I Worry About Trump Challenging the Midterms

Short answer: worry about the noise and the harassment of election workers, much less about the results actually being overturned. The statistics Trump is passing around are weak, and most of the margins are too big for any challenge to change.

The post that started it

On Saturday afternoon, four days after Democrats took both chambers of Congress, Trump shared a post from an account called Truth Is Freedom titled “THE 15% BAND.” It claims a single formula explains 59 Senate and governor races: Republicans got 85% of Trump’s 2024 share everywhere, and Democrats picked up the other 15%.

The post calls that pattern “strange” and demands paper-ballot hand counts, poll-book checks and voter-file reviews. If you’re already anxious about the next few months, it reads like the opening move of 2020 all over again. So let’s take it apart.

The “15% band” doesn’t show what it claims

The two formulas are really one. In a two-party race, the Democrat’s share is roughly 100 minus the Republican’s, and Harris’s 2024 share was roughly 100 minus Trump’s. If Republicans got 0.85 × Trump everywhere, the Democrat automatically lands at Harris + 0.15 × Trump. That isn’t a second discovery; “the Harris part is zero” is the same equation written twice.

A steady, proportional swing is what a wave looks like. When a president is unpopular, his party loses a similar slice of support nearly everywhere, because the cause is national. Proportional swing is one of the textbook ways political scientists model elections, not a fingerprint of tampering. And Trump was deeply unpopular going in: after the Iran war, his approval in polling averages slid from 48% to as low as 36%.

The high “variation explained” isn’t impressive. State partisanship barely moves from one election to the next, so almost any sensible “this year vs. last time” model fits well. An 88% fit tells you red states stayed redder than blue states, which nobody disputes.

The evenness argues against fraud, not for it. Rigging Wyoming and Massachusetts by the same proportion, in races nobody was contesting, would be pointless and very hard to pull off. Real fraud tends to show up as anomalies concentrated in particular places, not as a smooth national tide.

The margins are too big to fish away

This wasn’t a squeaker. Democrats flipped seven Senate seats (Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas) and took the House. They also flipped five Republican-held governorships, including Texas, giving them a majority of governors for the first time since 2010.

In Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott by about 7 points, almost 700,000 votes. Abbott conceded, and Ken Paxton conceded the Senate race to James Talarico in a two-minute speech. A hand count does not erase a 700,000-vote margin, and the losing candidates themselves aren’t disputing it.

What Trump has actually said

His own signals are mixed. Days after the election, as the scale of the losses became clear, he told the New York Times he was willing to accept the results.

On Saturday he shared the 15% post, plus another asking whether anyone believed the Texas Senate numbers. But as of this writing, he hasn’t said outright that the results were fraudulent or that he no longer accepts them, and neither post offers any evidence that the counts are wrong.

That gap matters. Sharing someone else’s chart is a way to plant doubt without owning a claim, which looks more like narrative-building than a legal strategy.

What actually deserves your attention

None of this means the next few months will be calm. Here’s what I’d watch instead of the chart:

  1. The Justice Department. Unlike in 2020, the DOJ is run by Trump’s former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, who wouldn’t rule out challenging results before the election. Expect investigations, subpoenas for ballots and pressure on county officials. There’s precedent: the FBI already seized ballots and records from Fulton County, Georgia, in a new probe of the 2020 race.
  2. The genuinely close races. As of the latest tallies, Mary Peltola leads Dan Sullivan in Alaska 48.2% to 47.9%, and Scott Colom leads Cindy Hyde-Smith in Mississippi 49.0% to 48.9%. A fight over a few hundred votes is where “hand-count everything” demands could slow certification.
  3. The people who run elections. The realistic damage is threats, harassment and burnout among local election workers who would be asked to perform these “audits,” not seats changing hands.

The courts are the backstop. Trump’s election challenges have a poor track record there, and administration efforts to find widespread fraud have repeatedly come up empty.

The bottom line

Read the “15% band” as a story being laid down, not a case being built. Its likeliest uses are explaining away a humiliating loss and keeping the base angry heading into 2028.

So stay alert, but aim your worry where it belongs: the close races, the DOJ, and the election workers in the crosshairs. The math in that chart isn’t one of them.

This post was written by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, at my request.

Sources

Author: Shelton Bumgarner

I am the Editor & Publisher of The Trumplandia Report

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