november

For Democrats or, for that matter, anyone who believes in checks and balances, things are starting to look up.

President Trump’s days of untrammeled war-making, law-breaking and generally doing whatever he damn well pleases may finally be drawing to a close. Public opinion, history and, especially, the surging price of gasoline and groceries, all point to a Democratic takeover of the House in November’s midterm election.

There’s a direct correlation between a president’s approval rating and the way his party performs at the midpoint of his term. Anything below 50% favorability portends political trouble; right now Trump’s positive standing in polls hovers around a dismal 40%.

Then there’s the history part. Since World War II, the party out of the White House has gained an average of more than two dozen House seats in midterm elections. Democrats need to pick up just three to take control beginning in January.

(While the Republican grip on the Senate seems weaker than just a few months ago, the GOP is still favored to hang onto the chamber in November.)

There is, however, a looming threat causing nervousness among Democrats and their allies as they contemplate a celebratory fall, a landmine of sorts buried deep in the congressional election process.

Let’s acquaint ourselves with Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution.

The pertinent language written by the Framers states, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” In other words, it’s up to the House and Senate to acknowledge and abide by the will of voters as expressed in the election returns.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, if you let your paranoia run wild, quite a lot. If the election outcome is close — and probably it would have to be very close — Republican lawmakers could theoretically seize on phony claims of fraud and effectively nullify the results of enough contests to deny Democrats control of the House.

There’s plenty of skepticism that would or could ever take place. But if it were to happen, hello, national crisis!

Normally, we could count on the occupant of the White House to humbly submit to the election returns, even if it’s a “shellacking” as President Obama called his walloping in the 2010 midterm election, or a “thumpin’ ” as President George W. Bush described his electoral spanking in 2006.

Not Trump.

This president has amply demonstrated the lengths to which he’ll go to overturn an honest election, siccing a violent mob on lawmakers certifying his 2020 defeat, telling endless lies and using the Justice Department to confiscate ballots and intimidate innocent election officials and others Trump deems his enemies.

He strong-armed Texas into a highly unusual, highly partisan redrawing of its congressional boundaries, an effort to net five seats and lengthen the odds against a Democratic takeover.

The move appears to have backfired, spurring voters in California and, last week, Virginia to redraw their state’s political maps to more than offset Texas and boost Democrats in November. (The Virginia results are being contested in court.)

Voters attend an Arlington Democrats redistricting vote watch party during a special election Tuesday in Virginia. A measure to redraw the state’s congressional map was narrowly approved.

(Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

That failure doesn’t take away Trump’s malign intent. And in the supine Speaker Mike Johnson, he has the perfect handmaiden to undermine the midterm vote.

In 2020, Johnson was the lead author of a Supreme Court brief seeking to overturn the results in four states that Joe Biden had indisputably won. That speaks to Johnson’s probity and integrity.

How would subversion of November’s election take place?

One theory goes like this: When the balloting is over, Johnson could appoint a House committee packed with Trump’s acolytes to investigate alleged voting irregularities. (And if you think Trump won’t be bellowing the words “rigged” and “fraud” in the face of defeat, you’ve either been in a coma or living on another planet for the last decade.)

Those hearings and the “evidence” they turn up could then be cited by election officials in key states — collaborators, if you will — as a reason to delay the certification of election results and block the seating of majority-making Democrats in the next Congress. In their place, the theory goes, Republicans could vote to fill those seats with GOP candidates who lost at the polls, keeping themselves in control.

Derek Muller, an election law expert, suggests that scenario is little more than a fever dream of doomsday devotees and overly nervous Nellies.

He said he’d be very surprised if all the election results weren’t certified by Jan. 3, when the new Congress convenes, given the legal remedies available to prevent stalling and undue delay. And, Muller said, there is no assurance Republicans would march in lockstep behind a plan to prevent the seating of Democrats.

Thwarting a duly elected Democratic majority “involves extraordinary coordination and precedents that have never occurred, with a unique convergence of factors,” said Muller, who teaches law at Notre Dame — though, he added, if control of the House came down to, say, a single seat “all bets are off.”

Far-fetched? Perhaps. Some of the spun-up theories surrounding November’s election do sound a bit like a product of political science fiction.

But what kind of president picks a fight with the pope? Plunges the world into crisis by unilaterally going to war with Iran with no exit plan? Demolishes the East Wing of the White House on an egotistical whim?

If Trump, an inveterate norm-buster, sees a way to keep his grip on unchecked power, don’t put anything past him.

SACRAMENTO — A ballot measure that would require Californians to show identification every time they vote in person, or use a special pin number when submitting mail-in ballots, has qualified for the November ballot, elections officials announced Friday.

The measure also would require election officials to verify registered voters are U.S. citizens, aligning with a Republican-led push for new restrictions on voters in the wake of President Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that undocumented immigrants are swaying elections by voting illegally.

Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio from San Diego has been pushing the measure for several years, while Trump and Republicans also are seeking a similar initiative at the federal level.

If passed, the California ballot measure would require a voter to present government-issued identification, such as a state driver’s license, every time they vote. Voters mailing ballots would be required to write a four-digit number, essentially a pin number, on their ballots matching the one generated when they registered to vote.

The pin would come from ID such as a driver’s license, or could be generated from the county. The vast majority of Californians mail in their ballots in elections.

Under the measure, election officials also must ensure that registered voters are U.S. citizens by using information from government records, which could include information in the federal Social Security Administration database, and maintain accurate voter registration lists.

DeMaio said the measure is different than a federal proposal, known as the SAVE Act, which stalled out in the U.S. Senate this week.

DeMaio said the state ballot measure “does not do away with mail in ballots, because voters of all political backgrounds like the convenience of mail in ballots. So we want to keep that convenience.”

The ballot measure needs a simple majority to pass.

Under current law, Californians are not required to show or provide identification when casting a ballot in person or by mail. They are required to provide identification when registering to vote, and must swear under penalty of perjury, a felony, that they are eligible to vote and a U.S. citizen.

Jenny Farrell, executive director of the League of Women Voters of California, told the Times that her group is committed to fighting the measure, arguing it would make it harder for people in the state to vote.

She said that people may forget to use a pin on their mail-in ballot, leading to their vote being disqualified. Similar changes in Texas, she said, led to a rise in rejected ballots due to technical errors.

“It doesn’t really weed out illegal voting,” which doesn’t actually exist, she said, “but it does cause more ballots to be incorrectly flagged and ultimately rejected.”

ACLU of Northern and Southern California, Common Cause, Disability Rights California also oppose the measure.

DeMaio filed for the ballot initiative in 2021 and 2023, but did not move forward with the signature collection process in order to fine-tune the ballot language.

He said his ballot measure wasn’t focused primarily about making sure that undocumented people don’t vote.

“That’s one element of concern that we’ve heard from some groups, but it really is making sure that, number one, we properly maintain our voter rolls,” he said.

Democrats on Wednesday celebrated an election win in Virginia that could put them slightly ahead in the national redistricting competition that President Trump triggered in an attempt to preserve his party’s House majority in this year’s midterms, but it will not be the final round.

Now that it’s been approved by voters, the new Virginia map will have to clear additional legal hurdles. On Wednesday, the state attorney general’s office said it would immediately appeal a ruling earlier in the day from a judge in rural southern Virginia who ordered that the results of Tuesday’s vote not be certified.

Ultimately, the Virginia Supreme Court will decide whether Democratic lawmakers violated procedural rules when they referred a constitutional amendment to the ballot authorizing the new U.S. House districts that could help Democrats win as many as four additional seats in the state. If so, that could invalidate the map voters narrowly approved Tuesday.

What happens next in Florida also will matter.

The state’s Republican-controlled Legislature is to meet in a special session next week that GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis called in part to draw a new map to expand the party’s congressional majority there. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to issue an opinion by the end of June in a Louisiana case that could overturn a key provision of the Voting Rights Act and lead to redrawn political maps across the South, though almost all of those could not happen until 2028.

After voters passed the Virginia amendment, Democrats could tentatively claim that they netted 10 seats nationally from the mid-decade redistricting, compared with the nine that Republicans claim. Even if things swing again in the GOP’s favor, the net result of Trump’s campaign would be at best an incremental increase in the number of GOP-leaning House seats at a time when his approval rating is dropping and Republican anxiety over losing control of Congress in November is rising.

“We have successfully blunted Trump’s attempt to completely hijack the midterms,” said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Many Republicans agreed.

“The GOP will now lose net seats across the country. If you’re going to pick a fight, at least win it,” Ari Fleischer, who was a spokesman for President George W. Bush, posted on the social media site X after the Virginia vote. “All this was foreseeable and avoidable. We should not have started this fight.”

Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, argued that it is too soon to declare one party a victor.

“It’s an ongoing process with many legal challenges pending, and it’s far too early for sweeping statements on the final outcome,” he said.

Trump on Wednesday tried to undermine the Virginia result by leveling groundless accusations of fraud similar to ones he made after losing the 2020 presidential election. He called the Virginia vote “RIGGED” and “Crooked” in a post on his social media site and added, “Let’s see if the Courts will fix this travesty of ‘Justice.’”

Redistricting spread from Texas to other states

Redistricting is typically done every 10 years after each census, unless ordered by a court. But last summer, Trump pushed a redrawing in Texas, prodding the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to add up to five winnable House seats for his party. Trump then began pressuring other Republican-run states to follow. Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio have since created more GOP-leaning seats in addition to Texas.

Democrats began to fight back, even though they were more constrained because several Democratic-controlled states had maps drawn by independent commissions rather than lawmakers and governors.

To counter Texas, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, pushed the Democratic-controlled Legislature to place a redistricting initiative on last fall’s ballot. After voters overwhelmingly approved it, the measure will replace a commission-approved map with one that could gain Democrats five seats.

Democrats reclaimed the Legislature and governor’s office in November in Virginia and swiftly moved to replicate California’s move with an even more aggressive redistricting plan. It replaces a congressional map imposed by a court after the last census that had resulted in a 6-5 edge for Democrats with one that could allow Democrats to win as many as 10 seats.

“We are not going to let anyone tilt the system without a response,” state Senate President L. Louise Lucas said at a news conference Wednesday.

Courts could still have a say on redistricting

In Washington, U.S. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York warned Florida Republicans, who have been openly nervous about redrawing their district boundaries and potentially spreading their core voters too thin before an election that appears to be trending against them.

“Our message to Florida Republicans right now is, ‘F around and find out,’” Jeffries said.

House Majority Forward, the nonprofit arm of the super political action committee aligned with House Democrats, has spent nearly $60 million to push back against Republicans’ redistricting efforts. Some $40 million of that was on the Virginia campaign.

Another obstacle in Florida is an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment that was approved by state voters in 2010. It is likely that any new Florida map would trigger significant litigation, although six of the state Supreme Court’s seven justices were appointed by Republicans.

Nicholas Stephanopolous, a Harvard law professor, said a challenge for DeSantis is that the Florida amendment forbids drawing lines for purely partisan purposes, so he has to find some other excuse for revising the map. “Even with that sort of acquiescent state supreme court, I don’t think it’s a done deal,” Stephanopolous said.

The Virginia move comes with its own legal issues. Republicans have challenged the process that Democrats used to place the measure on the ballot and the state Supreme Court opted to wait for the vote before even scheduling arguments in the case. It is unclear when a ruling could come.

Wednesday’s ruling stopping certification came from a separate case that Republicans filed with the same lower court judge, whose initial ruling against the initiative was put on hold by the state supreme court.

“The ballot box was never the final word here,” Terry Kilgore, the Virginia House Republican leader, said in a statement after Tuesday’s vote. “Serious legal questions remain about both the wording of this referendum and the process used to put it before voters.”

The biggest legal wild card is held by the U.S. Supreme Court. Its conservative majority could throw out a requirement under the Voting Rights Act that in areas with a large minority population, mapmakers draw districts that are more favorable to the election of minority candidates.

That provision has led to the creation of several majority-minority congressional seats, especially in the South. Without it, Republicans in conservative states could shrink the number of U.S. House seats winnable by Democrats even further.

But it’s unlikely that any state other than Louisiana, which brought the lawsuit the high court will rule on, would be able to adjust its congressional lines in time for November even if the court eliminates that provision, known as Section Two. That’s because the November election is already officially underway in most states and candidate filing deadlines — and, in some cases, primary elections — have already passed.

Riccardi and Lieb write for the Associated Press. AP writers Lisa Mascaro and Leah Askarinam in Washington contributed to this report.