For the past year, President Donald Trump has been waging a multifront campaign to rewrite the rules for the 2026 midterm elections and avoid a GOP wipeout. But so far, thanks to determined legal resistance, he has failed in nearly every phase of his assault.

The failure of his long battle to impose new election controls that would favor Republicans would be among the most significant setbacks of Trump’s presidency. He’s still trying, but Democrats and activist groups have mobilized hundreds of lawyers to challenge last-minute efforts to influence balloting in key states and congressional districts across the country.

For the past year, President Donald Trump has been waging a multifront campaign to rewrite the rules for the 2026 midterm elections and avoid a GOP wipeout. But so far, thanks to determined legal resistance, he has failed in nearly every phase of his assault.

The failure of his long battle to impose new election controls that would favor Republicans would be among the most significant setbacks of Trump’s presidency. He’s still trying, but Democrats and activist groups have mobilized hundreds of lawyers to challenge last-minute efforts to influence balloting in key states and congressional districts across the country.

“We know the playbook of Trump and the election deniers. We’ve sued them before, and we’ve beaten them before,” Norm Eisen, the head of Democracy Defenders Fund, told me in an interview. His group is organizing a $20 million effort that he calls Project 126, an implicit pledge to double the 63 legal victories that blocked Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Eisen shared a list of 10 midterm election threats his lawyers have mobilized to stop. They include attempts to purge voter rolls of supposed noncitizens, impose new rules for mail-in voting, deploy federal agents to polling places, seize ballots or voting machines and intimidate election officials.

“We’ve been preparing all year,” explained Seth Waxman, a former solicitor general under President Bill Clinton. Waxman is helping Eisen coordinate litigation strategy for volunteer lawyers at his firm, WilmerHale, and a dozen other prominent law firms. They will be ready to file complaints, requests for restraining orders, affidavits and........

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