Dems Fear a GOP Legal Blitz Around The Midterms

The Shadow (Docket) Campaign

DEMOCRATIC LEADERS ARE CONFIDENT they can retake the House in the 2026 midterms. But that optimism is increasingly clouded by fear that a blitz of legal challenges from Republicans could complicate or even upend their wins.

In conversations with leading campaign operatives and Democratic-allied lawyers, there is a growing concern that the party is not effectively focused on—and resourced-up for—the legal fights ahead around voting rights, election laws, and election certifications.

Such legal warfare has popped up in every recent election cycle. But these Democrats warn that Republicans’ post-election legal challenges in 2026 could be substantially more aggressive than in the past. Already, the party has seen how that could play out.

North Carolina Democrats have been quietly struggling to regain their financial footing after the contentious legal battle to defend Justice Allison Riggs’s November election to the state supreme court. Riggs’s GOP opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin, spent six months attempting to get thousands of votes tossed out in order to reverse his loss. Riggs ultimately prevailed when Griffin finally conceded in May. But that win—celebrated as a positive sign that the legal system would ultimately protect the integrity of elections—came at a cost.

Riggs’s campaign alone spent over $1 million on legal fees, according to a person close to her campaign. And the state party is still sorting out how to pay off its own bills related to defending the court seat. Party officials accused Griffin and allied Republicans of deliberately using the legal challenge to try and bankrupt them.

“I absolutely believe that one of the strategies in the Riggs case was to try and reduce the amount of resources that the party had to work with because if you’re spending money on lawsuits, you can’t spend money on other things that are just as important,” said Reyna Walters-Morgan, a North Carolina-based member of the Democratic National Committee who serves as the vice chair for civic engagement and voter participation.

Incumbent GOP Sen. Thom Tillis’s announcement on Sunday that he would not run for re-election in 2026 underscored that point. The midterms in the state would be contentious no matter what, but with Tillis’s seat now up for grabs, there will be a spotlight on races further down the ballot, too. Yet state Democrats have been slow to get moving: Despite Riggs’s victory, the legal challenge ultimately limited Democrats from being able to get a headstart on raising money for the midterm cycle.

The fear among some Democratic officials is that Republicans will attempt similar challenges on a mass scale next year—and that the national party won’t be able to underwrite the defenses against them. The North Carolina Democratic Party received very little financial help from the Democratic National Committee, according to an operative in the state. And the future prospects for a cash infusion from the national party appear even bleaker. The Republican National Committee reported entering June with $72 million on hand, nearly five times the DNC’s $15 million stockpile.

“I don’t think that [DNC officials] are fully prepared to help states even do the basic litigation prep work that it takes,” said the operative. “We are going to lose a lot of races probably in states where if they had the money, they could contest what Republicans are doing.”

Beyond the DNC’s coffers, there are additional fears about the election law battles to come. Among them is that the party is too reliant on one big law firm—Elias Law Group—to handle the bulk of the legal strategy and hasn’t invested enough in creating a network of lawyers in the states most likely to see GOP challenges. (ELG, it should be noted, did not represent Riggs in the post-election contest.)

There is also fear that the incumbent president will go to extraordinary lengths to hold on to power. And not without reason: The country is only four-and-a-half years removed from January 6th.

“People say, ‘Well, we survived Trump the first time, we’re going to survive him the second time,’” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said in an interview with The Bulwark earlier this month. “No. He’s carrying out a fundamentally different plan, a well-organized, well-thought-out plan, to install himself and his allies in power forever that he never even contemplated carrying out and implementing in his first term.”

Publicly, the DNC and party officials are projecting confidence. Party lawyers note that they’ve gotten better at reacting quickly to Trump’s actions compared to his first presidency, filing lawsuits to block executive orders attempting to give the president control over the Federal Election Commission and another requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.

The DNC also recently created a new litigation department, hiring Dan Freeman, a veteran of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, to lead a team of three lawyers. Freeman, who started in his role last week, told The Bulwark he plans to hire more lawyers in the coming months—describing it as a significant investment compared to just a few years ago, when the DNC did not employ any lawyers in-house.

“The law requires free and fair elections. I think we are well positioned to successfully protect them, but it’s going to require a lot of work—and that’s exactly why we are staffing up inside the DNC in a way that we have not done for at least thirty years,” Freeman said.