The Dispatch Podcast - Will Trump Interfere with the 2026 Midterms?

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Mike Warren and Stephen Richer to discuss the growing concerns and conversations around election integrity ahead of the 2026 midterms and the proliferation of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. The Agenda: —Election integrity —Media influence on election claims —California and conspiracy theories —Understanding voter behavior —The need for quick election results —Federal law enforcement & voting —Trump's influence on 2026 midterms —NWYT: Trump and the number 22  The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we take a look at the growing concerns around election integrity ahead of the 2026 midterms and the proliferation of conspiracy theories about voter fraud. Why does it sometimes take so long to tally the votes? Was Spencer Pratt cheated out of a win in Los Angeles? Will Donald Trump attempt to interfere in the electoral process over the next several months? I'm joined today by Dispatch Politics Editor Mike Warren and Stephen Richard, a legal fellow with the Cato Institute's Robert and Levy Center for Constitutional Studies and a senior practice fellow in American Democracy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Stephen is most importantly a dispatch contributor. Let's dive in. Gentlemen, welcome. Stephen, I want to start with you. It seems to me that every year we have discussions about upcoming elections, we are told by election experts that the elections in front of us are likely to be the most secure, the most credible, the elections with the greatest integrity in American history. And we usually hear that because we've seen developments in technology and there's much more focus on election security than there has been, you know,

20 years, 50 years ago. But this year, there are all sorts of questions about election security, in part because of a growing lack of faith in the institutions that conduct the elections, and a increase, a dramatic increase in conspiracy theories around the way that we conduct our elections and, importantly, the results of those elections. So if I were to ask you, do you believe that the 2026 elections will be the most secure elections in recent U.S. history? How would you answer that? It's certainly not what the democracy community is saying. It's certainly not what the Republican Party is saying is certainly not what the Democratic Party is saying. So I think you're right to characterize the arc, the trajectory of American elections as getting more and more accessible and getting

more and more secure, especially over the last few years we've paid a lot more attention to transparency, to post-election audits, to pre-election tests. But I think that this year, there's a lot of concern from the democracy community about the Fox being in the henhouse with, respect to the federal government. Certainly President Trump and his supporters continue to cast dispersions regarding a lot of standard practices in different states. We just saw this with California. And then I think Democrats are ready to jump to the worst conclusions about anything that the federal government might be doing. And so it's no surprise that confidence following the 2024 election was really high. It was like 77% across the board. And now it's down to the low 60s across the board.

And that is bipartisan, the declining confidence over the past year. Mike, we've heard pretty consistently in the days before the 2020 elections, which President Trump has claimed falsely was stolen. But even going back, I mean, this was something that President Trump was saying as early as the Iowa caucuses in 2016 when he lost to Ted. Cruz. He was saying basically any result that he doesn't like has to have been stolen, has to have been fraudulent. That seems to have caught up with us here, where you have polling suggests that Republicans in particular are skeptical of the election system, election outcomes, although they believe much more strongly in election outcomes when the elections elect Republicans. As you've surveyed the scene and looked at the reporting and listened to the rhetoric that we've heard from the president, from Republicans.

How worried are you about people's confidence in the elections? There are a lot of people. If you talk at the local level with whether the Republicans or Democrats or just sort of nonpartisan elections officials, there's a lot of confidence. And I think there's in some ways a lot of confidence in the same way that people hate Congress but love their own congressmen in poll after poll after poll. I think there's a lot of sense that there's a lot of integrity in how they do my elections, right? I go to the polling place and I'm generally comfortable with how things go.

It's in that other place. In that other place, maybe that's close by to me. You do hear this a lot. And look, there are some legitimate concerns, I think, about the way that various, you know, places, whether it's individual polling, you know, or I guess individual votes. voting districts or counties or even states like California, where there are actually legitimate questions about do we really need to spend this much time counting or why is it that Fulton County, Georgia always takes the longest to get their votes in? And there are legitimate answers to

those questions, but I think some of those are legitimate questions. But I think it's those places that are maybe not where the complainants live, but where they are seeing things that don't smell right to them, don't pass the smell test. That seems to be where a lot of that generalized frustration is when it comes to election integrity. And of course, you layer on top of that something that is new, I think, in this current regime, which is you have politicians increasingly in both parties. I think Stephen is correct.

We need to be concerned as well about Democrats sort of falling into the same trap that Republicans have in the Trump era, but also media outlets that you know, kind of, a lot of them are not establishment or mainstream media outlets, but increasingly on the internet, they're sort of niche podcasts or media networks that trumpet those claims and allow for conspiracy theories to sort of fester. And that, to me, seems like a big problem that's layered on the general sort of distrust of, you know, we don't like how they count votes in that other place over there. It gives voice to those. And I think that is sort of the story of the last 10 years or so with election integrity. And the big problems, of course,

have been that one of those people, you know, throwing gas on that fire of those conspiracy theories, has been the president of the United States, Donald Trump. The question that I have, and maybe this is some we can get into discussion with, is what does the media landscape look like on this question? We saw that Fox News and News Corp faced a big lawsuit. The same thing happened with some other right-wing news outlets like Newsmax. They've faced lawsuits over their coverage of the 2020 election, are there going to be more media outlets that sort of run with conspiracy theories? Or will those lawsuits, which they have to pay out a lot of money to companies like Dominion voting, will they be a deterrent on the media amplifying some of these claims?

Yeah, I mean, watching some of those media outlets, it may be that they've become more sophisticated in how they peddle conspiracy theories rather than committing to, not peddle conspiracy theories again in the future. Hey, Stephen, I want to play a clip from the all-in podcast, very popular podcast, more than a million subscribers on YouTube, hundreds of thousands of listeners to each episode, sort of a mix between startup, talk, economy, tech, and they dabble in some politics. When they dabble in politics, they often shift in a conspiracy direction, and they certainly did that in a conversation that they had a little more than a week ago about those results in the Spencer Pratt, L.A. Mayoral Primary. Can we play that clip, guys? Is the election system in Los Angeles,

specifically in California, corrupt? And is this election been stolen from Spencer Pratt? Or is it just? There is no election. There was no election. There is no election. Okay. So there is is no spoon. Your rights to have an election are gone. You were a citizen of those who tell you who your overseers are.

You are no longer allowed to vote for your elected representatives. They are now appointed representatives. Here's some statistics for you. In-person voting the day of the election in Los Angeles County for mayor.

Spencer Pratt, 35%. Karen Bass, 29%, Nipia Rahman, 26%. Mail-in ballots received before election day. 38% for Bass, 28% for Pratt, 20% for Rahman. And then all these ballots that arrive after election day, 37% for ramen, 35% for Bass, 19% for Pratt. So Pratt's post-election mail-in ballots declined by one-third. So statistically, the population of people that send in their ballots late, reduced for Pratt by a third, increased for Nipia Rahman by 80%, and Karen Bass, 10% less.

If you just look at the mail-in ballots before and after-election day as a comparison, I don't know if there's a socio-political way that you can assess those statistics and assume that these are individuals casting their individual vote for who they think should be mayor of L.A. hung for mathematical and statistical literacy. And what happened here is mathematically and statistically. So nobody has any steel man or a concept of how this could have happened. I can tell you the statistical odds that this would have happened. And it's one in a trillion. Okay. What if?

Are you telling me the one in a trillion shot hit? I'm asking if there is any. Stephen, you've run elections. You know how this stuff works. The reason I chose that cliff is not only because it's very popular podcast, These are smart guys. You know, these are not your sort of, you know, ill-informed. They do these podcasts.

They talk about the stuff in detail. They know what they're talking about. And my suspicion is that if you're listening to that and you don't know anything else, but you trust these guys on other things, you're going to hear that and think there was no election. These people are appointed. This was a one and a trillion shot and it hit. And this is therefore, in our most. populist state, this is an illegitimate election. How do you respond to the specific claims that they

made there? Yeah, so I'm of two minds. One, they have individual agency, and so shame on them for saying what they said was seemingly without doing any research, because even the way that they're talking about it is just wrong. The way they said ballots received after election day when actually what they're talking about is votes reported after election day. So that includes all the mail ballots that were dropped off on election day, which constituted in Los Angeles County about 33% of the vote. This is not all that surprising. Even in Rahman's past elections, she surged late in the game because her demographic largely comes from racial minorities and young voters who, for whatever reason tend to return their ballots, their mail ballots, later in the process. And so, again, to John

and to Mike's point, this sort of shook out the way that one might have expected if one was looking at Los Angeles County. Now, of the other mind, we absolutely knew this was coming. California knew this was coming. Los Angeles County knew that this was coming. And yet, I feel there was an insufficient effort to head off this type of theory. Yes, the election played out in a way that really sort of fan the flames, but we knew that this was coming. There wasn't enough communication about how this we might expect to get results. And there certainly wasn't enough of an effort to hasten the results that were available within the first 2448 hours. And so we were still looking where we only had about two-thirds of the results available within the first 2448 hours. And so we were still

looking where we only had about two-thirds of the results available within the first 24 hours. Can I butt in here because I watched that clip that you played and I'm like rolling my eyes. And Stephen is a much more maybe professional in his reaction here and sort of parsing exactly what they got wrong. But I'm struck so much by how much those very intelligent and very, you know, much more successful than I am in terms of where they are in their industry, right? these are big, big wigs in Silicon Valley, how much they don't know what they don't know. And maybe I'm giving them too much credit by saying that.

Maybe they do know that they don't know, and they're sort of saying this because they know it will get a reaction from their listener base. But I would just ask these guys on all end, David Sacks and the rest of them, to like go spend a week reporting on elections, on campaigns, go talk to voters, go talk to actual real people. they're talking about statistics as if voting is not done by actual human beings who are weird,

who have bizarre, I mean, have weird things like where I've talked to voters who are like trying to decide in an open primary between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders, like there are actual voters out there who think that way who cannot be sort of shoved into a statistical model and you can't figure out, well, how did those votes happen? And it must have been, it must have been fraud. It must have been sort of the people who are holding the marionette strings and allowing, you know, and making things happen. Because frankly, that's how a lot of Silicon Valley folks view themselves. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of projection of their own view of how they operate in how people in elections, people in government operate as well.

I think Stephen can speak to the fact that that's not how government works. That is not how election maintenance and election, you know, conduction of elections works. And so I would encourage them to actually go learn about what they are speaking about. And also to listen to, I guess that was the host. I'm unfamiliar with all of the personalities on that podcast. But the fact that the moderator of that discussion was trying desperately to get these guys to steal man, right, to figure out what's the best argument for why this wasn't a complete sham election? Listen to that guy more because I think it will sharpen their analysis as dull as it is and allow them to actually help their audience try to understand things instead of providing all this just bad information.

But look, you're asking them to do shoe leather work. I'm not even asking them to go that far. Fair enough. I'm asking them to do Google work. I'm asking them to read the Los Angeles Times, which has a very helpful explanation of the phenomenon. I'm asking them maybe just to go to Los Angeles County and watch. the tabulation process or ask them to look at past election results. But Mike makes a sort of a preliminary point that we have to assess is whether they believe this in good faith or whether

that they know that this is a way to gin up their audience because let's not discount the number of conflict entrepreneurs and stolen election theorists who have ridden this thing to great fame and to great fortune. Yeah, for sure. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you.

It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg. And we're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. What we played was, I think, roughly two minutes of what was a 25-minute conversation on an hour and a half long podcast. And my own view was that they all believe it, that they all believe that the election was stolen or manipulated. They believe it as emphatically as both those two clips from the two people speaking suggested and that the host, Jason Calcanus, was Steeleman. And the argument or trying to push them to steal a man the argument, even though he too is sympathetic

to this. Now again, as I said in introducing those clips, they do tend to veer off into conspiracy when they're talking about politics. David Sachs is a very well-known sort of Russia, pro-Russia conspiracy guy. He also heads the president's AI task force. But I think they actually do believe it. And to me that, I think that was part of what made that clip so concerning is, you know, I didn't play a clip from Gateway Pundit where these guys are not smart. They have no standards. They don't care. And they are doing exactly, Stephen, what you suggest. I think they're conspiracy farming, they're rage farming. They're looking for content. They're looking for clicks. That's how they make their money. And they've gotten themselves in trouble repeatedly about this. These guys reach,

you know, a million plus people. And, you know, Stephen, to your point, you're right. I think that they didn't use compelling statistics. They did use statistics. I mean, David Friedberg was quoting those numbers and when they came in, even if he was mischaracterizing them. And then the conversation continued. And he said it was almost as if you were announcing this epiphany, he said, and the sort of clusters of votes for Nithia Rottman were around Skid Row and suggested that that was what carried her over. the top. Now, even if there was fraud around Skid Row and there are some viral videos floating around where you have a woman from Skid Row saying she was paid to do this, even if it were the case that everybody on Skid Row voted fraudulently, that is not going to do what he seems to be

suggesting it would do. So I want to just clean a few things up. One, the Skid Row videos were people who were paid potentially to register or to sign a petition sheet. not in order to cast a ballot. Two, the Skid Row final statistics did not favor Rahman. They favored Bass. So that was another thing. I don't know if that was being alleged. It was.

Three, David Sachs, a graduate of the same law school as I'm a graduate of. So he understands formal logic. He should understand that just because you cannot explain something doesn't mean that it must be fraud just because your theory doesn't fit, doesn't mean that this next theory must absolutely be the only controlling theory. And so that's frustrating to me. And then finally, sort of, what is your theory? You allege these statistical anomalies, but how did it happen? And that's something that they've never been able to do. But then I go back to, okay, shame on them. But again, this was entirely predictable and are we as an election administration community as a row democracy community,

are we doing enough to make sure we're not always fighting from behind as we clearly are on this podcast and with many, many Americans who otherwise aren't inclined to believe that every election is stolen? Yeah, I mean, let's spend a moment there. Like Stephen makes the point that, you know, there were these delays that it does take a while to count. We didn't have final results. And in those moments, in those days and weeks, it allows people like this to say, hey, there has to be some people up to no good here. And I'm very sympathetic to that argument. You know, we had, there was a, we're recording this Monday morning, June 22nd. There was an election in Columbia. Yesterday, the country, Columbia, by most accounts, it was a clean and fair election. The

ballots were counted within several hours, paper ballots, as I understand it. And we had a result. California, this is routine in California. This happens virtually every election. And in fact, one of the people on the All In podcast was saying, no, this doesn't really count as fraud because they do it on purpose. And his argument is they do it on purpose so that when this, when you have these delays, they can go in and sort of fix the results, which I think is nonsense and certainly unproven. But it does create questions. And, you know, at a time when people are increasingly worried about the integrity of our elections, shouldn't California be doing everything it possibly can to eliminate those questions, Mike? They should. I think we should not hold our breath

and expect that, you know, the government of California is going to sort of clear their throats, before every election run ads in order to inform people about how this is going to work. But I do want to say, going back to the idea that people don't know what they don't know, you know, there is a sense that a lot of people who are pointing this stuff out are for the very first time paying attention to how elections are administered. They are learning for the first time that California allows for, you know, ballots that are mailed in or dropped off that were mail and ballots dropped off on election day in California can be counted, right? Stephen, let me make sure I give this, right,

after election day. These are the laws the way that California has chosen through its elected representatives. Perhaps there was a referendum because California has a lot of ballot referendums, but I believe this is all just state law passed by their elected representatives for how elections can be conducted in California. They are conducted in California differently than they are in Arizona, in Nevada, in Florida, in Illinois, in Virginia, right? Every single state has their own sets of laws. A lot of them are similar, a lot of them are different. You know, there are states, particularly in the West, that have essentially all mail-in ballots, all mail-in. All-mail- voting. And there is, and, you know, I believe in Nevada, you essentially have to decline to receive a

ballot. You have to say, I do not want to vote in this election. Do not send me a ballot. And again, correct me if I'm wrong on the specifics. But the point is, is that every state has its own laws. And just like with every other law, states need to be able to sort of defend their laws, the way that they do things. People don't like it. But I just, I guess I have a little impatience with people who are either, you know, Californians paying attention for the first time, or people from outside of the state of California sort of looking at how things are done there and complaining that it's not just that it's unfair, they don't like it. That's fair. I think you can say it's not the way that I would like for our elections to be conducted. But to then make the logical jump that this is being done to rig the

election to rig the system to allow for fraud to happen, you've got to have proof. Otherwise, it's just partisan complaining about the way that they do elections there. On the other hand, I will say that Florida, we remember 26 years ago now, had an election in which it was an embarrassment in how they conducted and counted those elections, the hanging chads and all the rest, and a presidential election hung in the balance because of that. Florida cleaned things up because of the national embarrassment that they were in the 2000 election and Florida now counts very quickly.

I think it would behoove California to not just defend the way they do it, but seriously reconsider how they count elections and if they want to keep the system that they have to make the case publicly to the people of California and I suppose the rest of the country

that what they're doing is above board because I think in general, you know, without, you know, there are some small exceptions because there is a non-zero amount of voter fraud that happens or sort of ballot fraud. But to make the case that it is something that is on the whole above board, they should be saying that. They should be shouting that from the rooftops instead of sort of jealously arguing that, you know, people are wrong to doubt. You know, they are election deniers. I actually kind of hate that term because it can sound a little smug, you know, to say, oh, you're denying the truth. people should be a little more understanding that openness about these things is the way to go.

Yeah. Here you'll honor a lot of that. A few things. One, national media environment is responsible for a lot of this. Those differences between the state that you pointed out only become material when you have access to information about all the different states and you're watching it through the national prism. Two, the correct states for California to be assessed against are not Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey. Those are all states in which less than a quarter of the population votes by mail ballot. The correct states to be assessed in California against are Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, Arizona,

all of whom have above 75% of their results come from mail ballot. Even in that comparison, however, California is slow in results available within the first 48 hours, and I think that that deserves assessment. Now, if I were a California election official listening to Mike, I would say, don't you dare compare us to Florida in 2000? In Florida in 2000, that went not as it was intended. There were not supposed to be hanging chats that were messing with. tabulation. In California, our election just went exactly as we wanted it to. Just a lot of people don't want it to be designed that way. And I think that's right. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't

have a conversation, a resetting conversation, even if it went the way it should be just the way that Florida had a resetting conversation following the 2000 election. Stephen, I think it would be useful if you could explain to us in talk to me like I'm a third grader because that's roughly my level of sophistication on these things. Why can Arizona successfully process mail-in ballots in a timely manner when California can't? What are the differences? So first, I think a lot of people would say that Arizona counts ballots too slowly. Arizona is consistently one of the last states to know the presidential results on, both in 2020 and in 2024. And part of that goes to the same reason that we're dissatisfied with California system is that a lot of people drop a mail ballot off on election day.

So let's take the comparison of a state that has a lot of people voting in person versus a state that has a lot of people voting by mail. So if you vote in person, you're showing up to a voting location, you're showing your identification to a poll worker. That means that there's no ex post, no post-election verification of your identity. You've confirmed your identity. Then if you're voting in person, you're marking your ballot and you're putting it through the tabulation machine at the voting location. The voters doing that himself. That means that at the end of the night, all the election workers have to do is remove the memory drive from the individual tabulation machine, securely package it up, drive it to wherever the central facility is, and then load it into the aggregate server and then post the results.

Now let's take a look at the mail voting system. If you have that ballot that's on your kitchen counter and you say, oh, it's election day. This is exciting. I should find. finally fill this out. And you fill it out and then you put it in an envelope and you sign the envelope and then you drop it off on election day. Now that constitutes about one third of the voters in Los Angeles County. 700,000 people dropped off their mail ballots on election day in Los Angeles County. Well, county election workers aren't picking those up until election night. then they're bringing them back. Then they're scanning the barcode on that return ballot affidavit envelope to make sure that

the voter hasn't already returned a ballot or shown up to vote in person. Then they're doing signature verification, making sure that signature matches the signature on the voter's profile because, again, they didn't show up in person and show anyone an ID. Then they're removing those sometimes four ballots from one individual envelope, because California has so many candidates and so many contests that it goes on to multiple pages. And then the election workers are ultimately feeding that into a tabulation machine, not the individual voter. And so I think even in that very sort of hopefully third grade level or sixth grade level, I don't know, it was probably a little higher than third grade.

Are you still with us, Steve? Are you understanding it? I'm getting it. I'm following. Okay. Okay, good. You know, and that smoothed out some of the rough edge. and some of the additional complications of what you have to do

to ensure the integrity of the mail voting process. But it does show how it might be harder on the front end to have an in-person voting setup, but it is easier on the back end when it comes to just reporting results on election night. And that's part of the reason why I get frustrated with some of the political posturing from Governor DeSantis and others who sort of say,

Well, Neiner-Neiner, our system, you know, we do it better, as if that's some indication that Governor DeSantis is simply of a better work ethic than Governor Newsom. And that might have actually be the case, but I don't think that this is the dispositive evidence here. We're going to capture that Neiner-Niner clip, and we're going to use that every time. I'm going to use that every time Jonah says something foolish. You needed to put your hands like this or on your nose. Those are something, Stephen.

Come on. Steve, I've been thinking about this because what we're really talking about here is trust in elections and what is the source of the lack of public trust. And this is difficult because it doesn't always sort of match on to political parties because obviously Arizona is a state, for instance, where Republicans win a lot with a mail-in, you know, Utah is another Republican state that has a lot of mail-in voting. So some of this is east and west. But I do think that if you look at...

at what both parties sort of dislike about the other party's kind of general preference for voting, right? Republicans prefer voting in person and voting on election day as a general rule. I know that's different in specific states. And Democrats often support increasing the ability for people to vote in any way they can. Mail in ballot, bring the mail-in ballot on election day, vote on election day, bring it to your polling place, expand the number of opportunities. And I think both of those kind of preferences also match with the pathologies that people have about what kind of fraud or what kind of election meddling could happen as a result of the other party liking those sort of things. So you hear a lot about, particularly in red states,

you know, that all of the efforts to sort of ensure that people who are showing up to vote on election day are who they say they are. We've got to have more voter ID. We've got to have more rules to stop fraudulent voting at polling places. You hear from a lot of Democrats say, see, they're trying to suppress the vote. They're trying to stop people from voting because maybe they don't have ID. They're trying to stop people from busing in large numbers of people who are generally Democratic voters. See, they're trying to stop us from voting. So that's one side of it. And on the other side, I think what you're hearing from a lot of Republicans is they look at what is happening in California and in Oregon and in Washington and in Utah and Arizona, but particularly in the more blue

side of that ledger. And they're saying, see, this system, which allows for any number of ways to vote, it's in itself is opening up opportunities for fraud as well. And I think that nobody can kind of see the other side, can steal man the other side. And it can steal man the other side. of those arguments, or I shouldn't say nobody. I should say the partisans, the most motivated to sort of stir the pot on election integrity and say there is no integrity in our elections or sort of have been sucked in by their worst fears about their opponents and their assumptions that the other side is going to do whatever they can to win, including, you know, lie, cheat, and steal.

And those are the ways in which they do it. I just think there's a lack of communication. and understanding, not to sound like, you know, peace love and understanding, like we all got to get together and hug and talk about elections, but I do think there is just a fundamental distrust of how those other guys do their elections. Well, that just gets back to the point that you made at the outset, which is there is a higher level of confidence in your local jurisdiction. There's a higher level of confidence in your state, and there's a higher level of distrust of other states, particularly states that you feel live a way that is incompatible with your worldview,

incompatible with what you think the just society or the role of the government should be. And that's absolutely true. That's a well-documented phenomenon. And it's true outside of the election administration context as well, obviously. I would posit another reason that some people have diminishing faith in elections and election results. And this one traces back directly to 2020. and the efforts by the President of the United States

to steal the election and to rein in an office after he lost. I mean, there's a reason that people are saying, we can't trust him, we can't trust Republicans, because of all of the things that he said and did, I mean, you know, wherever you want to start looking, he really started making this case that the election was going to be fixed or corrupt or rigged was his favorite word in the months leading up to the 2020 elections,

then in the time in between the actual, election day and January 6th, he trotted out virtually every crazy conspiracy theory he could find, almost all of which were sort of systematically and methodically put down when they were adjudicated. You had public comment from the president's own people, people who worked on the elections who said that they weren't rigged, that this was a legitimate result. And then we have seen the president in the nearly six years in between, every time he's given an opportunity, suggests that that election was fixed. He's required his own people, whether they appear in a Senate confirmation hearings and they take questions from somebody like Richard Blumenthal,

Senator from Connecticut, who's made it a practice of asking nominees before his committees, do you believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and they all sort of ham and hawn haw so as to not piss off the president? He's in effect requiring them to say something that is false, that Joe Biden didn't win, that Donald Trump won or might have won, and they're doing this for even low-level employees, people who are seeking jobs in agencies around the government. The first question many of them get when they sit down for interviews

about the prospective job they're going to hold is, was the 2020 election fair and legitimate? And the wrong answer from their perspective, isn't it? So you have a president who's thundered about this for six years and is now, and I want to use this, the remaining time that we have to look forward, doing everything he can to sow continued confusion and mistrust about the election results that are now in front of us. You have people in Trump world like Steve Bannon who are actively calling for the deployment of ice to polling places around the country.

You have the president and his team effectively using the Department of Justice as an arm of his campaign. In certain requests, you have the DOJ and the FBI seizing ballots. You have the DOJ requesting voter registration data that it's not entitled to and sometimes prohibited. from having, what are we to make of all of these things? On the one hand, we're less than six months out and you don't want to speculate irresponsibly about where this could be leading. On the other hand, it seems to me entirely likely that we get to the day after the election if the president hasn't done well if Republicans lose and we see sort of chaos as a result. We'll look back on all of these things and they'll be the data points to tell us, hey, they're about to do something.

Stephen, do you have thoughts on what the president is up to? Yeah. So one quick point on the California election vis-a-vis the comments you just made, though, and then I'll turn to the November elections, which is, yeah, the president is historically awful on this front. But if we hold that as a constant, then why was California different than the redistricting election in? Virginia. The president said that the redistricting election that Virginia had just a few months ago was rigged. And yet that didn't spread like wildfire. The president said that the Los Angeles County, the Los Angeles mayoral race was rigged. And that caught on and lots and lots of

normal Americans gave credence to it. So why did California catch on? And I think part of it is beyond our control in that that's the different nature of the things that were on the ballot. But I do think that some of it is within our control as good faith election administrators and good faith state legislators. And I think that's where California needs to look and it needs to assess. And yes, maybe some of them will say, well, that's like negotiating with a terrorist, but I still think that it needs to be revisited. Now, moving forward, I think that a lot of this is just, bluster. I think a lot of it is causing chaos for the sake of chaos. I think a lot of it is further fortifying the narrative that President Trump is unassailable and has never lost

anything in his life. That being said, I think that the real wild card here is if federal law enforcement gets involved in the November elections during the administration of the election. I think that we've gotten very good as an election community about defending elections that have already concluded and the ballots have been tabulated. But if the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security intervenes and takes out equipment or takes out live ballots before the election has been concluded, then I think that we will be in new uncharted waters. And I think you'll be very complicated and very messy. Before we take an ad break,

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you can upgrade to a premium membership, no ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away exclusive town halls with the founders and more. Okay, we'll be right back. And we're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. Stephen, what are you, what, what's the administration doing by trying to seize these ballots going back to 2020 or trying to tell Ohio, you know, to change its deadlines on mail-in ballots? Is there anything that sort of connects all of these that you can see that helps us make sense of this? Or is it just simply about

sowing further mistrust in the way that our elections are conducted? Yeah, that's certainly what the cynics say, is that this is a plot to undermine confidence in the elections, to sow further distrust, to so further chaos, such that the federal government can do something in the 26 November elections. Now, I don't know what that something is. And the honest answer is, I don't know why. I don't know if they're connected or if it's just disparate actors who are all trying to please the president. Because it's exactly as you suggest that if you want to get in the president's good books, then election integrity is the surest path to do that.

And a lot of this could just be, oh my gosh, the president's asking my district. I'm the special agent in charge of the northern district of Georgia, which is where Atlanta, Fulton County. I got to do something. So I don't know. And though I was very involved in the Fulton County warrant and the removal of the 600 plus boxes of election material from the 2020 elections, I have no idea what the FBI is now doing with that material. And I certainly don't know how it factors into a broader Trump team agenda if there is one. Yeah. I mean, I appreciate your restraint there. And it's good.

I mean, part of the challenge in even having a conversation like this is it necessarily requires us to speculate. We don't like to do a lot of speculation on this podcast. We don't like to do a lot of speculation at the dispatch. But I do worry that when you look at all of these things taken together, you don't really have to be a cynic to believe that there's something, you know, nefarious afoot. Mike, I think if you go back and you look at it. the conversation that Donald Trump had with Leslie Stahl, and she asked him why he constantly beats up

the media. Why do you do this? Why do you trash us? She said to him, you know, this gets tired, this gets annoying. People are sick of hearing this. And in her telling, what he said in response was, you know why I do it. I do it to discredit you all and demean you all. So when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you. And she said, put that in your head for a minute when she was talking describing this to the audience and look i mean i think don't trump is mostly an ad hoc person who makes decisions in the moment and he's trying to win the next minute and he's not somebody who gives a lot of thought or has a lot of sort of sort of strategy behind some of the decisions that he makes but that one seems pretty clear and i wonder if

what he's doing here is sort of the electoral equivalent of that every time he pokes holes or or floats a conspiracy or something, people, more and more people believe, ah, this can't possibly be right. Am I too cynical? I mean, Stephen has painted me as a hopeless cynic here. Does that fit? No, I think we should be guarded and limited in our cynicism, but we should also, we should not pretend like what happened in 2020 didn't happen. we should not pretend like he has, he being Trump, has not continued to talk in this way.

I view this in many ways as, you know, to go back to the way Donald Trump sort of is trying to win this minute, win this hour, win this day in a media context, he, I think, is approaching all of this as well in the same way. It's throwing the kitchen sink, throwing all possible theories and paths and ways, and can I get there this way?

Oh, somebody's telling me I can't do that. Is there an even easier path through this other loophole and a law, which may not be a loophole, but I have some lawyer telling me it is a loophole, and so we can proceed in that way. I think that is how he approaches and how he has trained those, I don't mean literally trained, but has trained people who are sort of working for him to think as well. So many people in this second Trump administration, ape. the ways and the manners and the sort of attitude that Trump has in a way that wasn't the case in the first term. I think that is something to be concerned about as well because, you know,

there was, we can all go back to December and early January of 2020 and 2021. When there were all those shakeups at DOJ, you had Bill Barr leave, you had an effort to put in Jeffrey Clark as acting AG. All of this was just, finding the person closest to him, you know, finding the tool closest at hand and trying to, you know, make his way to the result that he wanted. I believe that that is, that is what we should be concerned about, but we should also sort of take a breath and understand that even doing so, you know, his attempt to do this in 2020 was ugly. It was, it was, I think, long-term destructive. it was embarrassing, but it also failed.

And I don't mean to say that as a way to say we don't need to worry about something similar happening in the future, only to say that this is a big country. It is a country with a lot of checks and balances at the local level, at the state level, in the courts, in the court of public opinion, there are lots of checks on things. And I think those checks are weaker than they have been. you know, in a very long time, but they are still there. And we should just, I think as a journalistic entity, we should continue checking those checks, talking with people in election administration, folks like Stephen here who are in office

and are actually having to do the work of administering elections, understanding, you know, who might be willing to bend the rules or break the rules in order to to get some kind of outcome. Those are the things that, you know, that I think we in journalism have a responsibility to do, but also not to get hysterical. So, Mike, let me push back a little bit.

For exactly the reasons that you're suggesting, I'm more concerned at this time than I was in the past. Rather than people like Bill Barr and Chris Ray at the FBI and Mike Pence as vice president, we have in place people who are well-known conspiracy theorists

and election deniers, and I will use that. I'm not offended by it. I think it works. Mark Wayne Mullen, Cash Patel, Todd Blanche, potential attorney general, J.D. Vance, leading the charge as vice president. These people just make shit up all the time. Yeah.

They say things that are not true. They say things that are not true about elections. And, you know, in the context of any kind of dispute, do you think there's any question that they would just come down on the side of the president? say what they believe the president of the United States wants them to say? Yeah, I agree with you. I share your concern.

I believe that this is a crew that is more willing to step out of, not just more willing, is almost certain to step out of the bounds if they believe that Donald Trump wants them to. And so I think that's a concern. We should just continue. All I'm saying is we have a sort of a responsibility to continue shedding a light, continue talking about that this, as we are discussing here on this podcast, in terms of solutions, you know, I don't know. I mean, I will, I guess I will say there was a, there was a theory going around, and I would be interested to know what Stephen thinks about this, but there's a,

there's a conservative, Republican lawyer, media type by the name of Will Chamberlain, who over the past couple of weeks has been saying, going on podcasts, he went on Benny Johnson's show, he went on a couple of other things and push this idea that, you know, hey, these California elections were clearly corrupt. Clearly, they're not legitimate elections. And so when members of Congress are elected from California in November, Mike Johnson, as Speaker of the House, should just refuse to seat them until, until what, until the House of Representatives or the Department of Justice or a combination of the two, investigate those California elections and verify that they are correct. I find that alarming. I find that alarming that he is saying that and saying that in

venues that will get a hearing in places of influence. At the same time, I find that hard to believe and that that could stand up to any kind of, you know, any kind of scrutiny in a court of law, for instance, and that, you know, anybody of the House of Representatives would have jurisdiction to investigate elections. States run elections, not the House of of representatives. So I just think that sort of highlighting those ways in which these theories that folks have and that folks are pushing

won't work that way. And eventually they come smack up against the truth. And I don't think we can forget that is that one thing we had on our side with respect to the 2020 election and all subsequent elections that the president

has said were fraudulent, is that they weren't fraudulent, that President Biden lawfully and fairly won the 2020 election. And I think we saw this with the Trump kind of appointed, but he wasn't confirmed by the Senate, U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, Bill Assaley, who's about as Trumpified a attorney as you can get, who, when he went to investigate one of the claims, which was that a batch of 24,000 votes had been loaded in Los Angeles. Angeles County and it contained zero votes for Spencer Pratt and that therefore this was evidence of fraud. He went and investigated and he posted that this just wasn't the case, that the Associated Press

had delivered the results in two different batches and the one that they delivered one minute later had only votes for Spencer Pratt and no votes for the other two major candidates and that upon reviewing the event logs from Los Angeles County, there was no batch. released in which Spencer Pratt had zero votes. And so I think that we have to remember that there will come a point where these people will need facts in order to be able to do anything that is short of putting tanks in the streets if they want to upset the Apple car. And they have never had the facts. And I think people need to remind themselves that for six years now, every enterprising MAGA fraud finder, fraud hunter, attorney general, district attorney,

U.S. attorney has had lots of runway to be looking for fraud, massive fraud in our election systems, and they have not been able to find it. And even over the past year and a half since Trump has been back in the White House, they have been unable to produce anything but these pathetic announcements from director Kosh Patel about rounding up four non-U.S. citizens who voted in a past election. And so I would say there is your ultimate proof that they don't have the proof. And they're increasingly even acknowledging this. I mean, Speaker Mike Johnson's comments regarding the California election were just so pathetic that they were like they were bordering on insane when he said,

well, the fraud is so deeply hidden that the evidence is the non-evidence of fraud. I was just like, you know, I think that's very telling. I think it is telling. Look, I want to be where you are on this, Stephen. And of course, you know, probably wouldn't be in the business that we're in if we didn't believe that the truth is ultimately going to prevail and will ultimately matter. You do get to the point where some of these things take on enough of a life of their own and are able to persuade enough voters, enough Republicans, that we may reach a point where perception matters more than reality,

and it could cause a lot of problems if it does. I want to end on a note that I think is in some ways a continuation of the previous comment. We're recording this on June 22nd. Have any of you noticed the number of times that President Donald J. Trump refers to the number 22 in his public remarks and speeches. I have not. Is that a code or something, Steve? So it's a thing. No, there's an NBC news story out yesterday about how often Donald Trump refers to the number 22 in his speeches, both extemporaneous remarks and apparently in his

prepared remarks. They say that he's mentioned the number in a wide range of contacts, claims about Washington, D.C. infrastructure, military operations, historical timelines, what have you. People have, present said in Iowa in January, people have been waiting for 22 years for the U.S. to strike Iran. In March, he said there were 22 mind-droppers in reference to a military operation there. He has apparently described Washington, D.C., having 22 fountains. he has said that he met 22 medical specialists and claimed a trip that he was going to take to Asia would take 22 hours. No explanation. You guys have not picked up on this. This just means that you're not as observant as our NBC colleagues. But there is now, of course, a conspiracy theory. Of course. About this. Because the president has argued in different.

contexts about serving a third term. He's had Lindsey Graham and others cheer him on. And he's argued that one of the amendments to the U.S. Constitution ought to be repealed. Can you guess which amendment that is? It's not the 21st, is it? You've got it. Wow. Wow. Oh, my goodness. Do you think the president is seeding the number 22 in people's brains so that when he runs for a third, term. This is, this is, this is, this is Kevin Nealin and Mr. Subliminal on Saturday Live, you know, like if, if Trump were really trying to do this, he would sort of say 22 under his breath, you know, as, as he's giving a speech, you know, the, we're going to have a great, we're going to have a great time for July 4th, 22, and it's everything is going to be wonderful, and we're

going to be big getting the election's 22. And I just, I don't know. I mean, this is, my view on this is that Trump is at heart a performer and knows almost like in his bones, like certain things sound right, certain sounds. And I mean, you hear about this all the time. Stand up comedians often say, you know, words that, like, the letter K is funnier than any other letter. And so, like, that's why the F word is like so often deployed, not just for shock value, but because that ending with the c sound is somehow funnier.

and you can't even explain why that is, it just is. And I think that Trump has a similar thing where, you know, he relies on sort of rhetorical crutches. And so I chalk up, I'm, now I'm being naive, I guess, Steve, but I think this is, this is like a rhetorical crutch. It's the same way that he refers to, you know, conversations that didn't happen where people are puffing him up. He refers to the person talking to him as calling Trump, sir, right? Sir, sir, we've never seen anything like this. 22 is like the numerical version of that. Yeah.

Right. Right. Or when he says, people don't know this, but it's the tell that he himself did not know this. This is the first I've heard of this theory. That being said, I think we have now declared victory in Iran at least 22 times. So perhaps. No, it is a good reminder that conspiracy theories, are not the exclusive domain of MAGA,

but they, for whatever reason, have had particularly acute purchase within MAGA. As far as a third term, I feel like I haven't heard as much about that since the first six months of his retaking the White House. And I don't know if that's because just, you know, we're getting caught up in some controversies and some challenges of the second term and the third term seems less fun at this point, or if it's because of just continuing health challenges. But I don't know, but I'll take the win for what it's worth.

I would like to believe it's just because the Constitution prohibits it. But I don't think that is, in fact, the motivating force here. But I'll take it whatever the reason. I do think we may not hear much more about the number 22, although now, of course, if he ever says it again, people are sort of primed to jump on it. But I do think we will hear more about the 22nd Amendment. I think it becomes more and more fanciful as the president seems to struggle in a number of different ways.

But that doesn't mean that we won't hear more about it, and I suspect we will. At the very least, Lindsey Graham is going to be out there wearing hats pushing for Trump 48. 2028. Trump 2028 are the hats he loves. Yeah. Well, thank you for this edifying discussion. I hope it helps our listeners kind of make sense of some of what we're hearing and, seeing as we proceed toward November of 2026, we will undoubtedly be revisiting these important issues. And Stephen, we will be here to have you back to help us make sense of a lot of nonsense between now and then.

Before we end today's show, I wanted to let our listeners know about an upcoming live Scotis blog event. On Wednesday, July 8th, at the John Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., the Scotus blog crew and a cast of brilliant legal minds will come together to explore this blockbuster Supreme Court term. If you'd like to register your interest, you can find the link on the SCOTUS blog homepage or in the advisory opinions newsletter, and we'll pop it in the show notes here as well. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review, and subscribe to the show on your podcast, player of choice to help new listeners find us. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything

even the ones from the 22 of you who don't believe there's any significance to the president's use of 22. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure.

Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.