Nationalizing American Elections

Donald Trump has called recently for “nationalizing” the U.S. electoral process out of a belief, he says, that elections are not being administered properly at the state and local level, in strongly “blue” states and counties especially. Trump’s use of the phrase “nationalizing elections” is a bit strange, in that most American politicians use it to mean something else. To career politicians, nationalizing elections means a major party’s efforts to elect more of its candidates to public office by coming up with a national campaign message, rather than allowing most electoral contests to turn on local and state issues. Using a national message approach has sometimes worked well for the major parties. One famous example in the 1990s was the 1994 “Contract with America” developed by Republicans serving in Congress. That approach helped the GOP win control of both the House and Senate that year for the first time in four decades. This year, it’s the Democrats who are seemingly trying to “nationalize” the upcoming off-year elections of 2026 (in the messaging sense), by turning them into a referendum on the Trump administration’s record in its second term, especially with respect to the issue of affordability.

What Donald Trump is after is something different. He wants the federal government to play more of a regulatory role in the elections process. The basic objection to that proposal is Article 1, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives the states the main role in administering elections. The federal government has, to be sure, had a role in the electoral process since the early years of the republic, but the states have always been the dominant force in that realm. One example of an early federal regulatory effort came in 1845, when Congress passed a law establishing a uniform presidential election day. (Prior to that time, the states chose their own dates for the presidential election, which slowed down the process of figuring out who had won.) Tuesday was chosen because it was not a Sabbath Day, nor was it Wednesday, which was a market day in many towns. Early November was chosen because the harvest (which dominated the rural American economy of the time) was complete by then, but heavy winter storms that impeded travel had not yet begun. Another example of federal regulation came during wartime, most notably during the Civil War and the two World Wars, when Congress established procedures intended to facilitate voting by soldiers who were absent from their home states.

That kind of federal regulation of the electoral process was – and still is – very much the exception rather than the norm (except for the historically unique period of Reconstruction when the federal government tried to supervise elections in the South). What President Trump appears to want is to reverse that pattern. The reason he is so animated on this issue could very well be that he fears a loss of GOP control of at least one house of Congress and perhaps both in the off-year election cycle of 2026. Imposing stricter voting requirements nationally could confer a real advantage on Republican candidates. Requiring would-be voters to provide proof of citizenship, residency, and a valid ID card with a photo, to give only three examples, is usually more onerous for lower-income voters, who tend to vote disproportionately for Democrats. Trump argues that stricter voting requirements will serve to deter fraudulent voting, but there isn’t compelling evidence that wrongful voting is a significant problem at present. (It once was, when the urban machines of the 19^th and 20^th centuries sometimes stuffed ballot boxes, and Southern whites hostile to black people voting resorted to all kinds of underhanded behavior to prevent that from happening.) If significant amounts of fraudulent voting is, at least for the time being, only a hypothetical problem, why then is President Trump so emphatic about imposing much more federal control of the voting process?

The answer, one suspects, is that he fears that loss of GOP control of the U.S. House and Senate would block his ability to move his political agenda forward. Turning over Congress to the Democrats could also result in legislative investigations of his administration, and, perhaps, even a third effort to impeach Trump and remove him from office. Whatever the reason, his bid to have the federal government regulate elections much more seems to be a long shot. Even many conservatives tend to prefer state control over the voting process, out of a strong philosophical resistance to concentrating more power in Washington. Overcoming that kind of resistance seems hard to imagine, especially because the 2026 election cycle will soon be upon us.