Early concerns for the 2026 Midterms

TAT readers,

First things first, thank you all for your patience. I haven’t written now for a week, a very rare occurrence. Considering the length of some of my essays, the hiatus may have been a pleasant respite for some of you. Last week’s Thanksgiving holiday, my favorite of the year, is traditionally the beginning of a few weeks, where I reflect on the passing year and what lies ahead. All this means is that I will be a bit more erratic about posting, but never fully absent during the holiday season. In fact, I still owe a couple of people responses in my Substack mail.

My recovery from last Thursday’s feast via the generous hospitality of dear friends, is now complete and my mind is already abuzz with warning bells and sirens for the year ahead. I am not generally associated with hyperbole and detest the use of fearmongering as a method for motivating people to act. There are though times that a good stern warning must be delivered, with all the subtlety of a prize-fighter’s knockout punch. This is one of those times. For those that do not understand the importance of next year’s midterm elections, I don’t believe it delusional or even an overblown warning, that our elections are under significant threats. If our elections are compromised in any way and without redress, our republic as we knew it, ceases to exist. Restoring them once lost is a risky and painful proposition at best, and unimaginable at worst.

Over the ensuing months and as we approach the midterms, I will continually bring news regarding the topics to be briefly discussed today and continue to highlight new threats that arise as well. More than any other single factor, free and fair elections are what make and keep us Americans. Protecting our elections should be first and foremost in the hearts and minds of every single citizen.

The three primary classifications of election threats are, 1. voting irregularities, 2. information control and 3. legal. Please keep in mind that these categories are just general groupings that include an exhaustive number of tactics, strategies and operations. The point of today’s essay is to explain how that they are all connected and for the specific purpose of illegally and dishonestly, “rigging” our midterms. Next up, let’s take a quick look at each of the three categories, in order to better understand the complexity of these threats.

First of all, we must acknowledge that the baseline for understanding the types of voting irregularities we so often hear about and see in our news feeds, is that fraudulent irregularities are nearly non-existent in US elections, going back decades. The wild accusations so common in Republican election fraud rhetoric about the 2020 election, are so false as to be laughable. Their fearmongering about election fraud, is solely designed to undermine confidence in our electoral process. The problem is that we are no longer living in a 2020 world and the potential for election fraud and other related crimes has grown acutely. This is where the law enters the picture, pertaining to where voter oppression and suppression can occur. The other side of the legal issue is a simple question not easily answered in Trump and the GOP’s America… “do we still have faith in the justice system?”

Faith in today’s DOJ is hard to come by for most Americans. Watching AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel flail like fish out of water professionally, while clumsily pursuing useless political and personal vendettas for the White House, should horrify any sane and law-abiding citizen. If you can get by Patel and Bondi’s hyper-partisan malevolence, we still must contend with a Federal Court system that seems to stop functioning at the very top, the US Supreme Court. To borrow from an FDR quote, the Chief Justice John Roberts Supreme Court, will “live in infamy.”

Finally, one of the bright spots in our national elections from a national security perspective, is that DHS under Presidents Biden and Obama, greatly strengthened DHS involvement in election security. CISA in previous years has done a very fine job of protecting our elections from normal cyber threats, as well as keeping the public informed as to our threats.

What DHS, CISA and others fail, it that cyber threats are often influence operations as well. The mixture of the two when wielded by experienced operators such as Russia, the GOP’s propaganda arm, bot and troll farms, etc. is a potent assault on the essence of our republic, voting rights. As for threats from the influence operations saturating our social media feeds, the entire national security community has failed miserably to protect the nation, for more than forty years. Under the current administration, we can expect no national security help in managing our mis and disinformation threats or, conspiracy theories and false narratives either.

Last but not least, is that pesky category about “information control.” This pertains mainly to administration propaganda, spewed all day and every day from the White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, GOP congressmen, their propaganda machines and especially Trump himself. Not only does the White House have a bully pulpit, but they also have the power to deprive US citizens of critical information during the election season. Whereas DHS has done a remarkably good job through the 2024 election about keeping Americans informed on election security, there is no chance that we will be afforded this same level of protection in 2026. The replacement of so many officials within the election security community and replaced by MAGA loyalists, leaves the proverbial fox, in charge of the henhouse.

This criminal administration has long regulated what information can be disseminated by agencies within the government. All agencies have MAGA Republicans acting as political commissars in every US agency. Dissent is not tolerated and results almost always, in loss of one’s job. DHS in particular has become an overt propaganda agency, with their crazy claims about immigration, removal operations and those hideous Kristi Noem, propaganda videos in our airports.

Ultimately, the administration has long demonstrated heavy-handed tactics to censor mass media. Their Jimmy Kimmel debacle did show the limits of such heavy-handedness, but in a variety of ways, multi-media conglomerates still show deference to the wants and whims of the White House. One way or another, what we read, see, hear and otherwise experience, is being significantly influenced by mass media.

All things considered, all three categories of threats are in the way of our successful resistance against tyranny. There will be plenty of distractions from now through the new year. Today’s brief essay was merely food-for-thought about what lies ahead. A large part of my focus in the coming months, will be in finding a way around these obstacles and defeating the un-American ideology behind the dismantling of our republic. So long as we all can agree to focus on a general strategy or a plan to overcome obstacles such as described here today, our numbers will speak volumes about our will to restore our constitutionally guaranteed birthrights. The three points above are only my early thoughts about what stands in our way in the year ahead, or until we restore our republic.

We must deny this administration and their party’s intentions to, control all media, deny our First Amendment Rights and legislate draconian voter suppression tools, including gerrymandering. The GOP brand is now dead and has been fully replaced by MAGA-themed fake conservatism, that exclusively enables autocratic oligarchy.

The best tool against unconstitutional threats is truth, spoken loud and clear and by as many voices as possible. This is why that I and so many of you, write, speak out, organize and march. When engaged in heavy cognitive combat with determined and powerful adversaries like the GOP, Russia and their oligarchs, the old proverb that says, “the best defense is a great offense,” is spot on. Take the fight to them with powerful, sustained campaigns about how the GOP protects pedophiles, how they have accomplished nothing for anyone but themselves and their oligarchical campaign donors, or their unwillingness to abide by the constitution and rule of law.

In order to win regularly against a well-oiled propaganda machine, we must establish and control the most important narratives. The GOP dishonestly used the alleged “border crisis” and so-called “inflation” narratives throughout the 2024 campaign, and we heard little or nothing from the DNC. Those two issues were the primary reason that the Trump campaign succeeded. The DNC let the GOP control the narratives then, and still do. There is no indication that the DNC has learned anything at all, and so I share my professional insights here with you, the warriors in the trenches and on the front lines of American democracy.

Onward my friends,

Paul