Americans are heading to the polls today in US midterm elections widely seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s second presidency and a chance for opponents to rein in his untrammeled power.
At stake is control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, both currently held by Republicans, and in recent days, the two parties have scrambled to deliver their final pitches to voters. Additionally, there are elections for governor in 36 states, as well for state legislatures, sheriff’s offices, and on the approval of ballot initiatives nationwide.
Trump has put himself at the center of the election, staging several dozen rallies across the country while urging his make America great again (Maga) base to vote for Republican candidates and pretend his name was on the ballot.
The party holding the White House typically loses congressional seats at midterm elections, and Democrats are hoping Trump’s nose-diving popularity can be exploited to generate a “blue wave” groundswell of popular opposition that will win them the Senate and the House – a feat no party has achieved in a midterm since 2006.
They are seeking to wrest control of Congress to put a brake on Trump’s presidential power, which has gone largely unchecked as he launched a fierce immigration crackdown involving mass arrests and deportations, waged war on Iran, imposed tariffs on foreign imports and embarked on vainglorious building projects, including a White House ballroom.
Opinion surveys have suggested the Democrats are well positioned to win the House. The party faces a tougher task in regaining control of the Senate, because the majority of seats at play are in states that backed Trump two years ago.
Democrats have broadly centered their pitch to voters on promises of making life more affordable, after Trump wielded similar concerns to defeat Kamala Harris and return to the White House.
“There has to be a better way for everyday people to be able to live their lives out here,” said Troy Jackson, the Democratic candidate in Maine’s marquee Senate race, said in final campaign speech on Monday. “And if we quit wasting money on foreign wars, if we quit giving money to billionaires, if we quit doing these dumbass tariffs and things like that, we can make people’s lives better by prioritizing what we want to do in this country to help regular, everyday people, and that’s what this race is about.
Balloting across the 50 states and District of Columbia has thus far proceeded smoothly, with a handful of exceptions. Voting in one Kansas county was reportedly disrupted temporarily by a shortage of ballots, while flooding in south Florida has forced the relocation of a handful of polling sites, local media reported. Problems had been reported with some voting machines in a suburban New York City county, but all ballots cast should ultimately be counted, Republican congressman Mike Lawler said.
A final set of polls from the New York Times and Siena University, published on Sunday, put Democratic candidates ahead in five of seven key battleground contests – including Texas and Kansas, where voters have not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1988 and 1932 respectively.
The closing stretch of the campaign was not without drama for the Democrats, however. In Michigan – widely seen as crucial to either party’s ambitions of controlling the Senate – the Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost her party’s Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, on Sunday.
Stevens was widely condemned by fellow Democrats over the move, which followed a feud with the El-Sayed campaign over an outside group’s campaign ad that blamed the high cost of living on US support for Israel. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, described her endorsement of Rogers as “a despicable betrayal”.
“Whatever they’re trying to distract you, it’s because they’re picking your pocket,” El-Sayed told hundreds of supporters in Royal Oak, Michigan, on Monday.
The extraordinary rupture took places days after the party faced damaging headlines in Alaska, where it was reported that the Democratic Senate candidate’s campaign was behind an effort to recruit a challenger with almost the same name as her rival, the Republican senator Dan Sullivan. (The Democratic candidate, Mary Peltola, has denied any knowledge of such a scheme on the part of her campaign.)
Before the report of the Peltola campaign’s involvement, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to block the certification of Alaska’s Senate results in the event of a Republican defeat, citing potential “voter confusion” over the presence of two Dan Sullivans on the ballot. The lawsuit has since been dismissed by a judge, but the administration is expected to appeal.
Trump has put himself center stage by crisscrossing the country to deliver a succession of speeches for Republican candidates, despite opinion polls showing his approval ratings falling to record lows of between 33 and 37%.
In his final public campaign appearance on Monday, Trump gave a rambling talk that focused mostly on his problem-plagued renovation of Washington’s reflecting pool. “This is the last day before the midterm elections, the most important midterm I believe in our lifetime,” he said, 26 minutes into the speech, before quickly returning to talking about renovations. Schumer called it a “pathetic closing message”.
Democrats have sought to reinforce the message that the election is about Trump, tying the perceived corruption of the president and his family with affordability issues, such as the US conflict with Iran and its impact on oil prices.
Opinion surveys have shown that voters have become increasingly concerned about corruption in government. A recent Harris poll for the Guardian found that 76% think elected officials care more about enriching themselves than improving the economy for ordinary people.
Disclosures to the US office of government ethics show that Trump has made about $2.2bn since returning to the White House, including royalties from his own name-branded memecoin.
The war with Iran – which Trump launched in February in tandem with Israel – has stoked inflation by increasing global oil prices, which has led to higher prices at the pump for American motorists and raised the cost of diesel, a vital fuel for supply chains and farmers.
“We need to focus that anger and point it at where it ought to be pointed, which is at a broken two-choice political system that is too easily abused to allow elected officials to be corrupt and to be lazy and still hold power,” Rob Sand, Iowa’s Democratic candidate for governor, said on Monday.
The US elections also take place under a shadow of uncertainty about whether Trump will accept the results if they do not go the Republicans’ way.
Alaska is just one of the cases being pursued by the justice department – under the control of Trump’s close ally, Todd Blanche, the attorney general – that opponents say are designed to cast doubt on the election’s integrity, including through baseless claims of mass voting by non-US citizens.
The department plans to deploy a record 1,000 election monitors to polling stations across the US. Critics have denounced the move as voter intimidation.
At a Sunday meeting of Democratic senators to prepare for any attempts by Trump to meddle with the election results, an aide said lawmakers resolved “to fight back immediately and aggressively, on election day and for as long as it takes to ensure the results are respected”.
