Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told MS NOW that he has conducted a “doomsday” simulation to prepare members of Congress for what he believes are hypothetical threats surrounding Election Day.
“We have to prepare for it,” Schumer told Ali Vitali. “What these so-called tabletop exercises teach us is when you’re prepared in advance, you can stop a lot of bad, bad things from happening. A lot of the stealing that [President Donald Trump] will do, but if you just wait for them to do it and then try to react that day? Not good.”
The simulation was attended by nearly a dozen Democratic senators. Schumer pushed back on the idea that such events risked public confidence in elections. “In a vacuum, you might be right. But Trump is trying – and all his people are trying – to scare elections. They threaten the election officials,” he said.
“If you could do a truth serum and give it to Republican senators, about 80% of them would agree he’s trying to steal the election. The trouble is, they’re too scared to say anything about it,” he argued. “But if we keep at it and keep at it and keep at it, every so often you get someone on our side. And the more we do that, the greater chance we have of stopping them, but of also winning elections so we can prevent these bad things from ever happening again.”
Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias asserted that the simulations are necessary due to what he claimed are election lies from President Trump. He asserted that the simulations aim to prepare “for the fact that Donald Trump, in 2020, lied about the election in advance, lied about it in the aftermath, went to court … and then he instigated a violent insurrection in this very building. So I think we need to take these threats in the 2026 midterm run-up, you know, both seriously and literally.”
