ICYMI: Eric Holder Warns of Republican Voter Suppression in the 2026 Midterms

Washington, D.C. – On Friday, Eric H. Holder, Jr., the 82nd Attorney General of the United States and Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), participated in a panel discussion hosted by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in which he sounded the alarm about Republican efforts to undermine the integrity of the 2026 midterm elections. The event occurred the day after President Trump delivered a speech filled with false claims about election security that were widely debunked.

The panel event can be viewed here. Below is an excerpt from the discussion:

AFT PRESIDENT RANDI WEINGARTEN: “Attorney General Holder, I thought of you—the first person I thought of when I saw the Callais decision, because you had to live through Shelby and you predicted this, but what keeps you—and I’m sure there’s many things that keep you up at night—but what keeps you up at night?

ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER: “What keeps me up at night is the way in which the midterm elections are gonna be conducted. There’s a ton of stuff that keeps me up at night, but this is just the one at the front of the line. I’m a Democrat, a partisan Democrat, and proud of that. What I worry about, with regard to Trump and the Republicans, is that they’re gonna do anything that they can—anything—to cheat, to rig the election, to come up with a result that’s inconsistent with the desires of the American people through gerrymandering, through voter suppression, through the deployment of ICE in certain communities, declaring an emergency of some sort to try to justify the use of troops. All these things, 18 months ago, might’ve seemed fanciful. ‘No way that could possibly happen.’ I put everything on the table with regard to what these people are capable of doing. So we’ve gotta be prepared to respond in kind. That’s the thing that keeps me up.

“If it’s a fair election, we’re gonna be fine. I think there’s going to be a wave. The House of Representatives should come our way. We’ll make great progress, I think, in state legislatures, which we need to focus on to a much greater degree than we do. The Senate is certainly in play. But I really worry, if you shave one to two percent through the mechanisms that they might use—you know, voter participation—by one to two percent, that can be outcome-determinative, and I worry about that in certain states. So what it is that they’re going to do—and that speech that we saw last night, as crazy as it was, as error-filled as it was, could serve as the basis for the kinds of conduct, the kinds of practices that they might try to put in place that, 18 months ago, we would’ve said ‘Eh, that’s not possible.’ That’s what keeps me up at night.”

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