No, Trump can’t cancel the midterms. He’s doing this instead

Worried about losing unified Republican power in Washington and mystified at his lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump keeps talking about not holding the November midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of the House, Senate or both.

Trump doesn’t understand why his approval rating is underwater (and it is, on every issue, in a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS and released Friday).

“I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,” he told House Republicans in a speech earlier this month.

Later, he added: “Now, I won’t say, ‘Cancel the election. They should cancel the election,’ because the fake news will say, ‘He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.’”

But Trump did talk about canceling the election in an interview with Reuters this week. He said Republicans have been so successful that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was “joking” and “being facetious” about canceling the election.

If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. Told during an appearance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last September that Ukraine won’t hold an election during a period of martial law during its war with Russia, Trump expressed some envy.

“So you say during the war, you can’t have elections,” Trump said. “So let me just say, three and a half years from now – so you mean, if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Sometimes they’re jokes, sometimes not

Trump routinely says things that seem like trolls until they don’t. Owning Greenland? Not a joke. However, he seems to have retreated from the oft-repeated idea of an unconstitutional third term.

And for the record, unlike Ukraine, the US has held elections in the midst of multiple wars, when the British had invaded in 1812 and when it was at war with itself in 1864. It held elections during world wars when millions of Americans fought overseas in the 20th century as well.

It makes sense that Trump would dread the November midterms

Trump knows that presidents rarely pick up seats in a midterm. His administration has been moving at breakneck speed to change the government because, as his chief of staff famously said, they know that presidents expect to lose power after their first two years. 

A net loss of just a handful of seats would give control of the House to Democrats, for instance, requiring their buy-in for spending and giving them power to investigate his administration.

Presidents do not have the power to delay or cancel elections

The Constitution requires that a new Congress be sworn in on January 3, 2027. Election Day is set in law, so it is theoretically feasible for Congress to move it, but not to cancel the election. 

Elections are supposed to be administered by each state, so state governors and legislatures could, in theory, move their own elections to deal with a major disaster, but there’s no precedent for it. To get into the weeds of all of this, read a report from the Congressional Research Service.

The president’s distrust of US elections is legendary

Trump has also mused about using emergency powers to meddle with elections. He told the New York Times recently that he regrets not directing National Guards to seize voting machines after the 2020 election.

Even the elections he has won, he has said were rigged. There’s still no evidence of any widespread voter fraud, even after all these years of the Trump era.

People are talking about doomsday election scenarios

Election officials say they are thinking very carefully about all of this. Asked about Trump’s musings at an event sponsored by The Atlantic this week, Arizona’s top election official, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said this:

“Look, you can’t cancel the election… We’ve got a whole bunch of scenarios that we’re playing through to make sure that we’re prepared for the types of processes that might be necessary to preserve our democracy so that if somebody tries to cancel something, 

if somebody tries to take some stuff they’re not entitled to, we can go to the courts, get the orders, and hopefully have the backup of law enforcement to make sure that we can move forward through this.”

“The fact that we’re running through these scenarios in the first place should tell you something about the health of our democracy,” Fontes added.

To that end, he would not elaborate on what scenarios they’re preparing for.

“I don’t want to give the bad guys any ideas,” Fontes said.