2026 midterm elections live updates: Latest news, results, and analysis

Good morning from the Washington Examiner’s live blog team. It’s finally Election Day, and control of Congress will be decided.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, which released its final race ratings yesterday, has both the House and Senate leaning toward Democratic control, with 19 House races rated “likely Democratic” seats, 36 “leans Democratic” seats, 21 “leans Republican,” and 16 “likely Republican” seats on the House map. In the Senate, they expect Democrats to win 53 seats.

But some analysts are concerned all of the Democratic momentum could be another major polling miss, given rural voters’ tendencies not to answer pollsters’ calls.

The Washington Examiner has all the news you need to know. Catch up on the latest, and check back in for results.

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Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) said Tuesday he expects results for New York’s 17th Congressional District to bleed into the “wee hours” of Wednesday morning after ballot scanning problems in Westchester County prevented voting machines from accepting ballots.

Lawler, appearing on CNN, said his campaign, the state board of elections, and the campaign of his opponent, Cait Conley, have come to a “tentative” agreement about how to count the affected ballots. According to Lawler, uncounted ballots will be brought to the state board of elections, where attorneys and both parties can watch, to be counted.

“All of the ballots that have already been cast but not accepted by the machines and placed in the emergency orange bag will be police escorted to the Board of Elections from across the county, and it will be counted at the Board of Elections, a central location,” Lawler said. “Everybody will be able to see all of the ballots be counted tonight.”

However, Lawler said he expects the counting of the affected ballots to “take a few hours,” as machines are only able to process about 2,000 ballots an hour.

“There’s going to be roughly 10 machines at the Board of Elections to process them,” Lawler said. “So about 20,000 votes an hour will be processed and scanned. So it’s going to take a few hours, but we expect to have results certainly into the wee hours of tomorrow morning.”

Across the nation, officials are helping Election Day run smoothly, a top elections expert told reporters on Tuesday afternoon.

“We’re seeing elections go very normally with only minor problems,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Some issues have occurred in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where polling-location hours have been extended to accommodate late openings. Scanners in Westchester County, New York, are having issues tabulating ballots. The Department of Justice also sent 1,000 election monitors to polls, although “we’ve heard of very few problems,” said Becker, who worked for seven years as a senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division,

“We’re at the point where everybody in the country is now voting, and we’re just not hearing as many problems,” said Becker. “And that’s really remarkable. It’s largely due to the preparation of those local and county election officials who worked so hard to pull it over, despite attempts at federal interference, and it also is due to the large numbers of people who chose early and mail voting.”

By Tuesday afternoon, more than 51 million Americans have already voted, 22% more than at the same point in 2022, according to TargetSmart. Becker identified 10 states where early voting hit record levels: Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.

Becker also cautioned reporters that it may take time before control of the House and Senate is called. “We will almost certainly not know who controls the Senate tonight or by tomorrow morning,” he said. “We may know who controls the House, but it might not be until late. We’ll have to see how the results go … officials are going to be staying up through the night, getting reports of ballots out as quickly as possible.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement warned noncitizens Tuesday that it would pursue anyone who illegally casts a ballot, posting the message on X as voters headed to the polls in the 2026 midterm elections.

The post echoed a message Attorney General Todd Blanche posted Monday. Blanche urged the public to report suspected noncitizen voting, double voting, and ballot-box stuffing to the FBI. “Violators will be found and prosecuted,” he wrote.

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) responded to ICE about an hour later in a quote post. He turned the agency’s words into a warning aimed at federal agents: “If YOU show up to the polls illegally, we will find you.”

ICE’s post came the same day it announced that officers had arrested two foreign nationals in Tennessee on charges of voting in the 2024 presidential election.

Federal law makes it a felony to station troops or armed agents at polling places. President Donald Trump has declined to rule out sending troops or immigration agents to the polls. However, the military’s top officer has said there are no plans to send troops to polling sites. The Department of Homeland Security has said ICE “is not planning operations targeting polling locations.”

The Justice Department said in a court filing last week that no FBI or ICE employees would serve among its roughly 1,000 election monitors. The monitors come from agencies including the Bureau of Prisons and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and they are barred from carrying firearms. A federal judge on Monday night rejected an NAACP bid to block them.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee filed on Tuesday to establish a recount fund for Alaska’s Senate race, the latest development in the state’s Senate battle controversy in which two Dan Sullivans are featured on the ballot.

The NRSC’s filing with the Federal Election Commission comes just a week after a New York Times report revealed Democrats worked to recruit spoiler challengers against Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), including a candidate sharing his name. Republicans have argued the effort will cause voters confusion at the ballot box, possibly siphoning enough votes from the incumbent that he loses the election.

Sullivan is facing Democratic challenger Mary Pelota, a former congresswoman, in the Senate race. The Federal Election Commission filing only lists Sullivan’s super PAC, Alaskans for Dan Sullivan, as a joint fund participant.

The Washington Examiner has reached out to the NRSC for comment.

The University of Texas Police Department is investigating two false fire alarms at a polling location on campus Tuesday morning, leading to a 10-minute delay in voting after the building was evacuated.

“UTPD is actively investigating two incidents from this morning where the fire alarm was activated at the Texas Union,” the department wrote on X. “During the activation of the fire alarm, the Texas Union was being used as an election polling location. As a result of the activation, there was a brief delay to operation of the polling location, which resumed approximately 10 minutes later.”

The suspect is not believed to be affiliated with the school, according to the university police department, which asked for assistance in identifying the suspect.

There are two polls open on campus, as the school has over 55,000 students.

President Donald Trump blasted Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) after the congressman said the president was more focused on changing the name of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool than addressing rising costs.

“Lightweight Congressman Ted Lieu, one of the least respected in Washington, D.C., made a knowingly malicious, false, and defamatory statement that I wanted to change the name of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the Trump Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social.

During his Monday event in front of the national monument, Trump said his administration was giving “serious thought to changing the name to the Trump Reflecting Pool” before stating shortly after that was only joking. Lieu posted a clip of the president’s speech drawing attention to rising costs and criticizing Trump.

“What are trump and his Republican enablers focused on? Changing the name of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the trump Reflecting Pool,” Lieu wrote on X. “Punish them at the ballot box. Repudiate them. Vote.”

The president called the congressman a “fraud,” claiming he knowingly misrepresented his statement.

Lieu responded to Trump’s post, calling the president’s comments “FUBAR” and adding, “Was trump joking about putting his name on the Kennedy Center too?”

Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate nominee in Iowa, said he did not vote straight-ticket when he cast his ballot Tuesday morning.

A local reporter asked him if he voted straight-ticket, and he responded, “Nope.”

Turek then listed some of the downballot Republicans he cast a ballot for.

“Susan Miller, I voted for,” he continued, referencing a Republican candidate for the Pottawattamie County Board of Supervisors At-large in Iowa. “I think she does an excellent job on the County Board of Supervisors.”

“Foss, I voted for. Maybe one other as well,” Turek said, likely referring to Michelle Foss, a Republican running for election to the Page County Attorney in Iowa.

The Iowa Senate race is one of the closely watched contests that will determine control of the upper chamber. Turek is facing off against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA), who has the backing of President Donald Trump. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss-up.”

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The North Carolina Board of Elections said results in the state could be delayed due to technical issues in four counties.

“The state board will be meeting later today to discuss the issues that these four counties had in the delayed voting, and it could be that it necessitates extending voting hours; I will leave that to the board. That is their purview, but it could also delay reporting across the state as well. So stay tuned for that,” an NCBE official said at a press conference.

North Carolina has voting from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. State election law allows voting time to be extended in the event of complications.

Michigan Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers told reporters Tuesday he is “disappointed” in the response from Democrats over Rep. Haley Stevens’ (D-MI) endorsement of his campaign.

“I’m disappointed in how vicious they’ve been, but I think that speaks to who the modern Democrat Party is,” Rogers told reporters after he cast his ballot. “Here’s somebody who said, ‘I voted Democrat all the way down the list, except for one person who I think is too extreme for our state.’ That’s country over party.”

He continued, “They outta celebrate her courage and encourage her to continue to being a Democrat rather than try to throw her out of the party. I mean, I’ve never seen such viciousness online.”

Stevens’s move to flip her support from Democratic nominee Abdul el Sayed to Rogers sent shockwaves through the Democratic Party over the weekend.

Republican Guam gubernatorial candidate Tony Ada defeated Democratic candidate Therese Terlaje, according to the Guam Election Commission’s final unofficial tally, flipping the territory’s governorship.

Incumbent Guam Gov. Leon Guerrero first won in 2018, then won reelection in 2022, and finally hit her term limit this year. Republicans held the governorship of the island from 2003 to 2019, and have been eager to return since. After Guerrero won reelection handily in 2022 with 55.49% of the vote, Republicans appear to have found a winning team with Ada and his running mate, E.J. Calvo, who received 51.45% of the vote compared to the 48.15% supporting Terlaje and her lieutenant governor candidate, Sabina Perez.

Ada and Calvo’s unofficial total is above the 50% required to avoid a runoff. The Guam Election Commission still has to certify the results, but the percentages are unlikely to change, with the Republicans receiving over 1,000 more votes than their rivals on the island, which has 59,146 registered voters.

Voter turnout exceeded 53%. Republicans also held the lead in the attorney general race, and Republicans occupied eight of the top 15 positions in the Guam legislature race, giving them a narrow majority, according to the Guam Daily Post.

Republicans experienced one notable loss, however, with Democrats set to flip the territory’s nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) office in Biddeford, Maine, was vandalized on Tuesday with the message, “blood on her hands,” written in red paint on the day voters head to the polls to decide the fate of the five-term senator.

The message appeared to be cleaned up by Tuesday afternoon, according to reports. The vandalism is not the first time Collins’s Biddeford office has been marred, as vandals wrote “Trump wh***” on the office doors last month.

Additionally, the office is the same location that saw protests in July following the fatal shooting of a Colombian man by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Collins had previously voted to support $70 billion in funding for ICE without reforms to training and operational practices, which was targeted in protesters’ slogans at the time and continues to be an attack line against Collins.

A Democrat super PAC spent more than $30 million on the midterm elections this cycle to elect candidates with medical or scientific backgrounds to state and federal office across the country, contributing to the nearly $12 billion total spent during the campaign season.

314 Action Fund spent $23.6 million on STEM candidates and nearly $7 million on direct campaigns this season, the most it has spent in the 10 years since the group was founded.

A spokesperson for the group told reporters on Tuesday that the organization spent nearly $4 million to elect pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews for Senate in South Carolina in her race against Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC) as well as $3 million on Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton.

Other candidates backed by the group include Christina Bohannan, Dr. Richard Pan, and Dr. Amish Shah.

Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico made his final pitch to voters, calling for Texans to back the “underdog” who has been up against a “rigged system” in the midterm elections.

“Texans working hard every day to make a life for themselves,” the ad released Tuesday said. “We’ve always been the underdogs. We’ve always been up against a rigged system, but we’ve always had each other, and now we’re here on the brink of making history.”

“Hours from taking our power back. It hasn’t been easy, but nothing worth having is,” the ad continued. “Texas, you did this. You built this movement. You gave your blood, sweat, and tears. Your nights, your weekends, your Saturday mornings. We’re here because of people. We’re here because of you. Let’s show the world why you should always bet on the underdogs.”

Polls close in Texas between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., and the state typically counts votes fairly quickly. Talarico’s contest against state Attorney General Ken Paxton is rated a “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report, which in its final race ratings said it would “put a pinky on the scale” for the Democrat. A Talarico victory would be a major upset for the GOP as the party seeks to maintain control of Congress.