The American voter dealt President Donald Trump a resounding rebuke in Tuesday’s midterms as Republican support cratered and Democrats won in places they hadn’t carried in decades.
Democrats were on track to take back control of the House. They won a Senate seat in South Carolina, the Georgia governorship for the first time since 1998 and the Ohio governorship for the first time since 2010. In early returns, they appeared on track for a statewide victory in Texas for the first time since 1994.
Among their early House victories were a Kentucky district that voted for Trump by 15 points and two Florida seats that Republicans redrew to shift right.
The head of the House GOP’s campaign arm trailed in his own race with 95 percent of the vote counted.
The leftward swing extended across demographics and geographies. Compared with 2024, the exit poll conducted for the Associated Press and the major television networks showed double-digit swings toward the Democrats among Latinos, Catholic voters and voters younger than 30.
Republicans also suffered from a collapse in turnout as fewer of their supporters showed up on Election Day than four years ago, according to preliminary data.
More than 4 out of 10 voters called their family situation worse than two years ago, versus 2 in 10 who said it was better, according to the TV networks’ preliminary exit poll. About three-quarters of voters said they were dissatisfied with the direction of the country, including almost 4 in 10 who called themselves angry.
Democrats were poised to take power on Capitol Hill eager to thwart Trump’s agenda and investigate scandals throughout his administration.
“Democrats are on the verge of getting this thing done, taking back control of the House of Representatives and delivering the type of dramatic change that the American people are demanding,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said at a watch party Tuesday. “The early vote numbers were strong, and today’s vote numbers all across the country are strong in blue states, in swing states and in red states.”
As the results came in, Trump vowed to wield his veto pen to force Democrats to compromise.
“Historically, you veto for a couple of months and then they come and say, ‘We’ve got to make a deal,’” he said in a Tuesday night phone call with CBS News, calling himself “Mr. Veto.”
Throughout the fall campaign, Trump and Democrats agreed on wanting to make the election about him. The president held near-daily rallies, mostly in red states, for the past month, urging his supporters to vote as if he were on the ballot.
But in the closing stretch of the campaign, Republicans in tough races increasingly broke with him on tariffs and the Iran war as voters felt the pinch of higher prices.
On Tuesday the White House moved to point the finger at other Republicans.
“President Trump was not on the ballot,” said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “President Trump did a better job promoting many of the candidates on the ballot than the candidates did themselves.”
The official said Trump’s resolve to fight the left would only grow, adding, “Buckle up.”
Democrats countered with their own saber-rattling to welcome the next two years of divided government. Rep. Robert Garcia (California), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, previewed investigations into the Trump family, immigration enforcement and the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“Lawyer up,” he said in a statement.
The president’s party typically loses congressional seats in midterm elections. Unlike many past elections in which presidents have suffered from events over which they had little control — a recession, for example — Trump’s steady drop in polls over the past year and a half followed directly from his own policy decisions, including his tariffs, the decision to launch a war against Iran and his opposition to the release of the Justice Department’s files on the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The early results were consistent with pre-election polls showing Democrats favored to win both chambers of Congress. Trump’s approval sank to a record low of 33 percent in October, according to a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll. For the first time in more than a decade, more voters trusted Democrats to deal with the economy, as about three-quarters of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living in the United States. Seventy-two percent said the country was heading in the wrong direction.
That public dissatisfaction overpowered the GOP’s advantage in campaign spending. Trump’s super PACs pumped at least $380 million into midterm races, with another more than $400 million from Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, according to federal disclosures.
The midterms were the most expensive election ever, topping past cycles that included presidential campaigns, according to media tracker AdImpact. Republicans spent $5.45 billion on advertising across TV, radio and digital, and Democrats spent $5.02 billion.
Texas’s Senate race between Republican Ken Paxton and Democrat James Talarico became the most expensive non-presidential race ever, costing more than $500 million, according to AdImpact.
Democrats picked up a Senate seat in North Carolina, where former governor Roy Cooper beat former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley. The Republican incumbent, Thom Tillis, did not seek reelection after crossing Trump last year.
They also led in key Senate races in Ohio, Michigan, Maine, Iowa and Kansas.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) cruised to reelection, and former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms became the nation’s first Black woman to be elected governor. Rep. Chris Pappas (D) easily won a Senate seat in New Hampshire.
In Ohio’s gubernatorial contest, Republican Vivek Ramaswamy trailed Democrat Amy Acton after bipartisan backlash to an attack ad featuring her estranged mother.
The election mostly ran smoothly despite concerns from Democrats and some election officials that Trump officials might try to use federal power to favor Republicans.
Top election officials in Michigan and New Mexico complained to the Justice Department on Tuesday about what they described as unusual behavior by federal election monitors deployed to polling sites in their states. The Department of Homeland Security did not deploy immigration officers to voting locations.
In Alaska, Trump has demanded the disqualification of the Democratic Senate nominee, Mary Peltola, after the New York Times reported that operatives aligned with her helped recruit an independent candidate with the same name as the incumbent Republican senator, Dan Sullivan.
“I’ve heard from people who think they’ve voted for the wrong guy and have apologized to me,” Sullivan told a Fox News reporter on Tuesday. “The scheme is working.”
In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump’s closing message insisted that the economy was booming — contrary to most Americans’ experience. As in his past campaigns, he attacked Democrats, calling them “communists,” “freaks” and “jihadists.”
“These are the couple of points where I just leave because they’re so good,” he said, citing positive economic statistics when he spoke in Lubbock, Texas, a week before the election. “The rest is just — we’re wasting frickin’ time,” he said — a recurring bit that he reprised at numerous rallies.
He called Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, who is Muslim, a “jihadist” and said Black and Jewish Americans would be “crazy” to vote for him; demanded the ouster of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and the prosecution of Peltola; used an offensive nickname for Democratic Senate nominee Annie Andrews of South Carolina; mimed an imaginary incident of Talarico vomiting after eating meat; and joked that a $5,000 stimulus he promised citizens if Republicans won would barely cover a hamburger and “maybe a small dessert” at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida.
Interruptions from protesters frequently punctuated his rallies. Often, they cited the investigation into Epstein, who had been a friend of Trump’s years ago.
Trump spent election night watching the results with Cabinet officials and advisers in the East Room of the White House. He repeatedly posted critiques of Fox News’s coverage.
As the Democratic wins piled up, he posted a statement on his Truth Social site:
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
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