The Candidates Who Could Stop Trump From Stealing The Next Presidential Election

When President Donald Trump tried to steal the 2020 election, he tried to bully Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, into changing the vote total to put him one vote ahead of Joe Biden.

“What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state,” Trump said to Raffensperger in a phone call on Jan. 2, 2021.

But Raffensperger refused. Trump attempted a coup that failed a few days later, but his lies about the 2020 election became cant among Republican politicians.

All Republicans who seek a Trump endorsement or nomination must affirm, in some manner, Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election. There are no Republicans like Raffensperger running and winning their primaries anymore. (Raffensperger himself earned just 15% of the vote in the Republican primary when he ran for governor this year.)

That makes the elections for secretary of state in swing states like Georgia, Arizona, Nevada and Michigan — all states that Trump attempted to steal in 2020 — vital for Democrats to win in 2026 if they hope to protect their citizens’ right to vote from the president’s interference in 2028.

“We must win Arizona, we must win Nevada, we must win Michigan and we have to try to take Georgia, because ’26 is about ’28,” said Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who is currently running for reelection. “If we can elect strong Democratic secretaries of state, we know that our elections in ’28 are going to be protected from the federal government.”

In Arizona and Nevada, the Republican candidates are outright election deniers who worked tirelessly to steal the 2020 election for Trump and, in Arizona, to steal the 2022 gubernatorial election for Republican Kari Lake.

In Georgia and Michigan, the GOP candidates are not explicit election deniers, but have lent support for Trump’s push to federalize elections, seize voter data and spread fears of mass noncitizen voting. None of the four GOP candidates immediately responded to HuffPost’s request for comment.

Democratic incumbents Adrian Fontes and Aguilar are running for reelection in Arizona and Nevada, respectively. Fontes faces Republican state lawmaker Alexander Kolodin, while Aguilar is in a rematch with his 2022 opponent Jim Marchant.

In Michigan, Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist (D) is running against Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini (R) to fill the office that Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) is vacating as she runs for governor.

Judge Penny Brown Reynolds (D) faces state lawmaker Tim Fleming (R) in Georgia, the only one of the four swing states where Democrats do not currently hold the secretary of state’s office. In fact, no Democrat has held the office in 20 years.

“Nothing else matters at this point if we don’t get the secretary of state’s office right in Georgia,” Reynolds said. “My opponent is a MAGA extremist who has been endorsed by Donald Trump, and we know that with that endorsement comes a fidelity to everything that he wants done.”

Trump has already shown why these races are so important by continuing to meddle in them and undermine faith in the electoral process.

The Department of Justice has sued to obtain full voter rolls, including sensitive personal information, from each state in order to allow the Department of Homeland Security to match the rolls with a noncitizen database — a process that routinely turns up false positives and ends up kicking rightful citizens off the voter rolls.

The DOJ has also sent letters to municipalities in Michigan questioning the maintenance of the state’s voter rolls and stating it would send election monitors for the Aug. 4 primaries. Trump also singled out Michigan in a primetime address to the nation where he repeated long-discredited claims of fraud in 2020 related to improperly filled-out voter registrations.

The stakes are even higher in Arizona and Georgia, where Trump has pursued criminal investigations into his false claims about the 2020 election. These investigations led to an FBI raid on Fulton County election offices in Georgia where federal agents seized election materials from the 2020 election. Arizona Republicans, meanwhile, provided similar materials from Maricopa County to the Department of Justice under a grand jury subpoena.

“They have been so aggressive right now, in the lead-up to 2026,” Gilchrist said. “That’s going to be even more aggressive in 2027 ahead of the 2028 presidential election.”

That is why the Democratic nominees and incumbents believe that electing their GOP opponents poses a threat to the integrity of future elections.

In Arizona, Fontes’ challenger, Kolodin, who won his primary with the backing of Turning Point USA, previously worked with former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell in 2020 and represented Lake when she challenged her 2022 loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, with unproven claims of fraud. Kolodin was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona for bringing meritless cases and filing lawsuits primarily for the purposes of harassment.

“The danger is foundational,” Fontes said about electing Kolodin. “You’ve got here an individual who has outrageous viewpoints across the board.”

Aguilar faces the same kind of election denier in his rematch with Marchant in Nevada. Back in 2022, in a less-favorable electoral climate, Aguilar beat Marchant by a slim 23,000-vote margin.

Now, Marchant is back with the same belief that most of Nevada’s recent elections have been fraudulent and with radical plans to upend the state’s voting system. Among his proposals? Unregistering every voter in the state and forcing them to re-register while using biometric data, including their heartbeat, to confirm their identities.

“Nevada runs some of the safest, most secure and most accessible elections in the country,” Aguilar said. “He will rip this all apart to do what he’s publicly stated in the past that he would deliver the results to President Trump.”