On Monday afternoon, a reporter asked Donald Trump why, if he was so worried about fraud, he was telling his supporters to vote by mail. Trump said he had "no choice because a lot of people want to vote by mail."

He then launched into his usual baseless allegations of fraud. Pressed to say where this fraud had taken place, he told reporters to "start off by taking a look at California."

With the midterms less than a month away, we have become sadly accustomed to Trump's false attacks on free and fair elections. But his focus on California is more than routine. It is both a decade-long fixation and a roadmap for his plans in 2026.

Weeks after winning in 2016, Trump blamed "serious voter fraud" in California for his loss of the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. He has repeated the charge in every election cycle since.

In 2019, he claimed California had "admitted to a million [illegal] votes" in a court settlement. It hadn't. In 2020, his false claims about California's mail ballots earned him Twitter's first-ever fact-check label on one of his posts. In 2024, he told Dr. Phil that "if Jesus Christ came down and was the vote counter, I would win California."

This year, the rhetoric has escalated into action. Trump has called California "one of the most dishonest states" and told Fox News that its "mail-in votes are a fraud."

On June 5, three days after the state's primary, Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office was conducting "multiple election fraud investigations." Weeks later, Trump bragged that he had personally phoned the "U.S. attorney in California" with a request: "Do me a favor. Take a look."

Around the same time, Jay Clayton, then the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, went on CNBC to question California's voting rules, claiming they created "an opportunity for fraud." Days later, Trump nominated him to be director of national intelligence.

Trump's obsession with California isn't just about the fact that he has repeatedly lost the state in landslides, or that it is reliably controlled by Democrats. It's that he sees California as the biggest obstacle to stopping a Democratic wave in November.