Polls point to Democratic gains as Americans vote in Trump's midterm elections

Polls point to Democratic gains

Americans vote on 3 November 2026 in the midterm elections of Donald Trump's second term, choosing the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Polls suggest Democrats are poised for big gains and possibly a takeover of Congress. Columnist Miles Taylor, writing in inews, argues that British readers should prepare for what follows, since he expects a more volatile American president to emerge whichever party wins.

Taylor bases that warning on his own experience. Weeks before the 2018 midterms he attended a closed White House meeting of top agency heads, convened to plan for a Republican loss of the House as polls pointed to a "blue wave". White House lawyers advised stonewalling where possible, cooperating where unavoidable and above all minimising the probes. Taylor argues that this plan rested entirely on Trump's self-discipline, which anyone who had spent time around the president could have predicted would fail.

The 2018 precedent

Democrats flipped 40 House seats on election night, their largest gain since the Watergate era of the 1970s. The day after, Taylor saw the president, who privately vented about investigations he expected before walking into the East Room. There Trump warned that a new majority using subpoena power against him would provoke a "war-like posture". The press conference lasted an hour and a half and ended in a shouting match with reporters. That afternoon Trump forced out Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and by evening the White House withdrew the press pass of CNN's Jim Acosta, who had pressed the president with hard questions at the event.

Campaign rhetoric under scrutiny

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in the Guardian, argues that Trump's midterm campaign has distilled his rhetoric into its most vulgar and hateful form, drawing on misogyny, racism and nativism. He invokes Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1993 essay in The American Scholar on "defining deviancy down", the process by which a society stops noticing behaviour it once would have punished. According to Blumenthal, Trump used profane or vulgar language in nearly every public speech over the past month, insulting Democrats and calling Norway a name after it did not award him the Nobel peace prize. He says the Republican candidates and the vice-president have followed that line. Blumenthal also cites Trump's September Republican mini convention, where attendance cost at least $25,000 and a photograph with Trump cost $89,000.

Minimum attendance fee25,000

Photograph with Trump89,000

Minimum attendance fee

25000 USD

Photograph with Trump

89000 USD

Data from the article text

Transgender messaging and ad spending

Spiegel traces the focus on transgender rights to remarks Trump made at the White House on 13 March 2025. He told Republicans to hold the subject back for the campaign's final stretch.

“I tell the Republicans, don't bring that subject up, because there is no election right now.”

Trump went on to advise them to raise it about a week before the election, and Spiegel says the party was listening. GOP campaigns and political action committees spent tens of millions of dollars on ads targeting transgender people this cycle. An early September ad buy of more than $100 million by Elon Musk through the America PAC stood out for its scale, much of it focused on transgender messaging. Spiegel also reports that some Democrats have followed the same line, and that the LGBTQ+ community in Ohio is divided on how to respond.