AmeriCast weighs 2026 midterms and election threats (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Donald Trump is not saying that he's going to cancel the 2026 midterm elections, but he is talking about them in increasingly threatening terms.

[00:00:09] Speaker 2: We can't allow cheating in elections. If they can't do it honestly, and it can't be done properly and timely, then something else has to happen.

[00:00:20] Speaker 3: AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News.

[00:00:25] Speaker 1: We're going to talk about the entire 2026 set up for two reasons really, isn't it, Anthony? Number one, Donald Trump has effectively kicked off the Republican campaign, but number two, he's kicked it off by suggesting pretty strongly, not exactly in any great detail, but suggesting pretty strongly that he has his doubts about this set of elections, to put it mildly.

[00:00:49] Speaker 4: And it's something that should be familiar to anyone who's followed Donald Trump in American politics for the last 10 years. Before the 2016 election, Trump refused to say that he would accept the results of those elections. Of course, he won. He still kind of questioned the results, saying he should have won the popular vote as well. In 2020, he said the same thing. 2024, he said the same thing. He before elections tends to talk about them being honest and fair. And if he loses, that's a good indication that they are not honest and fair.

[00:01:22] Speaker 1: Yeah. And we should say that not only does it matter because this is an election that takes place right around the nation, every seat in the House, of course, and a third of the Senate as well. But also, and this is a crucial thing, the margins are pretty fine, aren't they? So in the Senate, it's four seats, isn't it, that the Democrats would need to win, four seats net gain. And in the House, Anthony, I can never... People keep dying or redesigning or retiring. I never work out what the Republican majority is, but it's tiny, isn't it?

[00:01:57] Speaker 4: It is. I think it would be a two seat switch.

[00:02:00] Speaker 1: Which is nothing, to make it plain. In a midterm, that is absolutely nothing.

[00:02:05] Speaker 4: Yeah. It's just a couple of seats in the House of Representatives that Democrats have to flip over to their side in order to take control of the chamber. And in a 435 seat chamber with all of those seats up for re-election this year, it wouldn't take much at all. You see in some wave elections like 2018 and 2010, 30, 40, 50 seats flip from one party to the other. I don't think there's any chance that we'll see that big a change, that big a wave this time around. But it is within reach for the Democrats. It's so close they can taste it. And they know that in these midterm elections, it tends to break against the incumbent party, the party in power in the White House. So they are fairly optimistic that they could take the House, even if the Senate is a slightly greater reach for them, just because of the seats that are up. Most of them lean heavily or even solidly Republican. It would take a kind of a drawing to the inside straight for them to take control of the Senate.

[00:03:08] Speaker 1: Right. OK. Just another point about the number of seats that are genuinely in play, because that always surprises people on this side of the pond, that it's actually not very many, is it? So if you look at the House, I mean, what is it, a dozen or so where where we genuinely could say they'll change hands or is it more than that, do you think?

[00:03:31] Speaker 4: Yeah, I'd say a dozen, 20 maybe that are are within. You know, there are all these different organizations that rate the races and they compile lists of what are considered to be toss up races. And yeah, a dozen, maybe a little more, maybe a little less are the ones that are truly, in their view, toss ups now in a wave election. Usually you see everything break one way or the other. And so not just one party winning all the toss ups, but winning races that maybe no one expected to them, them to win surprises. I remember in 1994, that was the first big House wave election that I can remember. Republicans won in places they had no business winning. They won a seat in Washington state that was held by the then speaker of the House. No one thought that that seat was going to go to the Republicans, but they won it. And so you get sometimes you get surprises. But when we're looking at this, if this is going to be a closely fought, contentious election where we're deciding it on the margins and yeah, we could see maybe a dozen, maybe 20 seats that are truly in play here.

[00:04:43] Speaker 1: OK, the big question hanging over them is, are they going to take place or is Donald Trump going to find some way of getting them not to take place or at least not to take place fairly? We've had an email. This is, by the way, from Roy, who's emailed us. Would slash could President Trump try to cancel the midterms if it looked like he, the Republicans were doing badly? If he did lose, would slash could he try to declare them invalid?

[00:05:08] Speaker 4: Well, it's would he cancel the elections? I doubt it. Could he even cancel the elections? That would be really, really hard. There's no provision in the law for suspending elections for any kind of reason. I suppose if there was a national disaster, some sort of a national emergency, things could change. And, you know, you never you never want to say never with Donald Trump. But for instance, after September 11th in New York City, they were having a primary contest there on September 11th, and they ended up delaying that significantly. But again, that was a local emergency, if not a national emergency. Now, could Trump declare the results invalid? Again, it would be something beyond the routine, although there have been instances where individual races have the results have been challenged in Congress. The Congress has refused to seat certain people who won in certain congressional districts because there's questions about the validity of their victory. Now, in theory, Trump and the Republicans could try to do that on a much larger scale to say, well, everyone who won in California is is a questionable, questionable validity. We're going to challenge that and not seat the entire California delegation. And if they did that, then that would virtually assure that Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, because without California, that's 30 something Democrats who would be coming in. So you can you can imagine scenarios where Trump could say these these results are invalid, have allies in Congress who also push that forward and throw all of it into question. But that is that would be unprecedented in American history.

[00:06:54] Speaker 1: Well, let's hear what the man himself is saying about what potentially concerns him. This is Donald Trump talking to reporters at the White House and then to NBC.

[00:07:03] Speaker 2: I want to see elections, be honest. And if a state can't run an election, I think the people behind me should do something about it. Because, you know, if you think about it, a state is an agent for the federal government in elections. I don't know why the federal government doesn't do them anyway. But when you see some of these states about how horribly they run their elections, what a disgrace it is. I think the federal government, when you see crooked elections, and we had plenty of them, and by the way, we had them last time, but go to 2020. Look at the facts that are coming out, rigged, crooked elections. Will you trust the results of the midterms if Republicans lose control of Congress?

[00:07:39] Speaker 1: I will if the elections are honest. And then just this morning, Donald Trump appearing at the National Prayer Breakfast, which I think we should say, Anthony, is traditionally a non-partisan event. It's a prayer breakfast. But well, it wasn't quite that this time round. Here he is with his address.

[00:07:59] Speaker 2: I don't know how a person of faith can vote for a Democrat. I really don't. And I know we have some here today, and I don't know why they're here because they certainly don't give us their vote. I certainly know that we're not going to be convincing them to vote for a little thing called voter ID. It polls at 97%. And even the Democrat, the people, the voters are at 82% for voter ID, but the leaders don't want to approve of it. They said they will strike. They will not allow it to happen.

[00:08:30] Speaker 4: Gosh, there's a lot to unpack there, Justin. The first thing I'll say is that that National Prayer Breakfast speech that Donald Trump gave lasted more than an hour. It practically became a national prayer lunch by the time he was done. But he covered a lot of ground. And yes, it was personal. And yes, it was calling into question the faith of Democrats, the religious faith of Democrats, and then touching on one of his favorite subjects, which is questioning the results of the 2020 election. And I'll add that there is no evidence of any kind of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The facts that he says have come out haven't supported that. Now, he says that there's more facts that are going to come out soon, and we'll look at them when he presents them. But at least at the moment, Joe Biden won that election. It's just Donald Trump who can't seem to let it go.

[00:09:17] Speaker 1: Yeah. To the enormous annoyance, at least behind the scenes, of a lot of Republicans who, even if they kind of vaguely think that he might have a point, actually just think that that's not the way that they're going to win the next set of elections, either this set this year or indeed the next presidential one either. Plus, that stuff about, I don't know why the federal government doesn't run elections. Well, it's not just that it's in the Constitution, is it, Anthony? It's an absolute... I mean, if you're a conservative Republican, at least until recently, you hugely believed in states' rights. The idea of the federal government, frankly, running anything, really, other than defending the country occasionally, was anathema to you. It is a complete turning on its head, isn't it, of so much that you traditionally think Republicans believe?

[00:10:03] Speaker 4: Yeah, it's in the Constitution. States administer the election. Now, I will say that there have been times when the federal government has stepped in to provide guidelines, to provide rules for how the states could run these elections. In the 1990s, for instance, they passed what was called the Motor Voter Law, which required that departments of motor vehicles also provide voter registration, that you get a voter registration when you get a driver's license. You just check a box, and you're automatically registered. That was one way the federal government stepped in. Another one was after the mess that was the 2000 presidential election with the butterfly ballots in Florida, and the questions about whether people knew they were voting the right way, and just the disorganization. But to step in, as Donald Trump seems to be implying here, to just step in and take over wholesale the administration, the running of elections would be unconstitutional, at least in the way it's been traditionally interpreted. You never know with the Supreme Court. They might see it a different way, but also would, as you rightly say, infringe on state rights, which is something that conservatives, traditional conservatives, have generally fought to uphold.

[00:11:22] Speaker 1: The other thing is postal votes, isn't it, Anthony? For several cycles now, there's been a real fuss, well, really, I suppose, since COVID, about who gains from postal votes, and who loses, and whether they're secure, etc., etc., etc. That's become another great row, hasn't it? In fact, we should listen to the speakers. This is a speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, big backer, of course, of Donald Trump, saying that he wants to take action on postal votes. Let's listen.

[00:11:53] Speaker 5: In some of the states, like in California, for example, I mean, they hold the elections open for weeks after election day. That's just one thing that bothers so many people. We had three House Republican candidates who were ahead on election day in the last election cycle. And every time a new tranche of ballots came in, they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. And no series of ballots that were counted after election day were our candidates ahead on any of those counts. It just, it looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove that? No, because it happened so far upstream. But we need more confidence in the American people in the election system.

[00:12:30] Speaker 1: I mean, does it look fraudulent, Anthony? I would have thought that was perfectly easily explained, isn't it?

[00:12:35] Speaker 4: Well, I think what you're seeing here is that Democrats tend to vote more by mail than Republicans. And part of that is because Donald Trump, for the past six years or so, has been criticizing mail voting and encouraging Republicans to vote in person. So then you get this split between Democrats and Republicans as far as how they vote. And in places like California, where they count any ballot that is postmarked on election day, you do get instances where Republicans who voted in person may have been doing better on election day. But then as more and more ballots come in, Democrats slowly move ahead. And that creates, as Johnson mentioned there, the perception that something's wrong. But the reality is, this is just that dynamic playing out. And there are other instances, like in Florida, that has a very robust early voting process and absentee voting process, where Republicans actually do better. And they vote a lot early. And they vote. And so you see a surge of Republican votes when those early ballots are counted. So it really is a reflection of kind of the voting patterns and the habits of the two different parties.

[00:13:42] Speaker 1: And also plenty of Republicans saying, at least behind the scenes, maybe not saying to Donald Trump's face, for goodness sake, our people need to be voting early or voting by post or whatever it is, not going to the ballot box, because our people tend to be less frequent voters. They're less involved. I mean, you know, the whole Trump victory has been based on getting people to the polls who didn't normally go or who infrequently go. And that's why the polling was a bit off repeatedly with Trump, because it's quite difficult to catch these people. But the one way you do catch them, seems to me, Anthony, is you make it easy for them to vote. And if you don't, they won't turn up. You shoot yourself in the foot.

[00:14:25] Speaker 4: Yeah, that is something that you do hear from Republicans. And one of the really powerful tools that parties can use when dealing with these early voting opportunities is they can look and see who voted and they know who their voters are and they can see if their voters, Joe Schmoe on Block X, cast a ballot or not. And if they voted early, they can not waste any time trying to convince them anymore. They know they've got that vote in the bag. Now, if they haven't voted yet, they can focus all their effort on getting those folks who haven't showed up, who haven't voted early, who haven't voted by mail to cast their ballots. That is something that I think has frustrated a lot of Republicans. And you actually, in 2024, when I went to Trump rallies, you would see a video play before Trump spoke talking about how people had to start voting early and getting your ballots cast. And this is the system as it is constructed now. And go ahead and get out there and get your vote counted before anything happens. So I think there was an awareness that they were hurting themselves there.

[00:15:28] Speaker 1: OK, let's say we get to Election Day and the election is taking place and there are people, of course, who are going to go to the polls themselves. Here is where it potentially gets quite dark. Let's listen to Steve Bannon. So Steve Bannon, former Trump adviser, got his own podcast now, still a very big figure on the MAGA right. Let's listen to what he says should happen in those circumstances with people turning up at the polls to vote in a free election.

[00:15:56] Speaker 6: We're going to have ice surround the polls come November. We're not going to sit here and allow you to steal the country again. And you can you can whine and cry and throw your toys out of the pram all you want. But we will never again allow an election to be stolen. And that's why I'm so proud of what President Trump is doing.

[00:16:15] Speaker 4: It's throwing your toys out of the pram. He's he's been spending time in England. He's speaking your language, Justin.

[00:16:21] Speaker 1: Is that is that not an American phrase?

[00:16:24] Speaker 4: Not as far as I've ever heard. Very British to me. But what he is saying is is is definitely something that Democrats are afraid of. And that is that ICE Border Patrol National Guard could do a show of force around polling places, particularly polling places in immigrant communities that that vote heavily for Democrats and depress the vote. And I think Republicans will say we're only looking for people who are undocumented who vote. But we've already seen instances over the past month in Minneapolis where American citizens have been detained. They've been profiled just because they they look like someone from a different country. And that that could happen on Election Day. That might keep American citizens from showing up and having their constitutional rights infringed on.

[00:17:14] Speaker 1: Yeah. And American citizens who look a particular way, wouldn't it be? It's basically people with non-white skins. I mean, to be brutal about it, that that would be the potential impact. Anyone who thought that ICE might think that they could be an illegal immigrant and thus, as we know, they could be hauled off the streets. And you were kind of in two minds about whether to vote. I mean, it's pretty obvious the decision you make, isn't it?

[00:17:42] Speaker 4: You'd do something else that you hear stories about people in Minneapolis, immigrants in Minneapolis, even American citizens. They're not leaving the house, not going to the grocery store, not going to schools because they're afraid of what might happen when they're on the street. So if you can imagine that same sort of scenario playing out on Election Day, I think it is something that Democrats are very concerned about. And while you haven't heard Donald Trump float that idea at all, Steve Bannon, obviously, is kind of in Trump's head. And often he's a trial balloon floating ideas before Donald Trump picks them up. So it is something that could be a very real issue when we get closer to November.

[00:18:30] Speaker 1: OK, so to the Democrats and what they're saying, not just about Steve Bannon, but also about the president and his plans, the minority leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, really calling on his fellow Republicans, the Senate still a relatively chummy place, a place where they kind of believe that people of goodwill can come together and all the rest of it, calling on them to speak out themselves. Let's listen.

[00:18:55] Speaker 7: This president clearly doesn't believe in democracy at all. Never in American history have we had a president so hostile to democratic traditions. Even worse, never have we had a president who breaks the norms that have made this country strong and held them together for centuries. And he just slashes them. And people on the other side of the aisle just shrug their shoulders. It's incredible. Democracy is at risk here from the president to the United States.

[00:19:26] Speaker 1: The thing is about what Chuck Schumer was saying there, they really tried that last time round, didn't they? I mean, that was pretty much the line, the Kamala Harris line and indeed the Biden line before her, before the presidential election. And Donald Trump won, won pretty handily. It wasn't a landslide, as he claims, but he won. So they made that case to the American people. And now I suppose they could say, well, now we've got evidence of what we were initially claiming, which is this, that and the things that they're saying about the election, etc. This time around, are you sensing any sort of contract with America vibe, any sense that the Democrats have got something coherent that they're saying to the country, which isn't just about Donald Trump?

[00:20:14] Speaker 4: Yeah. And that was something in our episode last week with Brian Lanza, the Republican strategist. He said that Democrats don't have a plan. All their plan is Donald Trump's awful. And that's not enough to win on. And it might be enough to win on, honestly. They're gonna get people who are gonna show up at the polls just to put a stop to what Donald Trump is doing. Their base is motivated. Now, whether they can expand that and win over disaffected former Trump voters, win over independence, they will, I think you're right, need something more than just Donald Trump is bad. He's trying to destroy democracy, even if Chuck Schumer legitimately believes that and does see a real threat to democracy. And that's why I think you see Democrats in a variety of different ways talk about how to address affordability, the cost of housing, the cost of food, economic issues, the cost of health care. I think you saw Zohran Mamdani in New York City do that really effectively last year, where he talked about child care and groceries and housing affordability. And I think that Democrats are gonna have to find ways of offering proposals that voters can look at and say, OK, this is really you taking these sorts of things seriously. And they don't all have to look like what Mamdani came up with. But I think they all have to find ways of presenting a plan to voters if they want to win those folks over.

[00:21:40] Speaker 1: It's worth saying, and if you were a keen Democrat and you were here, you probably would be saying, hang on a second, Justin and Anthony, we are getting real results where we're actually doing well and we're getting real people to the polls. So don't be too depressed about our chances. And it is fair to say, isn't it? They had this extraordinary result in a state election in Texas with a massive, a 31 point swing towards the Democrats.

[00:22:06] Speaker 4: Yeah, that happened this last weekend on Saturday. It was a runoff election for a state legislative seat, a state Senate seat in an area of Fort Worth, which is kind of northern near Dallas, part of Texas that, as you mentioned, traditionally very Republican. Donald Trump won this Senate district in 2024 by 17 points. The Republican won it last time. It was up two years earlier in 2022 by an even larger margin. And here you saw the Democrat, his name is Taylor Remit. He is a Air Force veteran, a union leader, win that seat by 14%. So a 31 point swing from 2024. And he ran on economic issues, a familiar refrain. He ran on education issues. And even though the Republicans poured millions of dollars, outspent the Democrats by orders of magnitude in that race, even though Donald Trump posted on Truth Social twice in the run up to that runoff election on Saturday, encouraging Republicans to get out and vote, the Democrat won and the Democrat won comfortably. And I think a lot of Democrats in Texas point to that race and say, look, see, we are eating away at the Republican margins. So we are going to flip some seats in these elections coming up that a lot of people don't expect us to. And the Republicans are saying this should be a wake up call. There is a Hispanic districts in the northern part of that race, Hispanic neighborhoods where you saw a 50 point swing from Donald Trump supporting Donald Trump in 2024 to supporting the Democrats.

[00:23:48] Speaker 1: Do you think Taylor Remit won because people had read one or more of the books that are currently being written and published by the various presidential candidates, potentially on the Democratic side? So obviously, Gavin Newsom, but all the others are either writing or published, haven't they? Josh Shapiro, Chris Murphy, Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock. I mean, are you writing a book, Anthony?

[00:24:13] Speaker 4: I'm not running for president, so I'm not not writing a book yet. But yeah, no, it's a tradition, right, to write a campaign book. I remember Bill Clinton had one out in in 1992. And every year people people write these these books if they're thinking about running for president. And it's it's a useful thing, right, because then you can go on a book tour and you have an excuse for showing up at all of these different places to promote your book. But really, all you're doing is raising your visibility for a presidential campaign. It seems like there must be avid book readers in New Hampshire because everyone goes on their book tours to to Manchester and to little towns in New Hampshire where the little bookstores they they they do their best to promote them. So Gavin Newsom, new book, clearly has presidential ambitions, clearly positioning himself to to be the standard bearer for the Democratic Party. And he has a record to tout, too. We just found out earlier this week that the Supreme Court isn't going to step in and throw out the congressional districts that Gavin Newsom helped his state redraw to tilt the table more in favor of the Democrats there. That was in response. And we talked about this before. That was in response to Texas doing the same thing for Republicans. So Gavin Newsom has as a little bit of a record to run and to show that he is willing to roll up his sleeves and go toe to toe with the Republicans and Donald Trump.

[00:25:42] Speaker 1: OK, Anthony, just before we go.

[00:25:49] Speaker 5: I pledge allegiance to the United States of America.

[00:26:00] Speaker 1: We have been asking you to get in touch so we can build our own network of Americasters, every state in the US ahead of the midterms. So we want to know what's going on in individual states, what's going on where you are, what matters to you. And today, it's a state that, frankly, we don't talk about very much.

[00:26:19] Speaker 3: Hi, Americast. This is Jenny in Utah. My hubby and I have lived here since our college days with our four children. Obviously, the biggest thing to happen in Utah recently was the Charlie Kirk shooting. My daughter is a student at UVU and was in the crowd that day. I think the most interesting political story in Utah is how the people have been fighting the legislature for fair maps for years. Since Utahns voted on an initiative in 2018 to have fair, non-biased maps, the legislature has continually tried to undermine, rewrite, and ignore the initiative and the many rulings from judges and the Utah Supreme Court. I have found this gerrymandering issue to be nonpartisan among my neighbors and community along the Los Angeles Front. Stop with the gerrymandered maps, Utah ledge.

[00:27:10] Speaker 4: It's interesting the point she raises about gerrymandering and these partisan maps because Utah is actually one of the places where it looks like because of that ballot measure that she talks about, Democrats could pick up a seat in Salt Lake City, flip one seat from Republican to Democrat because of the interpretation of that, which is why the Republicans now are scrambling to try to repeal it. They won't get that done this time around, but if they get it on the ballot and then the voters vote for it, then they can draw their partisan maps again and make sure that the entirety of the delegation that Utah has is Republican.

[00:27:47] Speaker 1: Okay, so we've heard so far from Kentucky and Utah. Plenty more to go. If you want to join our United States of America, tell us what's happening in your American state. You don't have to live there, by the way. Perhaps it's your home state. Maybe you've got another link to us. Tell us what's going on or what you think is going on there. Perhaps a fun fact we don't know about the state. So the voice note or an email would do the WhatsApp 443301239480 or it's americast at bbc.co.uk. See y'all later.