SMS Transcript 8-19-2026
Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Vanita Gupta will review the massive legal planning underway to defend the vote, the count, and the certification of winners in the midterms – she was Associate Attorney General in the Biden administration, and has been working with the Senate Democrats’ Elections Task Force on planning and preparations for November. But first: Indivisible, with its 3,300 local groups, is preparing for a rapid response to any threats to free and fair voting – Leah Greenberg will explain—in a minute.
[BREAK]
This year is the culmination of an unprecedented campaign led by Trump to sabotage Democratic voting in the midterms, and millions of people are already at work to protect free and fair elections. One of the groups taking the lead in that work is Indivisible, the network of grassroots groups that turned out 8 million people in 3,300 places for the No Kings 3 protests last March. To talk about Indivisible’s election protection program, we turn to Leah Greenberg. She’s co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project, and she’s also co-host of the weekly podcast “What’s the Plan?” It’s about the actions we can take right now that have the most impact. Last time we talked was in March, just before No Kings 3. Leah Greenberg, welcome back.
Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.
JW: Trump is trying lots of tactics to prevent Democrats from voting. He’s been losing a lot. He’s been losing in the courts. He’s been losing in Congress. He’s been trying to get Congress, the Senate in particular, to pass the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship and photo ID for voting. But the Senate has never voted for it, because the Republican leadership knows they’d lose.
And the legal side of election protection seems to be in pretty good shape right now. The lawyers have been preparing for this for years, ever since Trump won election. That includes, of course, the lawyers who work for the blue state attorneys general, plus the ACLU, the Brennan Center, the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP, and all those organizations we read about like Democracy Defenders, Democracy Docket, and of course, the parties, the Senate Democrats and so on.
I was amazed to find what the big foundations are doing to support all this election protection work: Ford Foundation, $60 million. Macarthur, $100 million. Open Society. $300 million. Democracy Fund, $500 million–that’s Pierre Omidyar. And hundreds of millions more from Freedom Together, Rockefeller, and others. So, lots of lawyers at work. Lots of money being spent on this.
What’s not as well understood is the grassroots part of election protection. And that’s where Indivisible comes in, with its millions of veterans of No Kings protests in thousands of places where people vote. Indivisible, of course, is best known for those huge one-day mobilizations. Are you planning to do more of that around the election?
LG: Well, here’s what I can say on that front. We think that there is going to be a number of moments when it’s going to be really important to collectively show up en masse in the period pre-election. We think that the most important and most significant thing that we collectively need to do is establish, in a really movement oriented way, that we will not be scared out of exercising our right to vote, and to really encourage people collectively to understand that this is an election in which we all get a say in our democracy, and we collectively have the power to drive the results that we want.
And so we are looking at an additional collective day of action. It is not yet official. We’re working through our grassroots networks, we’re working through with partners around the country, because this is the kind of thing that you really want to have everyone have a chance to weigh in on. Obviously, election season is quite sensitive that way, but we are collectively working towards something that we hope to announce pretty soon.
JW: Of course, what we really need is not just a big demonstration of millions of people. We need a big turnout for voting.
LG: That’s right! That’s right. Absolutely. And what we think is going to be really crucial during this window is understanding the connection between exercising our freedom of speech and exercising our right to vote. Like fundamentally, the movement that we have been part of is a movement that is for small d democracy. It is a movement that is saying “we the people are where the power ultimately resides.” And one of the core ways in which that right is expressed and that power is expressed is via the voting booth.
JW: And winning by undeniable, overwhelming margins is by far the best form of election protection, you’ve been arguing.
LG: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we talk about a lot in our own anti-election-sabotage campaigning is the Hungary move. We were very much in touch with a lot of our friends in the Hungarian pro-democracy movement in advance of their election last year. This is after almost two decades of rule by their authoritarian dictator. There was an enormous amount of preparation and concern that went into the possibility of a stolen election. And also, at the end of the day, they turned out and they won in such margins that it simply didn’t pass the smell test to try to sabotage the results. And so, we are under no illusions that you can simply vote your way out of it with nothing else, no preparation, no organizing, etcetera. But we’re also clear that massive, overwhelming turnout is itself an election protection strategy.
JW: What a lot of our friends are worried about is Election Day: Trump declares, in this scenario, Trump declares a national security emergency and claims the power to send troops or ICE or the National Guard to blue polling places in swing states to try to intimidate voters. The lawyers, of course, will be rushing to court to get injunctions to stop them, because voter intimidation is against the law in every state. What are Indivisible groups planning, thinking about, for Election Day?
LG: Well, first of all, let me say that part of this is partly why, when we do our Hands Off Our Vote campaign, we talk about early voting as such a centrally important part of the strategy. Because early voting creates a visible demonstration that communities are turning out to vote. They create, it creates an orientation around voting as a season, rather than just a single day that you take that action on. It spreads out the time window, so that if there are risks, if there is a sabotage attempt, if there is a crisis, there is time to address it and make sure that you are getting your vote successfully in. And so, we’re really going to be encouraging people, first and foremost to avoid the situation in which last minute shenanigans, I say lightly, last minute sabotage attempts on Election Day can meaningfully impact the outcome. So that’s the first piece.
The second piece is we really think that it’s important for people to be connected at a hyper-local level so that if and when there are sabotage attempts in your county, in your state, you know who’s got the ball and how to show up and what to do. A lot of our work in the key states where we are worried about sabotage is really about making sure that people are connected and trained in advance, so that if there is a crisis, people are prepared.
And I’ll just add one additional thing on the ICE at the polls consideration, because this is something that I hear quite a lot from people. And, we think it’s both a valid concern. And we also want people to understand what could happen and what could not happen, because it’s the kind of place where there’s also a real risk of fear running rampant and people attributing to the administration powers that they don’t have. It is very possible that we would see the administration deploy ICE, CBP, some part of their DHS secret police force into communities that have larger minority populations, as a voter suppression tactic. We are concerned about that. The most important thing that I would urge people who are worried about that front, to do right now, is to collectively get trained on knowing your rights on ICE. Watch on the ways you can coordinate with your local immigrant rights infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Because in a window where that kind of threat is being made, it’s racial profiling, attempting to suppress a community. The people who are going to be organized to respond are the people who’ve been doing this work on a daily basis. So, we really encourage people to not think of that as some kind of totally separate election threat, but another impetus to get trained and prepared and connected locally.
JW: Groups that have been doing this, not just for days and weeks, but for years.
LG: 100 per cent, 100 per cent.
JW: In some ways, the biggest problems may be in the blue cities in states with Republican governors, Republican attorneys general, Republican secretaries of state. Texas. Texas has a lot of Democratic votes in Houston, Dallas, and so on. And in Texas, the attorney general is Ken Paxton, who happens to be the candidate for Senate, who happens to be running behind right now in the polls. James Talarico is three points ahead in the latest Fox News poll. I’m pretty sure there are Indivisible groups in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso. What can you tell us about them?
LG: There are a bunch of places where we’re concerned. One is, as you mentioned, red governed blue cities. And also, there are a bunch of other – if I start listing the number of different concerns that we have in the number of different geographies and exactly what we’re at risk for, people tend to get a little overwhelmed. And so, I really want to encourage people to not think about this in terms of hyper specific local guidance, but in terms of knowing your rights, getting trained, getting connected, dispelling administration propaganda and disinformation, turning people out to early vote, being prepared to do rapid response in response to threats in your area. So that might look like you are showing up to your local board of elections meetings in order to monitor a MAGA-adjacent supervisor, right? That might look like you are showing up to the state legislature in order to push back on a threat that impacts your city. The most important thing is to be connected to flexible, local activist organizing communities that can help to direct you when the time comes. Because this is not like an independent situation where you just can make your calls and be done with it. We actually all have to be in relationship with each other and prepared to move quickly.
JW: Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned that problems aren’t going to end on Election Day. Election Day is the first big challenge. But then there’s the counting the ballots, and the certifying the ballots. Remind us what that requires — and what it might require of us.
LG: Yeah. Well, so there are a number of different potential interference points that we are concerned about in monitoring. And that ranges from, as you said, Election Day to the process of counting to certifying the count to the actual swearing in.
JW: January 3rd, 2027.
LG: Exactly, exactly. And what I would say is that we will not be dropping our guard until the new Congress is sworn in, because at each point there is some vulnerability to either legal or extralegal attempts to subvert the process. Some of that is going to look like making sure that people are really organized, so that there’s very local backlash. In the event that you see a state effort to do that, some of that is going to be around preparing the collective mobilization capacity, right? We have shown over the last year and a half that we can mobilize in literally historically unprecedented numbers if we need to do that again on much shorter notice. We will be able to do that. And some of it is just going to be about collectively organizing and making sure people understand this is a real threat so that we can move swiftly if we need to. One of the biggest fears that we have is around people being too slow to understand what is happening in order to successfully react. And so, we want to do the pre-work to make sure people understand this is a real risk.
JW: And it isn’t just Indivisible that is doing this work. Who else is part of this coalition?
LG: Well, I would say there’s a there’s a really heroic cross-ecosystem effort to coordinate here, because fundamentally what we’re talking about is risks and threats that play out in 20-something different states. More really, if you think about all the additional ones that have congressional districts that might be at risk, each of those states, there is coordinated effort by folks who are thinking about election protection, about voter rights, voting rights, about the legal strategies, about the mobilizing strategies. We are then in touch collectively to make sure that state actors are getting the support that they need from national actors. And we’re making sure that the folks who are going to be leading the legal strategies and the communications and narrative and the mobilization are all talking to each other, because fundamentally, this is not something where you can just have a legal response or a mobilization response, you actually need to wed those folks together in order to have a really effective strategy where you win. The story of what is happening in the country, and you win the legal fights.
JW: I want to recall what happened in Minnesota in 2025, because I think there’s some important lessons there. That was a kind of a nightmare scenario for Indivisible Twin Cities. The night before the No Kings rally was scheduled, June 2025, the Democratic Party speaker of the state legislature, Melissa Hortman, was assassinated, along with her husband, by what turned out to be an anti-abortion activist. But he had some No Kings leaflets in his car, which the police recovered shortly thereafter.
But the killer was still on the loose at the time the main No Kings rally was scheduled to take place at the Minnesota State Capitol in Saint Paul. You and I have talked about this before on this program. The Minnesota State Police urged people not to attend, and the governor, of course, had to follow the advice of the state police, and canceled his speech. But Indivisible decided to go ahead with that rally. That was a very courageous and important decision. And how many people showed up at the state Capitol?
LG: I believe it was something like 70,000 people.
JW: It was a great event. Keith Ellison, the state attorney general, kind of gave the keynote speech.
It’s not impossible that something scary and horrible will happen right before Election Day this November. But we will remember what you guys did in Saint Paul that day. And it’s one reason why you say, “we will not be scared.”
LG: And so much credit to Indivisible Twin Cities, who really did take that moment and turn it into something very powerful and a collective show of people power.
JW: Indivisible has a program called Hands Off Our Vote, a national program to ensure that all eligible voters get to cast their ballot and that those ballots get counted. How can our listeners find out more about all this?
LG: Yeah, well, you can go to indivisible.org and you can sign up, you’ll get updates. You can sign up for the Hands Off Our Vote campaign there, and you will be invited to trainings. You’ll be invited to rapid response updates. If you are in a state that we have identified as a high-risk state, we will make sure that you can get connected to resources on what to do and how to take action wherever you are.
JW: Last question: Do you think we will have free and fair elections in these midterms?
LG: Well, I think we’ve got to start from being real that free and fair elections has been a moving target throughout American history. I know many people from across, particularly the American South, who would be very clear that they haven’t been operating under anything that looks like free and fair elections for a long time. And particularly when it comes to attacks on voting rights, the ongoing efforts to really destroy the Voting Rights Act, all of the ways in which there’s been both the culmination of Trump’s specific obsession with election sabotage, and also a multi-decade campaign by a broad swath of the Republican Party to sabotage the right to vote, to make it harder for regular people to vote, and particularly to limit the rights of Black and brown folks to vote.
So, I think they will attempt to throw every trick in the book at this election. I think that they will take advantage of wherever they have the power to try to restrict conditions. And I think they will fail – because there are more of us than there are of them. There are more people who fundamentally want a free and fair election in which all of our voices are heard.
JW: “We think they will fail.” Leah Greenberg, she’s co-founder and co-executive director of the Indivisible Project. More information @indivisible.org. Leah, thank you for all your work, and thanks for talking with us today.
LG: Pleasure to join.
[BREAK]
Jon Wiener: Voting rights leaders and blue state officials have been hard at work to stop Trump’s efforts to sabotage the midterms. One of those leaders is Vanita Gupta. She’s director of the Center for Law and Public Trust at the NYU Law School and a distinguished scholar in residence there. Before that, she was associate attorney general in the Biden administration. That’s the third ranking official at the Department of Justice. She’s also headed the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department for President Obama. She led the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She’s also worked at the ACLU and the NAACP. Vanita Gupta, welcome to the program.
Vanita Gupta: Thank you so much for having me.
JW: Chris Hayes has a great image: it’s like Trump is going down the hall of a hotel, trying every door.
And so far, he has been failing his efforts to get the courts to order states to hand over voter rolls there. He’s on a historic losing streak. I think as of today, it’s 22 defeats and no victories in court. He’s been trying to get the post office to refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t comply with his efforts. And there, so far, he’s lost three times — because Congress never gave the Postal Service, or the president, the authority to regulate mail voting. That’s some of what he’s been trying recently.
I know you worked on the Senate Democrats election task force led by Chuck Schumer. It includes Bernie Sanders, Adam Schiff, and others, briefing them on threats to the midterm — along with others, including Eric Holder, former Attorney General; Marc Elias, the attorney who’s defeated Trump dozens of times in court trying to overturn the 2020 elections. What do you consider the biggest threats to the midterms right now?
VG: So, first of all, thank you for having me. I think there are a number of threats to the midterms. But I also think with every threat we have some counter strategies. But let me name the threats first. He’s been trying to federalize the elections. And by that, I mean trying to use the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department to do all kinds of things — to get involved in demanding voter data from local and state election officials seeking voter data from states. And they’re as you mentioned, those efforts have been met by dozens of challenges. He has lost every single challenge and every decision that has come down so far where he’s lost a challenge, including by, you know, Trump appointed judges. There has not been a win for the administration.
But we’ve known about other efforts by the administration to use the Justice Department and DHS to go after voter registration groups. For instance, there was a raid in against the Ohio Organizing Collaborative in June, an organization that has, through the last several decades, done really important voter registration work — and this effort to kind of intimidate people that are so actively engaged in the machinery of our democracy is, is another ploy he’s been using.
JW: Let us mention here the Southern Poverty Law Center, kind of the leading group in exposing fascist groups.
VG: The Justice Department’s move on the Southern Poverty Law Center is deeply disturbing. You know, somewhat unrelated to election related work. They were indicted for this, allegedly defrauding their donors, because they were using informants to infiltrate white supremacist organizations. Most of us who have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center, both in and outside of government, know that that was a core part of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s work, and that donors actually were extremely excited and supportive of this work. An area of work that the FBI relied on to go after domestic extremism.
So, this effort to go after organizations right now that are doing some of the most critical work to protect our democracy, defend the rule of law, protect vulnerable communities, has been another area of my work. I launched this Nonprofits Together last year. It’s a network of organizations aimed at protecting the core work that organizations are doing right now to fight for our democracy, and it includes the Southern Poverty Law Center.
JW: And do people want to find out more about that? Where can they go?
VG: NPtogether.org.
JW: NPtogether.org. Getting back to the election protection front, some of our friends worry especially about the scenario where Trump declares a national security emergency. Maybe he claims he’s got secret information that Chinese are interfering, or that undocumented people are going to vote, and claiming emergency powers as the basis for sending the military or ICE to blue polling places to intimidate voters. What do we know about that possibility?
VG: Look, I think that’s one of the scenarios that people have been preparing for, that the president would use this narrative of non-citizens voting or flooding our election system to declare an emergency. Almost certainly, it will be met with immediate litigation and a challenge to the exercise of those emergency powers. This is where the ground that he is treading is not new. This is a playbook. It’s a playbook that he has tried to deploy in prior election cycles. It’s one that organizations are prepared for. It’s one that, most importantly, state and local election officials who actually run our elections by the constitution. The federal government does not run our elections. States run our elections have been prepared for this type of narrative, but any exercise or declaration of emergency powers in this type of context is going to be met with immediate and swift litigation.
JW: You’ve been working on training licensed attorneys to serve as captains and poll monitors for the nonpartisan Election Protection Coalition hotline, again, something that’s long-standing practice in America. Tell us about the Election Protection Coalition and the hotline.
VG: The Hotline has existed for through many cycles, as you say. It’s a really important way that voters can call in if they have experienced a problem with voting, an irregularity at the polling place, and lawyers are a part of this election protection network. The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights runs this effort, and lawyers are able to call it to provide advice or guidance about how to navigate a particular voting challenge. If it’s a public safety issue, about the need to call local law enforcement and the like.
JW: And the nonpartisan Election Protection hotline is 866-OUR VOTE.
VG: It’s an extensive effort, and it’s important. It’s alongside also a very big effort that involves hundreds of organizations called the Election Safeguard Response Network. This is a network that many of us kind of put into being in the 2020 presidential cycle. It was an effort to deploy the work of and coordinate the work of organizations that litigate organizations that do mobilization, organizations that are effective communicators to fight disinformation, which is another threat to the election. To organize, you know, the many efforts and to ensure that there was good coordination, and that people could slot in as needed to particular crisis areas. This network has only grown more sophisticated through the last few election cycles. It’s an incredibly important effort that is very much ready at this moment for all of the various threats that we have been tracking that the media has been tracking. And folks are ready to litigate, to advocate. They’ve been working with local and state election officials to make sure they know what the law says and that they are resourced to do their jobs. It involves people, organizations that are recruiting poll workers, Power the Polls and other such organizations, to make sure that if you care about our democracy and you want to do something, that you can become a poll worker, and that there’s a mechanism to get trained up. So, it’s a pretty extensive outside effort, and it’s been really impressive to see it grow in sophistication over the last few cycles.
JW: And if people want to know more about the ESRN, where can they find out?
VG: Well, there’s a number of organizations that are operating it, but I would go to an organization. All Voting is Local, that Hannah Fried is running, and they can help plug people in.
JW: The ACLU has a list of 25 possible subversion scenarios. I’m especially interested in the last one, number 25. We’ve mostly been talking about voting on Election Day, but there’s a lot happening after Election Day that is also vulnerable – the count of the vote, the certification of the vote. And then January 3rd, 2027, when the new Congress is finally seated. The ACLU’s final threat scenario is the speaker of the House refuses to accept the winning Democrats and instead installs Republicans who lost as the new members of Congress in order to preserve the Republican majority there. You can’t take that to the Supreme Court because the constitution says Congress is the final judge of its own membership. Same scenario for the Senate: the president of the Senate, who’s the vice president of the United States, JD Vance, has the power to refuse to seat a Democrat. The groups that you work with, what are their preparations for this scenario?
VG: Yeah, there’s been a lot of discussion about this. Let me just start by saying, because we can run through all of the threats, and it can make people very nervous. I think it’s important to understand two things. One is that the greatest inoculation and pushback to any of these types of threats is to exercise your right to vote. It is safe to vote, and there is a huge machinery of good people at work to ensure that your vote will be counted if it has been lawfully cast. I call it sometimes the “too big to rig” strategy. If the system is overwhelmed by such a high level of participation by our electorate, any election is just too big to rig at that point. And so that is the best inoculation. And people need to remember that it is very safe to vote. And as I said, there’s big efforts underway to protect people’s right to vote and have their vote counted. Because I think I worry sometimes that this kind of dooming around all of the various ways that the election can be undermined or the threats that are being lodged against will kind of dissuade voters from participating. And that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then at that point, for the kind of nightmare scenario.
So, the best thing to do is to prepare and have a plan for how you’re going to vote, when you’re going to vote, and to exercise your right to vote on this, this concern around how the count will take place at the county level. Will the count be certified? And then what are the shenanigans that could take place in the House? There are congressional, legal and public readiness strategies that organizations and electeds are deploying. There are a number of scenarios that people have been preparing for. Organizations and others are really in the weeds of a state-by-state strategy, understanding the procedural vulnerabilities, what the solutions are. And so, I am fully confident that were there any shenanigans around this kind of certification process and seeding process. There will be litigation that will be very swift, but also organizing strategies and procedural strategies that will be deployed. So again, I feel like, going down the kind of spiral of all of the scenarios, it is important for us to understand what could happen only insofar as it’s going to trigger preparedness, preparedness to protect our elections.
JW: And how confident are you that voting in the midterms will be free and fair?
VG: I actually am very optimistic that it will be free and fair. All of this is to say, it’s not like the administration has not been trying to seed narratives of fraud to make people nervous that their vote won’t count; to to try to spook people about ICE at the polls. And they’ve been trying to get access to private voter data, but I am seeing these efforts fail. I also am seeing state and local election officials very proudly stand up to defend their elections. They run the elections, not the federal government. And so, I am actually quite optimistic that we are going to have elections where there is strong participation and where people are going to be able to cast their vote that are eligible to do so and have their vote counted, and that we will have a result. It may be messy. I’m not saying it’s not going to be messy. It’s already been messier than we would have wanted. When the president wanted the SAVE Act, though, he was unable to get that enacted by legislation. He’s losing in the courts. So, it’s going to be messy, and there may be a lot of litigation and organizing. But the good news is people are prepared to do everything we can to defend our elections and protect our democracy and ensure that people can cast their vote.
JW: Vanita Gupta, she’s director of the center for Law and Public Trust at NYU Law School and an adviser to the Senate Democrats Election Task Force. Vanita, thanks for talking with us today.
VG: Thank you.
