Sand, auditor for state with strong Trump support, defeats Maha-backed Republican Zach Lahn as Democrats win big

• US midterms 2026 live – latest updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Democrat Rob Sand has been elected governor of Iowa, the Associated Press projects, a milestone as his party seeks to rebuild its political standing in the midwestern state.

Sand, the state auditor who is the sole Democrat holding statewide office in Iowa, triumphed over Republican Zach Lahn, a political newcomer backed by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s “Make America healthy again” movement.

Populist Democrat defeats Jon Husted and says he will serve voters, not corporations or billionaires

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Democrat Sherrod Brown will return to the US Senate, as Ohio’s voters rejected the incumbent Jon Husted in a significant defeat for Republicans.

Brown’s bid for a comeback after being ousted from the seat he held for 18 years in 2024 became one of the marquee contests of this year’s midterm elections, and a key test of whether Democrats can regain support among the working class and rural voters who have deserted them in recent years.

Jubilant Talarico says ‘Tonight we defeated Goliath’ as Ken Paxton defeat a crushing blow to Trump and Republicans

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

• Tell us: what do you want to know about the midterm election results?

Democrat James Talarico has won the US Senate race in Texas, breaking a 38-year drought for his party in the Republican stronghold and delivering a stunning blow to Donald Trump.

Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and a staunch ally of the US president, in one of the most closely watched contests of the midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

Son of Mexican immigrants will become state’s first Latino governor since 1875 after victory over ex-Fox News host Steve Hilton

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Xavier Becerra, the Democratic former health and human services secretary, was elected governor of California, marking the historic ascension of a longtime public servant who has vowed to resist Donald Trump’s agenda for the final two years of his presidency.

Becerra, 68, is the son of Mexican immigrants and will become California’s first Latino governor since 1875, a milestone in a state where more than 40% of residents are Latino and nearly one in two children has an immigrant parent. Becerra was the overwhelming favorite to defeat Steve Hilton, the Republican endorsed by Trump.

Democratic doctor wins over Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur endorsed by Donald Trump

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Democrat Amy Acton was elected governor of Ohio on Tuesday, after an ugly contest in which her rival Vivek Ramaswamy spent millions of dollars on deeply personal attack ads featuring her estranged mother.

Acton, 60, will become the first woman to serve as Ohio’s governor, ending 16 years of Republican control.

Democratic candidate defeated Republican Gregg Hull, businessman and longtime mayor of Rio Rancho

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary under Joe Biden, has been elected governor of New Mexico and will become the first Native American woman to govern a US state.

Haaland, a Democrat, defeated her Republican opponent Gregg Hull, 60, a businessman and the longtime mayor of the city of Rio Rancho.

As polls close and election results roll in, Americans across the country wait in anticipation and celebrate announced outcomes

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Andrews ran a campaign on healthcare affordability and beat Darline Graham, sister of Lindsey Graham to win

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who campaigned on healthcare affordability, has won the race for US Senate in South Carolina, making her the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate for over a quarter century.

Andrews had faced an uphill battle in what has been seen as a reliably Republican state against Darline Graham, the sister of the late Republican powerbroker Lindsey Graham.

Billionaire Rick Jackson was favored to win until ex-Atlanta mayor campaigned with Barack Obama and Jon Ossoff

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor and Democrat, won the race for Georgia governor on Tuesday in an upset for Republicans. Bottoms will become the first Black, female governor in the US.

Georgia is historically a swing state offering tight margins to the winners of statewide contests, and billionaire businessman Rick Jackson had been favored to win the race until recent days.

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

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

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.

Donalds, who billed campaign as ‘a continuation of the DeSantis-era of success’, becomes state’s first black governor

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Republican Byron Donalds will be the next governor of Florida, and its first Black leader, after defeating Democrat David Jolly in one of the country’s most-watched midterm races.

Donalds was endorsed by Donald Trump and appeared twice with the president at rallies in the campaign’s closing days despite previously appearing to distance himself. He will succeed Ron DeSantis, the former presidential candidate who will be termed out of office in January.

Moody is elected over Nixon in a contest seen as a measure of whether the state remains reliably Republican

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Ashley Moody fended off a challenge from Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist, to win Florida’s special election and retain her seat in the US Senate.

It was the first election win for the Republican, who was appointed by Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis in January 2025, when Marco Rubio became US secretary of state. Moody will serve the remainder of his term until the 2028 election.

Pappas focused campaign against Republican John Sununu on serving as a bulwark against Trump administration

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Chris Pappas, the four-term Democratic congressman, has won New Hampshire’s US Senate race, making him the first out gay man to serve in the upper chamber.

Pappas, 46, is a centrist voice in the US House who has at times broken with his party on major legislation. He focused his Senate campaign on serving as a bulwark against the Trump administration, which is unpopular in the Granite State, and defeated the former senator John Sununu in a closely fought contest.

State’s ex-governor bests Michael Whatley, ex-chair of Republican National Committee, by focusing on lower costs

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Roy Cooper, North Carolina’s former governor, will be the first Democrat to represent the state in the Senate in 10 years, after defeating Michael Whatley, a former chair of the Republican National Committee.

Cooper will succeed the outgoing Republican Thom Tillis and his win marked the first Senate seat to turn blue in this year’s midterms.

Rising Democratic star made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Jon Ossoff, a rising star in the Democratic party who has been cited as a potential presidential contender in 2028, has been re-elected to the Senate in Georgia, defeating Mike Collins, his Republican challenger.

The senator made his re-election campaign a referendum on the Trump administration’s misdeeds, highlighting self-serving stock trades and business deals by the president and others in his orbit, as well as the consequences of the war in Iran and Trump’s trade policies on the finances of Georgia’s voters.

Voter turnout has surged as Americans cast their ballots in the critical US midterm elections. Although mostly smooth, there have been some voting snags across the country. In Westchester county in New York, voting machines have been unable to scan as many as 250,000 ballots, and manual counting could delay the announcement of results there by several days. Meanwhile, a lack of paper ballots saw voters turned away from some polling stations in Illinois, while heavy rain and flooding forced election officials to relocate some polling places in Florida

• US midterm elections – live updates

•  Track live results from all 50 states

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

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

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.

Landmark victories in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina set to give party control of chamber

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Democrats are on the brink of returning to the majority in the US Senate, after their candidates won historic victories across the United States in a sweeping repudiation of Donald Trump.

Democratic victories in Texas, Ohio, North Carolina and South Carolina, projected by the Associated Press, will give them control of the chamber, assuming they can hold on to all seats they currently hold. It was a stunning turnaround for the party, two years after voters put them into the minority in Congress’s upper chamber as they returned Trump to the White House.

Voting machine issues affect Westchester county, New York, but emergency ballots are provided to voters

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Voting in US midterm elections took place relatively smoothly nationwide on Tuesday, with only a handful of reported issues as tens of millions of voters cast their ballots.

With control of the US Congress in the balance, glitches at polling locations were minimal as Americans lined up to vote.

Demand for individual applicant records as part of purported civil rights review fails on procedural grounds

A federal district court judge dismissed a lawsuit on Monday filed by the Trump administration seeking individual applicant records from Harvard, finding the government failed to meet procedural requirements before filing the lawsuit against the university.

Judge Myong J Joun did not rule on the merits of the case, rather he granted a request from Harvard to dismiss the case on procedural grounds, finding that the justice department failed to demonstrate it took necessary steps to seek voluntary compliance before moving for judicial enforcement.

Democrats flip Senate seats in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio; voters reject Trump’s agenda in ‘blue wave’

• Track live results from all 50 states

• Full report: Democrats win control of Congress in ‘blue wave’

• Tell us: how do you feel about the US midterm election results?

As we bring you the latest from around the country, Donald Trump is certainly paying attention. From the White House, the president said that he was tuning into coverage on Fox News.

“I can’t stand Jessica Tarlov’s voice,” Trump said of the Democratic strategist and Fox News contributor in a post on Truth Social. The president called Tarlov “DUMB AS A ROCK”.

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

• US midterms 2026 live – latest updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

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.

President says he is willing to accept results but that if he were on ballot Republicans would have won ‘landslide’

• US midterms 2026 live – latest updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Donald Trump, who spent months urging supporters to pretend he was on the ballot, declared on Tuesday night he “wasn’t on the ballot” as Democrats scored a string of victories over his Republican party in the US midterm elections.

As a blue wave appeared to take hold across the country, the US president said he was prepared to accept the results.

Anil Menon has voted in the US midterm elections by casting an electronic ballot from the International Space Station. He said he filled out the ballot on his station computer and sent it to election officials in Harris county, Texas. In a social media post, he said all three US crew members onboard also had the chance to vote.

• US midterm elections 2026 live

Midterms didn’t appear to have huge impact, though predicted wins for Democrats could mean more regulation

US tech stocks made a recovery on Tuesday afternoon after a selloff spooked investors over AI spending.

Tuesday’s midterm elections didn’t appear to have a huge impact on Wall Street, though investors are predicting Democrats get at least a majority in the House and potentially gain seats in the Senate, which could lead to more AI regulation.

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

• US midterms 2026 live – latest updates

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.

Triumphal arch continues to face legal challenges as government says DC area project will take up to 39 months

The US justice department said on Tuesday that Donald Trump’s proposed 250ft (76 meter) triumphal arch in Washington would not be completed until after the end of his second term.

If it is given ⁠the go-ahead, the ⁠justice department said it ​expected an initial six to eight months of construction focused on excavation and foundation work that could begin as soon as Thursday, with above-ground construction ⁠beginning in May 2027 at the earliest. Total construction is anticipated to take 33 to 39 months, the government said.

National Transportation Safety Board says discovery of parts confirms plane was breaking apart before it crashed

A piece of the private Learjet 60 that crashed in Florida, killing all nine people onboard, was found 4 miles (6km) away from the crash site, according to investigators on Tuesday, providing confirmation the plane was breaking apart prior to impact.

The majority of the left elevator, part of the tail that controls the pitch of the aircraft, was found in three separate pieces between 1.3 miles and 3.8 miles from the crash site at Greenacres, near West Palm Beach, according to National Transportation Safety Board member Tom Chapman.

Residents send message on deportations while grassroots organizers aim to prevent federal election interference

• US midterm elections – live updates

• Track live results from all 50 states

Minnesota voters left “I Voted” stickers on memorial sites for Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, the two US citizens killed by federal immigration officials earlier this year, while organizers in the area deployed their “democracy guardians” to visit and monitor polling sites for disturbances or the federal government.

Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care unit nurse at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Good, a writer and mother of three, were killed during a large-scale immigration enforcement operation in the Minneapolis region in January.

US voters vote today in the midterm elections, which will decide whether Republicans retain control of the House and Senate. A Democratic victory in either chamber would significantly constrain Trump’s ability to advance his domestic agenda. Even if Republicans retain one or both chambers, a reduced majority could make passing legislation more difficult, and could pave the way for Democrats to launch investigations into the administration

• US midterm elections 2026 live: Americans go to the polls to decide control of Congress

• What are the races to watch in the US midterm elections and why do they matter?

Kansas City officials found Jacob Morley, sentenced to life for killing a co-worker, with his truck stuck in mud

An escaped Tennessee prisoner convicted of murder was recaptured on Tuesday near Kansas City, Missouri, when his truck got stuck in the mud after troopers used roadside cameras and a helicopter to track him down, ending his more than a week on the run, authorities said.

Jacob Morley, who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a co-worker four years ago, was apprehended at around noon, officials said.

500-plus-day search for Kylie Arellano ends as FBI warns of ‘gore groups’ targeting and exploiting children

A 17-year-old girl who disappeared last year from Garden City, Utah, has been found in Oregon, and a 39-year-old man has been taken into custody.

The recovery of the teenager took place last Sunday, following a 500-plus day search involving Oregon law enforcement, the FBI’s Salt Lake City field office and the Rich county sheriff’s office in Utah.

Big tech stocks falter as investors question whether billions being poured into AI can generate returns quickly enough

A sell-off of tech stocks that began earlier this month and gained steam with disappointing earnings from leading tech companies drove US markets down by hundreds of billions of dollars on Friday. In total, the decline has knocked nearly $1tn in value off the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange in one week and erased about $2tn in a month.

The S&P 500, the index of the 500 most valuable companies in the US, fell by more than 1% Friday, losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. It was on track to erase its gain for October, even though it set its all-time high during the same month. The weakness for technology stocks dragged the Nasdaq composite down even further, more than 3%, also erasing hundreds of billions in value. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell less.

It will take decades to rebuild trust in a country that removed a tyrant once – and then reinstated him four years later

When Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021 it was possible to believe that Donald Trump’s reign had been an aberration. “America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back,” the new president declared to relieved European leaders shortly after winning the 2020 race. It was true, but not for long.

Trump’s defeat proved that US democracy was mechanically operational, not culturally robust. His supporters tried violent subversion to prevent the inauguration of a successor. A second term should have been unthinkable. Republicans who failed to denounce the 6 January insurrection should have been unelectable. Instead, within four years, US voters reinstated the champion of a failed coup against their cherished constitution as commander-in-chief.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Oklahoma man accused of sending letters with white nonhazardous powder before 2024 and 2026 elections

Federal authorities have charged an Oklahoma man with sending hundreds of letters containing nonhazardous white powder to public officials before the 2024 and 2026 elections.

The powders turned out to be yeast or flour, though not all letters had been fully tested, the FBI said in a court filing made public on Tuesday.

• US set to host Summer and Winter Olympics

• USOPC CEO says business model in early stages

The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) is in the advanced stages of setting up an entity to sell a stake ⁠in the commercial rights for Team USA in return for capital, according to multiple reports.

Any deal would mark a significant shift for the USOPC, a non-profit organization that, unlike many national Olympic committees, relies heavily on sponsorships, licensing ⁠and other commercial revenue streams rather than government funding.

Cleveland Meredith arrested after allegedly posting a call to execute all judges involved in 2021 US Capitol attack trials

A man pardoned by Donald Trump for participating in January 6 attack on the US Capitol and threatening to kill the then house speaker, Nancy Pelosi, is facing new charges for threatening to kill federal judges that presided over his and other cases arising from the violent anti-government clash.

Cleveland Meredith, from North Carolina, was arrested on Monday over a Facebook post in April that allegedly read: “ALL J6 Federal JUDGES will be EXECUTED!”

US president makes surprise election day announcement, saying country does not ‘need’ $4bn annual payment

Donald Trump has said that the US will end military aid to Israel at the end of this year in a surprise election day announcement that appeared to be targeted at voters sceptical of US support for Israel and the war in Gaza.

In a phone interview with Fox News as voting began on Tuesday morning, the US president said the US would cut nearly $4bn (£2.96bn) in military aid to Israel because “they don’t need it”.

Person arrested after fire at police department where officer who shot and killed one-year-old Kohen Wiley had worked

In the early hours of 31 October, a fire broke out at the Senatobia police department in Mississippi, which has been embroiled in controversy recently after one of its officers shot and killed Kohen Wiley, a one-year-old. Though the cause of the fire has not been reported, it is being investigated as arson by agents with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In June, then Senatobia police sergeant Hunter Foster shot Kohen as he sat in his mother’s arms in a Walmart parking lot. Foster, who is white, was responding to a report of an alleged shoplifting; Kohen, his mother and the driver of the vehicle, are Black.

Endorsing his opponent while the US risks plummeting into fascism, she reveals the one issue that triggers her to take destructive action

“Did you talk to anyone? Did you have a long night of the soul? Were you up all night? ... Did you have a dream?”

Interviewing the Michigan US representative Haley Stevens on CNN on Sunday, Anderson Cooper was casting about for explanations. What caused the Democrat’s radical change of heart between a Saturday night promise to her House colleague Debbie Dingell that she would stand with the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and a public endorsement on Sunday morning of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers?

These resource-guzzling centres drive up utility bills and are hated across the political spectrum. Cue a clunky, but potentially influential, new name for them

Jesus may have turned water into wine, but Donald Trump has done one better: he turned Lake Ontario into Lake America and the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. And then, for his next trick, he insisted we all stop talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and call it superintelligence (SI) instead.

Those, of course, are only a few of the name changes the president has ushered in. When he’s not golfing or commenting on senators’ buttocks, president Trump loves a rebranding project. Which makes sense: coming up with a new name is far easier than making meaningful improvements to people’s lives.

The US has seen plenty of terrible speeches over the centuries. But Trump’s midterm rallies are a new low

In a sense, history has already been made. We do not know the result of the election yet, but over the last two months, Americans have endured the worst speeches ever given by a president of the United States.

It is far from a simple matter to adjudicate – there have been so many bad speeches over the years, going back the founders, some of whom dreaded speaking in public. George Washington’s inaugural address did not begin promisingly, with a halting first sentence: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.”

Christians in the south of the state seek to vote their values – but a common faith does not mean a common politics

A few days before the Fourth of July, Ron Peterson, the 38-year-old pastor of Longview United Pentecostal church, stood beneath a large white tent in a parking lot in Longview, Washington.

Surrounded by church members selling fireworks for a fundraiser, Peterson remembered watching area residents rally after an industrial accident at the local paper mill killed 11 people in May. “We can all come together,” he said. “There’s not going to be sections in heaven.”

Americans are voting in midterm elections with control of the House and the Senate at stake for the remainder of Donald Trump’s second term in office. Voters are also electing governors and other state and local officials

Experts say ‘very dangerous’ move diverts attention from violence driven by far-right extremist ideologies

The US Department of Justice is funding research aimed at exploring whether there is a link between gender dysphoria and violent crime.

Last month, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the justice department, said it would grant up to $1m for studies into the frequency and type of violence committed by people who have been diagnosed and treated for gender dysphoria.

A decision could reshape the relationship between religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws in the US

The US supreme court will hear arguments on Tuesday over a challenge brought by two Catholic preschools in Colorado, arguing that they should be admitted to the state’s free education system despite their rejection of children with LGBTQ+ parents.

A decision in the case, St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy, could reshape the relationship between religious freedom and nondiscrimination laws in the US.

From Hamilton to the ‘Epstein class’, we have long been fascinated by a charismatic yet shadowy set of power brokers. American aristocracy is alive and well

Americans remain awed by the extravagance of the super-rich, oddly enticed and generally accepting of the fact that the moneyed elite have privileges that they use to their own advantage.

After the Hollywood celebrity and the professional athlete, the figure who invites the most curiosity is what is colloquially termed “powerbroker”. We’re talking about the dealmaker, the inside player – or in the words of Sade’s song, a “smooth operator”.

Compared to infants in the state’s low-pollution areas, the odds were 4.3 times higher for babies from toxic hotspots

A study looking at babies hospitalized in New Orleans found that babies born to mothers from neighborhoods in south-east Louisiana with high levels of industrial pollution were four times more likely to suffer from severe congenital heart defects.

Published last week, the study in the Environmental Health journal looked at medical records for 454 infants hospitalized at the two major Louisiana hospitals that can provide surgery for heart defects in babies. Researchers traced back where the mothers of these infants lived, examining the levels of industrial toxic pollution in their communities using the US Environmental Protection Agency’s risk-screening database. Compared to infants from low-pollution areas in the region, the odds of congenital heart defects were 4.3 times higher for infants from toxic hotspots, and 3.1 times higher for infants from places with intermediate levels of pollution.

Federal court says group likely to win its free speech claim and tells officials to approve application within seven days

A federal judge ordered state officials in Iowa on Monday to permit a local Satanic Temple organization to hold a holiday event in the rotunda of the state capitol after years of denying the group’s application.

The religious organization and Iowa Republican state officials have been in a legal battle over the group’s applications to hold a holiday event at the state capitol in recent years.

• Slovenian star is averaging 38.3 points per game

• Antetokounmpo offers high praise to fellow All-Star

Giannis Antetokounmpo has offered high praise to his fellow All-Star Luka Dončić after the Los Angeles Lakers star went on another scoring tear on Monday night.

Dončić scored 42 points in the Lakers’ 138-117 win over Antetokounmpo’s Heat to bring the Slovene’s scoring average this season to 38.3 points per game, the best in the NBA.