THIS MIGHT BE HOW TRUMP INTENDS TO STEAL THE MIDTERMS, WITH MIKE JOHNSON'S BACKING

A couple of polls released this week suggest that Democrats are in a strong position to take back the House in November. A Fox poll gives Democrats a 7-point lead on the generic congressional ballot and a record-high level of support:

If the election were today, 53% of voters would back the Democratic candidate in their House district and 46% the Republican.... Notably, 53% is the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.

An Emerson College poll gives Democrats an even bigger lead:

A new Emerson College Polling survey of likely 2026 voters finds the Democrats with an 11-point advantage over the Republicans on the generic congressional ballot, leading 53% to 42%.

But because of gerrymandering, there aren't a lot of swing districts for Democrats to win, so even a blue tsunami is likely to leave them with a single-digit or low-double-digit majority.

And that could be before the challenges begin.

David French has pinpointed one way the Republican Party might try to steal the House after the midterms:

Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says that “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In plain English this means that the House and Senate make their own decisions regarding who belongs in each chamber of Congress, and those decisions are not reviewable by any other branch of government, including the courts....

The actual process for contesting an election to the House is governed by the Federal Contested Elections Act of 1969.... The actual grounds for overturning an election are left to the discretion of the House....

The law gives a losing candidate, which it calls the “contestant,” 30 days after the certification of the election by state election officials to file a challenge with the House. The challenge is then referred to the Committee on House Administration, which investigates the contestant’s claims.

The contestant is supposed to bear the burden of proving that the election result should be reversed. But the matter is ultimately decided by a simple majority of the House, and the House can refuse to seat any member while the contestant’s challenge is pending....

This means that even if Democrats win a House majority after all the votes are counted this fall, one or more defeated Republican candidates could try to persuade the lame-duck Republican majority not to permit their Democratic opponents to take office while the challenge is pending.

Would every Republican unite to deny a half-dozen or dozen Democrats their seats? Maybe disaffected Republicans like Thomas Massie wouldn't, but I'm not sure.

French tries to imagine the possible excuses for the challenges:

And as the 2020 election conspiracies illustrate, the challenges could be based on virtually anything. A contestant could use the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE Act to claim that illegal immigrants voted for his opponent in large numbers. Or he could claim that a state’s refusal to turn over voter rolls to the Trump administration meant that the election was corrupt. Or he could go right back to the 2020 playbook and cast doubt on mail-in ballots.

All of these sound plausible. For mail-in ballots, I'd expect Republicans to focus in particular on ballots counted after Election Day in California, where one or more Democrats might win after trailing on Election Night, simply because Democrats like to vote by mail more than Republicans do.

Republicans could also categorically proclaim that no socialist should be seated in Congress. Donald Trump and Mike Johnson has been talking about socialism quite a bit lately. Early this month, Johnson said:

We’re fighting right now in Congress over whether we're going to maintain our status as a constitutional republic or we're going to trade that in, dismantle the foundations and go down this dark road of death to communism. That is the question on the ballot this fall....

There has been a small number of times in the history of America where the actual experiment in self-governance was on the ballot. The idea that we would preserve a constitutional republic, one nation under God, a government of, by, and for the people. All that is in question right now. For the first time, really in my lifetime, this is a real question. The American people have to decide in November, in a midterm election for Congress and Senate. It’s not something that we would've projected. I hoped and prayed it would never come to this, but here we are. The barbarians are in the gate.

The three Zohran Mamdani endorsees who won congressional primaries this year will all have Republican challengers in November. All three endorsees are likely to win in November, probably by two-to-one margins -- but all of their Republican opponents could challenge their elections on "OMG communism!!!" grounds. There could be challenges to democratic socialist candidates elsewhere in the country (Melat Kiros in Colorado), and even to long-established House members who are democratic socialists (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib).

I suspect that whatever the Trump administration does to try to steal the midterms up to Election Day will be the tip of the iceberg. The worst will come after the elections. It might not work, but it will at least discredit the new Congress in many voters' eyes -- although no Democratic victory will ever again be seen as legitimate by the majority of Republican voters, which is no way to run a democracy.