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US Midterm Elections 2026

Election Day was on November 3Tuesday, November 3, 2026

Americans vote on November 3, 2026 for every seat in the House of Representatives, about a third of the Senate and many governors and state offices. This page gathers our latest reporting on the campaigns, the races and the results.

What you need to know

  • Election Day is Tuesday, November 3, 2026.
  • All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election.
  • About a third of the Senate is on the ballot, plus special elections.
  • Most states also elect governors, legislators and other state officials.
  • Control of Congress for the next two years depends on the results.
ExplainedWhat is behind Trump's $15bn Iowa steel plant announcement?Trump announced a $15 billion steel plant for eastern Iowa timed to boost a Republican Senate candidate, even as polling shows widespread public unease about the economy heading into the midterms.Read the explainer →
PoliticsDeveloping

Republican midterm losses tied to voter backlash over Iran war, polling shows

SUMMARY

Voters remembered Trump’s many promises to avoid the same kind of regime-change wars started by his predecessors For much of his political career, Donald Trump ranted at past US presidents who got the US entangled in endless foreign conflicts. He used it as a cudgel to belittle his predecessors, calling George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 “the worst single mistake ever made in the history of our country”. Trump also regularly derided the occupation of Afghanistan as “a total disaster”. Then Trump decided to launch his own disastrous war against Iran eight months ago. And that conflict may well have cost Republicans control of Congress in last week’s midterm elections. Continue reading...

Politics· Developing

Texas Democrats secure landmark education wins after voter backlash

Displaying Ten Commandments in class, whitewashing history and study of Bible verses drove many to vote blue Michelle Palmer has run for the Texas state board of education twice before, but this time felt different. “I was hearing from day one from people who had not really been politically active before that they were worried about education,” Palmer said. Continue reading...

World· Verified

Donald Trump seeks foreign policy reset on Asia trip following midterm defeats

After his party suffered a midterms hammering, President Donald Trump faces a new challenge: proving he is still the boss of US foreign policy on the global stage. With Trump politically hamstrung as he enters the remaining two-year ‘lame duck’ period of his White House tenure, world leaders may be quietly wondering how to leverage the new balance of power in Washington. The 80-year-old Republican heads to the ASEAN summit in the Philippines and APEC summit in China from a radically transformed and hostile political landscape at home after the Democrats seized both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Constitutionally banned from seeking a third term in the 2028 presidential race, the unpredictable billionaire could be all the more inclined to focus his energy on the international stage. “After bad midterms, this is how presidents reset,” Edgard Kagan, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told a news briefing. Iran, trade, China That is especially true for Trump on his Asian tour, where he is unlikely to be pressed publicly on domestic politics. China has described the midterms as an “internal affair” and said it is “willing to continue working” with the United States after Republicans lost control of both chambers of Congress. But the power shift in Washington will still be on leaders’ radars, said Joshua Kurlantzick, an expert in Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. “In private, many (Asian) leaders are relieved,” Kurlantzick wrote in an article this month. “The Iran war has been particularly challenging for the United States’ Asian partners and allies, and they hope that after the midterm results US President Donald Trump’s decision-making on the issue will become more predictable.” Trump has said several times since the midterms that renewed fighting between the US and Iran is unlikely. A Democratic-controlled Congress could also take a tougher stance towards China, Kurlantzick added, backtracking on the Trump administration’s “soft approach” to Beijing that has sparked unease among US allies in Asia. Leaders in the world’s largest continent are also hoping to see Democrats push back on Trump’s barrage of tariffs on trading partners, which have stung Asian economies heavily reliant on exports. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries has urged Congress to reassert its authority over US trade policy. The Democrats will not get an easy ride in undoing Trump’s policies, though. The president enjoys broad authority over trade and holds veto power over congressional legislation — which he has vowed to use. High-profile meeting Trump relishes dramatic gestures and foreign policy provides an ideal arena for high-profile meetings, such as with Chinese and Russian leaders Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Trump told reporters this week he expects to meet Xi and Putin at the APEC summit in Shenzhen, China, scheduled for November 18-19. The president said “denuclearisation” and ending the war in Iran would be on the agenda. But the bigger goal for Trump may well be a single photo of himself standing with the two other leaders he views as his great power equals, said Kurt Campbell, chair of The Asia Group and a senior diplomat during the Biden administration. “I think in many respects this could be ‘the meeting is the message’,” Campbell said. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who watched in horror as the White House appeared to pivot towards Moscow this year, has warned against a “Yalta 2.0,” referring to Western leaders dividing Europe with the Soviet Union in 1945. Victor Cha, president of geopolitics and foreign policy and Korea chair at CSIS, said the Republicans’ midterm defeat meant a high-profile meeting was all the more likely. “One that he (Trump) has personally staked a lot of time over two terms has been on North Korea,” Cha said. “There’s nobody else in the US government that makes policy on North Korea except the president, so I think that he’ll be focused on that sort of legacy issue”.

Politics· Verified

Democrats urge bipartisan immigration limits following midterms

Members of Congress seek to ‘bring sanity’ to system but decline to give details on plans to reform or abolish agency A group of congressional Democrats on Wednesday pushed for immediate efforts to rein in the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement operation and “bring sanity” to an immigration system that Donald Trump said, after his party’s midterm drubbing, had been “too tough” in certain aspects. Just over a week after the midterm elections in which the US president’s harsh crackdown on immigration fueled a voter backlash against Republicans, some sitting and newly elected Democrats gathered outside the US Capitol in Washington to advocate for a bipartisan approach to reforms – even as they gear up to take control of both legislative chambers next year. Continue reading...

Politics· Verified

Scott Colom flips Mississippi Senate seat in historic midterm victory

Democrat chatted up people at hair salons, colleges and at Trump rallies to become Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction The ad is simple, less than half a minute long, but many say it was the moment the nation took notice of Mississippi’s US Senate race. In it, the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a cattle farmer, answers a reporter’s question about the rising price of beef: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from,” she says. Continue reading...

Politics· Developing

Democrats face record debt and trillion-dollar deficits as safety net plans stall

‘The post-election wish list is about to run into harsh fiscal reality: there is no money’ Is this an opportunity for a new America? As the Reagan revolution four decades ago launched US society down the path to low taxes and meager solidarity, perhaps the Republican bloodbath last week could turn US politics toward building a new social contract anchored on an aspiration to equitable prosperity. One can sense the ambition of the bumper new crop of Democrats ushered to power last week, calling for support for programs for children and their parents; emphatically endorsing the long-held dream of Medicare for All. The project includes rolling back Donald Trump’s cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, and restoring subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act that Republicans allowed to expire. And that’s just the start. Continue reading...

Business· Verified

US inflation rose 0.4% in October as price increases cooled and gas costs dipped

New data comes after Republicans’ midterms losses – which were largely seen as a rebuke of the party over high prices US inflation rose 0.4% from September to October, slightly above expectations but still a cooldown in price increases as the cost of gas dipped during the month. The Bureau of Labor Statistics did not release the usual year-over-year inflation figure as part of the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the price of a basket of goods and services, as data was not collected in October 2025 during the government shutdown. Continue reading...

Politics· Developing

Congressional Republicans confront major midterm losses as lame duck begins

With weeks left on the congressional calendar, House and Senate representatives have a host of issues they still need to tackle On their first day back in the Capitol after comprehensive defeats in last week’s midterm elections, Republicans were divided into two camps: those who saw the catastrophe coming, and those who did not. “I told you exactly what was going to happen. Over and over and over, I told you,” said West Virginia senator Jim Justice. “I said really and truly, if you weren’t concerned and you were a Republican, you were living in a cave. That was my exact words.” Continue reading...

AI· Developing

US midterm voters reject rapid datacentre expansion across multiple states

Election results appear to have turbo-charged an already growing social, political and financial market rethink about AI ‘AI clog’: UK battles onslaught of chatbot-generated complaints Editorial: the AI backlash – Silicon Valley’s political power is cracking Last week’s midterms may not have cowed Donald Trump, but they should be a wake-up call for the grinning tech broligarchs who lined up at his inauguration two chaotic years ago. Clearly, the cost of living squeeze unleashed by Trump’s war in Iran was a big driver of the Democrat wave. But AI was also on the ballot – in many places, literally. Continue reading...

Politics· Developing

Congressional Democrats prepare agenda on costs and oversight after midterm sweep

Midterms success gives party potent leverage over Trump – expect tough campaigns of investigating and lawmaking “Costs, chaos, corruption”: after almost two years spent relentlessly criticizing Donald Trump for failing to address those three, broad political concerns, Democrats won a monumental return to power in Tuesday’s midterm elections that will give them potent new leverage over the president. Now the question becomes: what will they do with it? Continue reading...

World· Developing

US considers renewed Iran strikes as Gulf nations bolster regional defence pacts

Despite midterm election losses weakening Donald Trump politically, the threat of an escalated US-Iran war looms large. As regional mediation efforts struggle to bridge deep divides, Gulf nations are accelerating collective defence plans and infrastructure resilience in anticipation of renewed conflict.

Politics· Developing

Midterm voters reject Trump agenda as cost of living and Iran war drive defeats

President claimed to have ushered in a ‘golden age’ even as prices soared and war dragged on – and midterm voters did not buy his looking-glass narrative A new “golden age of America” is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections. The war in Iran was not really a war, because “we’ve done very little fighting”, the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. “They’re saying,” he said, that on his watch the US has become “the hottest country anywhere in the world”. Continue reading...

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