President Donald Trump said he would accept the results of Tuesday's midterm elections, in which Democrats recaptured both the House and the Senate. It was a sharp break for a president with a long record of claiming that elections he disliked were stolen.
In a string of late-night interviews, Trump congratulated Democrats on their showing and talked about striking deals with them. He did not take responsibility for the Republican losses, instead pinning them on his own absence from the ballot, even though he had urged supporters to vote as if his name were on it.
Vice President JD Vance pointed to the war with Iran. Writing on social media, he said many voters who backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 had switched to Democrats this year.
By midday Wednesday, Democrats had locked up 54 Senate seats and at least 228 House seats, well past the 218 needed for a majority.
Election experts said the size of the defeat left Republicans no realistic path to contest it. David Becker, who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said the lopsided fight for Congress and heavy turnout made a challenge impossible.
The vote was Trump's first as a sitting president since 2020, when his campaign to overturn his loss helped spur the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
State and local officials had spent months bracing for federal interference, planning how poll workers would react if federal agents arrived at polling sites. Some states added new limits on law enforcement and military personnel at the polls. None of those feared scenarios came to pass.
A year of federal pressure
Voting rights advocates said the administration nonetheless tried to influence how states ran the election. The Justice Department sued California over the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens, a request the Supreme Court rejected Monday. A federal judge dismissed a separate suit against Alaska over alleged voter confusion in its Senate race on Sunday.
The department also sued dozens of states for unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive personal data, losing in at least 27 court decisions without a single win. Prosecutors subpoenaed Los Angeles County election workers for records suggesting they are examining whether officials helped noncitizens vote.
Federal judges found that election-related field operations by the Department of Homeland Security could intimidate voters. Democrats and election experts said a department program built to identify possible noncitizen voters was unreliable and prone to wrongly flagging citizens.
Despite unprecedented executive branch efforts to interfere in election administration, state and local officials responsible for running our elections have continued to do their jobs and uphold the process
Michael McNulty, senior policy director at Issue One
Trump's redistricting push also faltered, with new Republican-friendly maps in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas and elsewhere doing little to protect GOP candidates. The Supreme Court blocked his effort to have the Postal Service restrict mail ballots, and Congress never passed the SAVE America Act he demanded.
The pressure may not be over. Late on Election Day, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a three-judge panel's decision lifting limits on the administration threatening election workers with prosecution, after a federal judge in California had barred such threats last week.
