President Donald Trump and his administration spent months attempting to influence the electoral process in multiple states, but this year's blue wave proved so large that, in Trump's own words, it was "too big to rig."

The two most significant legal challenges before the midterm elections have now effectively collapsed, Slate reports. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Justice Department's lawsuit against election officials in California, which argued that they must set aside approximately 20,000 mail-in ballots that federal authorities believed were cast by non-citizens. One day earlier, a federal judge dismissed the DOJ's case in Alaska, which sought to withhold certain ballots in the Senate race in that state should Republican Dan S. Sullivan be defeated. In almost every case in which the DOJ sued states for access to their voter rolls, the federal government came up short.

Some election-related disputes persist, with a handful of significant Senate races and House seats still undecided. The AFL-CIO has filed a lawsuit against the DOJ seeking to block the demand that state and local officials segregate contested ballots under threat of prosecution should those ballots be counted. How the courts handle this challenge will also help determine whether federal authorities can enforce such segregation demands against state and local election officials in the future.

In Alaska, the DOJ sent letters to 20 Democrats warning that they could become targets of a federal investigation into alleged donor fraud and conspiracy, and instructing them to retain certain records. Joyce Vance, the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, questioned the logic of such prosecutions in a post on her Substack, noting that the Alaska Supreme Court has already ruled that both Dan Sullivans could appear on the ballot.

None of this comes close to the scale of the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, the report notes. Since Tuesday evening, the president and his allies have been noticeably more restrained. Charles Stewart III of MIT offered a plausible explanation for this lower-key approach: "these intellectual wars, election administration wars" are not yielding political or strategic results for them.

Should the Trump administration or Republican candidates challenge the narrow Senate races in Mississippi or Alaska, "the heavy hitters of both the Democratic and Republican parties, with respect to legal talent, will not be spread thin," Stewart told Slate. "I think it will be much easier for attacks on the democratic process to be beaten back." Whether these challenges actually materialize is one of the key developments to watch as the remaining races are decided.

The numbers support this assessment. Democrats recorded double-digit victories in states including Texas and Georgia, and even in the closest races, they achieved comfortable vote margins that largely fall outside the margin of error. This presents a mathematical problem for Republicans: Democrats have so far won 54 Senate seats, and once the Senate confirms the results, the Trump administration will no longer have the Republican majority needed to push its legal maneuvers through this time. With a handful of Senate races and House seats still outstanding, the final composition of the chamber will decide whether the administration retains the majority on which its election litigation strategy has relied.