A 14-page document marked “CONFIDENTIAL” is circulating among state legislators as a preparation guide for the 2026 midterms, and it did not come from a party committee, a state capitol, or a campaign. Protect Democracy, a nonprofit whose founders served as associate White House counsels under Barack Obama, produced the guide. The State Innovation Exchange, known as SiX, promoted it to lawmakers in an October 22 briefing led by Anthony Gad, SiX’s director of Shared Tactics and Training.

The document walks legislators through seven scenarios its authors expect to unfold around the next election. They include voter intimidation, the nationalizing of election administration, seizures, criminal investigations, interference in vote counting, mass ballot challenges, and a refusal to certify results. Each scenario is paired with recommended responses, and the recommendations are aimed less at county clerks and secretaries of state than at the legislators who will be asked to comment when those fights become public. The guide is explicit that its audience is not the courtroom, and it treats credibility as a resource to be borrowed rather than built. It also returns repeatedly to a three-word framing that sets the tone for everything else.

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From Natalie Winters on Substack:

Protect Democracy’s guide for state legislators lays out seven scenarios extending beyond Election Day. Among its proposals:

• Educating community members to “reject improper prosecutions when serving on grand juries”.
• Immediately framing investigations used to enforce unlawful demands as intimidation intended to overturn an election.
• Using public outrage to make seizures of election materials politically costly.

Protect Democracy was founded by Ian Bassin and Justin Florence, both former associate White House counsels in the Obama administration. The organization describes its work as cross-ideological and frames its mission as defending democratic institutions from authoritarian pressure. In practice, its litigation and messaging have repeatedly targeted Republican-led changes to election procedure, executive authority, and agency rulemaking, and its attorneys have been involved in case after case against state election laws. Its legal network gives it reach into nearly every state where a contested election rule is being litigated.

SiX operates as a network for progressive state legislators, offering training, model legislation, and shared communications strategy across the states, positioning itself as a left-of-center counterpart to the American Legislative Exchange Council on the right. Its briefings are typically closed to press and built for lawmakers who want practical guidance rather than theory. The October 22 session fit that pattern, with Gad walking legislators through the scenarios and the responses the guide recommends.

The document devotes space to a subject most legislative manuals skip: how a grand jury actually works, and what a legislator should say publicly while one is sitting. The guide lays out a five-step account of the process, points readers to a January 28 explainer on the subject, and treats refusals to indict as developments worth publicizing rather than setbacks to be managed quietly. The treatment suggests the authors expect the next two years to produce criminal investigations that become political events, and they want legislators equipped to shape the narrative when that happens. What the guide does not do is describe how a legislator should respond if an investigation concerns someone in his or her own party, nor does it address what happens if the scenarios it anticipates fail to materialize.

Much of the document concerns language rather than law. It instructs legislators to amplify the voices of clergy, veterans, and business owners when making their case, treating those messengers as more persuasive with swing voters than elected officials speaking for themselves. The assumption is that a pastor or a small business owner saying something plainly will land where a legislator’s press release will not.

The guide arrives in the middle of a running dispute over who sets the rules for elections. State legislatures have moved aggressively in recent years on voter identification, ballot collection, voter roll maintenance, and the authority of state election officials. Those statutes have drawn litigation from advocacy groups on the left and countersuits from states defending their own laws. The same questions now surface in courtrooms, in statehouse hearings, and in press conferences held outside polling places, and county clerks and attorneys general have found themselves arguing procedure in public while the underlying legal questions remain unresolved. Nearly every state legislative chamber holds elections in 2026, and the lawmakers receiving this material will be running in the same cycle the guide is written to prepare them for.

Protect Democracy did not respond to a request for comment on the guide, and SiX did not respond to questions about the briefing or the material distributed to legislators. Neither organization has publicly released the document.

A group founded by Obama administration lawyers is handing state legislators a plan built on borrowed credibility and controlled language, and telling them the coming election will be won by shaping perceptions rather than by passing laws. Christians should notice that clergy are named in the strategy as instruments to be deployed, not as shepherds with their own charge from God. “The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perversity of transgressors shall destroy them” (Proverbs 11:3). Pray that pastors would refuse to be recruited for any man’s political errand, that legislators would govern honestly, and that voters would weigh these claims with care.

Let’s pray for those serving in state legislatures across the country, that they would be guided by integrity rather than tactics, and for discernment for voters who will hear these messages in the months ahead. Pray that the counsel of the wicked would come to nothing and that honest men and women would be raised up to serve.

How are you praying about this issue? Share your prayers and scriptures in the comments below.

From Natalie Winters on Substack. Photo Credit: mediaphotos from Getty Images Signature).