Election Day Is Here: 57 Million Votes Are Already In, and Control of Congress Hangs on a Handful of Races — Texas's Included
American voters deliver their verdict Tuesday on the first two years of President Donald Trump's second term. Polls and nonpartisan analysts favor Democrats to take the House; the Senate is genuinely uncertain — and Texas, where James Talarico is trying to do what no Democrat has done in decades, is one of the states that will decide it.
The midterm elections arrive Tuesday with control of Congress at stake, more than 57 million ballots already cast in early voting, and the final two years of President Donald Trump's term in the balance, the Associated Press and Reuters reported.
All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate's 100 seats are being decided, alongside three dozen governors' races and thousands of state and local contests. History is against the president's party: it has lost ground in Congress in all but two midterm elections since World War Two, and Trump's approval rating is hovering near his all-time lows, dragged down by deep voter frustration over the war with Iran and the resulting rise in fuel prices, Reuters reported.
Trump campaigned like a man on the ballot himself — more than two dozen rallies since the start of October, the vast majority in states he easily won in 2024, which Reuters read as a sign of how much defense Republicans are playing. 'The Democrat Party has nominated the most extreme and dangerous slate of candidates in American history,' he said on Monday during a speech in Washington. Polls show voters are most concerned about affordability, and disapprove of his handling of it.
The Senate math is the day's hard edge. Democrats must flip four Senate seats while defending every one of their own — including a tight race in Michigan that was jolted on Sunday when Democrat Haley Stevens, who narrowly lost her party's primary, endorsed the Republican, former U.S. Representative Mike Rogers, over the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. And they must win at least two states Trump carried by double digits in 2024. Reuters' list of those states ends with the one this station covers: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina — and Texas.
In Texas, Democratic candidate James Talarico, 37, has his party once again dreaming of winning the biggest Republican state after decades of heartbreak, against Attorney General Ken Paxton, 63, whose campaign has benefited from a nine-figure investment by Elon Musk, Reuters reported. Polls show Democrats either narrowly leading or within striking distance in every one of the contested states — which is another way of saying that nothing about Tuesday is settled, in Texas or anywhere else, until the counting starts.
Polls in Dallas and Tarrant Counties are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., at any vote center in the voter's own county, and anyone in line by 7 p.m. votes. What the early vote cannot tell anyone — 57 million ballots or not — is who wins. That answer starts arriving Tuesday night.
