US Midterm Election Results: Trump Blames Iran War After Losses

Citizens in dozens of US cities approved restrictions or outright bans on data centres during Tuesday’s midterm elections.

“Democrat, Republican, that didn’t matter,” said Alisha Lange, a farmer from Piqua, Ohio. “People want their town back.”

She was one of the driving forces behind the grassroots group Save Piqua, which advocated for a ban on data centres with a capacity of more than 25 megawatts, effectively ruling out any large-scale project.

The ban passed in a ballot measure and now jeopardises the construction of a data centre worth more than $1bn planned by Meta, even though the project has already been approved.

“We’re just a little farm town, and we would much rather just have a cornfield or have some sort of industry that provides an income to a larger amount of people,” the 42-year-old farmer said, referring to the relatively small number of jobs data centres tend to create after they’re built.

In Ottawa, a small town near Kansas City, residents also overwhelmingly approved a ban on large data centres.

“We’re not for sale,” Michael Lewis said.

South Korea’s Finance Ministry says the country will closely monitor changes in AI-related policies and regulations in the US after the midterm elections.

The government will also monitor changes in US tariff policies and developments in Middle East conflicts, the ministry said in a statement after Finance Minister Lee Hyoung-il met with the country’s top economic policymakers on Thursday.

Authorities also pledged to be thoroughly prepared for the possibility of increased volatility in financial markets and to ensure stable economic growth by responding to changes in external conditions.

Trump was publicly humbled by inflation in Tuesday’s midterm elections as rising prices led to big losses for Republicans in the House, Senate and gubernatorial races.

Most respondents to the AP Voter Poll, a survey of roughly 100,000 midterm voters, said Trump’s policies have smothered growth and driven costs higher.

Consumer prices have risen 3.7 percent over the past 12 months, compared with an inflation rate of 3 percent when Trump began his second term.

The president’s message that the fault lies with his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, didn’t land.

About two-thirds of the poll’s respondents said Trump’s policies had fuelled inflation. By contrast, in the 2022 poll of midterm voters, only about half said this about Biden’s policies, according to AP VoteCast.

About nine in 10 voters in this year’s poll said the cost of living was a “crucial” or “major” factor in their US Senate and House votes. And about six in 10 of this group backed Democratic candidates in their local House races.

Here are the major developments of the day:

• Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican Dan Sullivan with 48.2 percent of the vote in Alaska’s US Senate race, with about a quarter of the vote to count.
• In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom is leading incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith by just over 1,000 votes, with 96 percent of votes tallied.
• Democrats have flipped 31 US House seats and seven US Senate seats in the midterm elections. The Republicans have flipped one House seat.
• The Democratic Party hold 240 House seats and 54 Senate seats so far, seizing control of both chambers from the Republicans.
• Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has called on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to resign before he introduces articles for impeachment.
• A Texas state representative has called on Republican Governor Gregg Abbott to curtail the executive powers of the governorship after losing the seat to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
• Democratic US Senator Chris Van Hollen has called for an immediate end to the war on Iran.

Oil prices continue to decrease for a fourth day on expectations that the losses Trump’s Republican Party suffered in congressional elections may reduce the risk of further escalation in the war on Iran.

Brent futures fell 0.85 percent to $93.75 a barrel as of 05:00 GMT, while US West Texas Intermediate crude futures were down 1.36 percent at $86.82.

Both benchmarks tumbled by more than 8 percent in the previous session to settle at their lowest since August 31.

There is an expectation that a weakened Trump, facing a Democratic Congress able to constrain his military options, is likely to have a greater incentive to seek a deal with Tehran.

Michigan-based progressive SuperPAC, Millions of Michiganians, says there was “little to no difference in Jewish support for Elissa Slotkin and Abdul El-Sayed, based on analysis of voting patterns in the state’s top 12 ZIP codes”.

Jewish support for El-Sayed was 60 percent of the total ballots cast, less than 1.3 percent of the votes for Slotkin’s Senate run, two years earlier, “despite millions of dollars spent by AIPAC and Republican groups to move Jewish voters towards Mike Rogers”.

US Senator Elissa Slotkin welcomes Michigan Democrat senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed at a union hall in Jackson, Michigan, on October 29, 2026

Democrats regained control of both chambers of the United States Congress in this year’s midterm elections, with a wave of victories that party leader Hakeem Jeffries likened to an “American tsunami”.

But as of Wednesday night, two US Senate races remain undecided.

A cliffhanger in the southeastern state of Mississippi and a scandal-plagued Alaska race are the final Senate contests to be tallied.

So, why are Alaska’s and Mississippi’s Senate races still up in the air? Al Jazeera breaks it down with this brief explainer.

Read more here.

US Senate candidate for Mississippi Scott Colom speaks to supporters on November 4, 2026, in Jackson, Mississippi

Democratic Congressman-elect Brad Lander has responded to Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid’s comments on his close ties to the Congressional Democratic leadership, saying “you’re not listening to what American voters – Jewish and non-Jewish – are saying”.

In a post on X, Lander says: “As someone who won a seat in Congress last night, and who cares about Israel… We aren’t starving for a barnstorming [performance] tour.”

“We’re hungry to see respect for international law and human rights”, he said.

Congressman-elect Brad Lander speaks during a vigil led by Israelis for Peace, anti-occupation activists, to commemorate the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023 attacks in New York, October 7, 2026

Former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the Republican defeat in the midterm elections opens up the race for the party’s presidential nomination ahead of the 2028 election.

“The scale of the Republican defeat is so great that it makes the race for the GOP presidential nomination wide open,” Gingrich said in a social media post.

“If the administration had won a big victory, Vice President JD Vance would have had an enormous argument to be the inevitable nominee,” he said. “The number of people who want to draft Secretary of State Marco Rubio is staggering,” Gingrich added.

A record number of candidates for federal offices who were backed by or affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won in Tuesday’s US midterm elections, marking the most successful night the left-leaning movement has had in national politics so far.

“This is a record for the DSA; these are numbers we have not seen in over a hundred years in socialist electoral activity,” National Electoral Commission member Chanpreet Singh said on a livestream on Tuesday night after the elections. The stream, broadcast on Twitch to more than 200,000 viewers, was hosted by political commentator Hasan Piker.

Read more here.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, left, laughs with US Senator Bernie Sanders, right, during an address marking Mamdani’s first 100 days in office on Sunday, April 12, 2026

Domestic concerns exacerbated by Trump’s foreign policy missteps led to the Democratic landslide in Tuesday’s midterms, says Leslie Vinjamuri, the CEO of Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

In a post on X, Vinjamuri said that at the beginning of his second term, Trump promised “he would be the president to end wars and not to take America into new wars”.

“And we’ve actually seen the reverse” of that, she said, adding that Trump’s presidency has been “marked by war, and I think Americans haven’t liked that”.

US President Donald Trump holds a news conference at Bestepe Presidential Compound during the NATO Summit on July 8, 2026 in Ankara, Turkey 

US President Donald Trump has told CNBC’s Washington correspondent Eamon Javers, he “can work” with the Democrats on “many things, many more things than people understand”.

“When I ran against Bernie Sanders, basically when he dropped out, almost all of his people joined me instead of Hillary [Clinton]” Trump told Javers, adding that Sanders and him were “identical on trade”.

The official handle for the US Trade Representative on X responded to the comments with: “Reindustrializing America has always been nonpartisan. I have ideas.”

US President Donald Trump speaks with members of the media on the day the final steel beam goes into the ballroom, at the White House in Washington, DC, November 4, 2026