US midterm elections 2026 live: Americans go to the polls in referendum on Trump’s agenda
Özet haber: Thirty three people lined up at Roswell Library at 7am, waiting for the polls to open in a well-contested district in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. Jim Shannon, a small business owner, found himself at the wrong precinct. “The idea that I’ve voted here every time … maybe they think they can discourage people. I don’t know,” he said.
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Thirty three people lined up at Roswell Library at 7am, waiting for the polls to open in a well-contested district in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. Jim Shannon, a small business owner, found himself at the wrong precinct. “The idea that I’ve voted here every time … maybe they think they can discourage people. I don’t know,” he said. Shannon is a political conservative who voted for Rep.
Mike Collins for the US Senate and Rick Jackson for governor. “I believe the government needs to hire forensic accountants and go through every agency and find the waist, because taxpayers are paying for all of this.”
On 5 November, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland will join our global editor Devika Bhat and the Edward Orsborn Professor of US Politics & Political History, Prof Adam Smith, in London, along with Mary Trump, clinical psychologist, author, and political commentator, Washington bureau chief David Smith and leading US commentator Tara Setmayer live from the US.
They will discuss the election results and their implications for Trump’s future, the US and global politics. You can book tickets – in person or livestream.
Here are some of the latest images sent to us over the newswires as Americans cast their votes in the midterm elections, an effective referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency that will determine control of Congress:
As we have been reporting, the first results are expected after 18.00 EST (15.00 PST or 23.00 GMT), although these won’t tell us the national picture. You can keep an eye on our live tracker to keep up with the latest results when they come through:
The supreme court on Monday ruled against the Trump administration and its attempts to force California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people that the justice department claims are non-citizens. The ruling follows several lower courts siding with California officials, who argued the federal government was seeking to interfere in state elections.
The court did not issue an explanation for its ruling, which is customary in cases that come to it on an emergency basis. There were no noted dissents from the justices. California and the Trump administration have been in a legal standoff over the past few weeks following the justice department’s claim that 20,000 non-citizens were on the state’s voter rolls.
The DoJ delivered a USB drive to Los Angeles and Sacramento election officials in mid-October with the names, giving only 48 hours for officials to review the list and threatening to sue if the ballots were not sequestered until those listed could verify their
The justice department has shared a list of 126 jurisdictions across the country to which election monitors have been sent. In a press release this morning, the DoJ said the monitors will be deployed to all 50 states for the first time in what the department described as its “largest monitoring effort in history”.
As my colleague Sam Levine notes in this story, the DoJ has aggressively inserted itself into the midterm elections in the contest’s final weeks, shattering the department’s longstanding practice of political neutrality.
The midterms are occurring amid uncertainty about whether Trump, who still refuses to acknowledge his 2020 presidential election loss, will accept the results if they do not go the Republicans’ way, as many polls predict they won’t do. He has urged Republicans to “nationalize” voting, pressed for restrictions on mail-in ballots and deployed federal law enforcement to pursue discredited fraud claims.
At a Republican Party convention in September, the deeply un
For a special episode of Politics Weekly America, Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland is joined by Alexandra Petri, a staff writer from the Atlantic, about this election cycle’s most effective ad campaigns, surprising alliances and embarrassing gaffes. You can listen to it in full here:
In Florida, 18 polling sites have been moved due to flooding, according to the secretary of state’s office. The affected counties are Brevard, Highlands, Indian River, Martin, Okeechobee, Palm Beach and St. Lucie. The alternative polling sites include community centers, a council chambers, a town hall and a church. The announcement was made before polls opened in Florida at 7am ET on Tuesday morning.
“For the safety and security of our election workers and the voters of Brevard, it is necessary to relocate a couple of precinct polling locations due to these unprecedented circumstances,” Tim Bobanic, Brevard County supervisor of elections, was quoted as having said in a statement.
The state’s governor Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency for several counties on Monday after heavy rain turned roads into rivers and submerged cars. In Florida, progressive Democrat Angie Nixon is hoping to pull off an upset and unseat Republican incumbent Ashley Moody in one of two special elections t
It has just gone past 06:30 in North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia where polls have now opened.
Here are some of the key voter issues shaping the US midterm elections: The economy: Despite Trump’s 2024 campaign pledge to tackle affordability issues, the economy consistently ranks as voters’ top concern. Iran: Trump’s decision to go to war with the Tehran regime has exacerbated economic worries. Iran’s retaliatory decision to close the strait of Hormuz has driven up gasoline prices for US motorists. It also represents a breach of his pledge to end the US’s supposed addiction to “forever wars”. Immigration: Enforcement and closing the border remains a signature issue for Trump. He repeatedly boasts of the impact of his closure of the southern border as one of his biggest achievements, making comparisons with the performance of Joe Biden. AI and datacenters: AI has emerged as a key campaign issue, with surveys showing a majority of voters holding negative views on it, even as Trump champions its development and attempts to rename it “super intelligence”.
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 final stretch of the campaign was not without drama for the Democrats, however.
In Michigan – widely seen as a crucial pillar to either party’s ambitions of control in the Senate – 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 pick
Voting is taking place today (Tuesday 3 November), but the results may not be known tonight. Close contests, different state rules for counting early and postal ballots, and possible recounts or legal challenges could delay the final outcome. Once the dust has settled, there will be no respite in this – the land of the endless campaign.
Attention will soon turn to the 2028 presidential election campaign, when both parties will seek to turn the results of this November into a foundation for the next fight for the White House. Here’s an hour-by-hour rundown of when polls close around the US, courtesy of our blogger and reporter Shrai Popat:
The first polls have opened in the pivotal US midterm elections in the eastern state of Vermont, where it has just gone past 5. 15am. The next polls to open will be at 6am ET (in 40 minutes) including in: Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, New Jersey, New York and Virginia. The first results will start to come in after 18:00 EST (23:00 GMT) but a tight race could take hours to call – or even days.
It is important to remember that more than 58m early votes have already been cast across the US, according to an analysis by the University of Florida, a huge increase in the total number of early votes made in the last midterm elections, in 2022.
Rachel Leingang, a Midwest political correspondent for Guardian US, has been in Iowa, getting a sense of the political mood ahead of the crcuial elections: Across Iowa on Monday, candidates made final pitches in a set of toss-up races up and down the ballot, noting just how close these contests were and how pivotal the state could be for the nation’s politics.
In a standing-room-only town hall in Waverly, Iowa, Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Rob Sand started off by asking people in the crowd which political party they belong to, then having people clap for all of them before directing the audience to sing “America the Beautiful” together.
The bipartisan tone underscores Sand’s pitch to Iowa voters, including those who would need to cross party lines to support him: “not redder or bluer, but better and truer”. Wearing shirts that urged people to vote for Democrats and “rotate the crops”, about 150 voters turned out to the rally in the Republican-leaning area. Sand told the Guardian th
The US reportedly attacked Qeshm Island in southern Iran on Monday after Donald Trump downplayed the chances of a return to war with Tehran after the midterm elections. “We had a war with Iran. We won,” Trump told journalists yesterday. “I don’t know if you even call it a war because we haven’t been doing any fighting for months.” Monday’s strikes, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, were defensive in nature, according to officials, and targeted surface-to-air missiles being used against US assets, Reuters and the Associated Press reported. But undermining Trump’s comments to the press, the WSJ reported that the US has been launching smaller-scale strikes against Iran for several weeks, but have not been publicly announcing the attacks as they did at the start of the conflict in February.
On Monday, US vice-president JD Vance claimed there had been “a number of good conversations with the Iranians” and that he was feeling good about the prospects of a “negotiated settlement”. Bu
The US Congress has two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Both must approve federal legislation before it can become law and both play important roles in overseeing the executive branch. The House is elected every two years, meaning all 435 voting seats are contested at every congressional election.
The Senate has 100 members serving staggered six-year terms, so roughly a third of its seats are up for election every two years. This year’s ballot includes: All 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Republicans are defending a narrow majority, with Democrats needing a net gain of four seats to take control. 35 seats in the Senate.
Thirty-three seats are up in regular elections, along with two special elections in Florida and Ohio to fill the remainder of terms that were vacated early. Republicans currently hold 53 seats, against 47 held by Democrats and independents who caucus with them. Democrats need to gain four seats to secure a majority. 39 governorships. Vo
in Washington Donald Trump will still be US president on the morning of 4 November. But he could be facing a very different political landscape, depending on the results of the midterm elections held the previous day. As the name implies, midterm elections fall nearly halfway through a president’s term.
They are often a telling referendum on the sitting president’s performance, something Trump is actively encouraging by telling voters “pretend I’m on the ballot”. In this case, voters will decide whether Trump’s Republican party can retain its grip on Congress. Democrats are hoping to capitalise on growing discontent with Trump to seize control of the US House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate.
Republicans are fighting to preserve their congressional majorities and prevent a fresh period of legislative paralysis and investigations into the White House. Several Senate contests have emerged as key battlegrounds. In Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed is seeking to hold an open
It’s Tuesday 3 November, which means that after months of campaigning, debate and analysis, the critical US midterm elections that will take the political temperature of the nation halfway through Donald Trump’s second term – and determine the trajectory of the remainder of his presidency – are finally upon us.
Americans, who have already voted early in record numbers, will decide the balance of power in Congress and, therefore, Trump’s ability to advance his agenda for the next two years. With the US president almost unprecedentedly unpopular, Democrats are aiming for what would be stunning victories in seats where, for decades, turning blue would have been unthinkable.
Trump is not on the ballot, but this election is very much a referendum on the direction of the country under his Republican party. Trump’s agenda has thrown the US into a deeply unpopular – and expensive – war alongside Israel against Iran, sparking a global energy crisis and regional conflict that remains unresolved.
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Judge orders Iowa to permit Satanic Temple holiday event at state capitol
