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

The National Republican Senatorial Committee has coordinated TV ad buys with various Senate campaigns in swing states, including Ohio, Maine, Alaska, Iowa, Michigan, and New Hampshire, according to AdImpact. However, they haven’t coordinated any in North Carolina for Michael Whatley’s race, or in Georgia for Rep. Mike Collins.

Both Whatley and Collins have been facing an uphill battle in their races, and Democrats are favored in the majority of polls. Whatley has struggled to boost his name recognition in the state, and Collins has faced various personal attacks throughout the campaign.

No ads are currently planned from President Donald Trump’s political action committee in North Carolina. In total, $90,000 is planned for Georgia. However, there could always be last-minute cash infusions.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has added eight new House seats to its target list, all of which are typically safe seats for Republicans.

The seats include Kansas District 2, Michigan District 1, North Carolina District 13, New Jersey District 2, Oklahoma District 5, Texas District 9, Virginia District 6, and Washington District 5. All the seats voted for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election by a margin of between 11 and 24 points.

The Democrats have recently seen a surge in momentum as polls put their candidates up in major swing states. They’ve benefited from some campaign missteps from Republicans, including the midterm convention that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said was a drag on his race, and race shifts to the left.

Only one thing could put a damper on a good election night for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY): the arrival of Senate nominees who, if successful in November, have vowed to oppose him as Democratic leader.

Schumer told reporters this week that he will run for another term as the top Senate Democrat, and that he plans on doing so regardless of whether his party recaptures the majority. Less clear is whether Schumer will have the support of his entire caucus.

No matter what, Schumer, 75, is expected to welcome new faces who believe it’s time for him to step aside and make room for the next generation of leadership. That includes Julianna Stratton, the lieutenant governor of Illinois, who is slated to replace retiring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) in a decidedly blue state.

So far, there is no challenge to speak of, but nominees such as Abdul el Sayed in Michigan want to see a progressive Democrat take Schumer’s place — and he’s named Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) as his preferred replacement.

Other swing state Democrats who want to see Schumer go include Troy Jackson in Maine and Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota. Even more are unwilling to say how they’d vote in internal leadership elections that are typically held in early December.

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President Donald Trump is leaning into transactional politics in the final month of the 2026 midterm campaign, tying his administration directly to economic benefits in states that could determine control of Congress.

This week alone, Trump has promoted billions of dollars in proposed investments in Alaska and Iowa, redirected $20 million in Department of Homeland Security funding toward government-paid television advertising, and begun sending $500 checks to roughly 1 million people the administration says were overcharged for Affordable Care Act coverage under former President Joe Biden.

Trump is also taking the pitch on the road. The president traveled to Texas on Thursday to tour a Peterbilt Motors truck factory in Denton ahead of a campaign rally in neighboring Oklahoma. A White House official told Fox Business that Peterbilt’s parent company has seen a boom since Trump imposed tariffs on foreign trucks last November.

All of that comes on top of Trump’s promise last month that every American adult will get a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans retain control of Congress.

The burst of activity amounts to an explicit effort to connect Trump and the Republican Party with material benefits for voters, just as early voting gets underway. It also comes as Trump has publicly acknowledged the White House is not doing a good job of promoting its accomplishments.

“We’ve done a great job, and the thing I haven’t done a good job with is explaining it to people,” Trump told reporters at the White House before departing for Texas.

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WICHITA, Kansas — When President Donald Trump slammed Bombardier and urged a boycott of the Canadian company’s planes, it threw the 1,500 people working at its American headquarters into uproar.

“It was all anyone could think about for days,” said one employee in the parking lot outside its Wichita hangars. “There isn’t a person in this city who isn’t connected to aviation in some way. How could he diss something so important?”

And in Kansas, where the race for Senate is running so close, it threw local Republican officials for a loop.

Kansas should be a gimme for Republicans. It has not returned a Democrat to the Senate in almost a century, and Trump won it by 16 points just two years ago.

Yet the latest polling shows a tight race. Adam Hamilton has leveraged his position as the head of a megachurch to offer Democrats their best chance yet of nicking a Senate seat.

Republicans elsewhere have asked Trump to stay away from their races for fear his poor approval ratings might drag them down.

In Kansas, they have had to endure a series of policy decisions that have gone even further in potentially harming their chances, they say.

Click here to read more from Rob Crilly.

Democrats are increasingly optimistic about former state Sen. Troy Jackson’s chances of ousting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in November, a race that could prove critical to the party’s hopes of taking control of the Senate.

That outlook would have been difficult to imagine just four months ago, when Graham Platner suspended his campaign amid allegations of sexual assault and rape, throwing Democrats’ momentum in Maine into choppy waters.

But with 33 days until Election Day, Democrats once again see an opening to flip the seat, believing Jackson has emerged as a viable challenger to the longtime Republican senator.

“People aren’t really talking about Graham Platner anymore, and they’re really talking about the economy, Trump, and, you know, whether Susan Collins is still an effective senator for us or not,” Democratic state Sen. Joe Baldacci told the Washington Examiner.

“Voters are looking for something new, and the Collins magic is just going to run out,” Jim Kessler, a former staffer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and executive vice president of policy at the center-left Third Way, told the Washington Examiner. “Everybody has their time when you know when you can no longer beat the odds, and Troy Jackson’s running a campaign that should be good enough to do it.”

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A new ad from Iowa Democratic candidate Christina Bohannan features a voter identified as a Republican supporting the nominee, despite voting records showing he’s a registered Democrat.

The advertisement, posted by the 1st Congressional District candidate on Tuesday, includes a testimonial from a Republican resident from Le Claire, Iowa, named Dale, who says in the ad he used to vote for Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) but won’t this year because she “sold us out.”

“I used to vote for Mariannette Miller-Meeks, but not anymore,” he says.

The ad labels the voter, identified as Dale Zahn, as a Republican.

But Zahn is not a Republican, according to voting records viewed by the Washington Examiner. He is a registered Democrat and didn’t move to Iowa until 2024, per the records, when he migrated from Michigan. He also has never been a Republican in Iowa, registering first as an independent.

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Republicans are headed for a rough reckoning next month. Persistent inflation, record fuel prices, and widespread disapproval of the war with Iran have soured the outlook for the GOP. According to the latest Wall Street Journal poll, President Donald Trump’s 37% approval rating is the lowest for any president since 1990.

That comparison rang alarm bells with me. I was the National Republican Congressional Committee’s communications director in 1990, responsible for media and television advertising strategy in President George H.W. Bush’s first midterm elections. We started the year optimistic about chipping away at the Democratic majority in the House. Early that year, our polling revealed a budding anti-tax, anti-incumbent mood. It was driven by a recession, a financial crisis in the savings-and-loan industry, and perceptions of corruption in the Democratic leadership.

By focusing on the Democrats’ woes, we hoped to defy the history of midterm election losses for the party holding the White House. With luck, we might even expand on the GOP’s 175 seats in the House. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan had both picked up House seats in midterm elections. Why not Bush, too?

Bush’s 1988 campaign promise not to raise taxes positioned him to benefit from the anti-tax mood. I was at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans when he made his famous, “Read my lips, no new taxes!” pledge to the delegates. But in the spring of 1990, Bush broke that promise and joined congressional Democrats to support a tax increase. Bush’s flip-flop badly demoralized the GOP base. For the NRCC, it was a disaster. We had 17 open GOP seats to defend and another 23 incumbents we ranked vulnerable. In 1990, the average postwar midterm loss for the party in the White House was 24 to 26 seats. Without warning, Bush made losing most of our vulnerable incumbents and open GOP seats highly probable.

The only way to curb GOP losses was to put distance between Republicans on the midterm ballot and the White House.

Click here to read more from John Roberts.

Over the past week, House and Senate lawmakers have privately and publicly spoken out against or questioned President Donald Trump’s all-out approach to deportations.

Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-FL), whom Trump endorsed in August, released a campaign ad last week that chided Trump’s immigration policies as having “gone too far.” Salazar filmed the video outside the White House and said voters in her heavily Hispanic district felt betrayed over how deportations have largely swept up Hispanic illegal immigrants.

Trump hit Salazar back on social media several times, even resharing a post on Truth Social that called for a “NEW Republican to Replace Salazar.”

Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-IA) privately pushed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to release a woman from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention because the detainee is expected to be deported to a country that she is not from.

Fatou Traore “is currently in the United States legally under a 2011 withholding of removal order and is a wife and mother of 4 children, with no criminal history,” Miller-Meeks wrote in a letter to Mullin, although it is unclear if Traore has legal clearance to be in the U.S. “Deporting Fatou would deprive a young family of their mother and would violate the withholding of removal order, which allows Fatou to work and reside in the United States legally.”

Sen. Jim Justice (R-WV) told Politico on Tuesday that the Trump administration needed to “admit you’re doing something wrong” on deportations.

“With all that’s going on and all the stuff, we probably got to step back from it and say: ‘Maybe we’re doing something wrong here or there,’ and then adjust to that,” Justice said.

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