SOURCE: BBC
The Democrats win the Senate and the House in US midterm elections, taking control of Congress for the rest of Donald Trump’s presidency
“The reason we lost is the war,” US Vice-President JD Vance says
Trump also acknowledges the Iran war, and the rising cost of living, were factors in his Republican Party’s defeat – as the White House posts on social media: “Trump is still your president”
In Senate races, Democrats picked up a string of victories in Republican strongholds including Texas, South Carolina and Kansas – we’re yet to hear results in Alaska and Mississippi
Top Democrat in the House Hakeem Jeffries calls his party’s victory a “red, white and blue moment”. Some seats in the lower chamber are still being counted – but the Democrats have surpassed the 218 needed to win
How will Trump deal with a Congress controlled by Democrats? A picture he posted on social media may give us a clue, writes our White House reporter
It may be weeks before we know the results of Alaska’s Senate race – one of the most competitive in the country.
There, incumbent Republican incumbent Dan S Sullivan is running against Democratic candidate Mary Peltola and, in a twist that has stirred controversy, against an independent candidate named Daniel J Sullivan.
The expected delay is partly because Alaska has ranked-choice ballots, where voters can select more than one candidate in order of preference. And if a single candidate doesn’t win a clear majority – a particular risk this year with two similarly named candidates – then the state recounts the ballots in a second round with the last-place candidate removed.
On top of that, Alaska allows 10 to 15 days for mailed ballots to be returned to the elections office.
It could take a while.
Democratic candidate Scott Collum is challenging Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith for Mississippi’s Senate seat.
At 10:00 ET, 43 votes separated the two candidates, with 96% of the vote counted, according to AP. The race is still too close to call.
While we may have a result today, it could also take several days for all the votes to be counted.
Read more: Democrat leads by fewer than 50 votes in surprisingly tight Mississippi Senate race15:40
Addressing supporters in Louisiana last night, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson said: “Republicans will not be deterred by the outcome of one election. In fact, you know what we do? We double down.”
He added that in the 2028 election Republicans would “take back the House and we will finish this job”.
While Johnson, 54, won his race to return to the House, this morning he has said he will not run for House minority leader – which will become the top Republican post in the chamber once Democrats take control in January – according to reports.
Johnson has spent three years in the role, having replaced former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in October 2023 after a contentious selection process within the Republican party.
He began his career as a constitutional lawyer, spending close to 20 years in the profession before entering politics.
What do Republicans think of last night’s Democratic victory? I asked one of the party’s strategists.
Mark Bednar, who worked on the Trump-Vance transition team after the presidential election, tells the BBC it’s clear his party “did not excite the Trump coalition that won a historic victory in 2024”.
He says we can expect that with control of Congress, Democrats will use a lot of their energy to investigate – and possibly try to impeach – President Trump.
“But they will have their own internal fights that will only grow,” Bednar adds.
And, he warns: “Republicans need to adjust to the reality that President Trump alone cannot be the driving force for voter turnout.”
In an all-staff call this morning, Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson has confirmed he won’t run for the minority leader position when Democrats take control of Congress in January, US media reports.
He added that he spoke with President Trump earlier this morning.
Addressing supporters in Louisiana last night, Johnson had said he was “disappointed” by the election’s results.
US tech giants’ share prices jumped on opening the morning after Democrats took both chambers of Congress, with Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple leaping 7.5%, 5.5%, and 5% respectively.
As a general rule investors like certainty, which is what a Democrat-controlled Congress could give US politics for the next two years.
But not all tech giants were winners.
Elon Musk’s firms Tesla and SpaceX were down 4.9% and 3.4%, after many Democrats came out in opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) data centres on the campaign trail.
Musk’s relationship with Democrats could also be a factor. He spent millions in political donations against them in the midterms and he has been a vocal – and often controversial – critic of theirs for years.
As such, some investors might be considering what the erratic businessman’s relationship with politics could mean for his companies when Democrats have so much control.
“It’s on him. It’s not on anybody else. It’s a total, complete rejection of President Trump,” Republican lobbyist Bill Miller tells me, shortly after the midterm results became clear.
“This is a disaster of the first magnitude. Nobody saw it coming like this,” he adds.
Inside the Republican Party, initial shock at the stunning election results on Tuesday night has quickly given way to anger with US president.
After Democrats won upset after upset in deep-red states like Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, some Republicans focused their ire on Trump, arguing that his focus on his legacy and indifference to voter concerns cost the party control of Congress.
“It was just one mistake after another,” says Gregg Peppin, a Republican strategist in Minnesota, adding: “Clearly, in state after state, people did not like the president’s policies.”
A White House ally of Trump said anger with the president “is extremely high” after the Iran war, tariffs and the administration’s immigration crackdown created a “perfect storm”.
The S&P 500 index of the largest firms listed in the US opened up 1.13% following a series of historic wins for Democrats in the midterm elections.
Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was up 1.17% on opening while the Dow Jones index was up 2.3%
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Talarico denounces big money in politics and slams Muskpublished at 14:37
“Last night the people of Texas delivered a crystal clear message to the world’s first trillionaire,” he tells CBS, referencing Elon Musk, who poured more than $47m (£35m) into the campaign of Talarico’s opponent, Republican Ken Paxton. “Texas is not for sale.”
“We’re all tired of these billionaires who own the algorithms, who own so many of the news networks, who own the politicians fighting on our screens,” he adds.
Now that Democrats have won a majority in the House of Representatives, Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, formerly the House Minority Leader, is poised to become the first black Speaker of the House.
Last night’s blue wave was “an incredible victory for the American people all across the country, and a stunning rebuke [of] MAGA extremism”, Jeffries tells MS Now’s Joe Scarborough.
Responding to a question on what comes next for his party, Jeffries says “we won on affordability, and now it’s our job to govern on affordability”.
Turning to Congress, Scarborough asks about Trump’s priorities for lawmakers.
Jeffries says the president needs to end the war in Iran, before the new Congress even takes power in January.
“That was clearly one of the messages that the American people decisively sent last evening,” he says.
In the US House of Representatives, where all of its 435 seats were up for grabs in this election, there are still 68 that are yet to be confirmed.
The Democrats have so far won 228 seats, already comfortably past the 218 required for a majority, and have flipped 25 of those from the Republicans.
We’re seeing the first remarks this morning from the White House in the wake of the Democrats’ significant gains.
The official account for the White House posts an image of Trump leaning over the Resolute Desk, with a “public service announcement”. Imposed on the image are the words: “PSA: Trump is still your president”.
Trump reacted to the Republican defeat earlier today, conceding that Democrats “did a good job”, while claiming Republican candidates would have done better had he been on the ballot.
Last night, Trump acknowledged the Democrats’ wins, telling the New York Times,, external “I am absolutely willing to accept those results.”
He also posted on Truth Social , externalthat if he was on the ballot, “We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Election law experts, voting rights advocates, and Democrats were prepared for the White House to potentially contest the results of the election.
Trump spent much of the year warning about voter fraud, external – which experts say is rare – and had previously claimed the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was rigged against him.
The Justice Department launched unprecedented attempts to intervene in state election processes, and touted illegal non-citizen voting as a rampant issue despite evidence that this was rare.
But with the midterm results overwhelmingly in the Democrats’ favour, that clamour from the administration has gone conspicuously quiet.
Despite a few technical hiccups in a handful of jurisdictions, so far it appears the election went very smoothly. That makes it very politically difficult to dispute the results.
Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro – who was comfortably re-elected on Tuesday – says the party’s success in his state can be replicated elsewhere.
He describes the four candidates who ousted Republican incumbents in his state as “get-stuff-done Democrats” who attracted the support of Republicans, independents and Democrats.
“We showed last night, here in the toughest swing state in the entire country, that we elected candidates who could compete everywhere,” he tells the BBC’s US partner CBS News.
“I do think it’s important that we have an ideological conversation with our family to determine what our party looks like going forward,” he says.
“That’s a healthy thing, and that’s an important thing, and it needs to be done, with a focus on how we can deliver for people, how we can enable real fundamental change and reform in this country,” he adds.
Votes are still being counted, and we’re still waiting on results from Alaska and Mississippi’s Senate races.
Alaska: Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan is facing Democratic candidate Mary Peltola. The latest tally shows a tight race, in a state that was rocked by controversy in the days leading up to the election.
UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham, when asked about the US midterm results, says the world “has an opportunity now to unite around the cost of living”.
It comes as a major poll suggested US voters saw the economy as the key issue heading into the elections, which saw sweeping victories for the Democrats.
Speaking to reporters from the Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, the PM says he has put cost of living “front and centre” in his premiership.
Until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved, he says, those financial pressures cannot be alleviated.
Burnham calls for a “de-escalation” to the Iran war and for the Strait of Hormuz to “fully open once again”.
He says he believes the message from the US public is: “Lets get focused, in a laser-like way, on those cost of living issues.”
Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf earlier said the vote showed that the US public had said “no to war”
Once again, Iran has played a significant role in American elections.
On this very day 47 years ago Iranian students seized the US Embassy in Tehran, taking American diplomats hostage. The 444-day crisis contributed to Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Now, the war with Iran, along with soaring energy prices and the rising cost of living, has led to major Republican losses in the midterms and handed Democrats control of both chambers of Congress.
Analysts close to the Iranian regime, appearing on state television, have openly discussed prolonging negotiations with Washington and maintaining pressure on oil supplies, in the hope that the economic fallout would weaken President Trump politically and undermine Republican prospects in the elections.
Nearly a half-century ago, Iran released its American hostages just minutes after Reagan was sworn into office, January 20, 1981.
Tehran may now hope that a Democratic-controlled Congress will limit Trump’s ability to launch another major military offensive against Iran.
But while Congress can restrict funding and challenge presidential decisions, Trump, as the US commander in chief, still retains considerable authority over military operations and foreign policy.
Donald Trump’s second term has disappointed many Americans who thought he was going to bring prices down. The economy was seen by US voters as the key issue heading into this election.
So what impact have Trump’s policies had on US inflation and the cost of living?
The price of gasoline and diesel have risen sharply in the wake of the US strikes on Iran on 28 February.
In the case of diesel, the average price in October was $6.25 (£4.63) a gallon (3.8l), a record high and higher than seen in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump had promised when campaigning for a second term in 2024 to get gasoline prices below $2 (£1.48) a gallon. The average price in October was $4.31 (£3.19) a gallon.
The impact of Trump’s war with Iran can also clearly been seen in the overall rate of US consumer price inflation, which climbed to an annual rate of 3.7% in September.
Economists also estimate that US consumer prices are higher as a result of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs (taxes on imports) from 2 April 2025, which have pushed up the prices of a wide range of imported products.
In another first of the night, Amy Acton becomes the first woman elected to be governor of Ohio.
Amy Acton defeated Vivek Ramaswamy in a fiercely fought race over the governorship of the Midwestern state. The race drew global attention last month when Ramaswamy released an ad where Acton was called a liar by her mother.
Alongside Acton other women who made history on Tuesday include Deb Haaland, who became the first female Native American governor of New Mexico, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, who when elected in Georgia became the first black female governor of a state.
