WASHINGTON — For two hours Wednesday, away from the cameras, in a room just steps away from the Senate chamber, a group of powerful lawmakers rehearsed for some of their darkest fears about November’s midterm elections: disinformation triggering voter-roll purges in key states before Election Day, National Guard troops deployed to polling places as voters cast their ballots and the machinery of a free election seizing up in real time.

Almost a dozen senators, seated at long tables arranged in a U-shape, with notepads and water bottles before them, were walked through three hypothetical situations set before, on and after Election Day 2026. At points, screens displayed mocked-up graphics or artificial intelligence-generated videos that could be used to sow disinformation. 

The exercises are part of a broader effort by Democrats — both inside government and out — to prepare for anything ahead of November. Republicans often decry their fears as hyperbolic. They may yet be right. 

But multiple Trump administration officials have declined to rule out ICE agents or other federal law enforcement to polling places in the fall, though doing so would be illegal. And more GOP election deniers are rising into positions essential to safeguarding democracy in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election. 

“We have to prepare for it,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told MS NOW exclusively Wednesday evening after the simulated scenarios. “What these so-called tabletop exercises teach us is when you’re prepared in advance, you can stop a lot of bad, bad things from happening. A lot of the stealing that [President Donald Trump] will do, but if you just wait for them to do it and then try to react that day? Not good.”

Take the prospect of  Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents being sent into red states such as Texas. Schumer said the answer is to look to local law enforcement for backup. 

“What we would do is work with the local Houston Police Department, Dallas Police Department, Bexar County, San Antonio Police Department and figure out ways to stop this ahead of time,” he said.

It is just one answer to an endless number of questions that may or may not bear out come November. 

Pressed on if these warnings and doomsday scenarios — which many Democrats feel are more than warranted given Trump’s years of sowing doubt and discord around elections — could backfire by further eroding distrust, Schumer quickly shot it down. 

“In a vacuum, you might be right. But Trump is trying — and all his people are trying — to scare elections,” Schumer said. “They threaten the election officials.”

Marc Elias, a veteran Democratic elections lawyer who took part in the closed-door exercise, waved off the same worry. 

“I don’t think that’s a message we’re sending,” Elias told MS NOW in an interview at the Capitol. “What we’re doing is preparing for the fact that Donald Trump, in 2020, lied about the election in advance, lied about it in the aftermath, went to court … and then he instigated a violent insurrection in this very building. So I think we need to take these threats in the 2026 midterm run-up, you know, both seriously and literally.”

While the goal of the scenario-planning, as former Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta put it, is “to make sure senators don’t have a failure of imagination around these types of threats,” there is also a flip side. 

“I think it can be dangerous for people to have a catastrophizing attitude around our elections,” she said. “Like, there’s the flip side where people can only see the threats and then decide, ‘you know what, I’m too scared. I’m not going to vote. I’m going to stay home.’ Voters need to feel confident.”

Recommended

Wednesday’s closed-door gathering marked the second of its kind Schumer has convened this year — and the first since Trump’s primetime speech casting baseless doubt on the security of America’s electoral system.

For Elias and others working to anticipate Trump’s efforts, the speech provided a blueprint — even if it offered no new evidence for the president’s claims.

“I learned something there, right?” Elias said. “That fundamentally, after all of their digging and all of their lies, they don’t actually have anything new.”

A recent disclosure by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has further complicated the landscape: She said thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote in her state due to a software error in 2023 and 2024, and that several hundred of them cast ballots. Trump quickly seized on the news, posting on social media about “A Crooked Election System” and urging supporters to “SAVE AMERICA” — a rallying cry for the voter-identification legislation his party currently lacks the votes to pass.

Schumer, for his part, dismissed concerns over the episode in New Jersey, calling it a “machine vendor issue.”

“The minute New Jersey discovered it, they fixed it,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Has nothing to do with the SAVE Act, and just the opposite of what Donald Trump does. He creates problems in our elections. He exacerbates problems in our elections. He hides problems in our elections.”

Schumer, who has served in Congress since 1981, acknowledged that he has never done this kind of preparation for an election before. 

And the idea of unprecedented democracy doomsday planning happening mere steps from the everyday business of the Senate floor felt impossible to square.

Schumer, though, said it is an essential balancing act. 

“You have to show that you can both stop Trump and try to have government move forward,” he said. “You have to. If every time Trump did one of these things we just froze, he’d win.”

Ali Vitali

Ali Vitali is MS NOW’s senior congressional correspondent and the host of “Way Too Early.” She is the author of “Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet.”

Lillie Boudreaux

Lillie Boudreaux is a desk associate at MS NOW. She primarily covers politics and Capitol Hill.