Senator Adam Schiff didn’t hold back Sunday morning on ABC’s This Week. Speaking with Jonathan Karl just days after President Trump’s latest round of comments about “taking over” voting in key states, the California Democrat laid out a blunt warning: the president is already signaling plans to interfere if the midterms don’t go his way.
“I think he’ll — intends to try to subvert the elections,” Schiff said directly. “He will do everything he can to suppress the vote. And if he loses the vote, and I think the Republicans now expect they’ll get a real drubbing in the midterms, he’s prepared to try to take some kind of action to overturn the result, and we really shouldn’t question that.”
The remarks come against a backdrop of escalating rhetoric from Trump himself. In recent days, the president has floated the idea of Republicans “nationalizing” elections in as many as 15 jurisdictions—mostly Democratic-leaning areas—while insisting he would only accept midterm results “if the elections are honest.” Schiff tied those statements straight to a pattern of behavior the country has seen before.
“He’s basically telling us he intends to interfere in this upcoming election,” Schiff continued. “We cannot ignore what they’re telling us they’re going to do because time and time again we have seen that they’re willing to go to extraordinary and lawless lengths.
“He pointed to concrete steps already underway or being pushed. Voter suppression efforts, including aggressive pushes for mandatory voter ID laws, drew particular criticism. “Voter ID in the way that it’s being proposed disenfranchises people,” Schiff argued, calling it a solution in search of a problem when widespread fraud has never been proven.
Schiff also highlighted recent federal actions that have raised alarms among election officials and Democrats alike. He referenced the FBI’s seizure of voting machines and records in Fulton County, Georgia—home to long-standing 2020 fraud claims—and similar moves in Puerto Rico. The involvement of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in some of those operations only heightened concerns about politicized interference in state-run elections.
“All of this is intended to send a message,” Schiff said of the Georgia raid, “and the message is, ‘We will not tolerate or accept an election that we lose.'”The senator urged preparation on multiple fronts. He called for safeguards in upcoming DHS funding legislation to prevent federal agencies like ICE from being deployed near polling places—an idea floated by some Trump allies that he described as outright voter intimidation. More broadly, he said Democrats and election protectors need to anticipate every possible avenue of interference, just as they did heading into 2020.
“We’re going to have to do what we did, basically, in the run-up to the 2020 election,” Schiff explained, “which is try to anticipate all of the illegality, all of the efforts to suppress the vote, all of the efforts to overturn the vote that may take place during, before, and after the midterms.”
With polls already showing potential Republican vulnerabilities, driven by backlash to administration policies on everything from the economy to immigration, Schiff’s appearance felt like a deliberate effort to sound the alarm early. He wasn’t speculating about hypotheticals; he was quoting the president’s own words and connecting them to actions already in motion.
The stakes for 2026 couldn’t be higher, and Schiff made clear that dismissing these warnings would be a dangerous repeat of past mistakes. When a sitting president openly questions whether he’ll accept an election he might lose, and backs it up with moves to pressure or seize control of voting systems, ignoring it isn’t an option.Democracy doesn’t defend itself. Schiff’s message Sunday was straightforward: pay attention, prepare, and push back—because the other side already is.
