King County, Washington, election workers dump out a bin full of ballots from a local drop box to sort ahead of the midterm election on Oct. 29, 2026, in Renton, Washington. (Photo by Jake Goldstein-Street/Washington State Standard)
WASHINGTON — When the polls close Tuesday night, the 2026 U.S. election will go down as one of history’s most expensive and extraordinarily ugly midterms — galvanizing record-breaking early voter turnout among a deeply divided electorate.
Voters on Saturday crossed the high-water mark of 52.7 million early votes cast, surpassing the midterm record set in 2022, though analysts were reluctant to translate it into a Democratic wave on the way.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continued to run into a firewall of federal judges, losing its previous cases to take over mail-in balloting and obtain state voter rolls in advance of the midterms. The Trump DOJ actions nonetheless rattled state officials who hold the constitutional responsibility to conduct their elections.
“My hope is that this trend will continue and that our worst-case scenarios don’t come to fruition,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson told States Newsroom.
A federal appeals court on Friday denied Trump’s efforts to force state officials to quarantine up to 20,000 voter ballots. The department continues to pursue its preemptive lawsuit against Alaska’s U.S. Senate race results, depending on who wins.
When asked by reporters Tuesday if he’ll accept a Democratic victory, Trump said, “I will, if they’re honest elections,” refusing to rule out federal interference feared by Democratic critics.
Trump insisted in September that his supporters “pretend” he is on the ballot, as his base has turned out in higher numbers during presidential elections to vote for him. “When I’m on the ballot, we kill everybody,” he said at his midterm convention in Texas.
He also promised a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to voters if Republicans retained congressional majorities.
With GOP control of the House and Senate during the last two years of the Trump presidency in play, campaigns are on track to shell out $11.6 billion on ads, according to the firm AdImpact. The hard-fought Ohio and Texas Senate races led the way in spending.
Democrats need to net four seats to control the Senate, while Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House.
Campaign advertising hit a low point when Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy aired a $4 million ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, called Acton “a liar.”
The woman, Donna Arthur, has not been in communication with her daughter since the late 1970s, when court records show she lost custody and fled the state with her husband, Acton’s stepfather, after he was indicted for raping Acton.
Ramaswamy’s campaign pulled the ad Friday, roughly 10 days after it began to circulate. The ad drew outcry including from outgoing Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, though both Trump and Vice President JD Vance defended it.
While ugliness punctuated the campaign season, poll after poll revealed the cost of living remains the top motivator for voters — including fuel prices and the cost of food and everyday goods that have been driven up by Trump’s war with Iran and an erratic tariff policy.
“It ranks as one of the most important issues for over 80% of voters, and the majority of the electorate disapproves of Trump’s handling, not just of the economy in general, but of cost of living,” economist and former Biden White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said Tuesday, during a virtual press briefing organized by the Democrat-aligned advocacy group Defend America Action.
The GOP also risks losing Latino support on account of the administration’s dragnet immigration enforcement tactics that have targeted legal immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens, and have ended in injury or even death on multiple occasions.
María Isabel Di Franco Quiñonez of Equis, a Latino-focused research firm, surveyed 900 Latino voters across seven battleground states and found sinking support for and trust in Republicans.
“The clearest finding was that voters want both responsible enforcement and generosity towards immigrants,” she said. “They want a controlled border, enforcement focused on criminals and a pathway to legalization.”
Trump’s sagging approval ratings have dogged Republican midterm candidates, giving a major boost to Democrats’ chances of flipping the House — a tried and true pattern for midterm elections — and increasing the competitiveness of several U.S. Senate races.
“Given that the president’s not on the ballot, (voters) have no other place to take out their frustration or disappointment or anger, aside from candidates of the president’s party,” said David Dulio, a distinguished professor of political science at Oakland University in Michigan. The state is the site of one of the nation’s most vitriolic U.S. Senate races, between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and former Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers.
Democrats are reaching for command of the upper chamber, and if the final prognosticators and polls are correct, they could stand a chance in Republican strongholds.
Major forecasts and pollsters more strongly favor Democrats to take the House, though some experts observe that years of gerrymandering, including Republicans’ mid-decade redistricting, combined with entrenched polarization could stunt the crest of a so-called blue wave.
Several Republican-led state legislatures, including those in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, split majority Black voter districts after a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year struck down protections that were enshrined in the Voting Rights Act.
“I hesitate to say that Republicans are going to lose control of both houses, or Trump is going to be totally hamstrung by this blue wave. The polling has been so shaky in prior election cycles,” said Rob Glover, associate professor of political science at the University of Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is fighting to keep her seat against Democratic challenger Troy Jackson.
“But if I was a Republican operative or strategist, I would be concerned,” he said.
As of Friday, The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, a nonpartisan forecaster, rated Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas as toss-up U.S. Senate races. The University of Virginia’s Sabato’s Crystal Ball categorized Alaska as a possible flip.
Inside Elections, another nonpartisan forecaster, projected Thursday that Democrats would gain enough seats to reach at least a 50-50 split Senate, ranking Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas as tilting blue.
Pollsters have also found Democratic rumblings in time-tested Republican bastions.
Wednesday’s New York Times/Siena poll found South Carolina voters, surveyed between Oct. 19 and Oct. 26, evenly split between Republican nominee Darline Graham, who is running to fill the seat of her late brother Sen. Lindsey Graham, and her Democratic challenger Annie Andrews, a pediatrician.
A survey of Kansas voters between Oct. 26 and Oct. 28 by Emerson College Polling found Democratic candidate and pastor Adam Hamilton at 49% over Republican incumbent Sen. Roger Marshall, who polled at 45%. The survey, which asked voters who they would vote for if the election were held today, carried a 3.5 percentage point margin of error.
Trump on Thursday canceled his weekend trip to a rally in Kansas because Marshall is “doing very well,” but reversed his plans by Friday morning and announced he’ll appear in person, as scheduled.
He similarly flipped on canceling his trip to Iowa to support Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson, who is running against Democrat Josh Turek for U.S. Senate.
While the U.S. House appears to be tipping toward the Democrats, only a small fraction of the races across the U.S. are competitive. The districts include California’s 22nd; Florida’s 14th and 22nd; Iowa’s 2nd; Kentucky’s 6th; Michigan’s 4th, 7th and 10th; Montana’s 1st; New York’s 17th; North Carolina’s 1st; Ohio’s 7th and 9th; Texas’ 15th and 35th; and Virginia’s 1st, according to widely cited prognosticators.
Tens of millions of Americans have already marched — some literally — to the polls, or submitted their mail-in ballots, in the final stretch leading up to Election Day.
Carrie LeVan, a political scientist at Colby College in Maine, said she’s not sure whether the enthusiasm driving early voters will translate into a “wave” election for Democrats, like the 2010 midterm “Tea Party” wave when Republicans regained House control by flipping more than 60 seats.
“There’s a lot of hype and expectation that Democrats are going to perform and have this huge wave this election cycle, and I don’t know — if I’m gonna make a prediction, I don’t think it’s gonna be that big,” she said.
LeVan highlighted this cycle’s rare mid-decade redistricting by Republicans, and then by Democrats, combined with “affective” polarization as obstacles to the size of shifts. The academic term affective polarization, she explained, is not just clinging to your side and your beliefs but rather “how much do I hate the opposition party?”
“There’s all these things that have changed since the 2010 election, so can we ever have a wave that was as big, even if we’re so dissatisfied with the state of things right now?” she said.
An NRP/PBS News/Marist poll published Tuesday found other possible warning signs for Democrats hoping for a big surge.
The survey found several “key pillar groups” among Democratic voters, including voters under age 45 and voters of color, lagged in enthusiasm to vote in the midterms, while some Republican voter segments gained ground on who is “very closely” monitoring the races.
The poll also found some swing voters turned off by the Democrats’ primary victories for some far-left candidates, including those belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America.
Democrats are grappling with how to navigate the intraparty divisions, particularly if they gain control of the House.
Ahead of Election Day, an array of legal challenges are playing out in federal courts across the country.
The Justice Department wants to require California election officials to set aside the ballots of 20,000 voters it says are suspected noncitizens. The Trump administration doesn’t want those ballots to count unless voters can prove their citizenship. A similar request was also made to officials in Washington state.
Multiple federal judges have already ruled against the DOJ’s California request and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday dealt the Trump administration its third and fourth courtroom losses in less than a week. It’s possible the Trump administration will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene.
The Justice Department has also issued subpoenas to election officials in California, prompting a new lawsuit that seeks to stop the department from threatening state and local officials with prosecution. In recent days, DOJ lawyers have suggested election officials face “criminal liability” if they count the ballots of noncitizen voters.
In Washington, D.C., a federal judge is weighing whether to issue an order prohibiting the Trump administration from demanding that states set aside the ballots of voters. The judge has promised a decision by Monday.
And in Alaska, the Justice Department is continuing to pursue a preemptive lawsuit that would block the state from certifying the results of its U.S. Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses by less than the votes received by a nonpartisan challenger of the same name that Trump has said is on the ballot to confuse voters.
The New York Times has reported Democrats helped recruit the spoiler candidate.
Ariana Figueroa, Shauneen Miranda and Jennifer Shutt contributed to this report.
