WASHINGTON — Democrats have spent months researching arcane election law, preparing legal briefings and even role-playing ahead of this fall’s midterms so they’re ready, in real time, to combat as many as 150 potential threats President Donald Trump might throw at them.
But, even with all that meticulous preparation, the Democratic Party doesn’t seem to have a solid plan if Trump declares a national emergency ahead of Election Day.
“We talked about this today. It's a little frightening,” Rep. Paul Tonko (D-NY) told Raw Story last month — on the last day the House of Representatives was in session before November’s elections. “We're just coming up with scenarios of what could happen.”
“But did your office find a solution?” Raw Story pressed the nine-term progressive.
“Uh, no,” Tonko admitted. “We didn't take it that far.”
Trump just might take it that far, though.
In a recent interview, Trump teased testing the full weight of presidential powers when asked if he’d trigger the Insurrection Act — which enables presidents to deploy the military on U.S. soil — ahead of this year's midterms.
“I don’t rule anything out,” Trump told Time.
That’s why Democrats are braced for a historic battle — one they’re praying doesn’t involve hand-to-hand combat as was witnessed the last time the public handed Trump a crushing electoral defeat after the 2020 election.
“We feel like we are winning.”
Democrats are feeling buoyed after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor last month and rejected Trump’s plan to use Postal Service workers to police mail-in ballots.
“We feel like we are winning,” Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) — who’s charged with heading up House Democrats’ election security blueprint this cycle — told Raw Story. “And winning only means in our mind that people get to cast a meaningful ballot, that the ballot gets counted and the will of the American people is reflected.”
Morelle’s feeling bullish after overseeing the research and preparation of the 150 or so contingency plans the Democratic Party has readied to combat interference.
“We have plans for literally every contingency that we can think of and some I don't even think they've thought of,” Morelle continued.
“We have mitigation plans and response plans. We are working across the country with literally hundreds of partners and allies, not necessarily even Democratic allies, just not-for-profit groups who care deeply about making sure the elections come up. We're working with local and state administrators who — Democrats and Republicans — do a really great job.”
But the Democratic Party still doesn’t seem to have a tangible plan of action if Trump takes the unprecedented step of declaring a national emergency and stopping the vote altogether.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing will happen”
So what happens if President Trump upends 250 years of (mostly) free and (usually) fair elections in the lead-up to this year’s midterms?
“It will be a crime,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) — the former House Majority Leader — told Raw Story. “Because he'll be wrong.”
Like the former majority leader, a former senior American diplomat isn’t too worried about Trump decreeing a national emergency.
"There's not really anything you guys could do if he declares a national emergency ahead of the vote?" Raw Story pressed the former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. "It goes to the courts?"
"Yeah, yeah," Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) told Raw Story at the Capitol. "And everyone would still be working, so our ability to file lawsuits — or join in lawsuits — wouldn't be impeded."
When Raw Story initially approached Beyer, top of his mind was potential issues in seating the new Congress on Jan. 3, 2027.
"One of the rumors out there is, what if Mike Johnson doesn't seat us?" Beyer said.
Democrats have already gamed that scenario out.
"What I heard was that when we come in, he's not the Speaker,” Beyer continued. “It's the Clerk of the House who swears in the Speaker after he or she has been elected. And so he won't be elected, so he can't not seat us, because he has no power."
There were so many whispers about this scenario that Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Don Bacon (R-NE), who’s retiring, are now circulating a letter asking each of their House colleagues — including Johnson (R-LA) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) — to pledge a peaceful transfer of power in the new year.
That’s, in part, because whether Trump and his congressional allies have the power or not hasn’t stopped them in his bulldozer-like second term.
“The threats have evolved”
Many political watchers have been on edge since July, when Trump interrupted primetime programming and addressed the nation on “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”
Election experts panned Trump’s address for merely repackaging old intelligence, like his claim China acquired “220 million U.S. voter files” in 2020, even though voter data isn’t centrally located in America because each state runs its own elections.
That was then. This is now, and many are freaking out.
In an unprecedented move, the Department of Justice is preparing to deploy 1,000 election monitors across the nation, which comes on the heels of Raw Story breaking the news that the Postal Service has hired close to 1,000 armed security guards ahead of November’s midterms.
In recent weeks, the Department of Homeland Security quietly shared a 13-page plan from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (aka CISA), which DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said “very clearly describes multiple issues with voting machines.”
Mullin’s phrasing had election watchers bristling.
Their expert ears heard the legal claim buried in the DHS secretary’s otherwise bland statement: If there are issues with voting machines — unsubstantiated though they may be — then the federal government has an obligation to step into locally administered elections.
The steady drumbeat reverberating from senior officials throughout the federal government — including the president’s repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election — has Democratic Party leaders braced.
“As the year has progressed, the threats in the election space have evolved,” Morelle — who Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries tapped to lead House Democrats’ election integrity task force — told a sympathetic crowd at a Fairfax County, Virginia election security field hearing on Oct. 1.
In Morelle’s role as ranking member of the House Administration Committee, which has jurisdiction over U.S. elections, he’s been on an election security listening tour for the past year as he fanned out across the nation, holding sessions and information-rich mock hearings.
“Sadly, I think we find ourselves in a moment when those things that we traditionally rely upon to defend democracy are no longer the bulwarks that they were,” Morelle said. “The Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI — they are now threats. The Department of Justice is trying to get voter information, which is private. Department of Homeland Security is not doing its duty to protect elections' critical infrastructure.”
Under the guise of election security, Trump has spent most of the year trying to strong-arm the GOP-controlled Senate into passing his SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship for all voters.
Morelle dismisses that sustained effort as a flimsy veil for the president’s true intentions.
“In fact, even as the president was on national television talking about threats and cybersecurity threats from adversaries and others, he was defunding the election security unit at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA,” Morelle lamented.
Morelle’s also been coordinating with Senate Democrats, state attorneys general, local election watchers from coast to coast and organizations like the NAACP or Native American Voting Rights Coalition.
The New York Democrat has then been funneling the local wisdom he’s gleaned to his Democratic colleagues, providing the rest of the caucus with regular updates, in-person briefings and actionable toolkits to combat Trump in real time this fall.
“It's not like I'm Pollyannaish. I know he's coming. He comes every day,” Morelle told Raw Story. “It's just that we have been successful. We're going to continue to be successful, and we want people to have confidence in the system.”
Confidence in the system appears to be at historic lows, according to a recent UC San Diego survey that found “just 49% of voters” expect November’s elections to be “free and fair.”
“Election integrity is not just one thing.”
While only Trump himself knows if he’s planning to trigger a national emergency in the coming weeks, rank-and-file Democrats are hoping to flood the zone.
At the start of the month, West Point alumni and U.S. Army veteran Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) introduced the “No Troops in Our Streets Act,” which would explicitly outlaw military interventions in elections.
The measure “prevents President Trump from weaponizing the military to interfere with elections; the introduction follows new reports that advisors close to the President are encouraging him to declare martial law ahead of the midterm elections,” the Congressman claims.
“We've organized in my community for if we need to,” Ryan told Raw Story.
“You ready?” Raw Story pressed.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I mean, I think there's a playbook to a certain degree for Minneapolis, actually.”
If you remember, when ICE unleashed "Operation Metro Surge" and flooded Minneapolis with poorly trained agents, local communities banded together and coordinated block-by-block resistance efforts.
The community reactivated the mutual aid networks that were used to weather COVID lockdowns and they rebooted the loose alliances that proved essential to navigating the unrest unleashed in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
Private Signal chats and rapid response teams helped local citizens combine their powers while confronting law enforcement threats. The community also showed the power of cellphone and body cameras in combating the misinformation and outright lies spread by rogue agents.
“Election integrity is not just one thing,” Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) told Raw Story. “It's a thousand different things in every place where we think something's going to happen.”
During this year’s extended congressional recesses, elected Democrats have been rallying their base, wooing disillusioned MAGA supporters and directing their constituents to drop their ballots in official drop boxes — not Trump’s weaponized Post Office — as early as their local law allows.
Stansbury, a former federal worker, says whether Trump declares a fictional national emergency or not, she’s girded for an epic electoral clash.
“The most likely scenario is going to be similar to what we saw in 2020,” Stansbury predicted underneath the towering Capitol dome. “We already know that Donald Trump has hired a whole new slate of DOJ attorneys. We think he's going to use them to try to file lawsuits in any races where he has questions. I think he's likely to try to use the FBI and other federal law enforcement to seize ballots.”