President Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail with rallies in Iowa and Kansas, Republican-leaning Farm Belt states where his party is fighting to hold US Senate seats, two days before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.
Trump, who spent yesterday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after weeks of campaigning across multiple states, won Iowa by double digits in 2024. But polls show Democrats tied with or leading Republicans in many of the state’s races. And Trump’s approval among rural Americans fell to a new low of 45 per cent in October, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling.
Kansas, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1932, is also facing an unexpectedly close race.
Thirty-five Senate seats and all 435 House of Representatives seats are on the ballot tomorrow. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both chambers.
Democrats and many Republicans have framed the election as a referendum on Trump’s policies.
“His agenda, without any question, is on the ballot,” Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, told NBC’s Meet the Press.
Scott, the head of the Republican Senate campaign committee, predicted his party would keep its majority in the chamber.
If Democrats take control of the House or Senate, they could block Trump’s legislative agenda for his final two years in office and launch investigations of an administration that has so far faced largely compliant Republican majorities. The White House has been preparing to implement portions of Trump’s agenda without the aid of Congress.
More than 52 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, a record for a midterm and up from nearly 46m who voted before Election Day in 2022.
Senate control could come down to a handful of states, including Alaska, where polls show incumbent Senator Dan S Sullivan, a Republican, in a tight race with Democrat Mary Peltola.
Sullivan said he would accept the results of the election even as the Trump administration presses a criminal investigation into the presence of another challenger named Daniel J Sullivan Jr on the ballot. Separately, the Trump administration signalled it would likely ask the US Supreme Court to take up its legal battle with California over alleged non-citizen voting.
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