MS NOW’s Jacob Soboroff focused on Republicans electoral strategy for the 2026 midterms. Soboroff claims that President Trump and Republicans are seeking a power grab to stop Democrats from winning elections:

JACOB SOBOROFF, MSNOW HOST: We are now just 257 days from the midterm elections and Donald Trump hit the campaign trail today in Georgia with two main themes. First theme, my tariffs are amazing, you’re welcome, and we need to stop Democrats from voting so Republicans can stay in power for 50 years. Trump, whose popularity is as low as ever in his second term, knows he has got a big problem on the issue of affordability, and in Georgia, he visited a factory and a local business to try and rally the faithful, all while harping on, you guessed it, his conspiracy theory about the 2020 election. This coming after his FBI raided and seized ballots from the election office of the state’s largest county, Fulton County, and after Trump suggested that the state should take over elections in that county. This is the campaign message he delivered at the Varsity restaurant today in Rome, Georgia. PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They came in, they took all those ballots, all those crooked ballots were taken. Let’s see what happens. The Democrats are fighting like hell. They don’t want anyone to see those ballots. Did you see that? Let’s see what happens. It’s a disgrace, but what are you going to do? We’re cleaning it up. Who likes voter ID? SOBOROFF: Stacey Abrams is a former Democratic candidate for governor in Georgia. She is the founder of Fair Fight Action and the host of Crooked Media’s podcast Assembly Required, and she joins me now. Stacey, it’s so good to see you. Your name came up, we’ve been watching this thing pretty closely, at the Fulton County Election Board meeting when one of the members aligned with Donald Trump said, and this is a quote, we are here because our election has been in question for a long time. And she brought up your run for governor in 2018. Your reaction to what’s been going on at the Board of Elections? STACEY ABRAMS, FORMER DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE FOR GEORGIA GOVERNOR: I think it’s important for us to understand that this is not about 2020. This is a pretext. The 2020 election has been investigated by Democrats, Republicans, by every department you can imagine. They know that election was free and fair, but what they think they can do is use this as a pretext to seize records to which the federal government is not entitled, and they will use those records to challenge voters, to intimidate them, and to preemptively disqualify them, because Georgia has one of the preeminent Senate races in 2026. This is also a test run for what they’ve tried to do across the country, which is force states to abandon their constitutional responsibility for managing elections and give that information to a federal government that is in the midst of an authoritarian takeover. And so while they will use the easy layup of saying something about 2020, this is all about 26 and 28 and their attempt to destroy democracy. SOBOROFF: Yeah, you’re so right. What he said today, again, they came in and they took all those ballots, all those crooked ballots were taken. They love a pretext. They love the pretext when they went out to all these different cities and said that they needed to invoke potentially the Insurrection Act because riotous mobs were in the streets protesting over immigration policies. I saw myself that that was a complete fallacy. As it comes to elections in Georgia, there’s been concern that the state board was going to try to take over at the president’s suggestion, Fulton County’s elections board, but that didn’t actually happen today. What’s your level of concern that potentially could still happen? ABRAMS: Well, Jacob, what you just laid out is an important piece of knowledge for us to all hold. This is a country that is in the midst of an authoritarian takeover. There are 10 steps to authoritarianism, and we have hit all 10 steps. But step 10 is destroying democracy for everyone. And you do that by changing the rules, by redistricting. You do that by intimidating voters, by disqualifying voters. You do that by seizing the operations of elections. And while they may have failed today to take over Fulton County’s elections, they’re not going to stop. But I think it’s important for people to see Georgia not as a singularity, but as an example. Georgia has had this level of voter suppression attempted before, and we have been able to fight it back, which is why they’re so angry. But it’s also why Pam Bondi said to Governor Tim Walz, if you will just hand over your voting records, we’ll pull ICE out. We have a program that we call the 10 Steps Campaign, and we encourage people to go to 10stepscampaign.org, because this is all of a piece. You don’t need to declare martial law. You just need to break our election system if you want to stay in power. And this is the entire goal of this administration and this Republican regime. SOBOROFF: There was this extraordinary reporting yesterday from our colleagues here at MSNOW about the fact that they could end up having DHS agents long rumored, but now it appears to be a plan that is at least potentially in motion outside of polling places at locations around the country during the midterm elections. It was something that every one of these Democratic governors had said to me that they were concerned about as I went from state to state during the ICE raids. It’s so interesting to see how it’s been playing out in Georgia. All of those people showing up at that John Ossoff rally after the Fulton County raids was really an extraordinary thing to witness. I wonder what you’re looking at now as we get closer to these midterms. And to me, it certainly looks like people all these days out are showing up because of what’s happening in Fulton County at this very minute. ABRAMS: It’s what we saw in 2018 when we added 800,000 voters who had not previously participated. That wasn’t all voter registration. We had an increase in voter registration, but at 800,000 new people who voted in the Democratic side of the tally in 2018, those were people who watched the governor, then Secretary of State, attempt to throttle their vote. Voter suppression has three parts. Can you register and stay on the rolls? Can you cast a ballot? And does that ballot get counted? And the more we watch this Republican authoritarian regime try to take away the right to vote, the more people are going to fight to use it. And I think it’s really important that they do three things. One, call your senators and tell them to vote against the SAVE Act, especially if you live in Maine. Susan Collins, who knows better, has now signaled that she is willing to support a law that would disenfranchise millions of voters and put the responsibility on voters instead of the government. Number two, we need folks to support voting rights organizations wherever they are. And number three, make sure you vote in primaries. They’re not going to wait until November to try to steal elections. They’re not going to wait until November to break the machinery. They’re going to practice during primaries. So we’ve got to show up in force every time there’s a vote so we can make certain they hear our voices. SOBOROFF: Well, I’ll be doing my part. I’ll be out there at the Texas primary election in a couple of weeks’ time, and you know we’ll be watching that very closely. Stacey Abrams, it’s so good to see you. Thanks for being here.

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