President Donald Trump asked voters to pretend he was on the ballot in the midterm elections and handpicked Republican candidates in some of the country’s most consequential Senate races. By Tuesday night, voters had rejected them.
Follow 2026 US midterm election results LIVE updates here. Democrat James Talarico glided to a victory on Tuesday night, delivering Democrats a seat the party had not won since 1988. Trump-backed candidates in South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas all lost, while the president’s preferred pick trailed in early results in Michigan. In North Carolina, Trump endorsed former national Republican campaign official Michael Whatley, who lost in a rout to former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.
The defeats handed Democrats control of the chamber and exposed the limits of Trump’s political power. In Texas, Trump intervened in a messy Republican primary election to promote scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton over Senator John Cornyn, a Trump ally who some in the party considered a safer pick in the general election.
That helped fuel concerns among Republicans that the president had become a drag on the party he remade around himself. The losses came as Trump’s popularity was lower heading into Tuesday’s vote than in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, according to Reuters/Ipsos polls.
Some independent analysts said the Senate losses bore Trump’s fingerprints specifically. Thomas Kahn, a professor at American University, said the president’s intervention in the Texas Republican primary had cost his party a safe seat, arguing that a nomination for Senator John Cornyn “would have been a slam dunk for Republicans to win. North Carolina, Kahn said, was another clear case. The Republican incumbent senator, Thom Tillis, said he would not seek re-election last year after a public split with Trump, who threatened to back a primary challenger against him after Tillis balked at Medicaid cuts in the president’s tax-and-spending bill. Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory, a Republican, said Trump’s interventions in his party’s primaries had divided Republicans in state after state.
