This story is part of Gen Z at the Ballot Box, a collaboration between States Newsroom and The 19th. 

WINDHAM, Maine – As 24-year-old Maya Brooks walked winding roads in rural parts of Maine, a water bottle hooked to her fanny pack and a stack of “lit” on absentee voting and candidates her group has endorsed in hand, she was focused on reaching voters who either haven’t voted in recent years or have shown they’re willing to vote for both parties. 

Mainers frequently cross party lines, as evidenced by the fact that U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is the only GOP senator running for reelection in a state Donald Trump lost in 2024. Maine consistently ranks among the highest in the country for voter turnout, even among young voters, despite having one of the oldest populations in the country. 

That’s led Maine to be viewed as the top state where young voters could sway Senate outcomes in 2026. 

While Brooks canvassed for the state’s largest progressive community action organization, she thought about one of her first interactions knocking doors this cycle. A woman — not much older than herself— told her she probably wouldn’t vote. Whoever she voted for, whatever their party affiliation, she felt it would not make a difference, Brooks recalled.

“I don’t blame her,” she said. While a registered Democrat, Brooks would rather do away with the two-party system altogether. “Politicians aren’t delivering.” 

Generation Z, now roughly 14 to 29 years old, is a growing portion of the electorate with about 50 million eligible voters in the upcoming midterm elections. But these young voters have soured on both parties. 

Younger people have long been more likely to identify as independents, but Gen Z is doing so at a significantly higher rate than any previous generation at the same age. 

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Being independent does not mean being moderate. Gen Z’s ideological gender gap is driven more by women moving further left than men moving further right. 

“Really, what’s notable is that Gen Z women are the distinct group compared to both their young male counterparts but also to other American women,” said Melissa Deckman, a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on public opinion. “Simply put, Gen Z women are the most liberal and progressive group of voters in America today.” 

A unifier among Gen Z is a belief that the government is failing to protect and address their needs, notably the high cost of living. 

Trump capitalized on that discontent in 2024, making gains with young voters, particularly young men. Now, Trump’s net approval rating is underwater, especially among Gen Z, with 31 percent of young people who voted for the president saying they regret it, according to an August Navigator poll. 

Both parties are trying to remedy mistakes of elections past in the hopes of winning over the Gen Z vote, launching targeted recruitment efforts, hiring more young people and leaning into social media.

     

No longer taking the youth vote for granted

At a time when many young people were running away from the Democratic Party, Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, ran to it. 

That is not to say Clayton, who at 25 became the youngest state party chair in the country in 2023 when she ousted an establishment-backed incumbent, has not at times been disappointed.

She wants to see Democrats embrace progressive candidates who win primaries. She wants to get rid of the churn-and-burn cycle of campaigns prioritizing immediate national victories over long-term local sustainability. And she was “so pissed” after Democrats left 44 North Carolina legislative seats uncontested in 2022 that she decided to run for her current role. 

“If you don’t like a party right now, you’re the only one that can change it,” she said in her high-energy cadence.

Clayton got hooked on political work a decade ago, when her county party pushed back on Republicans trying to eliminate the voting site on her college campus. She’s up against similar issues now, after a federal judge ruled against restoring early voting sites on several college campuses in her state earlier this year. 

She has fellows on those campuses to try to turn out the student vote, part of the party’s broader voter protection program, which is in addition to 30 active college chapters and a 100-county, year-round organizing operation. 

“When people look at me and they’re like, ‘Well, young men are leaving the Democratic Party,’ I’m like, ‘Well, let me introduce you then to the leadership that I have right now leading my young Dems, because they are young men,’” Clayton said. “I think that the ability to organize and to help other people see themselves in the party is to also give them that representation.” 

North Carolina Democrats collaborated with Voters of Tomorrow, an entirely Gen Z-led organization seeking to promote political engagement among that demographic, for its national summit in August. Communications director Jessica Siles, 26, said she has seen state parties in particular having more success appealing to young voters. 

“I think in some ways that’s because obviously those ties to the direct local communities are stronger,” Siles said. 

That is borne out in research, which shows relational organizing works because young people trust their neighbors or community networks far more than national parties. Siles sees a sweet spot in engaging Gen Z in events that offer in-person connection in a more social, cultural setting.

That’s an approach being used by the Community Organizing Alliance in Maine, a civic group focused on engaging Black and immigrant voters. Executive director Safiya Khalid, 30, said young people are leading voter registration and education efforts, which include more traditional methods like canvassing, but also events to strengthen community, such as an upcoming concert featuring Somali music, where the alliance will share election-related information to attendees outside the venue. 

The alliance is based in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. One of the most rural areas east of the Mississippi, it’s an open seat being eyed as consequential for the balance of power in Congress since moderate Democrat Jared Golden is not seeking reelection. 

Another youth-led group in that district, Maine Youth Power, started in 2021 to offer young Mainers clearer paths to engagement in a state with one of the highest median ages. 

“All of our politicians and parties cater towards old people, which is not a bad thing,” said Phoebe Dolan, 28, co-director and one of its founding members. “But it does leave young people often with not a clear sense of a county party that they can join and take leadership in.” 

The nonpartisan organization now reaches roughly 200 young people annually and ahead of the midterms is launching a series of hubs across the state for members to make regional connections. Continuing year-round, the hubs will offer lessons on political history and organizing training, Dolan said. 

In Alabama, GOP chair Scott Stadthagen brought on Brilyn Hollyhand, a 20-year-old content creator from Auburn, who previously advised Trump on youth strategy, to launch Project Future Generation in late July.

The statewide effort to engage teens and young adults in the conservative movement “is not a separate auxiliary group,” Stadthagen said. “We’ve got the young Republicans, the college Republicans. This is creating new Republican members to our county parties.” 

It is a three-pronged approach: a “student strike force” focused on door knocking and registering GOP voters in purple districts, “semester summits” where the party meets with student leaders on campuses, and tours of colleges and high schools. Hollyhand and Stadthagen have ambitions to expand the model to other red states, and eventually swing states.

Comparing the Grand Old Party to a Southern Baptist church, Hollyhand said that without a thriving youth ministry, “when the good ol’ Southern church’s congregation inevitably passes away, the church passes with it.”

     

The social media factor

When Hollyhand worked for Trump’s campaign, he led the initiative that brought content creators to the 2024 Republican National Convention and urged Trump to make appearances on podcasts and TikToks to reach young people. 

That’s being mimicked by Democrats now. The Democratic National Committee is investing in thousands of content creators to aid wins in 2026 and beyond. Former first lady Michelle Obama launched a “Voting Squad” made up of popular content creators to try to encourage young people to get to the polls. 

More locally, too, campaigns have been leaning on influencers. Independent of Brooks’ job as a senior canvass manager for the Maine People’s Alliance, she regularly posts political content for her more than 85,000 followers on TikTok, an account initially spurred as an outlet to air political rage when Trump got reelected. She was invited as an influencer to one of Maine Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree’s events.

Despite this focus, research on the effectiveness of influencers is limited. While some studies find that influencers may help boost political awareness among young people, that doesn’t necessarily translate into action. 

“The sort of influence of influencers, if I can be redundant, has been a little bit overstated,” said Alberto Medina, communications manager at Tufts University CIRCLE.

Less than 1 percent of young people said an influencer had been one of their top three motivations to cast a ballot in CIRCLE’s 2024 post-election youth poll. And in its national pre-election poll this year of 5,549 young Americans aged 18–29, social media posts from influencers or celebrities ranked last for the sources of information they turn to for learning about politics and elections.

Most Gen Z voters do get their news on social media, but mostly through posts from advocacy or news organizations, according to the latest survey. 

“Social media algorithms tend to send young men and young women to different places,” said Deckman, who is CEO of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. 

She attributes some of the gender divide to the fact that the two demographics are often presented with different informational realities, though it is difficult to quantify. Overall, Gen Z women have been raised with a greater sense of agency, she said, and were brought up politically amid the #MeToo movement and the first Trump presidency, during which his sexist comments shaped public discourse.

In addition to being ideologically divided, young men and women have vastly different beliefs about religion and gender. While young women, and Americans overall, have been shedding religious labels, young men have seen essentially no change in Deckman’s research. Young men are also far more likely to support pronatalism, which the Trump administration has embraced in encouraging families to have more children. 

“No generation is monolithic,” Deckman said. “There definitely are conservative young women. There’s lots of liberal young men. But the trends are such that you’re seeing this gap emerging.” 

     

Not party but issue motivated

Nelson Dorsey, 20, voted for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in 2024. Now, the Bowdoin College student is campaigning for Collins, explaining in Brunswick after his early morning football practice that her pitch as an independent voice for the state resonates with him. 

“I’m not necessarily afraid to go across a party line if that means doing what I think is best for the country,” said Dorsey, a registered Republican. “At the time, I was drawn to [Harris’] campaign because she really was drawing on the whole idea of ‘Let’s put politics aside, let’s put our parties aside.’”

Dorsey’s refrain from party loyalty is common among his generation, which is continuing to identify as independent at relatively high rates as they have gotten older, a contrast to older generations who had been less likely to identify as independents over time. 

“You have really a story where Gen Z is really put off by party,” Deckman said. “It’s part of a larger distrust of institutions in society.” 

As Gen Zers struggle to make ends meet, a point of common ground regardless of political leanings, they are seeing the rich get richer and the powerful gain more control. They are united in their concern about the abuse of political and economic power, including the United States’ role in foreign wars and lack of accountability for bad actors named in the Epstein files. 

“Growing up in America at this time, there is a significant lack of hope,” said Katya Fromouth, a 17 year old from Yarmouth, Maine, who thinks she will likely never be able to buy a house and questions what her future will look like because of climate change. “That is the sort of thing that young people need — hope when we are envisioning our future.” 

Fromouth was one of the young Mainers who initially saw hope in former Democratic nominee for Senate Graham Platner, who energized voters with a pitch to rally against corruption regardless of their party affiliation. Platner won over many young people by embracing some of the most polarizing issues at the center of the widening generational divide, such as calling to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Seeing a candidate for national office with those values was “refreshing and frankly exhilarating,” said Cheyenne Hunt, who had initially endorsed Platner while leading the group Gen Z for Change. 

But after several women came forward alleging sexual misconduct, which he denies, Hunt withdrew her support. She helped support his exes in speaking with media, leading to the publication of an assault allegation in Politico that ultimately ended his campaign. 

While Hunt, founder of Reckoning Action, a nonprofit aiming to combat misogyny, said she received pushback because of the hope Platner inspired, she ultimately sees his swift downfall as evidence of the new kind of politics he had tapped into. 

“Young voters are routinely disappointed with the quality of representation that we’ve been offered,” Hunt said. “They are really ready for a class of representatives that across the board — whether it’s with issues of violence against women, with issues of corruption in general — do not believe that they are above the law and that they deserve special treatment.”

Tufts University CIRCLE has found some links between the issues young voters are focused on and their shifting politics. Those moving to the left care most about healthcare and abortion. Those shifting more conservative are prioritizing immigration and housing.

But regardless of whether their politics are shifting, young people are prioritizing economic issues.

“The centrality of economic issues and of those economic struggles that youth are experiencing is one of the big changes that we’ve been tracking in the last couple of election cycles,” Medina said. 

Young people on both sides think their party needs to change how they talk about the economy. Hollyhand said he wants the GOP to outline solutions, not just offer speeches blaming Democrats. And Clayton said Democrats can’t just rely on the buzzword “affordability.” 

“It’s got to be ‘Here is why the minimum wage is set at $7.25 and here is who’s doing that and who can help make it better,’” she said.

Young people are motivated most to cast a ballot in order to take action on issues they care about. In the Tufts University post-election youth poll from 2024, 46% said that was their top motivator. 

Issues are what Brooks starts with when she speaks to voters canvassing across Maine. As she tries to beat the sun knocking doors into the evening, she asks what matters most to them before sharing what she likes about particular candidates, starting with a local race and not mentioning political affiliations. 

After nearly 40 doors, more than 10,000 steps and three hours, mostly what she’s done is listen. 

“People don’t want to be talked at,” she said. That’s also her message for how the party could improve its chances of courting her generation: “I wish they would just ask.” 

The post Gen Z isn’t choosing a political party. They’re choosing issues appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned. 

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute. 

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service. 

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. 

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said. 

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives,

including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

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The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” 

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless. 

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” 

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The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. 

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed. 

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery. 

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. 

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order. 

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone. 

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks? 

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

The post The untold origins of Trump’s plan to sharply restrict mail-in voting appeared first on Salon.com.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.

For years, Khalwinder Singh Bhengura lived an unassuming life in Arlington, Texas, where the 69-year-old Indian immigrant works a graveyard shift preparing passenger meals for an airline catering company.

Bhengura moved to the U.S. and spent 18 years working toward becoming a legal resident, securing his green card in 2022. It was a cause for celebration in the Bhengura family. Then things took an unexpected turn.

In 2024, according to a federal indictment, Bhengura registered to vote and cast a ballot in the November presidential election, even though he’s not allowed to do so without being an American citizen.

Bhengura’s case is part of a Trump administration campaign to prioritize prosecuting noncitizen voters.

On Sept. 10, federal authorities arrested Bhengura and charged him with voting as an alien in a federal election and making a false statement about being a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote. That makes him one of 70 people the Trump administration has charged in voting fraud cases this year, according to Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter.

The list includes noncitizens from all corners of the globe, residing in all corners of the U.S. It features everyone from a 20-year-old college student from the Philippines accused of voting in Hawaii to a 39-year-old New Jersey restaurant owner from France. And an examination of the defendants and the filings in their cases found no sign of any organized efforts to cheat the American electoral system.

Votebeat reviewed Justice Department press releases and news accounts since June 1st and identified 41 recent cases involving noncitizens accused of voting. At least 23 defendants are legal residents holding green cards. Those charged range in age from 19 to 73 and come from at least 18 different countries, including Russia, Mexico, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria. Eight of the cases involved undocumented immigrants. About half of the cases come from Texas and New Jersey, with others popping up in a dozen other states, from Alaska to Louisiana.

Lawyers for most of the defendants did not respond to requests for comment. The list contains an eclectic assortment of alleged voter fraud cases. For example, one suspect in Massachusetts is accused of falsely impersonating his landlord to vote as part of a long-running feud between the two Chinese nationals.

The Justice Department has also charged American citizens in connection with the crackdown on fraudulent voting. One Pennsylvania man is accused of voting in both Alaska and Pennsylvania in the November 2024 presidential election. A city manager in Oklahoma is accused of signing voter registration forms for 11 residents.

But most of the cases involve immigrants like Bhengura who were on the pathway to U.S. citizenship when they voted in elections over the past decade. Bhengura’s lawyer says he acknowledged voting, but many of the cases involve nonresidents who secured their green cards, voted in elections, and then denied doing so when they were filling out paperwork or doing interviews to get their American citizenship, according to the legal filings.

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Joshua Ferrer, an assistant professor of government at American University, said many legal residents charged with improperly voting don’t realize they weren’t supposed to do so.

“It’s likely most of this is the result of confusion on the part of voters or election officials,” Ferrer said.

The fact that there are no indications that these voters were connected as part of any larger scheme “is another sign that the president’s claims of widespread voter fraud aren’t true,” he added.

Bhengura’s case raises a number of unanswered questions. Federal prosecutors said Bhengura registered to vote in 2024 when he applied for a driver’s license. But Texas law requires proof of citizenship or lawful presence to get a license, so it’s unclear how he could have been registered to vote if he had provided the documentation.

Knox, Bhengura’s attorney, defended him as “an honest, hard-working taxpayer and proud U.S. resident. He is terrified to face the government of the same nation that promised liberty and freedom. He prays that justice will prevail.”

Carol Lam, who served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California under President George W. Bush, questioned the Justice Department’s choice to prosecute these people. In her opinion, the government shouldn’t try to deport green card holders who didn’t know they couldn’t vote until they became American citizens.

“Our justice system was not created to terrorize people,” she said. “I think voting in national elections when you are not a citizen is a bad thing, but how you deal with these things is the question. If there is good evidence that the person didn’t intend to vote, that would be a slap-on-the-wrist kind of situation, and it’s instead being used to leverage people to be deported.”

Lam acknowledged that every administration has the leeway to decide what crimes to prioritize. But she questioned the Trump administration’s decision to devote so much time and energy to cases like Bhengura’s.

“Taking a 69-year-old grandfather with a green card with no apparent intent to violate the law who may have voted based on bad information and using it as a jumping-off point to deport a person would be at the bottom of my pile,” she said. “We had suspects who actually committed acts of violence, so there were so many more cases where life and limb were actually at stake.”

Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.

The post Alleged noncitizen voters targeted by feds from 18 different countries, mostly green card holders appeared first on Salon.com.

This article was first published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This week, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s plans to impose new rules for mail-in voting for the midterm elections in November. 

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule’s exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would “guarantee the midterms” for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly.