US midterm elections 2026 live: Democrats pick up more wins as vote counting in tight races continues and Republican blame game begins

The Republican senator Thom Tillis blamed Republican losses last night on the party’s “well intentioned, poorly executed policies” and certain members of the Trump administration, including Kristi Noem and Pete Hegseth.

In an interview with CNN, Tillis said: “We’ve got to regroup and be ready for 2028, and we won’t be ready for 2028 if we try and re-execute what I think were well intentioned, poorly executed policies over the last 18 months.”

He added criticism of former homeland security secretary Noem, saying: “What, a $220m ad campaign with her riding on a horse, people dead in Minneapolis because she put untrained people in a horrible situation. Give me a break. That’s the sort of tone deafness that will cause ’28 to look like ’08.”

Tillis also said the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is “just not the right guy for the job”, particularly in leading the war in Iran. “Nothing personal. The guy’s just demonstrated, like Noem, that they’re not up to the task of running these large, complex organizations,” he said.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said he hopes Democratic wins in the United States generate more support for Ukraine.

“I am also grateful to the Republicans, but the Democrats speak very clearly about supporting Ukraine and providing assistance ⁠to Ukraine,” Zelenskiy said in comments provided in German by German television station ZDF.

“They speak about renewing the connection between the United States and Europe … ⁠Therefore, there is hope that a balance of power will emerge and that we will receive ​more support.“

Zelenskyy has navigated a turbulent relationship with Donald Trump, particularly in recent weeks as the Ukrainian president said he felt personally betrayed by the United States pausing its sharing of military intelligence and waiving some sanctions on Russia to buy its diesel.

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, called Democratic wins in the midterms “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans” in remarks today.

He added that Republican losses in Texas “could reverberate for the next decade or more” and that if “the Republican party doesn’t have Texas as an anchor, then we’re not going to be viable nationally going forward”.

DeSantis added that he thought Republicans failed to target their ad spending on issues that would motivate voters, saying that ads on transgender Americans didn’t drive voters to the polls.

Donald Trump said there are “many things, many more things than people understand” that he will consider working on with Democrats, during an interview with CNBC today.

During a phone call with CNBC’s Eamon Javers, Trump said he would work on financial items – though Javers described the president as “a little bit cagey here about exactly what those ideas are, at least at this early stage.”

Javers added, “But this is a president who is signaling to markets and signaling to Washington that he’s ready to deal”.

Democrats in Texas took control of the state house after historic wins for governor and US Senate, the Associated Press has called, amid a series of sweeping gains nationwide in Tuesday’s elections that have shifted the balance of power across several battleground and Republican-leaning states.

It will be the first time that Democrats control the house in Texas since Republicans took over after the 2002 election. Republicans are keeping control of the senate in the state.

It comes as Texas elected Democrat James Talarico to the US Senate, breaking a 38-year drought for his party in the Republican stronghold and delivering a stunning blow to Donald Trump, and Gina Hinojosa as its first Latina governor in a stunning upset. She defeated the incumbent Greg Abbott, a titan of Texas politics who was running for a record fourth term.

Democratic congressman Hakeem Jeffries, the current minority leader in the US House, has officially announced his candidacy for speaker.

As of now, Democrats have secured 237 seats in the House, completely routing Republicans by flipping several districts and overcoming a mid-decade GOP redistricting push.

With an overwhelming majority in the lower chamber, Jeffries is poised to become the first Black speaker of the House of Representatives in US history. In January, Once the new Congress is sworn in, it will vote on Jeffries’ candidacy, and on those of any other Democratic members who run for the position.

“Against all odds, House Democrats were consistently successful in the minority. We must now deliver the dramatic change the American people are demanding in the majority,” he said in a statement, while outlining the caucus’s plans in the new year.

Donald Trump’s wealth is falling along with his political fortunes.

Tradeable investment assets that helped make the president more than $2bn during his first year in office are collapsing in value the day after the Democrats trounced the Republicans in the midterm elections. Trump Media and Technology Group stock, which trades on the Nasdaq exchange, was priced at just over $5 this morning – its lowest mark ever, and down from an all-time high of $101. It lost 11% overnight, dropping from $5.90 once the election returns started coming in. Trump has reported he owns 114m shares of DJT.

Trump owns over 40% of the stock through a trust. He has still grown his wealth dramatically during his presidency; Forbes estimated in a September analysis that he is $2.7bn wealthier than when he won the White House in 2024.

Another major asset for Trump and his family are World Liberty Financial digital tokens. The digital coins are trading at less than 5 cents after the election. At their height, in 2025, they were valued at six times that, at 31 cents. The WLFI coin, the governance token of World Liberty financial, began sliding in late October as the election drew near, and as a hack of Binance rattled crypto markets. It experienced a steep decline around 7pm ET on Tuesday as polls in some states closed.

Trump already made more than $500m in profit selling crypto assets last year, according to his personal financial disclosures, though he still owns 15bn tokens.

World Liberty is a venture created by the Trump family and the family of Steven Witkoff. Trump appointed Witkoff, a personal friend and real estate developer, to negotiate diplomatic arrangements about Gaza, Iran and Ukraine.

The value of both WLIF and DJT has always been pegged to the way Trump is perceived, said Jim Angel, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He added:

People think they’re investing in Trump. They really aren’t. They’re really betting on his popularity. That’s what they’re betting on.

Right now his popularity is at record lows, and so we see the price of DJT and World Liberty at record lows.

Separate digital novelty coins called Trump$, which made the president $636m in sales in 2025, have also collapsed in value. They are priced at about $1.40 and seem to have lost about 10% of their value overnight as election results came in. They launched shortly before his inauguration and briefly traded as high as $45 in January 2025.

My colleagues compiled a visual analysis of key Republican losses this cycle, mapping called-race returns to show how Democratic victory margins in GOP strongholds compare to past elections.

in Portland, Maine

The political demise of Susan Collins – a fixture of Maine and Washington politics for three decades – recalls the famous line in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises about how one of the novel’s characters experienced bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly.

In the run up to Tuesday’s stunning Democrat “blue wave” election triumph, it seemed obvious that Collins’ 30-year tenure as Maine’s Republican senator was vulnerable to the challenge of Troy Jackson, the Democrats’ explicitly working-class candidate, as voters prepared to unleash pent-up anger with Donald Trump’s presidency.

Rather like the Berlin Wall in the days before it finally fell in 1989, however, no one seemed to believe it could really happen until it did.

Collins, after all, had survived seemingly credible electoral challenges before and appeared primed – despite opinion polls showing a close race – to win a sixth Senate term, having once pledged to serve only two. She had become something of a state institution, with her assertions that Washington connections brought federal funds and contracts to Maine carrying weight with many constituents.

Jackson, meanwhile, seemed a less-than-polished prospect for a state that had previously sent such august figures as Ed Muskie, George Mitchell and Bill Cohen to the US Senate before they went on to become international statesmen.

The realization that this elemental political force was about to sweep away Collins came late in the evening, when – with about 60% of the ballots counted – returns showed Jackson with a convincing lead. Within minutes, MS Now reported that Collins had called to concede; wild cheers and chants of “Troy, Troy” filled the ballroom at Portland’s Holiday Inn.

Amid the euphoria, it was left to Jackson to deliver a message of humble, down-to-earth populism that emphasized his trade union background and underlined that his unlikely triumph had been driven by grassroots discontent.

“You understood what it would mean to send one of your own to the United States Senate,” he told the crowd. “Donald Trump and the billionaires need to understand one thing very clear – something about your new senator. I don’t owe them a damn thing.

“When they threaten your healthcare, your livelihood, or your freedoms, I am going to stand up to them. You know where I’ll stand. You know how I’ll vote. And when you’ve got a question about it, you’ll be able to ask me yourself. I’m not acting like I’m the best thing that ever happened to the US Senate or anything like that.”

It was a promise of accessibility that critics say Collins never provided – despite her claims of independent-mindedness and protestations of frequently voting against Trump, who failed to carry Maine in any of his three presidential campaigns.

You can read Robert’s full analysis here:

Democrat Leticia Gutierrez has won the race for Texas’ ninth congressional district, a seat that was gerrymandered in 2025 to benefit Republicans. It’sanother example of how the GOP’s mid-decade redistricting push ultimately backfired this cycle.

Gutierrez beat her Republican challenger Alex Mealer for control of the district, which includes the greater Houston area.

On a midterm election night that was a huge disappointment for Republicans, with Democrats taking control of the US House and Senate, the country’s most prominent conservative television network felt the brunt of viewer disillusionment with Donald Trump and his party, according to preliminary audience numbers.

The Fox News Channel, which often leads in viewership on election night, appears to have come out far behind the competition. According to preliminary “Fast Nationals” ratings dating from the Nielsen firm, the network averaged 3.882 million total viewers between 8 and 11pm, far behind broadcast networks NBC (6.519 million viewers) and ABC (4.906 million viewers), and even trailing fellow cable networks CNN (3.927 million viewers) and MS Now (3.922 million viewers). Fox News did, however, defeat CBS News, which attracted just 2.629 million viewers.

The numbers are preliminary, and are likely to be revised upwards when final audience data is released tomorrow.

Overall, the big six television networks averaged 25.784 million total viewers during prime-time election coverage, up from 22.215 million total viewers in 2022. During those 2022 elections, Fox News averaged 7.422 million viewers.

With Trump reaching historic levels of unpopularity, Fox News has seen viewers tune out in recent months. Last month, the network’s viewership was down 27% compared with the same month last year in total day viewers, though it still handily defeated CNN and MS Now. Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of parent company Fox Corp, acknowledged “viewer fatigue” in an earnings call on Monday.

Trump, who criticized Fox throughout election night and blamed the network for his party’s losses, poked fun at the network’s October figures in a Truth Social post, chalking up the decline to the channel’s industry-standard practice of booking Democratic candidates for interviews.

“FoxNews Ratings are way down (27%!) because they’re spending too much time covering the Trump Deranged Dumocrats!” he wrote on Tuesday evening. “All of those people who used to watch Fox, and no longer do, get it. It’s them, not me – My numbers are better than they have ever been.”

The historic Democratic victories in the 2026 midterm elections were more than just a rebuke of Donald Trump and his Maga movement – they are a five-alarm fire for the Republican party itself, which may be on the verge of collapse. The sweeping wins in GOP strongholds like Texas, Iowa and Kansas reveal an electorate that is fed up and eager for change. But that anger could turn on Democrats – quick. Now that they run Congress, what can the fractured Democratic coalition achieve? And will they do enough to keep voters on their side in 2028?

In this edition of our Stateside podcast, Kai Wright and Carter Sherman break down what we know about this once-in-a-lifetime election and how this new Congress has the potential to be the most consequential since Reconstruction.