In the run-up to the Grand Old Party’s (GOP) historic midterm humbling, pollsters warned that corruption in government had surged to the top of voters’ concerns, second only to the rising cost of living. Oblivious to such warnings, US President Donald Trump spent the day before the pivotal electionsshowing off his costly renovations in the nation’s capital, including his troubled Reflecting Pool and the $400 million White House ballroom he plans to build after razing the historic East Wing to the ground. It followed weeks of bizarre, rambling campaign speeches that saw the president boast about the “freaking fortune” the oil industry was making from the Iran war and joke that the $5,000 checks he dangled at voterswouldn’t even buy them a hamburger at his Florida resort.
Read moreWhy the Democrats routed the Republicans in the US midterm elections By all accounts, it was a baffling effort from a president who once cast himself as an outsider challenging the Washington establishment – but whose personal wealth has more than tripled since the start of his second term in office. The messaging has been “remarkably tone-deaf for somebody who is normally a pretty shrewd populist operator”, said Douglas Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee. One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading.
To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Throughout the election campaign, Trump repeatedly urged voters to pretend he was on the ballot. Many did just that, punishing his GOP and propelling Democrats to stunning victories across the map, including in states that had voted Republican for decades and that Trump won by double digits just two years ago.
Voters nationwide were in the mood for change, according to an AP surveyof some 80,000 voters across all 50 states, which found that roughly three-quarters of voters were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the direction of the country. A demonstrator cheers for midterm results outside the White House on November 4, 2026. © Evan Vucci, Among those who had Trump in mind when they cast their vote, about twice as many wanted to express opposition to the Republican president as those who wanted to support him. Most blamed the Trump administration for high costs and roughly 6 in 10 said the president placed a higher priority on his personal interests than the country’s.
More than half of voters nationally said government corruption was “crucial” to their vote for Congress, even topping the number that said that about the cost of living – and well above the share for other topics including immigration enforcement, the war in Iran and AI data centres. In a late-night phone interview with Fox News on Election Day, Trump said he didn't consider the elections to be a personal defeat. Voters, he argued, simply “didn't like the candidates”.
That was especially true of candidates hand-picked by the president himself, most notably his scandal-plagued Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton, whom he endorsed in a primary contest against incumbent Senator John Cornyn – ignoring the concerns of Republican officials in the Lone Star State. Paxton had previously been impeached by his own party over corruption accusations and was stained in the eyes of many voters by a very public divorce. On Tuesday, he became the first Texas Republican to lose a Senate race since 1988.
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