November 3, 2026

After months of hard-fought campaigning, the midterm elections have finally arrived. Today, voters are heading to the polls to decide which party will control Congress, and to cast their votes in several consequential gubernatorial races around the country. Recent polling suggests that the Democrats are likely to wrest control of the House of Representatives back from Republicans, and they have a shot at the Senate, where the G.O.P. currently holds a fifty-three-to-forty-seven vote advantage. The most likely path for Democrats to take the latter includes defending seats in three key swing states—Michigan, New Hampshire, and Georgia—and flipping at least four of seven competitive Republican-held seats: Alaska, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Maine, Kansas, and Texas. The first polls will close tonight at 6 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, and The New Yorker will publish results, as reported by the Associated Press, until the final votes are tallied.

This year’s midterms will go down as the most expensive election ever—including past Presidential cycles—as more than eleven billion dollars has been spent on campaign advertising alone. The bulk of this spending has been concentrated on a handful of Senate races, with more than a billion dollars going to just three states: Michigan, Ohio, and Texas. Texas, in particular, is considered a major bellwether for the Democrats; the state representative James Talarico holds a narrow polling lead over Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, despite President Donald Trump winning the state by more than thirteen points in 2024. If Talarico wins—becoming the first Democrat elected statewide since 1994—it will likely be because of Latino voters, who polls suggest, after swinging sharply toward the G.O.P. in 2024, have moved back to the left. It will also reflect a deep dissatisfaction with Trump, whose approval rating has sunk into the thirties—recently hitting the lowest point in either of his two terms.
Accordingly, Democratic candidates have actively sought to make the election a referendum on Trump, and, across several recent polls, voters have rated issues related to the President as their top priorities. This has included Trump’s war in Iran, which has contributed to high inflation and spiking gas prices, and data-center construction, which Trump has championed. If the Democrats are able to take back Congress, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the presumptive Speaker of the House, has signalled plans for aggressive oversight, including congressional investigations into business deals by figures close to the Trump Administration, immigration-enforcement reform, and potentially even impeachment hearings. The results of today’s midterm elections could also offer a preview for the 2028 Presidential landscape, providing an early test for several potential Democratic nominees who are currently up for reëlection in their respective states, such as the Maryland governor, Wes Moore; the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro; and the Georgia senator Jon Ossoff.

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