Midterms 2026: The Fight Over the Vote Became the Vote

The Rumors That Won’t Die

The week before Election Day the conversation about election integrity in 2026 kept returning to the same whispers, each one amplified online before it could be examined. One of the loudest was about the Postal Service. Posts on X and Facebook said the U.S. Postal Service had hired a private security firm to station 1,000 armed guards at post offices primarily in blue states ahead of the 2026 midterms. The claim traced to early October reporting that Prosegur, an international security company, had deployed nearly 1,000 armed officers to at least 55 post office locations as part of a Postal Service contract.

The Postal Inspection Service pushed back in a statement on Oct. 28. It said it had deployed a mix of unarmed and armed contract security officers to key USPS facilities, but that the deployment started in 2025 and had absolutely nothing to do with elections. The service said deployments were based on the number of employees at a facility, not the political leaning of the state. It said it could not confirm where guards were stationed in order to maintain operational security. A senior public relations representative for the Postal Service reportedly said the service had deployed armed security officers since last year. The executive director of the Postal Police Officers Association said wider deployment began after October 2025 and that claims the guards were brought in to meddle with the election were not supported by the information he had.

A parallel rumor was about voting machines. Social media posts in the final days of early voting said electronic voting machines were changing Democratic votes to Republican votes. The posts mentioned Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee. The surge followed a complaint on Oct. 21 by Stella Parton, sister of the late Dolly Parton, who said on Facebook she had to go back three times and correct her vote because it kept defaulting to Marsha Blackburn. Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee, is running for governor against Democrat Jerri Green. The Cook Political Report rates that race as solid Republican.

State officials and election experts said the reports matched a familiar pattern. The Tennessee state coordinator of elections said it was not a vote-flipping situation, normally like an unintended touch they may not even realize. He described multiple safeguards between selection on the machine and the ballot being processed. Voters see a review screen of their selections before printing, then review the printed ballot before it is deposited into the scanner and counted. The votes are counted on that paper ballot, not on the screen. He said for you to vote for a candidate that’s not supposed to be voted for, every one of those checks and balances along the way would have to fail.

The executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research said 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2008, every election we get these smattering of vote-flipping claims. For some jurisdictions, including some in Tennessee, ballots are still processed using a direct recording electronic machine, an older version of touchscreen, which can sometimes have a little bit of calibration problems. For more common modern touchscreens on ballot marking devices, almost all of the claims of vote-flipping are understandable human error. A law professor who served during the Biden administration as the White House’s senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights said he had heard a few reports of a few instances in which touchscreen machines were apparently having difficulty registering individuals’ choices, and registering other choices instead.

He suggested if a voter encounters an issue, the fix is easy: pay attention when the system asks you to verify that your choices are correct, and if you’re having difficulty, bring it to the pollworker or precinct inspector’s attention. An electronic voting security expert said this happens in a few places every couple of years. It is typically a touchscreen calibration issue. It is unlikely to be malicious hacking, because a hacker who wanted to steal an election would use a method voters couldn’t notice.

The Stage Is Set: Rallies in Red Country

The final week of campaigning was a study in proximity and contrast. President Donald Trump headed to Ohio to rally voters in a race that could determine control of the Senate. That stop followed dueling rallies in another key battleground, Texas, that highlighted sharp divisions driving this year’s midterms.

Last night in a usually deep red state, Trump and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico held rallies just miles apart in Lubbock. The president mocked the Democrat with insults and a nickname. Seven days from now, the people of Texas are going to defeat Democrat communist James Talafreako, he said. Talarico used the timing of the dueling rallies and that nickname to fire up the crowd. I know that we’re not the only show in town tonight, and I appreciate all 4,000 of you that showed up here this evening. That’s a lot of Talafreakos in one room. Talarico’s opponent, State Attorney General Ken Paxton, also took swings. He described the other guy, James Talarico, the most radical Democrat to ever run in Texas history.

It was all for a key seat in a state that has not elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate in more than three decades. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to retake the majority in the U.S. Senate. In Pennsylvania, just two years ago the state was central to Trump’s return to the White House, but now anxieties over the economy and corruption have crumbled support for the Republican base.

A new New York Times/Siena University poll showed Democrats may be making surprising gains. In reliably red South Carolina, Republican Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill her late brother Lindsey Graham’s seat, was tied with Democrat Annie Andrews. In North Carolina, where a Democrat hasn’t been elected to the Senate in nearly 20 years, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper led Republican Michael Whatley by double digits, centering his campaign on affordability. Vice President J.D. Vance was making the case for Republicans in North Carolina. North Carolina, you send a message to Washington that we are sick of being ignored, we are sick of being left behind, and we are going to put America first for a change.

On the other side of the map, former President Barack Obama came to Georgia to close the week. He spoke at a campaign rally in suburban Atlanta to support U.S. senator Jon Ossoff, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, and an array of down-ballot Democrats. From 3,500 to 4,000 people filled the Discovery Center of Clayton county for the late election season stop.

These are not serious people, he said of Donald Trump and the Republican party. And we’re all paying the price for their lack of seriousness. He invoked the image of Trump’s gilded renovations of the White House and noted Trump’s strident reaction to his crack last week likening it to Saddam Hussein decorating a Cheesecake Factory. The Saddam Hussein thing didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this is the crazy part: they mobilized a whole government response to that joke. The White House even called the secretary of the treasury. The guy who is trying to figure out how to lower inflation… they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.

He rebuffed Republicans’ accusations of snobbery. I am the father of two daughters. Do you think I could have survived their childhood without going to the Cheesecake Factory? He turned the discussion to affordability for American voters, in contrast with the corruption of the presidency. We have never seen a president so intent on selling favors. The guy has made billions of dollars while in office. Understand that this has not been done in modern times.

Ossoff spoke about the construction of a new ballroom on the site of the former East Wing. Each day, Donald Trump digs the moral pit deeper, he said, accusing the president of leading the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it. If you’re involved in any of this, next year you’ll be raising your hand to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, he said, in reference to Democrats pledging to impeach Trump if they take control of Congress next year. The crowd chanted Lock him up.

Bottoms contrasted her candidacy with her Republican opponent Rick Jackson, tying the billionaire healthcare executive to Trump and describing them as two out-of-touch billionaires who want to keep getting rich on the backs of taxpayers. Rev. Raphael Warnock warned of spiritual wickedness in high places while describing the effects of deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP nutrition support for children. This is about the character of the country, he said. This is about who we are and whether we are here for one another. I am concerned about the spiritual health of our country. There is brokenness, because only a broken nation could manage to elect Donald Trump twice.

The Court Pushback

While the rallies played out, a federal courtroom in California became the most concrete test of election integrity claims. About two weeks before Election Day, the Justice Department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

The Justice Department gave officials just 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if officials did not sequester ballots from those whose citizenship it could not confirm. The department refused to provide more details about its methodology and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators the list was inaccurate. The Justice Department then sued California on Oct. 15 to try and force the state to sequester ballots and verify citizenship.

U.S. District Judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, declined to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots. This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election, Carter wrote. Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch. In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.

Carter wrote that if the Justice Department’s request were granted, it would likely violate a 1993 law that requires states to strike ineligible voters from its official lists no later than 90 days before an election. California election officials have said they cannot verify the citizenship of those on the agency’s list before Election Day. A ballot segregated, in effect, would be a ballot removed, Carter wrote. The Justice Department separately threatened to prosecute election officials in the state if they tabulate ballots from non-citizens.

After filing the lawsuit, the Trump administration began providing lists to other counties of suspected non-citizen voters. After Carter set a Oct. 27 hearing on the Justice Department’s emergency motion, the department took the unusual step of appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, saying Carter was not considering the case fast enough. A panel of Ninth Circuit judges ruled 2-1 against the Justice Department earlier this week.

The Numbers Behind the Noise

Throughout October, President Trump traveled across the country holding campaign rallies supporting Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms. Several more rallies were scheduled before Election Day on Nov. 3. In his remarks, which tend to last more than an hour, he mostly boasted about his and Republican policies, while attacking some Democrats running for office and others who are not. Along the way he made a number of false, misleading or exaggerated claims, many familiar to readers.

In Syracuse on Oct. 9, he falsely claimed he inherited the worst inflation in American history, then added, Now we have it down to 1.8 percent. The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the 12-month increase in prices was 23.7 percent from June 1919 to June 1920. The annualized inflation rate during the Biden administration peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, and was down to 3.0 percent when Trump took office in January 2025. It was most recently up to 3.7 percent for the 12 months ending in September. Core inflation, which refers to the rise in prices excluding food and energy items, was 2.6 percent for the 12 months ending in September.

That is down from the 3.3 percent annual core inflation rate Trump inherited, but the annual rate hasn’t been 1.7 percent or lower since 2021.

While talking about the Iran war during his Syracuse rally, Trump said as soon as the war is over, oil is tumbling down like you’ve never seen. It’s already coming way down. We control the strait. Oil is coming down. The price of crude oil is not way down. West Texas Intermediate crude was $98.73 a barrel on Oct. 9, and was up to $105.25 as of Oct. 26. The price was $66.96 a barrel on Feb. 27, the day before the war with Iran began. Brent crude was $130.03 on Oct. 9, up from $71.32 just before the war. It was $128.12 as of Oct. 26.

In San Antonio on Oct. 7, Trump said the poverty rate has just reached its lowest level, so the best poverty numbers, lowest level in American history. Think of that. African American poverty, Hispanic American poverty, and Native American poverty rates are all at their lowest levels ever recorded. The official U.S. poverty rate was 10.2 percent in 2025, the lowest on record, according to estimates the Census Bureau released in September. The official poverty rates for Hispanics and Native Americans also reached record lows last year. The lowest rate for African Americans was 17.1 percent in 2022. But 2025 was not a record year based on the supplemental poverty measure, which factors in government assistance programs and accounts for geography and additional expenses. By that measure, 13.1 percent of the U.S.

population was living in poverty in 2025, which was higher than the low of 7.7 percent in 2021.

In Port Huron, Michigan, on Oct. 25, Trump said more Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 159,044,000 people working in the U.S. in September. That’s more than ever before. But the U.S. also has its largest population now. The employment-to-population ratio was 59.2 percent in September, down from 60.1 percent when Trump took office for his second term in January 2025.

In Youngstown, Ohio, on Oct. 12, Trump said our first term was phenomenal. You know, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We’re blowing it away now. Neither of Trump’s terms were the greatest in terms of growth of real gross domestic product. During Trump’s first term, annual real GDP growth peaked at 3 percent in 2018. Since he has been back in office, real GDP growth was just 2.3 percent in 2025 and was also less than 3 percent in the first and second quarters of 2026.

Ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Trump has implored his supporters in rallies across the country to pretend I’m on the ballot. The quarterly update for his second term noted job growth became sluggish, with only 776,000 jobs created. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.2 percent, still historically low. Inflation worsened. Consumer prices are up 5.4 percent. Gasoline is up 38 percent. Wages just barely rose faster than inflation, as measured since Trump was sworn in. But they’ve decreased this year. The economy grew 2.2 percent in the second quarter. Consumer sentiment remains low. Home prices increased 6.2 percent. The trade deficit for the most recent 12 months is down 10.4 percent compared with 2024, but it has risen substantially in the last two months on record. The number of apprehensions at the U.S.

border with Mexico decreased about 91 percent. The number of refugee admissions dropped by nearly the same percentage. The percentage of the population lacking health insurance was statistically unchanged in 2025. The number of people receiving federal food assistance decreased by 6 million. Median household income rose in 2025, while the official poverty rate declined. An alternative measure of poverty that factors in government assistance showed no meaningful change. Corporate profits continued to rise; 2025 was the 10th consecutive year that profits increased. The S&P 500 went up 28.6 percent. The violent crime and murder rates in 2025 continued to decline. The publicly held debt is up about 12.8 percent.

A Closing Argument

In the final days, the election itself became the contested object. Rumors about armed guards and flipping machines fed a narrative that the process was under strain. Polls suggested surprising Democratic gains in red-state Senate races. Courts drew a line against late, thin legal efforts to segregate ballots. Rallies in Lubbock and Clayton County showed a country arguing with itself, sometimes inches apart, about what the election should mean. With one week left, the claims, the counterclaims, the court rulings and the crowds all pointed to the same pressure point: whether voters would trust the count they were asked to make on Nov. 3.