House Republicans are rolling out a new package of election security legislation this week, with GOP lawmakers already setting eyes on 2026.

Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger, R-Texas, introduced the bills this week, with four lawmakers co-sponsoring the entire package and various other members supporting specific pieces.

The three pieces of legislation are a bill to prohibit noncitizen residents of Washington, D.C., from voting in local elections, a bill to block noncitizens from helping administer elections and a constitutional amendment to prevent noncitizens from voting.

It is currently illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Though the law does not apply to state and local elections, there is currently no state in the U.S. that allows noncitizens to vote in statewide elections.

Some areas, however, allow for noncitizens to vote in local-level elections – including Washington, D.C.

‘Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our democracy, which is why protecting them from noncitizen influence is essential to our nation’s sovereignty and will ensure America has a flourishing democracy for decades to come,’ Pfluger told Fox News Digital.

‘These bills are three commonsense steps we can take to ensure noncitizens are not influencing our elections by voting in them or administering them. We must safeguard the integrity of our electoral system, and these bills will work to do just that.’

Earlier this year, House Republicans passed the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which requires proof of citizenship in the voter registration process.

The majority of Democrats have cried foul at GOP-led efforts to crack down on noncitizen voting, with progressive lawmakers accusing Republicans of trying to spread doubt about the country’s election processes by targeting something that’s already illegal in most cases.

Democrats also criticized Republicans for pushing bills like the SAVE Act just weeks before the November election. 

However, Pfluger and his GOP allies are now side-stepping that criticism by introducing the bills well ahead of the 2026 midterm races, when historical precedent suggests that House Republicans face an uphill battle to keeping their majority.

Among the co-sponsors of the entire package is House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, who is playing a critical role in congressional Republicans’ efforts to pass a massive conservative policy overhaul via the budget reconciliation process.

Border security and immigration reform are expected to be a significant part of that forthcoming legislation.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) plans to focus much of its campaign efforts on winning over rural voters in the 2026 midterm elections, according to the party’s outgoing chairman— a sprawling effort they hope will help the party engage with and educate new voters, and loosen what many see as President Donald Trump’s ironclad grip on many red state voters.

The new strategy was previewed exclusively to Fox News Digital by outgoing DNC Chair Jaime Harrison ahead of the DNC’s slated vote Saturday to select his successor as next party leader.

In an interview, Harrison said the strategy, which has been weeks, if not months in the making, is designed to refute many of Trump’s campaign trail claims on the economy, health insurance and taxes for average Americans.

Rather, Harrison said the aim is to tie Trump more closely to these policies and to make the case to voters directly that Trump is ‘using rural America, and giving rural voters nothing in return.’

‘An examination of Trump’s second term agenda and first administrative actions reveals that rural families and the resources they rely on are in greater jeopardy than ever before,’ the DNC said in a preview of its new election strategy memo, shared exclusively with Fox News. 

‘One can conclude, Donald Trump is using rural America and giving rural voters nothing in return,’ the memo continued.

Trump’s rhetoric has long been praised as refreshing by voters, who resonate with what many said they see as his unorthodox, anti-establishment bona fides. However, there is a difference between Trump as a presidential candidate and Trump as president. It is ‘him just saying things and not having the power to implement them,’ compared to being back in the Oval Office, Harrison said. 

The DNC’s effort, however, will seek to challenge that assumption by highlighting victories secured by former President Joe Biden in his first term, including tightening CAFE fuel economy standards for gas-fired vehicles, investing in EV manufacturing and battery supply chains, cracking down on PFAS contaminants and pollution, and allocating billions of dollars in clean energy and climate spending.

Trump has vowed to undo many of these policies after retaking control of the Oval Office.

To date, he has made good on his promise. Trump used his first week in office to sign hundreds of executive orders and actions, a dizzying flurry of orders that, among other things, sought to crack down on immigration, unleash U.S. liquefied natural gas exports and freeze all congressionally approved spending, if only temporarily.

Democrats, for their part, have sought to use Trump’s vice-grip on the post-inauguration news cycle to double down on their efforts to appeal to voters and prepare for the midterms, no matter how far-off they might seem.

This includes focusing on issues like healthcare coverage and medical providers, both of which have suffered ‘major’ disparities in rural America, and where doctors have exited en masse amid a flurry of hospital closures and a dearth of insured patients.

Many of the Republican-led states that did not opt to expand Medicaid saw wide hospital closures, higher out-of-pocket costs for prescriptions and much more limited access to opiod recovery or substance abuse programs, Harrison said.

Rural communities are also seeing more limited access to doctors, emergency treatment centers and a lack of access to important medication, as Biden-era programs wane.

‘These things are going to have a detrimental impact on rural America,’ he said.

Still, Harrison acknowledged that the Democratic Party also needs to do its part to meet voters where they are at in 2026, just months after the party’s humbling defeat in the 2024 presidential election.

However, changing hearts and minds will not happen overnight, he said.

Rather, it will require many conversations from state party leaders at the local level, who can both identify key issues for voters and help recruit good candidates for the upcoming election cycle.

‘I think what we have to do is paint a picture for the American people of all the things that we rely upon— all the things that are necessary and needed in these communities, and that sometimes we don’t even know are [programs] that the federal government is funding,’ Harrison said.

 ‘Those things are in jeopardy under this administration.’

‘We want to let people know these things aren’t just happening by happenstance. It’s happening because Donald Trump is taking this radical right wing extremist agenda and trying to implement and therefore impacting the quality of your life.’

The DNC’s effort will also spell out to voters what they say will happen if these policies are rolled back, in accordance with Trump’s plans, Harrison said. 

‘The second thing is having our cannons— we go out, and we work with our state parties, and recruit candidates to run in 2026,’ he said of candidates who are well-positioned to speak to the communities they are representing.

In Harrison’s view, this will also help explain to voters how Trump’s drastic cuts or reductions will impact their communities specifically. 

‘And then we continue to have that conversation, one-on- one, in small and larger groups with the people in those communities,’ he said. ‘And that is how we put ourselves on a much stronger foot going into the 2026 midterm election. ‘

A stunning new poll this week found that a mere 31% of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party, with a whopping 57% viewing it negatively, and if you want to know why, look no further than the shameful antics of lefty senators in this month’s confirmation hearings.

What emerged through all the snide screeching and sarcastic snobbery is a Democratic Party that is pushing a Big Pharmaceutical agenda, agitating for forever wars, obsessed to the point of mania with January 6, and that believes the Army should be performing sex change operations. 

And they wonder why they lost the election.

In a pair of hearings featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the Democrats railed against his views on food and health, while ignoring the chronic disease and overprescription of drugs for our kids he seeks to address.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was specifically called out by RFK Jr. in the hearing for taking $1.5 million dollars from Big Pharma, to which the Vermont Senator shot back, ‘out of $200 million!’ while insisting that money came from pharmaceutical workers.

The American people aren’t dumb, they know that big pharma employees are, by and large, big fans of big pharma, and what RFK, Jr. was pointing out was that so are most Democrats in Congress.

When it came to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick for director of National Intelligence, Sen. Mark Kelly D-Ariz., gravely expressed concern that her criticism of Middle East regime change wars was somehow Russian propaganda, not a legitimate policy position.

To this Gabbard wisely responded, ‘My fear was a repeat of the deployment of another half a million soldiers like we saw in Iraq toward what was the Obama administration’s goal, which was regime change in Syria.’

Avoiding new wars is a big part of why Trump was elected and Kamala Harris was defeated. The American people want a sound foreign policy, not simply a knee-jerk reaction to whatever dictators around the globe say or do.

But the Democrats weren’t done impugning the president’s nominees. They saved particular ire for Kash Patel, who Trump tapped to head the FBI. 

Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., leading purveyor of the Russian Collusion Hoax, at one point asked the nominee to stand and face the Capitol Police in the room while the senator discussed Patel’s efforts to help the families of those imprisoned for the Capitol riot.

First of all, these are exactly the kinds of stupid antics that make Americans furious, and second, Schiff needs to realize that voters rejected Democrats’ constant hemming and hawing about January 6, they just want a fair FBI that doesn’t target political enemies.

Finally, in Pete Hegseth’s hearing for the top spot at the Pentagon, Democrats seemed more interested in making sure mothers can serve in combat and that the military perform sex change operations than ensuring the lethality and readiness of our armed forces. 

What we witnessed this month in the senate is not just a Democratic Party out of touch with the American people, but one that isn’t even in the same ideological galaxy.

Voters made clear that they want to Make America Healthy Again, they don’t want forever wars, they don’t want politics in the FBI, and they want a military focused on fighting, not social justice. The Senate Democrats seem to oppose all of this.

These are the wages of a political party that has spent the last decade solely defining itself as the opposite of Trump. Whatever Trump says or does, they’re against it. It is the only platform they have left.

And Trump knows and uses this fact, by putting himself on the common sense side of issue after issue, he forces Democrats, or maybe we should say tricks them, into defending the absurd and indefensible.

A glass-half-full Democrat may look at the abysmal poll numbers and say that this is natural after a big loss, or that there is plenty of time to fix it before the next election, but they have to want to fix it, and know what to fix.

In order to do this, Democrats must take their laser focus away from Donald Trump and his pugnacious braggadocio and put that focus where it belongs, on the American people.

If they don’t, if Democrats remain nothing more than the Anti-Trump party, then their period in the political wilderness could last a very, very long time.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg fired back at President Donald Trump on Thursday after the commander in chief blasted the Democrat during a press briefing about the deadly midair collision between a military helicopter and a passenger airplane that occurred on Wednesday night.

Trump sarcastically called Buttigieg ‘a real winner.’

‘He’s a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor. He ran his city into the ground. And he’s a disaster now. He’s just got a good line of bulls—,’ the president said. 

Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana Mayor who served as secretary of the Transportation Department under former President Joe Biden, sounded off in a post on social media.

‘Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch,’ Buttigieg declared in a post on X.

‘President Trump now oversees the military and the FAA. One of his first acts was to fire and suspend some of the key personnel who helped keep our skies safe. Time for the President to show actual leadership and explain what he will do to prevent this from happening again,’ he added.

Buttigieg mounted a presidential bid in 2019, but dropped out the next year and endorsed Biden.

Buttigieg is reportedly ‘taking a serious look’ at the possibility of running for U.S. Senate in in Michigan.

‘Pete is exploring all of his options on how he can be helpful and continue to serve,’ a source familiar with Buttigieg’s thinking told Fox News Digital. ‘He’s honored to be mentioned for this, and he’s taking a serious look.’

Fox News Digital’s Julia Johnson contributed to this report