Trump faces day of reckoning as voters head to the polls for midterm elections

Donald Trump faces a day of reckoning as Americans head to the polls for midterm elections that will deliver a verdict on the president’s tumultuous second term and set the stage for his final years in the White House.

The congressional races on Tuesday – from Maine to Alaska, and Texas to Michigan – will determine whether Trump’s Republican Party will retain its majorities in Congress or lose them to the Democrats in a blow to the president and his allies.

Midterm elections have often been used by American voters to vent their frustration against incumbent presidents, with Bill Clinton in 1994, George W Bush in 2006 and Barack Obama in 2010 suffering severe losses. Trump lost his Republican House majority after the 2018 midterm elections but retained control of the Senate.

Now Trump is at risk of sweeping defeats in both chambers of Congress after voters soured on his handling of the economy and his war against Iran, as well as his abrasive governing style and his family’s enrichment while in office.

Most polls suggest Democrats will win the House comfortably. While the Senate contest is expected to be closer – Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take control – the party is leading in nearly all seven battleground Senate races, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.

Trump’s approval rating on the eve of the midterms stood at 39 per cent, compared with 50 per cent when he took office in January 2025, according to the RealClearPolitics.com average.

“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said on Fox News Monday night as he tried to boost Republican turnout. “If our people vote, we win in a landslide,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Trump gave a speech near the Reflecting Pool on Washington’s National Mall that focused heavily on his plans to remake the US capital rather than the dominant issues in the midterm campaign.

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Democrats across the country in recent weeks have pummelled Republican rivals for links to Trump and policies that failed to address their concerns about the high cost of living in America.

Lexi Ries, a 33-year-old Democrat in Iowa, said she was “cautiously optimistic” that backlash against the president could help the party claw back power in the state, which backed Trump in the last three presidential elections.

She added that many Republican voters, including her husband, were “struggling” to decide whether to support the party because its politicians had become so beholden to Trump at the expense of local priorities.

Some Republican candidates have actively sought to distance themselves from the president – saying they disagreed with his tariffs and the war with Iran that has sharply driven up energy prices.

In last month’s debate, Maine’s Republican Susan Collins, who is battling against Democrat Troy Jackson, highlighted instances in which she had split with the president.

“This Congress alone, I voted against president Trump 137 times,” she said.

That was not enough for voters such as Jim (64), an independent in Portland, Maine, said that while he previously supported Collins, he would cast his ballot for Jackson as “a vote against president Trump”.

“I’m more voting for change in Washington,” he said.

Yet Trump still thrust himself into the centre of the campaign in an attempt to prop up his favourite struggling candidates, making frequent visits to battleground regions in a last-ditch effort to energise conservative voters.

In the Texas Senate race, Ken Paxton’s campaign has leaned heavily on Trump, who has made four trips to the state since early September, and focused almost entirely on culture wars with a blitz of anti-trans advertisements designed to turn out the party’s base.

In Anchorage, Alaska, there were signs of unusually high voter turnout as people queued for more than an hour and a half to cast early votes at one polling station. Election officials said lines had been much longer than in previous years for several weeks.

If Republicans perform better than expected in the midterm elections, it will probably be because they managed to parry attacks on Trump’s record and voters believed Democrats were an unreliable alternative that had veered too far to the left.

The Senate race in Michigan, where progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed is battling Mike Rogers, the Trump-endorsed Republican, is a key test of the electability of left-wing Democrats in swing states which will be closely watched ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries.

Gregory Russette, a trucker, said he normally voted for Republicans but had been disturbed by how “nasty” the Senate race had become, and he could not bring himself to vote for Rogers or El-Sayed.

“I didn’t vote for either one of them. I couldn’t do it,” he said. “It’s truly that bad.”

But many Democrats with a strong chance of winning Republican seats in this year’s midterm elections – such as Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Josh Turek in Iowa and James Talarico in Texas – are moderates who focused on cost-of-living concerns and linked them to Republican rivals and Trump administration failures.

Republicans hoped that a late infusion of cash into their campaigns by Trump and his allies – including billionaire investor Elon Musk – would help rescue their campaigns, but heading into the final stretch of the midterms there had been no clear shift in their favour. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026

How we’re covering the US midterms

Follow Irish Times Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan and video journalist Chris Maddaloni in the final week of the campaign as they report from key battlegrounds and gauge the mood of voters across the US.

More US midterm election coverage here.