House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries vowed on Sunday that Democrats would resist and block any attempts by Republicans to “nationalize” U.S. elections, which he characterized as an effort by Donald Trump to “steal” the 2026 midterm elections.
The rebuke came in response to the president’s declaration this past week that the GOP should seek to intervene in contests on a national level. Conservatives have insisted that the president was not insisting upon full federal control of elections, though his comments came just days after FBI agents raided an elections center in Fulton County, Georgia, as part of an unspecified grand jury criminal investigation.
“What Donald Trump wants to do is try to nationalize the election. Translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen,” said the congressman from New York.
Jeffries made the assertion during an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, where he was pressed by co-host Dana Bash about his stance on voter ID laws and efforts by congressional Republicans to pass a federal voter ID requirement. Jeffries and his party remain opposed to the SAVE Act on the premise that states are constitutionally mandated to determine how congressional elections are administered.
Jeffries made that point on Sunday, arguing that some states that are Democratic strongholds, like his home state of New York, have voter ID requirements.
“States are the ones who are empowered to conduct elections and every state should be allowed to decide the best way to proceed to ensure that there’s a free and fair election. Here in New York, there are in fact voter identification requirements….What Republicans are trying to do is engage in blatant voter suppression. They know that if there’s a free and fair election in November, they’re going to lose,” he said.
Jeffries and his party are favored to make gains in November’s midterms, as Democrats hope to capitalize on issues such as persistently high consumer prices and the growing chaos of the DHS-led mass deportation program.
Axios reported last week that GOP strategists are increasingly fearful that dynamics are shifting against Republicans on the Senate map, where Sen. Susan Collins is facing a tough re-election challenge in Maine and Republicans are also trailing in other key races, including Ohio, Georgia, and North Carolina. A messy Republican primary in Texas is also causing headaches for party bosses.
This past week, Trump made comments about federal takeovers of state voting infrastructure on two occasions. In both instances, the president went far beyond the level of control that congressional Republicans were willing to back, especially as party leaders in the House and Senate are preparing to put the SAVE Act to a vote in the coming days.
During a podcast interview with his former deputy FBI director, Dan Bongino, Trump argued:
“The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over.’ We should take over the voting, the voting in at least … 15 places.”
He later told reporters in the Oval Office that “the federal government should get involved” in states where he viewed elections as tainted by corruption, presumably meaning Democratic strongholds such as Atlanta, which he cited as an example.
The president’s 2020 campaign falsely alleged that election fraud took place in Fulton County, Georgia, where FBI agents searched as part of a grand jury investigation, as well as Detroit, Michigan, both cities with Black, Democratic leaders and high percentages of Black voters.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, later falsely claimed that the president was merely referring to instituting voter ID requirements.
“What the president was referring to is the SAVE Act,” she said. “I don’t think any rational person who is being honest with themselves would disagree with the idea of requiring citizens of this country to present an ID before casting a ballot in a federal election or, frankly, in any election, and that’s something the president wants to see happen.”
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff wasn’t buying that explanation during an interview Sunday on ABC’s This Week.
“He’s prepared to try to take some kind of action to overturn the result, and we really shouldn’t question that,” said the California senator. “I think he fully intends to subvert the election.”
Of the FBI raid in Georgia, he added: “All of this is intended to send a message and the message is, ‘We will not tolerate or accept an election that we lose.’”
Jeffries, in his interview, cited several legal challenges that Democrats had filed against the administration and implied that his party would use similar measures to halt any attempts by the White House or the Department of Justice to federalize election systems run by state and local jurisdictions.
The administration remains tight-lipped about the grand jury investigation, which resulted in a raid of Fulton County’s elections offices, which has continued to provoke speculation in the days since it took plac,e as it has been revealed that Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was present for the raid and put FBI agents in contact with the president as it was carried out.
Fulton County’s district attorney, Fani Willis, led a failed attempt to prosecute Trump and members of his 2020 campaign for their attempts to level allegations of fraud and efforts to pressure state officials into halting the certification of the election results. The president was heard on a phone call with a top Georgia official asking that official to “find” thousands of votes to add to his total.
