How Trump and his allies are sowing doubt ahead of the midterms

In the final week before the 2026 midterms, we wanted to try to quantify something we were all feeling: that Trump and his supporters are priming their base to doubt the results of the election in the event that the Republicans lose — something widely projected to occur in polls as Trump's popularity continues to suffer.

I used an LLM classifier to sort social media posts, podcast transcripts and other online statements from high-profile political influencers into election security-related topics, then combined that with Factbase data on Trump's in-person remarks, speeches and press conferences. The classifier had an accuracy rate of over 97 percent on a human-labeled test set of more than 200 statements.

That turned up more than 7,000 statements this year from nearly 600 right-wing accounts, podcasts and other outlets questioning the election's integrity. Claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud were twice as prevalent as during the 2024 cycle, while mentions of voting machines and general election rigging — a staple of past elections — appears to have been supplanted by those immigrant-related narratives. Trump himself made nearly 300 such statements in his second term and mentioned voter ID and mail-in ballots more than six times more often in 2026 than in 2025.

I ran the same analysis for the left's pushback to these narratives. Statements opposing on these claims more than doubled compared with the 2024 cycle — an even faster increase than in right-wing election integrity claims.