Let’s be honest: the 2026 midterm election is not going to feel like a normal election. It will be louder, stranger, and more artificial than anything we’ve seen before, thanks to a perfect storm of money, social-media manipulation, bots, and AI-generated content. That’s the warning from Mark Trahant, the veteran Indigenous journalist behind Native Vote 2026, who has spent months watching the machinery behind the races. In a recent analysis, Trahant writes that there are people—cough Donald Trump and Elon Musk cough—spending enormous sums on attack ads and misinformation designed for social media. The goal is not simply to persuade undecided voters; it’s to flood every channel of communication so completely that the truth gets lost in the noise. If you’ve scrolled through social media lately, you’ve probably seen the result: suspicious polls, angry comment threads, and AI-generated clips that look like news but aren’t. Trahant’s focus is on how these forces affect Native candidates and Native voters, who are often the targets of the most toxic content. Native communities have historically been ignored by national campaigns, but in a close election they are exactly the kind of voters who can tip a state. That’s why this cycle feels different. Trahant sees a deliberate effort to use every tool available—dark money, bot armies, AI, and viral attacks—to influence Native voters and discredit Native candidates. It’s a reminder that representation alone isn’t enough; getting to office has become a battlefield where your own words can be sliced, diced, and fed back to you in the most cynical way possible.
Let’s start with the most traditional weapon in the arsenal: television advertising. Reuters reports that Trump, whose approval rating is stuck at the lowest level of his political career, told reporters he plans to allocate $400 million to $500 million to boost Republicans in the midterms. That is a staggering sum, and it’s already moving. The Trump-affiliated Republican political action committee No Going Back reserved more than $74 million in ad time this week alone, according to AdImpact, a political ad research firm. The reservations span 15 different House races and Senate races in six battleground states: Alaska, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Ohio. Michigan has become the PAC’s biggest target, with $15.7 million locked in. Why Michigan? Because Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive Democrat backed by several prominent democratic socialists, pulled ahead of Republican Mike Rogers in the polls last month. The ad running in that market replays excerpts of El-Sayed in which he questioned whether police needed to carry guns and called for defunding the police. It doesn’t matter that those comments were probably part of a larger conversation about reform; the ad condenses them into a ten-second gut punch. Meanwhile, Musk’s America PAC has launched a separate digital campaign designed to exploit cultural fears. The ads attack Democratic Senate candidates in four competitive races over transgender athletes, gender-transition care, and other trans issues. The targets are Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, Iowa’s Josh Turek, Texas’ James Talarico, and Alaska’s Mary Peltola. Peltola’s inclusion proves that even a widely respected Native politician is not immune to national cultural messaging. The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking, Trahant notes, because it has been a much less prominent theme in Republican Senate ads so far this cycle. Running these attacks online and on streaming platforms allows them to reach voters without the scrutiny of traditional television, where fact-checking might catch distortions. It’s a deliberate strategy to define the terrain before the candidates can.
If TV ads are the visible part of the iceberg, bots and artificial intelligence are the hidden mass beneath the surface. Trahant illustrates this with a personal experience. He wrote a piece about the Supreme Court and mail-in voting, and seconds after it went online, a bot had already responded with an all-too-familiar talking point: “Mail in voting has been exploited to commit voter fraud. That is a fact.” The bot had eight friends. Another account, with just three followers, chimed in: “How is ensuring each vote cast is a registered voter chaos?!!!” These were not genuine readers; they were automated reaction machines, programmed to appear at the exact moment a piece went live. Trahant says his post had high traffic on social media—that algorithm!—but only a slice of it came from regular readers. The rest was the sound of a manufactured outrage economy. Beyond bots, AI is now generating entire video clips that mimic legitimate news. There are AI-generated “news anchors” reporting odd facts, true or not, with all the seriousness of a real broadcast. One daily “poll” claims a Republican surge is happening, trying to flip the narrative on what could be a blue wave. The only problem? It’s all made up. None of the polls in the video actually exist. One invented poll predicts Republicans will expand their majority in the Senate. Trahant’s response is dry: “Good luck with that.” The real, generic polling shows something different: when voters are asked whether they’d support a Republican or a Democrat in their district, Democrats maintain a solid lead of about nine percentage points. That gap is the reason why these fake polls exist. They are deployed to create confidence on the right and doubt on the left, and in a world where people don’t check sources, they can be devastatingly effective.
The real-world impact of all this can be seen in the polls of Native candidates. Deb Haaland, the Laguna Pueblo former congresswoman and Interior Secretary, is running in New Mexico, and Trahant says she is “all over the map” in the polls. Some surveys show her with a comfortable lead in the high teens; others shrink that margin to just six points. A dip like that can be produced by any number of factors, but the relentless onslaught of attack ads and astroturfed social media posts doesn’t help. Peggy Flanagan, a citizen of the White Earth Nation and the lieutenant governor of Minnesota, is showing a similar pattern. Republicans are touting a poll that claims her race is “statistically even,” despite the fact that primary voters gave her a landslide victory just weeks earlier. Then there is Mary Peltola, the Yup’ik former congresswoman running for Senate in Alaska. The Juneau Independent describes her race as one of the most watched Senate contests in the country, and it’s still a toss-up. A recent Alaska Survey Research poll of 1,495 likely voters shows Peltola prevailing in a ranked-choice tally, 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent over two-term Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan. That sounds like a win—except the margin of error is three percent, which means the race is statistically tied. For supporters of these candidates, the numbers can be anxiety-provoking. But Trahant urges people to step back. These polls are snapshots of a moment, not predictions of the future. They are heavily influenced by the very campaign we just described: a media environment filled with fabricated polls, viral clips, and people making a living off confusion. In races like these, campaign infrastructure matters as much as advertising. Trahant points out that Native candidates and their allies have been organizing for years, building networks of volunteers, phone bankers, and door-knockers. They know that a fake poll doesn’t show up at the ballot box. Still, the targeting takes a toll, which is why campaigns are increasingly using digital literacy and voter education to counter the lies.
Now for the counter to all of the noise, and it’s worth repeating until you believe it: polls don’t vote. Trahant makes this point forcefully, reminding us that the 2026 midterms are not merely a referendum on individual candidates. They are a referendum on the government currently in power, and that government is led by a historically unpopular president. The New York Times reports that Trump’s approval rating continues to languish at 38 percent among likely voters, essentially unchanged from the lows he hit after his confrontation with Iran. A majority of voters disapprove of his handling of every major issue included in the poll: the economy, immigration, tariffs, the war, and, especially, the cost of living. That last issue is the one that hurts most. People feel the squeeze every time they go to the grocery store or fill up their car, and they blame the people in charge. The same poll found that likely voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans by close to nine percentage points in their congressional districts—a metric that both parties watch closely as a leading indicator of momentum. So while the Trump political machine is pouring hundreds of millions into ads, and while Musk’s PAC is flooding the internet with divisive content, and while bots are spinning fake narratives around real articles, the underlying political weather has not changed. Voters are angry. They want lower prices, not culture-war distractions. They want stability, not chaos. Trahant’s message to down-ballot candidates, especially Native candidates, is to keep their eyes on that prize. Don’t let the attacks define you. Let the reality of people’s lives define the race.
And then there is the question of who actually shows up. In a couple of weeks, ballots will be in people’s hands across the country. Trahant says one metric to watch is First Day Voters—people who show up on the very first day early voting opens—and all early voters who cast ballots before Election Day. In the last midterm, just under half of all voters, 47 percent, voted early. Trahant bets that number climbs this time around. People are not waiting; they are energized. That energy has already shown up in primary races across the country. The August primary in Minnesota, for example, blew Trahant away. Statewide, more than a million ballots were cast, setting an all-time record of roughly 25 percent of eligible voters. In Minneapolis, the turnout was an astonishing 41.6 percent. That kind of urban voter intensity explains why Peggy Flanagan won her primary by such a large margin. It wasn’t just name recognition; it was organization. The same pattern appears elsewhere. Deb Haaland won her primary with 72 percent of the vote, a crushing victory that sent a clear message. Mary Peltola won her open primary by eight points and passed the magic 50 percent threshold, which is hard to do in a crowded field. These are not the numbers of a demoralized base. They are the numbers of a movement that has been building for years. Trahant says, “So for what it’s worth: I expect that upside to happen again in November.” It’s a cautious forecast, but an optimistic one. The money, bots, and fake polls may be loud, but they don’t cast ballots. Real people do. And if the primary turnouts are any indication, those real people are paying attention and ready to make their voices heard.