Transcription
Agent Donald Trump is bringing his voter suppression obsession to the nation's highest court, where he feels he does pretty well most of the time. News breaking in just the last hour: The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and lift a block on an executive order that would have curbed the use of mailing ballots. That block was issued by a federal judge.
I want to add to our conversation Democratic strategist, Dan CannanEN. He served as battleground director for the Harris-Walls campaign. Mark Elias and John Heilman are still here. Heilman, your thoughts about this obsessive theme in the midterms of voter suppression, rigging the midterms by any means, whole-of-democratic-government approach by the Trump administration?
Well, well, Nicole, I take all the adjectives you just applied and say those are my thoughts. I think that, you know, we talk about this frequently. I mean, I don't, Donald Trump says a lot of stuff that he doesn't ever follow through on. He telegraphs a lot of punches he never throws. But he rarely throws a punch that he doesn't telegraph. And the thing that he's, he's been telegraphing over and over again, almost from the day he walked back into the Oval Office in January of 2025, is that he had every intention, he was in the midterm election of interfering with, putting his thumb on the scales around, messing with whatever the right phrase is, the November that was before, long before his political fortunes started to tank. And they have been tanking now consistently for a year. He's been, he has been in decline and his, he's been on the broadest scale, on the strongest issues he has, on the weakest issues he has, he has been in decline and independent Republicans and his numbers have gotten perilously bad. Again, if you break them out and look at the cross-tabs, it's on most important issues to the electorate with the most important segments of the ones who are determining who controls Congress, independent voters on the economy, again, even on issues that he's ostensibly been strong on like immigration and crime. He's in a huge amount. I know we're going to talk about this reporting about the White House starting to tell the day finally coming that I've been predicting for weeks and months that the White House is going to start to tell endangered Republicans to start to put distance. I don't think they're going to take a look at this, but it's the writing is on the wall. There are two things on the wall. One piece of writing on the wall is Republicans are headed for to lose the House and potentially lose the the Senate. The other piece of writing on the wall is Donald Trump is going to do something and he's telling us a whole bunch of things, he's doing some things already, telegraphing other things, but he's going, we are going to try to stop that from happening by any means necessary. And anybody who's not taking that seriously at this point really needs to have their head examined.
Mark Elias has been taking it seriously since before any of us was talking about any of this. This will likely be your legal fight. Your thoughts, Mark?
Yeah, so it's something I've been thinking a lot about obviously in litigating. This case that's now in the Supreme Court, uh, involves an executive order, uh, that, uh, tries to do two things. It both leverages his power, or his claimed power, in fact, the president doesn't have this power over the postal service to sort of control who can vote by mail, but what it leverages that for is to gain access to state voter data. And, you know, if the 2020 election was mostly in the courts about vote by mail, and the 2022 election in the courts was mostly about the massive voter suppression laws that Republicans enacted after the 2020 election, and the 2024, the 2024 election was mostly about preparing for the possibility that Republicans wouldn't certify Kamala Harris or Joe Biden the winner. The 2026 election is about, it's about data collection. And you and I keep doing these discussions. You know, Donald Trump has sent his Department of Justice to sue 30 states to try to get access to their voter files. The Department of Justice is 0 and 17. 0 and 17. They have literally not won a single case. They lost before eight federal judges appointed by Donald Trump. And so that's like one part of, they've tried to deploy the SAVE database, the Department of Homeland Security and force states to use that. They're trying to leverage funds for FEMA and for national, you know, national, uh, for, for, for, uh, for the defense to try to do that. The third part is this case, where they're trying to use the postal service and say, hey states, we're not going to send out any mail ballots, we're not going to carry your mail, we're not going to allow voters to return their mail ballots unless you give us your data. So I ask you, why does Donald Trump want all the voting data in the country? And the answer is clear. Because he wants to be able to take that data, lie about what's in it, and then tell the states, if you don't remove these people, these people, then all hell is going to break loose. We'll send ICE, we'll send federal agents, we won't certify, whatever it is. And I promise you, what he sends back to the states will be inaccurate. It will be, it will be racist, and it will be targeting Democrats. And that is his plan for 2026. The Supreme Court appeal is just the latest sign of it. And if people don't wake up and realize that that is how, think about how Donald Trump thinks he's going to win 2026, not by persuading voters, not by saying running on your record, but by using this data to try to subvert the.