Elections have consequences. President Trump has issued executive orders motivated by suspicions of election fraud, pushing for blue states to purge voters. The Department of Justice has been on a rampage to halt ballots, investigate poll workers and pre-emptively investigate outcomes likely to not favor the president and his party.
This is the federal government legitimizing political recalcitrance.
And it is also a reminder of the many historic events that have shaped U.S. history, in many cases because of an election, and why I am worried about this one.
What will happen if a large section of America loses, not with grace but with violence? It summons thoughts of public safety concerns, financial market instability and militarized law enforcement.
It could start with President Trump at best publicly casting doubt over what is shaping out to be a Democratic Party power resurgence in Congress, and at worst using executive authority to outright deny it. The results might become a defining moment for America — the beginning of the end of a union never perfected.
One such historical lesson occurred in 1873, when more than 100 Black men were slaughtered in cold blood by a white militia in Colfax, Louisiana. It was Easter Sunday. President Ulysses S. Grant was forced to send in the National Guard to restore order.
An angry mob of insurrectionists was pursuing a “resurrection” of its own, the revival of old Southern Confederacy. What is now infamously known as the Colfax Massacre led to lifeless Black bodies piled into mounds and thrown into the depths of the Red River.
The year before, William Pitt Kellogg (a pro-civil-rights Republican) competed against John McEnery (an anti-civil-rights Democrat) for Louisiana governor, and after McEnery refused to accept defeat, his supporters rioted, with the worst of the violence happening in Colfax.
This is the sort of danger that looms over the 2026 midterm elections.
Preventing political division begins with a set of simple choices: accept the results of elections (win or lose), fight against unfair attempts to limit voting rights and allow truly independent courts to be the watchdogs over the political process.
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For proof, look no further than Louisiana. Even after Grant’s intervention, Gov. Kellogg’s tenure remained contentious, with his victory contested by the rival Louisiana Democrats in the state legislature during his entire term.
Ultimately, they impeached him. His successor and fellow pro-civil-rights Republican Stephen Packard lasted three months before the anti-civil-rights Louisiana Democrats took over the state legislature and removed him from office.
It was only through the Compromise of 1877 — in which Republicans ceded the governorship to Democrat Francis Nichols in exchange for the Louisiana State Legislature accepting Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as the victor of the 1876 presidential election — that order was restored.
More importantly, the agreement officially ended the era of post-Civil War Reconstruction.
Louisiana, and other Southern states, immediately signed into law what we now know as “Jim Crow laws.” They stripped Black Americans of voting power, while legalizing racially segregated facilities. Louisiana, in particular, also passed the Separate Car Act of 1890.
It was the very law that, two years later, shoemaker and civil rights activist Homer Plessy purposely violated by riding, as a Black man, in a “whites only” railcar on a train leaving New Orleans for Covington, Louisiana.
That simple act eventually turned into a court case, Plessy v. Ferguson,which reached the U.S. Supreme Court and cemented state-sanctioned racial segregation as the official law of the land.
Nowhere did legalized racial segregation create a stain on American society more than its education system. As the Supreme Court upheld the right for states to force segregation, states were also passing their first compulsory school laws.
Louisiana passed its such law in 1912. And that is how American schools in the South were segregated from the start, birthed out of state systems actively sculpting new worlds of racial inequality.
This brings us to the current moment. What happens if the fire of political division burns through the traditional acceptance of an election outcome and if the political division is so strong that it breaks the tradition of accepting the election outcome, and if ceding power means a repeat of the 1870’s?
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The midterms have direct implications for public education. We could see largely unregulated privatization gain an even stronger foothold over the control of schools. A political gaslight will be aimed at everything from the books students read to examples in math problems to what we call students “managing” neurodivergence — everything will become politicized.
We will continue to see school funding evaporate from some states and magically appear in others. The American education system — the “great equalizer” that has never gotten a real chance to live up to the nomenclature — will be the vehicle through which American social and political divisions further widen.
When this occurs, we will see, in half the country, deeper distrust in the idea of public education. It’s easy to imagine what these elections might be the beginning of: an apartheid system and why we must resist any attempt to keep any child both separate and unequal.
I don’t pretend these to be easy choices, but what waits on the other side of deep political division could be bloody massacre.
Jonathan E. Collins, Ph.D., is executive director of the Center for Educational Equity and an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, a nonprofit news outlet focused on innovation and inequality in education.
This story about the midterm elections was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit independent news outlet focused on inequality and innovation in education, Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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