Donald Trump’s unrelenting focus on the ‘beautification of Washington’ and Fox News ratings did not stop the Democrats’ decisive midterm election wins

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Standing at the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on Monday afternoon, Donald Trump zeroed in on his closing message of the high-stakes midterm elections: it can take a long time to get rid of filth.

Less than 24 hours before Americans headed to the polls, the US president staged a bizarre press conference in which he touted his troubled $14m renovation of the Washington DC landmark and blamed his predecessors for the algae that once bloomed in its water.

Hinojosa wins momentous victory, shatters Republican grip on key office and will become state’s first Latina governor

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In a seismic political upset that would have seemed improbable only a few weeks ago, Democrat Gina Hinojosa has defeated three-term governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday, shattering the Republican grip on the highest and most powerful executive office in Texas.

Hinojosa’s historic victory – she will be the state’s first ever Latina governor – ended Abbott’s bid for an unprecedented fourth term, and delivered Democrats their most consequential victory in the state in a generation.

Mid-cycle redrawing of district boundaries, especially in states president won in 2024, did not yield results party was hoping for

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Democrats won stunning victories on Tuesday in several districts that Republicans redrew over the last year and a half to benefit GOP candidates.

Those victories came in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas. All four states were part of a nationwide effort by Trump and allies to reconfigure the boundaries of congressional districts in the middle of the decade. Typically, states redraw congressional districts just once, at the beginning of each decade.

Victory for party comes despite unusual and aggressive efforts by Republicans to redraw congressional districts

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Democrats are winning competitive House races as well as ones in solid Republican districts and are expected to flip the US House of Representatives after two tumultuous years of Donald Trump’s second presidency. A change in House control would give Democrats a perch to conduct robust oversight of the administration for its final two years.

Republicans currently hold 218 seats in the House and Democrats have 214. (There is one vacancy in a Republican seat and one vacancy in a Democratic seat, and one Republican member switched his party affiliation to independent.) Democrats need to flip just three seats to gain control of the House.

Top election lawyer and lawmakers received notes over alleged scheme to confuse voters with two Dan Sullivans

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The justice department has sent letters to a top Democratic election lawyer and other Democrats informing them they could be targets in a federal investigation into efforts to get an Alaska man with the same name as Republican senator Daniel Sullivan on to the ballot.

The decision to send the letters is very unusual. The justice department has long avoided taking actions that could affect an election close to election day. It is also not common to send out target letters so early in an investigation; receiving a target letter does not mean that a person will be charged with a crime.

Latest arrests come after DoJ unsuccessfully fought to force state election officials to set aside about 20,000 ballots

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The US Department of Justice (DoJ) in California has charged six more people with alleged voter fraud crimes, an escalation of the Trump administration’s campaign against the state’s election processes on the eve of the midterms.

Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and a close ally of the president, announced on Monday that his office was prosecuting six lawful permanent residents accused of unlawfully registering to vote and casting fraudulent ballots. The DoJ filed similar charges against 28 people across California last month and arranged for a dramatic on-camera arrest of one 72-year-old defendant, editing the footage into a DoJ promotional video.

Sam Levine contributed reporting

Douglas DePodesta says he was made ‘scapegoat’ after collapse of case against Broadview Six anti-ICE protesters

The former head of the FBI in Chicago has accused the Trump administration of pressuring him to investigate the president’s political opponents and making him a “scapegoat” after a major federal case against anti-ICE protesters fell apart.

Douglas DePodesta, who served as FBI special agent in charge from 2024 until July 2026, alleged in a federal lawsuit filed on Monday that the Department of Justice (DoJ) had engaged in “misconduct” and “malfeasance” in its pursuit of unjust prosecutions – and that he was wrongly blamed for the DoJ’s missteps and unlawfully forced out of his job.

The administration’s efforts have raised concerns among experts about potential disruptions after election day

Donald Trump is waging a brazen effort to interfere with voting in this year’s midterm elections, escalating concerns that the federal government will try to slow down certification of election results – a strategy that could create chaos when the new Congress is seated next year.

Experts are certain the administration’s efforts to subvert America’s elections will not work. And some have bemoaned “fearmongering” about far-fetched scenarios that are unlikely to go anywhere in court.

Justice department had demanded state segregate and not count ballots from people it claimed were non-citizens

A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.

The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

Keaton Denlay says agents handed him ‘poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet’ and threatened to criminally prosecute him

A California county elections official is speaking out about the Department of Justice’s campaign against purported “voter fraud”, saying federal officials provided him a disorganized list of names filled with inaccuracies – and threatened to criminally prosecute him if he didn’t take action.

Keaton Denlay, the county clerk-recorder for Butte county, a region north of Sacramento, said a federal agent on Friday hand-delivered what appeared to be a printout of a “poorly formatted Excel spreadsheet with missing and jumbled information”. The DoJ claimed the list was of 47 “likely” noncitizens who were unlawfully registered to vote and demanded the county set aside their ballots. But Denlay said the document was riddled with errors and lacking crucial details, and he declined to act on it.

Bill Essayli, a former GOP lawmaker and ally of president, has not been confirmed by the Senate in his role

A US judge ruled on Tuesday that Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in southern California, was “unlawfully serving” as the head of the US attorney’s office and was disqualified from overseeing two criminal prosecutions.

The order, however, will not immediately go into effect, and the Department of Justice has said it intends to appeal.