The Midterms Are Being Sold, Spoofed, and Sowed With Doubt

The doctored post that wanted three votes

In early October, a screenshot of a Truth Social post began moving through feeds just as President Donald Trump was appearing at GOP campaign rallies nationwide to drum up support for Republican candidates ahead of the November 2026 midterms. The image showed Trump thanking Elon Musk for making every Republican vote count as three votes. It read, in part, “THANKS TO THE GREAT ELON MUSK EVERY REPUBLICAN VOTE COUNTS AS 3 VOTES!” and urged supporters to get out and vote.

The post was fake. Snopes found the image was a doctored version of a real Truth Social post from Trump’s account. The sentence about Musk was edited in, and the nonsense phrase “Dummods” appeared where the original read “Dumocrats.” On Oct. 3, 2026, Trump had actually written: “Republicans must WIN the 2026 Midterm Elections, and we must use every appropriate tool — Whether you vote early, absentee, by mail, or in-person, we must ‘swamp’ the Radical Left Dumocrats with massive turnout! SO IMPORTANT — PLEASE GET OUT AND VOTE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” There was no evidence Trump thanked Musk on Truth Social for making every Republican vote count as three votes.

The fabrication landed in a moment when the rallies were already feeding a steady stream of claims about turnout and the mechanics of voting. The doctored line was designed to read as a wink to the base while seeding the idea that the system can be bent. It is the kind of misinformation that travels faster than correction, and it arrived the same week the campaign calendar was tightening.

Taxpayer-funded spots that look like a campaign

The White House has defended three taxpayer-funded advertisements featuring President Donald Trump by comparing them to ads paid for by past presidential administrations. The announcements are described in a Sept. 25 press release as “public service announcements,” with the White House saying, “The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action. Instead, the announcements are a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.”

Legal experts consulted by FactCheck.org did not see a correlation. Richard Painter, a corporate law professor and former White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, said the Trump White House ads are “so clearly propaganda,” which generally refers to government communications intended to manipulate or influence public opinion. John G. Geer, a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, said his perception is that the Trump White House ads are more political. He said, “We’ll see what the courts say,” if a lawsuit brings the matter to the judiciary.

The first message to air includes images of Trump as he says, “Together we will defeat communism, socialism, and Marxism in America. America will never be a communist country.” Viewers repeatedly hear the words “love me,” lyrics from a JMSN song of the same name. Near the end, Dana White, the UFC CEO, compliments Trump and talks about him “fighting so hard for the country he loves.” A screen capture from the 2026 black-and-white White House ad is almost exactly the same as an ad released by Trump’s 2024 campaign.

The third ad, in black and white, shows Trump walking and staring into the camera as he says in a voiceover, “we will demolish the deep state,” “expel the warmongers from our government,” “drive out the globalists,” and “cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists.” The ad ends with: “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” The video is almost identical to an ad from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

The second ad, a minute long, features video and audio from Trump’s July 3 speech from a site near Mount Rushmore, as the president says, “We are the freest people on Earth, and by the grace of God, the United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.” The ad ends with him saying, “This is only the beginning of the golden age of America.”

All three ads were released on or after Sept. 23 and include a “Paid for by the U.S. Government” disclaimer. They have aired on broadcast and/or streaming platforms, including during Sunday political talk shows and college and NFL football games. Four ethics experts wrote in a Sept. 28 piece in the online publication the Contrarian: “These videos are not ‘public service announcements’ as the White House claims. They are clear attempts to boost Republicans’ chances in the impending midterm elections given their sagging poll numbers. The timing, content, and format of the videos all suggest they are covert attempts directed at the success of the Republican party.”

The White House said “Trump is not on the ballot” this November, but the president has told wavering Republican voters to pretend he is. Two of the White House ads highlighting Trump include references to defeating communism or communists, which is what Trump regularly calls democratic socialists running for Congress.

“Win by massive numbers”

Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan said on Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that Democrats must “win by massive numbers” during November’s federal midterm elections because Donald Trump and his Republican allies are bound to try to sow doubt about the integrity of the results.

El-Sayed’s comments came with the Democrats favored to win control of the House of Representatives during the 3 November midterms, and polls show that the party could also win Senate seats in states that traditionally elect Republicans and gain a majority there, too.

Trump has long baselessly maintained that the 2020 presidential election which he lost as an incumbent to Joe Biden was stolen by fraudsters. He also gave a primetime speech in July in which he made unverified claims about Chinese interference in the election, and he fired members of an independent federal election commission. When asked later by a rightwing broadcaster whether the president might declare a national security emergency pertaining to elections for the midterms, Trump ignited alarm among some observers by replying: “Let me just say, stranger things have happened, OK?”

The New York Times reported that Trump had cast doubt on elections on 440 days of his second presidency, which began in early 2025. When asked whether Democrats needed to turn out in such numbers in November that the election would be “too big to rig” — as it had recently been put by former vice-president Kamala Harris, who lost the 2024 White House election to Trump — El-Sayed said: “Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the outcomes of an election. So, yes, we have to win by massive numbers.”

The Cook Political Report revised its predictions on Tuesday and declared that “A Senate Majority is Squarely in Democrats’ Sights.” A recent New York Times and Siena University poll found Democratic Senate candidates leading in Alaska, Ohio and Texas, states that Trump won by double digits in 2024. The poll showed El-Sayed leading Republican candidate Mike Rogers by five points.

El-Sayed alluded to how Rogers had also claimed that a 2024 US Senate election which he lost to Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, was stolen from him — after first having conceded the race. Rogers in November 2025 was reported to have said at events that a single van carrying fraudulent ballots in Detroit cost him the race against Slotkin. “The guy … I’m running against insinuates that he didn’t actually lose,” El-Sayed said to Kristen Welker. “That’s the guy I’m running against right now.”

A direct overture to a Democratic senator

On Saturday, Donald Trump openly encouraged Democratic US senator John Fetterman to switch parties and become a Republican just weeks before the federal midterm elections could reshape control of Congress.

“I’d love to see him as a Republican,” the president told reporters at Joint Base Andrews as he returned to Washington DC from a rally in Tennessee. “He does better as a Republican than he does as a Democrat.” The comments were among the most direct overtures by Trump to woo Fetterman into his Republican party, a matter of growing importance as the GOP could lose its Senate majority in November’s midterms.

Fetterman has repeatedly rejected the notion of becoming a Republican, writing in the Washington Post in May that he would be a “terrible Republican who still votes overwhelmingly with Democrats.” His relationship with fellow Democrats became more tenuous after he recorded a video for the Republican midterm convention in September praising his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican Dave McCormick, suggesting there were extremists in his party. “I’m always going to stand with America,” Fetterman said in the video. “I’m always going to reject the extremes and socialism and that anti-American way of life.”

Also in September, Fetterman described himself seemingly inadvertently as a “lifelong Republican” during a fireside chat at the Texas Tribune festival in Austin. Such flirtations with the Republican party — if not his slip of the tongue in Austin — could make it extremely difficult for Fetterman to win the Democratic nomination for another term in the Senate.

Trump raised that prospect on Saturday as he encouraged the party switch. Democrats need to pick up four seats to retake the Senate majority, a once remote prospect that remains challenging for the party. If Democrats picked up the four seats for a 51-seat majority, that could put Fetterman in an influential position, reducing the incentive to switch parties. The last senator whose party switch affected control of the chamber was Jim Jeffords of Vermont, who left the GOP in 2001 to give Democrats a narrow majority. Former Pennsylvania US senator Arlen Specter’s decision to abandon Republicans in 2009 helped Democrats achieve a supermajority.

Testing the machines while doubt is seeded

Midterm election season culminates on one important Election Day, but voting is already underway in many states. For local officials who run elections, the work started even earlier.

In Davis County, Utah, workers run stacks of pre-marked test ballots through the machines. Some are marked wrong on purpose. It’s called logic and accuracy testing, and it confirms the machines count ballots correctly and catch errors like a voter picking too many candidates. Utah is one of a handful of states that votes mostly by mail. County clerk Brian McKenzie explains the path a mail ballot takes.

Every envelope carries its own bar code. If a voter needs a replacement ballot, the old code is canceled, a check McKenzie says keeps anyone from getting more than one ballot. Return ballots are picked up by at least two election workers, logged and brought to the counting center under around-the-clock video surveillance. Each envelope is scanned, date-stamped, and photographed. Workers compare the signature to as many as five on file, all that before a machine even opens the envelope. The machine creates separation from personal identifiers and anything that was voted, maintaining the constitutional right to a secret ballot.

Ballots move through the process in batches of 200, counted at every step. Vote tallies are loaded onto encrypted memory sticks. Nothing is wireless. Nothing is Web-based. It’s all physical, manual process to transfer that data from one place to another.

McKenzie’s first election in 2004 used punch cards. Now he’s the county’s clerk elected in 2022. Over that time, the job has gotten a lot more public. Early years, it was a successful election if you never made the front-page news, right? But there is a lot more focus on it. There’s a lot more engagement to it.

This year, that focus included a fight in Washington over voting by mail, which President Trump has tried to curtail. At his direction, the United States Postal Service announced new rules to regulate mail ballots before the Supreme Court stepped in last month to block it. The uncertainty had McKenzie’s team drawing up backup plans. He says the big risk is always change that comes too close to an election. With enough time and information, yes, voters do adapt and they do adjust. The concern is when it’s short. Short notice, significant changes, that creates disruption. That creates question. And when you have questions like that creates doubt. When people have doubt, they disengage.

In Bartow County, Georgia, northwest of Atlanta, election supervisor Joseph Kirk is readying the machines that will go out to polling places. He says the bigger danger may not be someone changing votes. There are so many ways to cast doubt on the election through that process, and I think that’s the true danger. I don’t know that anybody is going to try to, like, hack the voting system and change the votes. But they might try to convince people it’s not worth voting, that there’s no need to participate, it’s just a show game.

Kirk says some of the federal help his office once relied on has all but evaporated since the Trump administration has scaled back the agency that oversees election security. Maybe the easiest way to describe the need is, it takes a nation-state to fight a nation-state. I have a great I.T. director, but he can’t fight China or any other country, and he shouldn’t be expected to. And we had a lot of resources available to us through the federal agencies that either are not available anymore or available in different ways that are hard to participate in.

A diesel deal before Election Day

President Donald Trump said he has struck a deal to obtain diesel from Russia, a stunning reversal of years of U.S. pressure on Moscow over its war with Ukraine and an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Trump said on social media on Friday that he struck the deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call in which he was expected to discuss a suspected case of plague in Russia. Instead, Trump announced that Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver an additional 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.

Trump, in his announcement, did not address the sanctions or Russia’s war but said, “Lower prices for Americans, especially our Great Farmers, Ranchers, and Truckers, is my Greatest Priority.”

Washington and Moscow offer few details on the deal. The White House did not immediately respond to questions about who was paying for the diesel from Russia and when the fuel being supplied under the agreement would become available. It also did not clarify whether subsequent supplies of Russian diesel set to come next month would be supplied prior to Election Day on Nov. 3.

Gas prices globally have surged as the war in Iran upends the energy sector. While diesel future prices dipped on the news on Friday, the national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. remained high at $6.28, according to AAA, after hitting a record $6.52 on Sept. 22.

A statement from Putin, released by the Kremlin on Friday, said that during their call he and Trump dedicated “significant attention to the prospects of resolving the Ukrainian crisis” and also discussed “the situation around Iran and various aspects of bilateral relations.” Russia “confirmed its readiness to supply oil and oil products to the American and global markets,” Putin said. “I am confident that this will have a positive impact on the entire global economy.”

The announcement comes after Trump signed a sweeping Russia sanctions law last month that aimed at clamping down on Russia’s energy revenues, among other areas, that fuel its war against Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it, “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington. Zelenskyy, in a lengthy post online reacting to the deal, said Russia would repay it “with further terror and perfidy.” He cast it as an investment in the war, allowing it to be prolonged. “It plays into Russia’s hands — allowing it to kill more, wage war for longer, have even less respect for America, and inflict even greater losses and damage on the world,” he said.

The midterms are approaching with a campaign built on three overlapping pressures: the deliberate spread of falsehoods, the use of government-funded messaging to shape voter mood, and a sustained effort to make the outcome itself seem contestable. Local officials are testing machines and building paper trails, while national figures test how far the narrative can be stretched before Election Day arrives.