2026 Primary Elections

https://bsky.app/profile/sassysenior70.bsky.social/post/3mbhyl7okjk2j

Texas Democrats fill every state and federal race on 2026 ballot, a first for either party

Pro-Auschwitz Republican flips to Democrat in bid to win after California redistricting

Bleugh… For a second I thought an actual Representative was flipping which with the margin in the House would have been something but reading the article and looking into it this is just some perennial Nazi crank.

I'm old enough to remember when folks thought that a perennial Nazi crank couldn't become President after he insulted John McCain for being a POW.

https://www.notus.org/2026-election/jasmine-crockett-campaign-donations-crypto

Because they don't care who gets elected, as long as they have a say in things.

It's pretty clear Trump's gonna declare martial law on Minnesota, and suspend elections.
Dunno why y'all are still fantasizing.

He may bluster about doing it, but states run elections, not the federal government (and certainly not the president).

https://x.com/jacobkornbluh/status/2011612084572914091?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

True, we'll get elections, but my concerns are how rigged they'll be. Thanks to redistricting and Trump's administration and justice department putting their whole asses on the scales, I suspect Dear Leader's party favorites will somehow emerge victorious.

I'd be more concerned about post-election shenanigans like what his team of found objects tried to do after the 2020 election, but overall I'm not as pessimistic as many people on our side are.

I'll admit I'm soured on some things, and watching that Minneapolis encounter with ICE live as it happened last night made things feel even darker.

Quoting from a NYT columnist on Bluesky:

ICE can't even deal with irate middle-aged midwesterners. how does he occupy hundreds, if not thousands, of polling cites and precincts? trump v. illinois clarified that he has no legal authority to unilaterally commandeer national guards, how does he move forward from there?

what does he do about the fact that in most states midterms and statewides are on the same cycle, so "canceling the elections" might mean that tennessee doesn't have a governor next year. how does he convince tennessee republicans to give up power in their own states?

the question to ask about this is, okay, he wants to cancel the midterms. how does he get the VA state board of elections to cancel the midterms? how does he get the georgia board of elections to do it? how does he convince republican house members to quit their jobs and give up their paychecks?

now, of course, when you point out the practical obstacles to "canceling the elections" people move the goal posts to "voter suppression and various shenanigans." yeah, those things exist and they always have. but the other thing is that those things work *at the margins*

He's not wrong, but in the process of fucking up, a lot of innocent people are going to die. That's always the rub. Yeah, even Hitler eventually lost the narrative and became desperate, but look what happened to the people of Germany before that day arrived. We seem to be taking a similar course with our own news media and punditry in that they don't seem well prepared to actively resist the unhinged frothing at the mouth even though they know enough history to realize it will end very badly for many of them.

I haven't lost hope or anything like that, but I do see things getting significantly darker before they get better, and it may be a tunnel I might not emerge from on the other side.

However, a tactic working at the margins is increasingly all that Republicans need in order to end up with total control.

You are referring to what that out-of-date document, the constitution, says. True conservatives like Trump and those who support him don't care about those old things any more.

He might have a problem just "canceling the elections" in general, but he could do so on a piecemeal basis ("the election for the senate in ... is canceled, because our services have determined that there is so much corruption that it would be impossible to have a fair and honest election in the current situation). But he could also cancel the elections de facto, even if he doesn't do it de jure, just by declaring the Democratic party a domestic terrorist organisation and outlawing it, any candidate associated with it, and any candidate who has held office under it in the past ten years or so.

Part of me thinks that if he did do that, the media would be like "The Trump Administration expresses concern over Democratic Terrorism," and the Democratic Party would be like "Sir, we are going to write the strongest worded letter, expect it on your desk by next Tuesday," and then we're all going to be very screwed.

If he tried that to, say, protect Republican incumbents it wouldn't work. Without a reelection, their terms end on 3 January 2027.

Of course Republican governors could appoint senators via the 17th amendment, but they can't do that for House members.

If the Dems win control of either house the Speaker/Leader could in theory refuse to seat the Trump inserts (as if Jeffries/Schumer would ever show such spine)

The interesting thing to watch is whether the Texas gerrymander that was supposed to guarantee extra seats for the Repugnicans turns into a "dummymander" of historic proportions. The assumption is that because Latinos voted for Trump they will vote for repugnicans across the board forever and ever, amen. That could be an overoptimistic assumption. California dems could be making that mistake, but somehow, I think the voting patterns in California are more reliable than the ones in Texas, but

That's why I specified he would do it piecemeal. There would be no need for him to cancel the election in a state where a Republican is pretty much sure to win. But if you cancel the senatorial election in a state where a Democrat is very likely to win, it makes no difference that the term ends anyway. And then, as you say, the governor could name someone.

For that matter, Trump could simply declare that the senate could name replacements. (That would avoid the problem in Michigan, where a Democratic governor would name a Democrat to the senate.) He could do the same thing for the house of representatives. When you are pretending that some sort of national emergency allows you to "temporarily" set aside the constitution, the only limit is your own imagination.

My point is that I expect Trump to use very strong measures to hang on to congressional power. As the article you quoted pointed out, the tricks he tried after 2020 only work "in the margins". If that isn't enough (and it is not at all sure it will), he will do something stronger, because he absolutely will not accept having a congress that is against him. And since the supreme court has ruled that he has immunity for just about anything he does, he has nothing to lose by trying it.

Exactly what Async says. In my view it's very unlikely that Trump will cancel elections outright, because of all the reasons describe that make it difficult or theoretically against the rules for him to do so.

However, it's much more likely that he does stuff to try and muddy the waters with his supporters. In places Repubs/he wins he'll claim the victory, in places where they lose he'll claim it as a result of a faulty election the results of which are invalid.

Its exactly what he tried with the 2020 election, and then trying to get Pence to overturn the results and when it looked like that wasn't going to happen incited his supporters to storm Congress. This time round he'll throw out even more complicating factors.

The MAGAts like @Paladin will eat it all up as technically following the rules.

Not to mention that Congress can refuse to seat new members. Unless Democrats manage to gain control of Congress before the election, then it's a distinct possibility that the old Congress will simply say that the elections which picked new members who "just happen" to be Democrats, were invalid, and thus the new members won't be seated/sworn in.

Virginia may go the same way as California on redistricting — though, like California, it would have to be approved by referendum, and Virginia's electorate isn't the same as California's. (Though it is interesting to note that Prop 50 actually passed by a larger margin than Harris' 2024 margin in the state.)

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/16/virginia-redistricting-legislature-00733644

Just to anticipate the question: No, I don't think this is how our elections should be run. But a functioning democracy requires everyone to be working from the same rulebook.

US House candidate buys nazis.us domain to redirect visitors to homeland security

Obviously we are talking about crazy extralegal circumstances but constitutionally there is no Congress would could refuse to seat someone.

Representatives only serve two years. Once those two years are up they are fired unless rehired.

But the entire Congress is dissolved (which is why any pending legislation just goes away and the entire process has to start again) and has to reconstitute itself.

Which is why the rules of the House can change between every Congress. After electing a Speaker they then vote on the Rules Package which depending on the strength of leadership and their majority can vary wildly.

Yeah, whoever heard of Congress refusing to seat someone. Oh, wait.

Sure, in 1969 SCOTUS put limits on why Congress could refuse to seat someone, you wanna place odds that a SCOTUS that basically said the President can do whatever he wants and there's fuck all the law can do about it, will object to a Republican controlled Congress refusing to seat Democratic candidates who'd tip the balance of power away from the Republicans? You know, like how folks in 2024 said that there was no reason to think that ICE would be a modern Gestapo because they had such a small budget, and then Congress promptly voted them a budget so large that it dwarfs the military budgets of countries like Israel, and that of over 160 other countries.

Dude, do I need to shake you like I'm a British au pair? Shit's real goddamned bad, and the sooner folks recognize that however bad they think things are, the reality is almost certainly worse, the better.

If you really believe that then what physical concrete action are you taking in the real world?