The Constitution stands in his way. We have a decentralized election system in this country. Our elections are run at the state level. They’re run sometimes at the precinct level, the county level. The federal government does not run our elections. They cannot simply step in and federalize our elections. So, I say that and I can hear some of your listeners saying, “Yeah, well, the Constitution says all sorts of things, and he’s run roughshod over all of that,” but in this case, things are very, very clear and that does not, however, mean that we shouldn’t be concerned and alarmed and very vigilant because certainly if you were looking to do a wholesale takeover of elections ahead of the midterms, you would be doing some of the things that they are talking about right now.
And so we certainly need to be paying very, very close attention to what is going on on any number of fronts. I think one of the most concerning fronts is what’s underway right now in Georgia, where Trump is still attempting to prove that in 2020 the election was taken from him in Fulton County and the FBI, under the watchful eye of Tulsi Gabbard went in and claimed all kinds of voting machines and tapes and ballots from 2020. The fear there is that this is the kind of move that the administration could take in swing states in order to try and stop a full and fair counting of ballots in important states. Or, that the presence of Gabbard suggests that Trump is looking for some legal fig leaf to proclaim a national emergency and to step in and federalize elections, or perhaps to find a way to force a state Republican takeover of this blue Fulton County Atlanta election board.
So lots of opportunity for mischief going on there. You combine that with what’s happening right now in Minnesota. The enforcement by ICE and immigration officials in masks really terrorizing a city. We’ve all watched the execution of American citizens protesting these activities.
And what we have seen there is a city where citizens are afraid to go out to school, to work, to church, to buy groceries. And the question becomes, if people are that nervous to go about daily life under what has essentially been federal occupation, how will they feel on Election Day? I think it’s important to notice here that there were a couple of state legislative elections in Minnesota last month and turnout was strong and Democratic victories and Democratic districts actually grew. The margins there grew, so people did not feel as if they could not come out. But what if what we are seeing in Minnesota is a dry run for the kinds of activities you might see in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee in October and November of this year? And you have masked ICE officers, intimidating citizens into staying home for fear that they will be asked for papers or find themselves on the other side of a very aggressive enforcement process.
There’s also many bills in Congress, most notably the SAVE and the MEGA acts that are making their way through and Trump looks like he’s trying to fast track these. Now.
SCOTT HARRIS: I did want to ask you about that.
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, I’m sorry. I keep babbling.
SCOTT HARRIS: No, no, you’re right on target. I was going to ask you about the—I wondered if you’d sit just briefly, we only have a minute, a couple minutes left, but please describe the SAVE Act, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act or SAVE Act in the House and Senate. I think there’s two different versions and there’s a concern that Trump will urge Republicans in the Senate, particularly, to override the filibuster for this bill.
DAVID DALEY: Yeah, I don’t think these senators will override the filibuster for this. But certainly if they did, it contains a lot of the voter election denialists’ biggest goals as far as national voter ID and that it would be very, very rigorous and that would get in the way of tens of millions of Americans from casting ballots in that there are 69 million married women in this country who have a license that does not have their “official name” on it. All of these people in these instances could conceivably be on the wrong side of voter ID laws on Election Day. Prohibition, on mail ballots, lots and lots of things in these bills that would be themselves problems that would put additional barriers between American citizens and the ballot box.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, just finally, this is certainly an important question, but I hope we could do this in a minute or two, but David, what’s the most important thing that people generally, the opposition Democratic party can do to safeguard the elections given all these threats out there?
DAVID DALEY: I think we have to be hypervigilant, hyper aware, but we need not to panic. I mean, I think that “Trump will cancel the midterms.” He’s not going to cancel the midterms. He cannot federalize these elections, but we all need to be watching and aware. The states that can count ballots early should be doing everything they can to make sure that they are counting ballots early. Because what the administration is going to attempt to do is what they’ve done in previous elections, right? They’re going to say, “Well, on election night Republicans, were ahead and then you counted all of these mail ballots and all of these absentee ballots, and then our leads shrunk.” So whatever we can do in advance to counter that narrative in all of these states that ought to begin the process of counting early votes as early as they can. Really, really important, and if you can be a part of this, if you can get out, if you can volunteer, if you can help protect elections and count ballots and become part of this process, we need you this year more than ever.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well said. David, thank you for being here with us tonight and all you do to bring attention to the crucial issues, especially this year facing our elections and a free and fair vote to secure democracy. How can folks get in touch with you and the people you work with at FairVote?
DAVID DALEY: You can always find FairVote online, fairvote.org. You can find me on Blue Sky, Dave Daley at Blue Sky. And you can find Anti-Democratic and the other book whose title I won’t mention, at your local bookstores or anywhere online that you buy books. Hopefully, it’s not the place that’s owned by Jeff Bezos, but there’s lots of other great …
SCOTT HARRIS: Bookstores.
DAVID DALEY: Yes, great spots.
SCOTT HARRIS: Yeah. Alright, David, thanks so much. We’ll stay in touch.
DAVID DALEY: Anytime, Scott. Thank you.
SCOTT HARRIS: That’s David Daley, senior fellow in communications at the group fairvote.org.
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