Voters head to the polls with control of Congress in the balance

Voters in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are considering candidates for mayor aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America.

If Nithya Raman captures the mayoralty in LA and Janeese Lewis George wins in Washington, the two cities would follow New York’s lead, where democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor in 2025 after promising to transform city government to restore power to the working class.

Both cities are heavily Democratic.

Raman is trying to oust Mayor Karen Bass, who’s fighting to keep her job after a rough first term that included the deadly Palisades Fire, which ignited when she was out of the country and caught the fire department unprepared. The former political allies are progressive Democrats.

In Washington, Lewis George is favored after winning the Democratic primary. Her victory would signal a break with a quarter-century of centrist governance in Washington. It would place her in the vanguard of democratic socialists that also includes Katie Wilson, who won an upset victory to lead Seattle last fall.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has warned that Russia will step up massive drone and missile strikes on his country’s energy facilities this week while international attention is focused on the U.S. midterm elections.

“The world will be watching the American midterms, and what is happening here in Ukraine, along with our difficulties with air defense and Patriot missiles, will be overlooked,” he said in an evening video post.

Russian ballistic missiles and drones damaged energy facilities in 10 Ukrainian regions Tuesday — part of a campaign by Moscow to pressure Kyiv over the winter months.

Trump says Tuesday’s midterm results will be “better than you think” for Republicans, declaring that “inflation is solved” and “everything’s going good.”

Trump’s closing day message conflicts with frustration many voters are feeling with the economy, as the cost of groceries, gas and healthcare has climbed despite the president’s promise to bring down prices.

Inflation is running at 3.7% annually, up from 3% when Trump’s second term started.

Trump didn’t acknowledge concerns about prices in his Tuesday morning interview with “Fox and Friends.” Instead, he touted his administration’s immigration enforcement and said U.S. manufacturing was expanding.

“I think the results are going to be better than you think,” he said.

Texas hasn’t elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate since 1988, but the party is brimming with hope that it has the perfect storm to do so this year: a well-spoken candidate in James Talarico, an opponent saddled with scandals in Republican Ken Paxton, and an election favoring Democrats nationwide.

Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian and state lawmaker, has focused on Texans’ struggles against everyday costs, which he squarely blames on uber-wealthy people corrupting politics. Paxton, Talarico argues, is the flag-bearer of that corruption.

Paxton is the Lone Star State’s longtime attorney general and conservative culture warrior. He’s lived under a cloud of ethical questions, which led to his own party impeaching him on corruption allegations in the statehouse. Paxton has repeatedly hammered Talarico on his past statements, including “God is nonbinary,” insisting that he’s too “woke” for Texas.

The Justice Department announced early Tuesday that it is sending roughly 1,000 federal election monitors to all 50 states to observe Election Day voting.

Many are expected in populated areas that tend to vote for Democrats. They include past hot spots for election tensions, like Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia’s Fulton County.

The monitoring program isn’t new, but it has faced criticism from voting rights groups concerned about federal interference and voter intimidation.

The NAACP sued after the department said it would include law enforcement officers in the program, but a judge ruled against the group overnight, arguing the government had made it clear that monitors would be in plainclothes, would not carry firearms and wouldn’t have the power to make arrests at poll sites.

The Justice Department has said its monitors will observe and will not interfere with voting.

Latinos helped return Trump to the White House in 2024. Now they’re poised to play an outsized role in the midterms.

The path to a U.S. House majority runs through heavily Latino districts in states such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida and Texas. The front-line Senate race in Texas likewise could hinge on Latinos.

About 6 in 10 Hispanic adults disapprove of Trump’s handling of the presidency, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from October. About 7 in 10 disapprove of his performance on the economy.

One key factor will be how effective Democrats have been at making the case for themselves. Will disaffected Trump supporters vote for Democrats, or just sit out the midterms?

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed is seeking to become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. Republican Mike Rogers wants to be the first member of his party to win a Michigan Senate race in more than three decades.

The contest to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is among a handful that could determine which party controls the Senate.

Although Michigan Democrats have been successful in recent midterm elections, Trump carried the battleground state in two of his three campaigns. That divided political landscape helped set the stage for one of the most bitter and contentious Senate races of the cycle.

El-Sayed has accused Rogers of being a “puppet” for Trump. Rogers has accused El-Sayed of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, while Trump has falsely called the Democrat a “jihadist.”

Progressives are hoping an El-Sayed victory will signal their agenda can resonate in a battleground state ahead of the next presidential election.

Trump is staring down twin threats from Capitol Hill for his last two years as president if his party loses at least one chamber in Tuesday’s midterms: investigations and impeachment.

Democratic lawmakers are eager to exercise oversight, with senior officials long telegraphing how they would go after an administration they believe has escaped accountability for policies, personal profits and abuses of power.

The majority party controls gavels on powerful House committees, which come with larger staff budgets and more expansive resources, including subpoena powers.

Less certain are prospects for impeaching Trump, although House Democratic leaders will almost certainly come under pressure from their left flank to do so. Rather than Trump, who was impeached twice during his first term but acquitted by the Senate both times, Democrats may instead try to impeach Cabinet officials.

If Republicans lose the Senate, Trump’s ability to push his judicial and executive branch nominees through to confirmation will also be severely weakened.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration must stop sending voter lists of alleged noncitizens to election officials, as it has done in California and Washington state, while urging the states to set aside those ballots.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, D.C., said in her decision late Monday that more voter data transmissions would likely confuse voters and election officials at a time when election resources need to be focused on administering the midterms.

States and voting rights groups have pushed back on the administration’s claims and said the lists are riddled with errors.

The decision is one in a string of court losses for the administration in its efforts to expand federal authority over elections, which are run by the states.

The Navajo Election Administration says it has altered five polling locations — two in Arizona and three in New Mexico.

The tribe’s reservation surrounds the Four Corners Monument, where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado meet. The area has seen major flooding since October, with rivers overflowing their banks and some residents having to evacuate.

The tribe says it has more than 298,000 members.

Trump roared back to power due to the Biden administration’s border troubles. He cut illegal crossings of the border, which were already plummeting, to close to zero.

That’s when the trouble started.

The president turned to the trickier task of deporting illegal immigrants from the interior of the U.S. Soon the main image of illegal immigration wasn’t desperate people crossing the border, but mothers screaming as they were torn from their children, or masked federal agents chasing people — sometimes citizens — through streets.

Trump openly bemoaned how the U.S. didn’t get enough migrants from Scandinavian countries and only accepted white South Africans into the country as refugees. And then two citizen protesters were shot and killed by immigration agents during the administration’s raids on Minneapolis.

Now the GOP fears it will especially lose ground in immigrant-rich areas running from New Jersey to Florida to Texas. And polls show more voters oppose Trump on immigration than support him.

Over the past two elections, voters turned out against Democrats because of high inflation.

But Trump’s promise to bring down prices has failed. Inflation is running at 3.7% annually, up from 3% when the president’s second term started.

Trump’s tariffs pushed up inflation last year, and his decision to start a war with Iran has caused higher oil, gasoline and diesel prices.

As a result, consumer sentiment is lower than it has been during recent recessions. And the unemployment rate is still a healthy 4.2%.

The voter anger over inflation makes it harder for Republicans who campaigned on low prices to defend their House and Senate majorities.

In-person Election Day voting has begun. Polls are open in a handful of East Coast states, including Connecticut, Maine, New York, New Jersey, and parts of Kentucky and Indiana.

At 6:30 a.m. ET, polls in Ohio, North Carolina and West Virginia will open. Polls in 14 more states will open at 7 a.m. Polls will be open in every state, plus Washington, D.C., by noon ET.

Cooper, a former governor, was hailed from the start as Democrats’ top Senate recruit.

Republicans countered with Michael Whatley, Trump’s handpicked Republican Party chair whom the president urged to run for the seat.

The winner will succeed Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who announced his retirement and became an outspoken Trump critic.

The race became a testing ground for the two parties’ fight over how to frame the economy and Republicans’ sweeping tax-and-budget law that Trump called the “one big, beautiful bill.”

Cooper avoided personal criticisms of Trump but hammered Whatley and Republicans on inflation. Whatley cheered GOP tax cuts on tips, overtime and Social Security.

Republicans have dominated Senate elections in North Carolina for the last half-century. But Cooper has never lost an election, starting as a state senator before winning four terms as attorney general and two terms as governor.

Voters struggling with high prices and angry over an unpopular war with Iran will decide whether to drastically shift power in Washington in midterm elections Tuesday that will serve as a referendum on President Donald Trump’s second term.

Democrats were cautiously optimistic about their prospects as they watched Republicans spend the campaign’s final stretch pumping tens of millions of dollars into states and districts that Trump won handily just two years ago. They are betting that discontent over Trump’s failure to deliver on his promise to tackle rising costs, and perceptions that he has been more focused on gilding the nation’s capital than their pain at the pump, will depress Republican turnout and drive their own voters to the polls.

Republicans held out hope that their overwhelming money advantage would help stem the tide, but they were bracing to lose control of the U.S. House and fighting to hang onto the U.S. Senate — an outcome that seemed unlikely earlier this year, given a map widely seen as favoring the party.

Still, the margins are tight in both chambers and just one or two seats could tip the balance. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in the Senate to win the majority, an uphill climb because many of the most competitive races are in historically red states. In the House, they only need three.