Democrats Lead in Five of Seven Key Senate Races as Trump Hits Record-Low Approval on Midterm Eve

Democrats head into Tuesday’s midterm elections leading their Republican rivals in five of the seven Senate races that will decide control of the chamber, according to the final set of polls from The New York Times and Siena University published on Monday, while President Donald Trump closes his campaign with the lowest approval rating of any president heading into a midterm election in 80 years.

The surveys, conducted in the final days before Americans vote on 3 November, put Democrats ahead in Texas, Kansas, Michigan, Maine and Ohio, and within the margin of error in Alaska and Iowa, according to USA Today, which reported the findings on Monday morning. If the polls are even broadly right, Democrats are within reach of the net gain of four seats they need to overturn the Republicans’ 53-47 Senate majority — a result that would have looked implausible when the cycle began, given that most of the seats on the ballot are in states Trump carried.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 Senate seats are on the ballot on Tuesday, in the first nationwide verdict on Trump’s presidency since he returned to the White House. Democrats need a net gain of four seats in each chamber to overturn the Republicans’ narrow 218-214 House majority and their 53-47 Senate edge, according to Reuters. They are widely expected to reclaim the House; the Senate battle remains highly competitive.

Trump will deliver his closing message on Monday afternoon at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, according to USA Today, capping a final weekend of rallies in Florida, Iowa and Kansas and a day of nine closed-press telephone rallies. The White House’s public daily guidance, preserved in an independent press-pool archive, schedules his remarks for 2 p.m. Eastern on Monday, with telephone rallies at 11 a.m., 11:45 a.m., 4 p.m., 4:45 p.m., 5:30 p.m., 6:15 p.m., 7 p.m., 7:45 p.m. and 8:15 p.m.

The final polls: Democrats ahead where it matters

The New York Times/Siena polls found the most striking leads in two states where Democrats have not won a Senate race in generations. In Texas, Democratic state Representative James Talarico led Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton by 50% to 43%, according to USA Today. Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. In Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton led Republican Senator Roger Marshall by 49% to 44%; Kansas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

In Michigan, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed led Republican Mike Rogers by 53% to 42%, according to the Times/Siena survey. The poll was conducted before El-Sayed’s former primary opponent, Democratic Representative Haley Stevens, endorsed Rogers on Sunday — a defection that has shaken the race in its final hours and which NEXA News HD reported on Monday. In Maine, Democratic former state Senator Troy Jackson led Republican Senator Susan Collins by 51% to 45%. In Ohio, Democratic former Senator Sherrod Brown led appointed Republican Senator Jon Husted by 49% to 44%.

Two other races sat within the polls’ margins of error. In Alaska, Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola led Republican Senator Dan Sullivan by 48% to 46%, and in Iowa, Democratic state Representative Josh Turek led Republican Representative Ashley Hinson by 48% to 47%, according to USA Today. The margins of error in the polls ranged from 4.8 points in Alaska to 3.3 points in Texas.

The Cook Political Report rates Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas as toss-ups, according to NPR’s final ratings roundup, cited by NewsCubby. Several of those races sit within the margin of error in the final public surveys, and NPR’s Domenico Montanaro wrote that polling, advertising spending and candidate travel now point to competitive races in states Trump won by double digits in 2024, including Alaska, which Trump carried by 14 points, Iowa by 13, Kansas by 16, Ohio by 11 and Texas by 13.

Democrats are also defending open seats in New Hampshire, where Representative Chris Pappas led former Senator John E. Sununu by 7 points in the latest poll, and in Minnesota, where Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan led Republican Michele Tafoya by 3 points in a mid-October survey, according to NewsCubby. In North Carolina, former Governor Roy Cooper led Republican Michael Whatley by 10.5 points for the seat Senator Thom Tillis is leaving, a race NPR calls a likely Democratic pickup.

Trump’s approval at its lowest point

The polls land against a bleak backdrop for the president. Trump has a 36% approval rating, according to the latest New York Times poll tracker, which compiles the daily average of polls conducted by various organisations, while 61% disapprove, USA Today reported on Monday. With his favourability dipping over the last 30 days, his approval rating is the lowest for any president heading into a midterm election in the last 80 years.

According to the Times’ chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, Trump has the lowest pre-midterm favourability rating since President Harry Truman — and fellow Democrats were heavily defeated in the 1946 elections that followed, USA Today reported. A CNN poll from 21 October put his approval at 32%, a record low for that poll, while the final NPR/PBS/Marist poll found 40% of likely voters approve and 59% disapprove. Among independents in the Marist survey, it was 34% approve and 64% disapprove, according to This Newsroom. A Reuters/Ipsos poll showed a small improvement, with approval up one point to 32% after a record low the week before.

The Times’ final national poll, conducted with Siena University, found Trump’s falling favourability linked to several top issues. Just under three in 10 likely voters support how the president has managed Americans’ cost of living, the newspaper said, and more than four in 10 Republicans dislike his handling of fuel costs, according to USA Today. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 36% of voters thought Democrats were better placed to tackle the cost of living, compared with 28% who chose Republicans, while an AP-NORC poll found only 25% of American adults approve of Trump’s handling of the economy.

The cost of living is voters’ top issue in the CNN poll, and Trump’s approval on the economy sits at just 27% there, according to This Newsroom. The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index, which tracks household views on personal finances and broader economic conditions, stood at 48 in October — near the record low of 44.8 set in May — and down 31.9% from 70.5 in October 2024, just before Trump won back the White House, USA Today reported. The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to 91.7 in October, but remained below its revised October 2024 reading of 109.6.

Reuters reported on Monday that voters are in a sour economic mood heading into the election, with high and rising prices a key issue and many blaming the president’s policies, specifically tariffs and the war with Iran, for persistent inflation. The numbers tell a more complex story, Reuters noted: the unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.2% in September, more people than ever are employed, overall economic growth is solid, and data released last week showed the American economy grew at a 3.4% annualised pace last quarter, its strongest performance this year. Weekly unemployment insurance claims are near a 57-year low, and the unemployment rate has measured no higher than 4.5% for five straight years — the longest stretch on record, according to Reuters.

A record early vote

More than 54 million Americans — 8 million more than in 2022 — had already cast ballots before Election Day, according to the University of Florida Election Lab, USA Today reported on Monday. For comparison, about 45.9 million early votes were recorded ahead of Election Day in the 2022 midterm elections. States with competitive Senate races, including Texas, Maine and Kansas, are showing large increases in early voting, according to a recent Associated Press analysis cited by USA Today, and South Carolina and North Carolina are also recording more early voting than in 2022.

Texas alone recorded more than 7 million early votes, according to the Washington newsletter Today in Washington. The surge matters because it suggests the enthusiasm gap that pollsters have detected all autumn is real: opinion polls have shown Democratic voters significantly more enthusiastic about voting than Republicans heading into Election Day, according to Reuters.

The forecasters, meanwhile, have moved decisively toward the Democrats. Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats an 84% chance of winning the House and projects about 241 seats for them, according to This Newsroom. The Silver Bulletin model puts the figure even higher, at roughly 95%, and projects an average gain of 25 seats. Fox News rates Senate control a toss-up, with Alaska, Texas and Iowa among the races to watch, while Decision Desk HQ gives Democrats a 64% chance there.

Prediction markets tell a similar story. On Kalshi, 94% of users expect the Democratic Party to win the House — the highest percentage all year — and Polymarket users trade blue 94% of the time as well, according to Action Network. Kalshi users are slightly more divided on the Senate, with 74% expecting it to go blue, still a 10% jump from a week ago, and 53% of traders expect Democrats to win by three or more seats. Reuters reported that the odds of a Democratic sweep stood at 72% on Polymarket, while the chance of Republicans holding the Senate and Democrats winning the House stood at 23%, and the chance of Republicans retaining both chambers at just 6%.

Trump’s closing pitch: vetoes, pardons and a final rally

Trump has spent the final days of the campaign preparing publicly for the possibility of defeat. He has said he will wield the veto to enforce his priorities if Democrats gain control of the House or the Senate, but that he expects they will want to negotiate deals. “We’ll figure a way,” he said as he left Washington on 27 October for a pair of Texas rallies. “Look, I have a strong veto.” He said he hoped Democrats would not win enough seats to lead either chamber, adding: “I hope that won’t be the case. But if it is, it’s happened before with many presidents. You have a strong veto and you end up working out deals,” according to USA Today.

He has described himself as “Mr. Veto” in a clip from a New York Post podcast interview aired on Sunday on Fox News, according to Bloomberg, cited by This Newsroom, telling the interviewer: “They’ll be sending stuff up, you veto it.” Reuters reported on 1 November that White House staffers had spent months cataloguing what Trump could do without a single congressional vote — tariffs on critical minerals and wind turbines, visa crackdowns on students and foreign workers, housing by executive order — and that the White House had sought legal cover from the Justice Department in advance. The White House spokeswoman called that account a false narrative, while declining to deny any single detail, according to the newsletter that first summarised the Reuters report.

In the same podcast interview, which aired on 2 November, Trump vowed to protect Elon Musk and said he would consider pre-emptively pardoning the world’s richest man and other White House aides as Democrats prepare for investigations if they take control of the House, according to USA Today. “It’s talk, but if it is talk, we’ll have to protect them,” Trump said when asked about the potential for House Democrats to arrest Musk and seize his assets if they gain power. He said he would issue pre-emptive pardons to Musk, a close ally, and other potential targets of Democratic investigations if he believed it was necessary to protect them, even if they had not been formally charged with any crimes. “That’s what Biden did. He gave everybody a pardon,” Trump said. “I would if I needed to, sure. I wouldn’t even think about it. I did it for J6.”

Democrats have signalled they could pursue investigations into Musk’s run leading the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ lucrative contracts with the federal government and his potential role in cutting Ukraine’s access to the satellite internet provider Starlink, which is operated by his company SpaceX, according to USA Today. Musk, who spent nearly $290 million to help Trump in the 2024 election, has poured in $474 million to boost Republicans in the 2026 midterm election, according to The New York Times — including $212 million to help the Texas Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton.

Trump also used the final weekend to make headlines of a different kind. Speaking in Salina, Kansas, and Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, he suggested yet again that New Mexico should be renamed “New America”, according to USA Today. He argued in October that the name “would add great value and prestige to the State”, and that “home values and incomes would rise, and you would be even prouder while saluting our beautiful American flag”. He has previously pushed to rebrand other parts of the United States that share names with foreign countries, ordering the Gulf of Mexico to be renamed the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario to be renamed Lake America, and restoring Fort Liberty’s former name, Fort Bragg, and changing the nation’s highest peak from Denali back to Mount McKinley, USA Today reported.

Michigan and Alaska: the two races that sum up the night

Two races capture the strangeness of this election better than any others. In Michigan, the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed faced a new challenge after his former primary opponent, Representative Haley Stevens, threw her support behind his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, on Sunday. Democrats rallied behind El-Sayed, while Trump praised Stevens and launched a series of attacks against El-Sayed, according to USA Today.

Democratic leaders put internal party divisions aside and united in support of El-Sayed on Sunday after Stevens backed his Republican opponent. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Stevens’ defection a “despicable betrayal”, while former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said El-Sayed “must win”, USA Today reported. Schumer had previously backed Stevens in the Democratic primary but has since thrown his support behind El-Sayed. “Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors,” Schumer said in a post on X.

El-Sayed’s campaign raised $2.4 million on 1 November after Stevens endorsed his rival, according to USA Today. The money came from nearly 30,000 first-time contributors, with contributions averaging $36.74 from more than 65,000 people. “This record-breaking grassroots fundraising haul is a testament to the excitement that Abdul’s movement has inspired in the hearts of Michiganders — and a rejection of the status quo politics that’s left Michigan behind for far too long,” said Cole Wozniak, a campaign spokesperson.

In Alaska, meanwhile, the presence of two “Dan Sullivans” on the Senate ballot has spurred questions about whether the state’s results could get messy and mired in litigation as Republicans and Democrats vie for control of Congress, according to USA Today. A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s lawsuit on Sunday seeking to block certification of the race if the incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan lost because retired school teacher Daniel J. Sullivan’s name was also on the ballot — a ruling NEXA News HD reported on Monday. The teacher’s campaign has been accused of being recruited as a spoiler to confuse voters, though the candidate at the centre of the dispute has denied those allegations.

Election law experts told USA Today that Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system lessens the chance that the repeat “Dan Sullivans” will change the election’s outcome. The Times/Siena poll put Peltola ahead by two points, inside the margin of error — a reminder that the race which could decide the Senate may also be the one that takes longest to call.

What is at stake beyond Congress

The outcome will shape far more than the balance of power in Washington. Democratic wins in one or both chambers would likely trigger investigations into the ethics of Trump and his administration, their handling of immigration enforcement and the war with Iran, according to Reuters. A stronger-than-expected Republican showing could reinforce Trump’s grip on the party, while heavy losses could increase pressure to rethink unpopular policies such as tariffs and the war, and shape the message of candidates vying to succeed him.

Corporate America is already bracing for a potential shift in the balance of power, Reuters reported on Monday. In case of a strong Democratic showing, analysts and strategists say clean energy, housing and healthcare stocks could benefit, while artificial intelligence, data centre and defence companies may draw greater scrutiny from lawmakers. Democrats plan to scrutinise the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back emissions rules and could use the Congressional Review Act to overturn regulations that make it easier to sell petrol-powered trucks and SUVs, according to Reuters.

The election will also be watched for what it reveals about the mechanics of American voting itself. Election officials have warned that close races could spark disputes over voter eligibility, ballot counting and certification, while long lines, machine malfunctions or challenges by partisan poll watchers could fuel litigation and delay results, according to Reuters. Trump’s Justice Department plans to deploy about 1,000 monitors nationwide on Election Day, roughly triple the number used in the last midterms — a move some local officials worry could intimidate voters, although the Justice Department says those fears are baseless.

How Trump responds to the results, especially if Republicans lose control of Congress, could become one of the night’s biggest stories, Reuters noted. In the early hours of 4 November 2020, before vote counting had finished in several states, Trump declared victory and called for counting to stop. Election deniers who have met with Trump have urged a federal role in the midterm vote count, according to MS NOW, cited by The Monolith, with Tina Peters, convicted over a breach of her county’s voting system, saying the president has the “authority” to send federal law enforcement into the count.

Democrats are also hoping to pick up seats on utility regulatory boards that affect people’s power bills and the infrastructure that data centres rely on, according to USA Today. There are races in nine states this year, but Democrats are most competitive in Arizona and Georgia, where races for governor and Senate are bringing voters to the polls. In Arizona, Republicans hold all five seats on the Arizona Corporation Commission, and two Democrats are running hoping to weaken that majority. In Georgia, if Democrats sweep two seats, they will gain 3-2 control of the five-member Public Service Commission.

Analysis: Why It Matters

A referendum the president cannot escape

Midterm elections are, by tradition, a referendum on the president, and this one is no exception — except that the president has made it more so than most. Trump is not on the ballot on Tuesday, but voters have his economic record in mind as they head to the polls, and the mood is sceptical, if not downright grumpy, as Reuters put it. The paradox of this election is that the economy’s headline numbers are strong — low unemployment, solid growth, a booming stock market — while the way ordinary people feel about their own finances is close to the worst ever recorded. That gap between the statistics and the sentiment is the central fact of the campaign, and it explains why a president presiding over 3.4% growth can have a 36% approval rating. Voters do not experience gross domestic product; they experience the price of petrol, the electricity bill and the weekly shop. On that measure, the administration has lost the argument, and the Times/Siena finding that fewer than three in 10 likely voters back the president’s handling of the cost of living is the number that matters most.

The Senate map has flipped the script

The most remarkable feature of the final polls is not that Democrats lead, but where they lead. When the cycle began, Democrats were seen as long shots for the Senate majority because most of the seats on the ballot are in states Trump carried — and carried comfortably. A Democrat leading in Texas, where no Democrat has won a Senate race since 1988, and in Kansas, where the drought stretches back to 1932, is not a normal midterm pattern; it is a sign that the national political environment has overwhelmed the usual rules of state partisanship. That said, the polls come with a warning label that the forecasters themselves keep repeating. The Cook Political Report still rates all seven battlegrounds as toss-ups, the margins in Alaska and Iowa are inside the margin of error, and Reuters’ panel of analysts pointed out that a national swing of even 10 points toward Democrats would likely still leave the party two seats short of a majority, because so many of its targets sit in deep-red territory. The polls describe a possible Democratic Senate; they do not guarantee one.

The enthusiasm gap is real — and measurable

The early-vote figures give the polling a foundation that mere surveys cannot. More than 54 million ballots cast before Election Day, 8 million more than in 2022, is not a sampling artefact; it is behaviour. The increases are largest precisely in the states with competitive Senate races — Texas, Maine, Kansas — which suggests that the voters who are most motivated are turning out where it counts. The risk for Democrats, flagged by Reuters’ analysts, is that the groups driving that enthusiasm — young voters, Black voters and Hispanic voters — have historically turned out at lower rates in midterm elections than in presidential years, and that surveys show persistent scepticism among these groups towards both parties, especially over the cost of living. A record early vote is a strong signal, but the final test is whether the voters who cast those ballots are the ones who decide the closest races.

The veto presidency is already being built

Whatever happens on Tuesday, the most consequential story of the campaign’s final days may be the one about what comes after it. Trump has said openly that he will become “Mr. Veto” if Democrats win, and Reuters reported that his White House has spent seven months cataloguing what he can do without Congress at all — tariffs, visa restrictions, housing policy by executive order, spending already-appropriated money on his own authority. That is not the behaviour of a president preparing to compromise; it is the behaviour of one preparing to govern around a hostile legislature. The pardon pledge to Elon Musk points in the same direction: a president insulating his allies against the investigations a Democratic House would bring. The message to voters is, in effect, that the election will not change how he governs, only how he governs. That candour may be strategically shrewd — it tells his base that their vote still matters even if Congress flips — but it also raises the stakes of the vote itself, because it makes clear that the normal checks of divided government may not operate in the normal way.

What the night will actually tell us

The first results will arrive quickly and may mislead. Early results from Republican-held House seats in Florida and Virginia could provide clues to the size of any Democratic gains, according to Reuters, and the first big signal comes at 7 p.m. Eastern from Georgia and South Carolina. But the races that will decide the Senate — Alaska, where polls close at 8 p.m. local time, which is midnight Eastern for most of the state and 1 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday in the Aleutians — will take far longer. Ranked-choice counting in Alaska and Maine, the possibility of recounts in races decided by a point or two, and the Justice Department’s 1,000 monitors all point to a count that may stretch for days. The honest reading of this election eve is that the polls, the forecasts and the betting markets all point the same way, and they have rarely been this aligned. But polls have underestimated Republican strength in recent cycles, the Senate map is brutally unforgiving, and the final Times/Siena numbers, for all their drama, still leave two of the seven decisive races inside the margin of error. The verdict on Tuesday will be a verdict on a presidency. It will also be a verdict on whether the polling industry, after years of misses, has finally learned to measure the country it is trying to describe.

What to Watch Next

1. Poll closing times: The first big signal comes at 7 p.m. Eastern from Georgia and South Carolina; the Senate picture will not be clear until Alaska’s polls close at midnight Eastern, and the Aleutians at 1 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.
2. Florida and Virginia House seats: Early results from Republican-held seats in these two states will give the first reliable indication of the size of any Democratic wave, according to Reuters.
3. Michigan: Whether El-Sayed’s $2.4 million fundraising surge after the Stevens endorsement offsets the damage of a cross-party defection in the final 48 hours — and whether the Times/Siena lead of 11 points survives contact with the voters.
4. Alaska’s count: Ranked-choice tabulation and the “double Sullivan” ballot could delay the result that may decide Senate control, with litigation possible if the margin is narrow.
5. Trump’s response: Whether the president accepts the results, how quickly he claims victory or fraud, and whether the veto-and-executive-order strategy reported by Reuters becomes the governing model for his final two years.

Sources

• USA Today — Election live updates: Trump to make final midterm pitch at Reflecting Pool (2 November 2026)
• Reuters — Six things to watch as US voters decide control of Congress (2 November 2026)
• Reuters — Six reasons Democrats may fall short of a midterm landslide (2 November 2026)
• Reuters — US voters in a sour economic mood heading into midterm elections (2 November 2026)
• Reuters — Sectors bracing for a pivot as US midterm elections loom (2 November 2026)