US President Donald Trump’s free-falling approval ratings have brightened the Democratic Party’s chances of gaining House and Senate majorities in November. So what are Trump and the GOP doing about it? 

Rigging the midterms in their favor, that’s what — in broad daylight, and straight from the authoritarian playbook.

A recent Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll, shows that an all-time high 62% now disapprove of the Trump presidency. The reasons: surging inflation and soaring gas prices resulting from his disastrous tariffs and continuing war on Iran, respectively.

Even canned goods — a go-to source of sustenance for many low-income Americans — are getting more expensive, thanks in part to Trump’s tariff on imported tin and aluminum. Callously, he told reporters, “I don’t think of Americans’ finances,” in pursuing his war on Iran. Not a good message to voters already grappling with affordability.

Most Republicans remain loyal to Trump, but recent polls show independent — even former Trump voters — beginning to drift away. A surge in Democratic and independent turnout could spell disaster for the GOP in November. 

Democrats spring to action

As Trump’s popularity steadily sank, Democrats began racking up victories — or at least strong “overperformances” — in as many as 46 key down-ballot races, including special elections. Among the most notable were the New York mayoral win, gubernatorial victories in New Jersey and Virginia. All are encouraging signs heading into the midterms.

Those warning signals put Trump and the GOP on the offensive. 

Republicans in states they control began redrawing electoral maps to weaken Democratic strongholds of Black, minority, and liberal voters nationwide. 

Each state elects at large two senators for Congress, but House representatives are elected by local voting districts adjusted so each has roughly the same population size, officially to ensure equal representation. 

But recently, the US Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority effectively gutted the Voting Rights Act by blessing the Republicans redistricting of a majority-Black district in Louisiana, giving the party the green light to racially dilute Democratic voting blocs across the country to its advantage. 

Gerrymandering fight

Refusing to play dead, Democrats have launched gerrymandering efforts of their own, notching a win in California while legally blocking GOP attempts in Utah. There is also talk of Democratic redistricting pushes in New York and Colorado. In Virginia, however, the conservative-leaning state Supreme Court struck down a Democratic-backed redistricting plan that could have helped the party gain several House seats.

So far, Republicans seem to have the upper hand in the national redistricting fight, prevailing in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and North Carolina, as well as Louisiana — all former Confederate slave states. Some analysts suggest the GOP could gain as many as 10 House seats through remapping in Republican-ruled states if the current trends continue.

Beyond slowing Democratic momentum, court rulings that enable racially targeted GOP gerrymandering also threaten minority representation on Capitol Hill. The Congressional Black Caucus risks losing 13 to 19 of its more than 60 seats, ABC News reported. 

But aggressive redistricting could also backfire, further inflaming already rising anti-Trump and anti-Republican sentiment nationwide. Which brings us to the GOP’s nastiest tactic yet: voter suppression.

SAVE’ America Act: Impede the vote

To impede Americans’ ability to vote, the GOP-dominated House passed the SAVE America Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), purportedly to prevent voter fraud. Republicans claim widespread fraud, especially by non-US citizens, is undermining election integrity. It  echoes Donald Trump’s dubious claim that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was “stolen.”

But the statistics dispute the GOP narrative. The Brennan Center for Justice notes that “election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election referred only about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. That is .0001% of votes cast during that election.”

And yet, the SAVE Act would impose sweeping new barriers to voter registration. Going beyond existing federal law, it would require strict, documented, in-person voter registration. 

Registrants would have to prove US citizenship by producing documents many eligible American voters do not readily have access to, including U.S. passports, certified birth certificates, naturalization papers, marriage licenses, and government-issued photo IDs.

The Center for American Progress reports that as many as 146 million Americans lack a valid passport, while another 2.6 million have no government-issued photo ID at all. The requirement would also pose difficulties for women who changed surnames after marriage. The SAVE Act would also effectively end online and mail-in voter registration, while severely curtailing many civic voter-registration drives. 

Not a foregone conclusion

Trump and the sycophantic GOP’s success in rigging the midterm elections is hardly a foregone conclusion. 

In Hungary, popular exhaustion with repression, official corruption, and economic hardship eventually caught up with the despot Viktor Orbán after 16 years, despite a playbook built on self-serving gerrymandering and voter suppression and other tools of political entrenchment.

Growing dissatisfaction with Republicans’ economic performance and autocratic politics — as voters summon the full reserve of their collective democratic values — could likewise derail efforts to erect institutional barriers against free and fair midterm elections. Hopefully, it won’t take 16 years for that to happen in the United States. – Rappler.com

Rene Ciria Cruz is an editor at PositivelyFilipino.com. He edited the book A Time to Rise: Collective Memoirs of the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), (UP Press), and was Inquirer.net’s US Bureau Chief 2013-2023. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacific News Service, and California Lawyer Magazine.