Trump wooed Latino voters in 2024, then alienated them, with ICE tactics shifting Latino voters toward Democrats

Tuesday night’s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.

“Trump went against us,” said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”

President’s party stripped of control after he spent weeks pleading with Americans to pretend he was on ballot

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The United States woke up to a radically altered political landscape on Wednesday after Donald Trump was dealt a devastating blow in the midterm elections, in which his Republican party was stripped of control of the Senate and the House as his handpicked “Maga” candidates were swept away by a blue tsunami.

With counting still going on in a couple of Senate races, and with 68 House seats as yet undeclared, Democrats were assured of a congressional majority far more comfortable than most pundits had predicted. They had flipped at least seven Senate seats, in such deep-red states as Texas and Kansas, which hadn’t sent a Democrat to the upper chamber for 94 years, along with more than two dozen House districts.

‘It’s the disregard for the rule of law. It just seems like they’re thumbing their nose at it’

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In the battleground state of Maine, Todd Cox, 63, has supported the state’s incumbent Republican senator Susan Collins not once, but twice, in previous elections. Not this time.

On Tuesday, Cox, a technology professional, cast his vote for Collins’s Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson – driven not by pressing local issues, but broader concern “for the direction the country is going in”, he said.

Millions will vote to decide which party controls Congress – which will have a huge impact on Trump’s final years in office

US voters will soon deliver a national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump. On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.

Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the US voting system, what they hope Congress will tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.

Pike is facing death penalty for 1995 murder of classmate, despite surviving a botched execution last month

Christa Pike has marked a month since her failed execution by Tennessee and released a statement in which she laments the “incompetence” that has led to this moment, adding that despite ongoing healing she remains in constant physical pain and mental anguish.

In comments released by her legal team on Friday, the prisoner said that there had not been a moment since she was injected with a massive dose of the sedative pentobarbital that she had not been in pain. “My body hurts. My arms hurt. My hands hurt. My throat hurts. I still struggle to speak. And the pain isn’t just physical. There is pain in my mind and in my soul,” she said.