The Midterms Are Being Fought in the Rumor Mill and the Ad Buys

The stories that keep coming back

On Nov. 3 the U.S. will conduct its 2026 midterm elections, and the noise around the mechanics of voting has been loud all autumn. Snopes has been tracking a set of claims about polling stations and ballots that have been circulating ahead of the midterms, some carried over from earlier seasons and some tied to real or rumored actions of the second Trump administration. The collection opens with voters raising concerns about their ballots being lost in fires. Snopes notes ballot drop box fires remain a threat to paper ballots, though officials are working hard to mitigate the risk.

The same roundup flags a fight in Georgia where district attorneys are pushing back against a state law that would make several races nonpartisan across five Atlanta metro counties, removing candidates’ party affiliations from ballots. It also addresses the perennial worry that a ballot touched by a poll worker is disqualified. Several states require poll workers to mark ballots as part of the verification process, Snopes says, and that marking does not invalidate a vote.

Other claims in the set touch the architecture of the election itself. The Trump administration is skipping international election observers for the 2026 midterms, a decision that marks the first time since 2002 that the OSCE had not received an invitation. Posts have circulated showing the National Guard guarding a D.C. ballot drop box, a claim Snopes examines against federal law that criminalizes deploying federal troops or armed federal law enforcement agents to places where ballots are collected. The roundup also explains why vote count spikes are a normal part of elections, noting that sudden surges in votes regularly fuel unfounded election fraud claims.

Mail is another flashpoint. A claim that the U.S. postmaster general said he’d block mail-in ballots distorts facts, Snopes says, and fearful social media users urged voters to use drop boxes instead of regular mail. A separate claim about adding a stamp to a ballot making it first-class mail spread as the Trump administration sought to implement new federal regulations on mail.

The AP Fact Check pages echo the pattern. Social media posts falsely claim ballots marked by a poll worker will be disqualified. Posts falsely claim Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico was at a mental facility. The Fact Check also notes Trump and Republicans blaming France’s immigrants for riots without evidence, and it tracks the numbers that matter before Nov. 3, including a Census Bureau report that does not prove Trump’s claim about noncitizen voting in 2020.

When the ballot becomes the battleground

In California the fight has moved from rumor to letter. Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across the state on Friday demanding that local officials set aside and verify ballots the Department of Justice said may belong to noncitizens. The letters are the latest escalation in a legal battle between California and President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice, which has recently focused on the state in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterms.

Data shows illegal voting by people who aren’t U.S. citizens is incredibly rare, difficult to prove and has not been shown to change the outcome of races. Earlier this month the federal government targeted Los Angeles County and the California Secretary of State’s office in a lawsuit that aimed to block them from counting the votes of roughly 20,000 people who are “likely” noncitizen voters. A hearing on the case is scheduled for Tuesday and the Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit court of appeals to rule on the lawsuit with a deadline for Saturday.

Now at least 18 counties across the state have received similar letters. They have been given a 48 hour deadline to provide identifying information corresponding with ballots the federal government believes were sent to noncitizens illegally registered to vote. The letter requests that county officials also sequester any ballots where citizenship cannot be verified. “Any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy,” said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.

The Justice Department is asking counties to send information about the voters it suspects are noncitizens including social security numbers, ID information, and a copy of their registration. The letter sent to San Bernardino County voting officials says the government’s list of suspected noncitizen voters includes 1,133 people from the inland Southern California county.

California’s secretary of state and the Los Angeles County registrar have opposed the demands. Lawyers for California say the request threatens to delay certification of the vote and undermine the legitimacy of the November midterms, and they argue the federal government’s data is unreliable and the demands risk disenfranchisement of citizens. Voting is underway in California, with the state’s more than 23 million registered voters receiving ballots in the mail earlier this month. The state said in legal filings that over 330,000 mail-in ballots have already been counted.

On the heels of the letters, federal authorities conducted a statewide sweep earlier in the week where 28 people from the list of 20,000 were charged with illegally registering to vote. Some were also charged with illegally voting and lying on naturalization paperwork. Those charges could lead to years in prison.

The mother in the ad

A different kind of distortion is playing out on the air. In Ohio, Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has doubled down on an advertising campaign featuring the estranged mother of Democratic rival Dr. Amy Acton. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended the ad, even as Republican leaders across Ohio, including Gov. Mike DeWine, have called for its removal.

Former President Barack Obama stepped into the fight on Saturday in Ohio and Michigan, rallying Democratic voters in two Midwestern battlegrounds and seizing on what he described as cruelty and indecency coming from President Donald Trump and his Republican allies. First in Ohio, Obama took aim at Ramaswamy, noting that Acton has spoken movingly about her painful childhood and all she’s experienced: abuse, neglect and homelessness.

“In recent days, we’ve seen there is no line he will not cross, no low he will not sink to,” Obama said of Ramaswamy. The Ramaswamy campaign video features Acton’s birth mother, Donna Arthur, calling her “a liar” and insinuating she has mental health issues. Acton has made no secret of facing homelessness and abuse as a child. Arthur lost custody of her children after their stepfather, Arthur’s husband, was indicted on a charge of rape involving Acton. The abuse allegedly happened from December 1976 to April 1978. Donna Arthur remained married to him until his death in 2004.

Appearing before Obama, Acton spoke as if addressing Ramaswamy directly. “My opponent has chosen to exploit, intentionally, my childhood to save his stumbling campaign, but it’s not going to work,” she said. “Decency still matters.” She added: “Mr. Ramaswamy, you are not just out of touch, you are out for yourself and you are a danger to my state. Apparently there is no low to which you won’t stoop.”

The controversy has ratcheted up the temperature in a state that has become more reliably Republican but has been a hotly contested battleground this year. Obama’s rally in Ohio was to show support for ex-Senator Sherrod Brown, who is running to unseat incumbent Republican Senator John Husted, and for Amy Acton. Obama also criticized Ramaswamy for a campaign ad released last week in which Acton’s estranged mother was featured calling her a liar. The ad didn’t mention that the woman’s husband was charged with raping Acton when she was a child.

In Michigan, too, the campaign has turned personal. Obama offered a passionate defense of Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official running against former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican. The former president pushed back against those who call El-Sayed a radical, declaring that “Abdul shares my values.” He also acknowledged that El-Sayed was critical of him after his 2012 reelection for not following through on all of his progressive campaign promises. El-Sayed wrote that Obama “was not the right choice — he just wasn’t the wrong one.”

“You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama. Michelle Obama, about five times a day,” Obama said in Detroit, wearing a blue shirt with no tie, his sleeves rolled up. The former president told a packed high school gym in Detroit: “We have seen this movie before. I starred in it. I’ve got a long-form birth certificate to prove it.” “Abdul is as Michigan as it gets,” he added.

The economic backdrop and the map

The campaign is running against a hard economic picture that fact checkers have been tracking. FactCheck.org’s October 2026 update says job growth became sluggish, with only 776,000 jobs created. The unemployment rate edged up to 4.2%, still historically low. Inflation worsened. Consumer prices are up 5.4%. Gasoline is up 38%. Wages just barely rose faster than inflation, as measured since Trump was sworn in, but they’ve decreased this year. The economy grew 2.2% in the second quarter, continuing a steady rate of growth. Consumer sentiment remains low. Home prices increased 6.2%. The trade deficit for the most recent 12 months is down 10.4% compared with 2024, but it has risen substantially in the last two months on record.

The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased about 91%. The number of refugee admissions dropped by nearly the same percentage. The percentage of the population lacking health insurance was statistically unchanged in 2025, according to two government reports. The number of people receiving federal food assistance decreased by 6 million. Median household income rose in 2025, while the official poverty rate declined. Corporate profits continued to rise; 2025 was the 10th consecutive year that profits increased. The S&P 500 went up 28.6%. The violent crime and murder rates in 2025 continued to decline, dropping by the largest percentages since the FBI began collecting nationwide data in 1936. The publicly held debt is up about 12.8%.

Ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections, Trump has implored his supporters in rallies across the country to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” On Saturday he cast his own ballot in Florida alongside his wife First Lady Melania Trump. At a rally in Georgia he touted his administration’s immigration and tariff policies, telling supporters “we’re in the golden age of America.” He acknowledged oil prices were “temporarily high” but said “our country is getting stronger and stronger all the time, and those pump prices are going to come down.”

Talking up the economy, Trump told the crowd in Perry “we’re taking in massive amounts of money through tariffs” and repeated his pledge to offer every adult American a $5,000 payout if Republicans win both chambers of Congress. He also took aim at Democrats, accusing them of trying to open up immigration from Libya, Yemen, Haiti and Somalia — countries which he described as “terror-infested.”

Obama, campaigning in Ohio on Saturday, attacked the Trump administration over the Iran war and high consumer prices. “This election is our last best chance to at least rein in some of the foolishness of this administration,” Obama told crowds in Ohio. He said he sympathised with voters who rejected Democrats in 2024 over economic and inflation concerns following the Covid pandemic, but said Trump had only himself to blame for the current state of the economy. “If you thought everything was too expensive before ‘you know who’, everything is more expensive now,” he said, referring to Trump without using his name.

Obama also took a swipe at Trump’s efforts to renovate the White House. “What’s with all the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama joked.

The prairie and the opening

The midterms are also being fought in the country’s rural heartlands. In the final stretch of the US midterm elections, Democrats and independents could win back communities and towns across America’s rural heartlands through a combination of resurgent “prairie populism,” local despair over the impact of Donald Trump’s agenda and an old-fashioned tenet of shoe-leather politics: showing up everywhere.

Dan Osborn is touring all 93 counties in Nebraska before election day, about a dozen left to go. He’s one of several high-profile candidates seeking to win over areas the left and center ceded to Republicans in the last decade-plus, running on populist messages rooted in agrarian culture. In Iowa, Democratic US Senate candidate Josh Turek calls himself a “commonsense prairie populist.” Sam Forstag, a Democrat running for Congress in Montana, has emphasized economic populism in his campaign to flip a red district, saying he wants to fight for “people like the kid I was growing up, whose belly is full because of food stamps.”

The politics echo earlier populist movements. The chief enemy in the late 19th century was the railroads, which bought up land and charged exorbitant rates to farmers who needed to ship their goods. The hallmarks persist today: a state-run bank in North Dakota, as well as a state-run flour mill; political parties such as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor alliance in Minnesota. The conversations around anti-monopoly, antitrust and datacenters are providing new flashpoints for the kind of populist organizing that was successful in the 1980s and earlier.

In Arkansas, Republicans have spent millions of dollars playing defense in one of the most conservative states in the country, a sign of the potentially dire midterm political environment. Democrats see an opening at the edge of the competitive midterms map.

Closing

Three days before Election Day, early voting is underway and the stories about how votes are cast are as central as the candidates themselves. False claims about ballots, drop boxes and poll workers travel fast, while personal attacks in ads test how far voters will go for decency. The midterms will decide which party controls Congress for the rest of Trump’s term, and the narrative being built around the mechanics of voting is shaping how people show up at the polls.