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Charles Douglas and I had a lot to get into on this week’s live, because what Trump said Thursday night and everything he’s actually been doing for months before he said it add up to the clearest picture yet of how he plans to attack the midterm elections.
The throughline of this conversation is that Trump’s case for interfering in November rests on claims that fall apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny as he builds a pretext to interfere in the midterms.
Charles and I walked through why the China voter data claim doesn’t hold up, what Trump has actually done procedurally to the Election Assistance Commission, the Justice Department, and federal cybersecurity infrastructure, and why none of it changes the fact that he has less power and credibility than he did in 2020.
Then we got into how House and Senate Democrats are quietly preparing to counter over a hundred Trump midterm interference scenarios, and how you can help to counter Trump’s election interference at your local election precinct. We also talked about how Charles’s organization, Common Power, is treating this fall as the most important door-knocking season of its existence.
We closed on the kind of coalition message Democrats actually need heading into November and beyond, and on why Charles believes the whole fight ultimately gets decided by regular people at doors, not by anyone in Washington.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
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Debunking Trump’s Primetime Election Interference Claims
Trump spent the first five minutes of Thursday night’s address trying to convince the country that everything is going great, before pivoting into the actual point of the speech: a claim that China illegally acquired 220 million American voter files and interfered in the 2020 election. I watched it and immediately clocked the opening minutes as a tell.
When a president spends prime time insisting the economy is fantastic and crime is down, that’s not confidence. That’s someone who knows his approval numbers are underwater heading into a midterm he’s set up to lose.
The China claim collapses under its own weight. I pointed out that voter file data of the kind Trump described is largely public information, purchasable by anyone through entirely legal channels. Charles made the same point from firsthand experience, explaining that when Common Power’s volunteers go knock doors, the exact same data- names, addresses, voting history- loads onto their phones from a standard campaign data tool. If that’s a national security breach, it’s one both parties have been committing for years.
The intelligence Trump cited says the opposite of what he claimed. I laid out that the actual intelligence community assessment found no mass Chinese interference or exploitation in the 2020 election. What the assessment did find was that China considered a more aggressive meddling operation, similar to what Russia ran in 2016, and decided against it. The declassified documents Trump released to make his case actually confirm that Russia ran an influence operation in 2020 that benefited him. He surfaced evidence of the opposite scandal while trying to sell a different one.
The non-citizen voting numbers are still nothing. I noted that credible counts put total non-citizen voting incidents somewhere around 77 instances over multiple decades nationally, a number small enough that it’s statistically comparable to dead people occasionally appearing on voter rolls, which Charles pointed out is exactly the kind of clerical noise every large voter file naturally contains.
The “urgent action” line is the whole point of the speech. I flagged the key phrase in Trump’s address, where he said the intelligence “underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past.” Nothing was hacked. No election system was compromised. That sentence is the setup for whatever he does next.
He’s undermining the very security he claims to be defending. Charles brought in a point from a veteran Republican election attorney who appeared on CNN discussing how Trump and Musk’s DOGE effort defunded CISA, the federal agency responsible for election cybersecurity. Charles called it an own goal: if the country is more vulnerable now, it’s in part because this administration cut the very defenses meant to prevent it, then used that manufactured vulnerability as the emotional hook for the speech.
Why Trump’s lies are falling flat. Charles’s read on the reaction was that it wasn’t just the usual voices calling the speech nonsense. He said the pushback came from across the political spectrum, including people who don’t normally agree on anything, and he argued the core problem for Trump is that he’s simply not a trusted messenger anymore, for anyone. I extended that by pointing to Trump’s own logic trap: if the 2020 election was as compromised as he claims, that happened on his watch as president, and by his own timeline, the system somehow became secure enough for him to win again by 2024. Either the vulnerability was real, and his administration failed to catch it, or it wasn’t real, and this is a pretext. Charles’s response was blunt: apparently elections are only free and fair when Democrats are the ones in charge.
The Real Playbook: What Trump Has Actually Done To Interfere In The Midterms
The speech was never really about China. It was about laying rhetorical groundwork for a set of actions Trump has already been taking for months.
He gutted the Election Assistance Commission. I walked through how Trump fired three commissioners from the EAC last week, an agency that oversees election funding to states, alarming state election officials nationwide who depend on that funding and guidance.
His citizenship executive order already lost in court. I noted that Trump previously tried to sign an executive order seeking to force the EAC to withhold funds from localities that didn’t verify voters’ citizenship status, and it was struck down in federal court.
The Justice Department is demanding voter rolls. I flagged that the DOJ sent letters demanding states hand over voter roll data, using the same overblown non-citizen voting narrative as justification.
Mark Elias and his firm keep beating him. Charles noted that Elias’s firm represents Common Power directly, which gave the conversation a personal edge. I added that Elias has been intervening successfully across DOJ’s voter data lawsuits nationally, which is a big part of why none of Trump’s moves so far have stuck.
A live example of the strategy broke during our own show. While we were talking, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin escalated Trump’s rhetoric further, threatening states that refuse to partner with his department and promising to use “maximum pressure” to root out what he called illegally cast votes. I pointed out this is the exact same overblown non-citizen narrative, deployed in real time, to intimidate localities into compliance ahead of whatever comes in November.
The goal is a veneer of legitimacy he doesn’t actually have. I made the case that all of this, the speech, the EAC firings, the DOJ letters, the DHS threats, is designed to sow enough distrust that whatever Trump tries in November looks justified. But I don’t think it will work because this isn’t 2020. Even then, when more people were inclined to believe him, it wasn’t enough. Today, almost nobody of importance is buying it.
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Inside The Secret Meeting To Defend The Midterms: How Democrats Are War-Gaming the Response
This is the part of the conversation Charles genuinely hadn’t heard about yet, and it’s some of the most encouraging reporting either of us has come across in a while.
Rep. Joseph Morelle is leading a war-gaming effort in the House. I explained that MS NOW exclusively reported this week that more than two dozen House Democrats gathered for a closed-door strategy session organized by Morelle, a New York Democrat, to game out how they’d respond if Trump or his administration tried to interfere in the midterms.
They’re preparing for more than a hundred scenarios. I noted that Morelle’s team has been walking through upwards of a hundred potential situations where Trump or his allies could try to intervene, and according to the reporting, they’ve been doing this work for over a year already, not just reacting to this week’s speech.
The hypotheticals get specific. I described two of the scenarios MS NOW was allowed to watch. One involved Trump trying to implement a proof-of-citizenship requirement through executive action, with Democrats coordinating in real time with local officials to reject the order while courts process legal challenges. The other involved Trump attempting to shut down a polling place outright, with a plan to mobilize local officials and legal resources immediately in response.
Their core strategy is education and legal readiness, not just messaging. I laid out that Morelle described the overall approach as making sure voters and local officials understand the actual law, so nobody gets bullied or intimidated by someone falsely claiming authority they don’t have, while also having attorneys lined up nationally ready to file suit for nearly any scenario.
The Senate ran its own version of this. I mentioned that Politico reported last month that Chuck Schumer and nine other Democratic senators held a separate war-gaming session preparing for the same kind of potential intrusions, with Senate Democrats also training staffers to serve as election observers on the ground come November.
Charles’s reaction was cautious relief. Charles said it was genuinely comforting to learn Democrats didn’t just start this work reactively, and that they’d been building toward it for over a year. But he was quick to add a caveat that shaped the rest of the conversation: a plan built in Washington only works if it’s actually implementable by individual people at the state and county level.
How You Can Fight Back Against Trump’s Election Meddling
Charles’s biggest point of the entire conversation was that this fight gets decided at the precinct, not in Washington. A national war-gaming session is only as good as the sheriff, county clerk, or precinct volunteer who actually has to act on it in the moment.
State power structures will determine what actually happens. Charles argued that whether a given state protects its voters comes down to who controls the state legislature and the governorship there. He said nobody should assume Alabama or Tennessee will act to protect voters, but he pointed to Georgia as a state that has already shown up once and could again, along with movement happening in North Carolina and South Carolina, where even some Republicans have treated Trump’s asks as a bridge too far.
The real leverage is with everyday poll workers, not officials. Charles made the case that the people who physically manage ballot boxes, run polling locations, and process mail-in ballots are regular volunteers, not partisans with something to prove, and they’re being moved by the exact same economic pressures as everyone else: gas prices, the cost of living, the wars draining resources overseas. He argued that changing minds at the precinct level, one conversation at a time, is just as important as changing minds among voters.
Trump’s plan requires mass compliance that he isn’t going to get. I made the case that for any of this to actually work practically, Trump needs thousands of people across hundreds of localities to go along with it, and that’s the same reason the effort to overturn 2020 failed. So many local officials in both parties refused to play along that it collapsed under its own weight. Even in a worst-case scenario where some officials did comply, there’s no legitimate path to competing slates of certified results.
He has less power now than he did in 2020, not more. I argued that Trump doesn’t have another term coming, his approval is lower, and he’s already burned through trust with his own base over the Epstein files and the economy. I acknowledged the counterargument that he has more executive authority now because of favorable Supreme Court rulings, but noted the Court has historically been reluctant to intervene directly in election disputes.
Go be a poll worker. I pointed to Thomas Hicks, a recently fired EAC commissioner, who said in a Rachel Maddow interview that the single most useful thing a citizen can do right now is volunteer to work the polls. I made the case that the same energy that turned out for the “No Kings” protests, hundreds of people in nearly every locality, could be redirected toward poll working, building a real-time alert system so people can flag ICE presence or suspicious activity the moment they see it.
Early voting matters more than ever. I pointed out that early and mail-in voting are harder to interfere with once ballots are already cast and counted, which is exactly why Republicans have spent so much energy trying to restrict both.
Speed matters when something does go wrong. I made the point that the faster people on the ground flag interference, whether that’s an ICE agent at a polling site or someone meddling with voting equipment, the faster Marc Elias’s legal team and the rest of the legal apparatus can move to stop it.
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The Coalition-Building Messaging Democrats Actually Need
Before we got to Common Power’s own fall plans, Charles and I spent real time on Jon Ossoff, both as a messenger and as a test case for how Democrats should be talking about this fight.
Texas and Georgia both show what sustained organizing looks like. Charles walked through how Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is building one of the largest organizing operations the state has seen, built directly on the volunteer infrastructure Beto O’Rourke assembled after his own Senate loss. He drew the same line to Georgia, where Stacey Abrams’s earlier organizing work laid the foundation for Ossoff’s rise. Common Power is sending teams to Texas four separate times this fall, starting in September.
Ossoff is running a corruption message that travels. I made the case that Ossoff’s corruption framing is the message that carries not just through this midterm but potentially into 2028, and that he’s smart about how he distributes it, feeding well-produced clips to supporters who circulate them widely. Charles added that “corruption” functions as language that lands in red states too, pointing to Rob Sand in Iowa and Dan Osborne in Nebraska using similar oligarch-focused framing to reach voters who’d tune out more traditional progressive language.
I tied the corruption message directly to affordability. I argued there’s a bigger, largely untold story here about the failure of trickle-down economics playing out in real time, one Ossoff doesn’t have to name explicitly by ideology to make land with voters who are feeling the costs directly.
Ossoff is naming the racial targeting explicitly and pairing it with economic messaging. I pointed out that Ossoff has been direct in calling Trump’s election interference an attempt to delegitimize the Black vote specifically, which tracks with the actual 2020 record: the localities Trump’s team challenged most aggressively were places like Detroit and Atlanta. I said what makes Ossoff effective is that he pairs that explicit framing with a genuine working-class economic message instead of choosing one or the other, something I’ve heard some in the broader progressive coalition get criticized for not doing enough.
He’s also a uniquely positioned messenger on Israel. I noted that Ossoff is Jewish and voted against additional aid to Israel, and that his ability to criticize Netanyahu’s government without tipping into antisemitic framing matters given how often that line gets crossed elsewhere in the conversation. I said that criticism carries more power coming from within the progressive Jewish community itself.
Ossoff’s biggest asset might be that he hasn’t been defined yet. I described what Charles later called the Democratic Rorschach test effect: moderates see Ossoff as moderate, liberals see him as liberal, progressives see him as progressive, because he hasn’t been pinned down the way frontrunners usually get pinned down. Charles picked up that framing directly and ran with it, calling him a Rorschach test for the party.
The party needs an economic message that unifies rather than divides. Charles introduced a data point here that reframed the whole conversation: using the ALICE measure- Asset-Limited, Income-Constrained, Employed- roughly 40 percent of the country was already struggling financially as of 2024 data, even among people with jobs above the poverty line. He argued that number is likely higher now, and that an over-focus on identity-specific messaging risks obscuring the scale of a shared economic crisis that cuts across every demographic, including voters Democrats have lost.
I pushed back gently on how that point gets applied. I clarified that I’m simply arguing that we cannot ignore attacks on Black political and economic power, and that the more effective version of that conversation runs identity through an economic lens rather than a purely rhetorical one, pointing to how Trump’s federal workforce cuts directly raised Black unemployment as an example of that approach. I said one of my most-shared media appearances made exactly that case without ever calling out Trump’s racist words, but focusing entirely on the material racist impact instead.
Strengthening Democratic Infrastructure & Building Margins Too Big To Rig
We closed the show on the ground game itself, and Charles had real numbers to share.
Common Power just kicked off its fall program in the middle of summer. Charles said the organization held its fall kickoff call the night before our live, with roughly 400 people registering on Zoom to plan logistics, learn how to use Common Power’s volunteer app (which I built, full disclosure) and start booking trips. Charles described people as genuinely ready to act now that primaries are wrapping up and attention is shifting fully to the midterms.
The Michigan numbers back up the enthusiasm. Charles reported that a team of about a dozen and a half volunteers knocked on 6,000 doors in roughly four days while canvassing in Michigan, with a conversion rate higher than any other group working in that district. He credited part of that success to building a real community among volunteers, including a shared trip to a local African American museum to learn the history of the neighborhoods they were canvassing.
I disclosed my own role in the infrastructure. I mentioned that I personally built the app Common Power’s volunteers use to organize their canvassing, including new features like a search function the team just launched, as a way of contributing my tech skills directly to this fight.
Persuasion is happening in real time, including with Trump voters. Charles said flipping Republican voters happens more often than people assume, recalling volunteers knocking on doors with Trump flags visible in 2024 and having voters tell them they’d never actually spoken to a Democrat in person before. He argued that today’s Trump voters, after watching what this administration has and hasn’t delivered for them, are even more open to those conversations than they were then.
Charles will be filing updates straight from the doors. Charles agreed to serve as a live correspondent throughout the fall canvassing season, reporting back what he’s hearing directly from voters in the states Common Power is targeting.
The whole thing comes back to margins. I closed the conversation by connecting it to what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán’s opposition won by margins so large that he had no real path to contest the results. I made the case that building those kinds of margins, precinct by precinct, door by door, is the actual answer to everything Trump is trying to set up. You can’t lie your way past a result that’s too big to rig.
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Bottom Line
Trump’s speech Thursday night wasn’t really about China, and it wasn’t really about election security. It was a pretext dressed up as an intelligence report, delivered by a president whose own declassified evidence undercuts his own argument. What matters more than anything he said is what he’s already done, gutting the EAC, demanding voter rolls, defunding cyber defenses, and what House Democrats and organizations like Common Power are already doing in response.
This fight isn’t hypothetical anymore, and it isn’t just happening in Washington. It’s happening in county clerk offices, at polling stations, and on doorsteps in Michigan, Georgia, Texas, and more. That’s where this all actually gets decided.
If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.
