US President Donald Trump has blamed the Republican Party’s heavy defeat in the midterm elections on the fact that his name did not appear on the ballot.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform late on November 3.
By then the Democrats had already been projected to win the House of Representatives. US networks including CNN, NBC News and CBS News called the lower chamber for them shortly after 10pm Eastern Time.
CNN projected at 11.35pm that the Democrats had also secured at least 51 Senate seats, a call later confirmed by The Associated Press.
Going into the vote, the Republicans held 53 of the 100 Senate seats and a narrow majority in the House. The Democrats needed a net gain of four seats to take the upper chamber.
They flipped Republican-held seats in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, according to Time magazine. In Kansas, Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton became the state’s first Democratic senator in nearly a century.
Time reported it was only the fifth time since the Second World War that a party had flipped both chambers of Congress in a midterm election.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly urged supporters to imagine he was standing for election himself, casting the vote as a referendum on his presidency. On election night, though, he said he did not regard the result as a personal defeat, according to Newsweek.
He also struck a conciliatory tone, telling The New York Times he looked forward to working with the Democrats and expected the two sides to reach agreements.
Exit polls carried out by SSRS for a consortium of US media outlets suggested the cost of living weighed heavily on voters. Nearly nine in 10 said it was a crucial or major factor in their decision.
The Washington Post also pointed to discontent over the war in Iran.
Control of both chambers would allow the Democrats to block the President’s nominees and open investigations during the final two years of his term.
In Brussels, officials had played down expectations before the vote. European Commission spokeswoman Paula Pinho said the EU would not comment on elections inside the bloc or abroad, AFP reported on October 28.
EU diplomats told the agency they did not expect a Democratic win to boost US support for Kyiv in the Ukraine War or bring a major reversal of Trump’s tariffs on European goods.
As Brussels Signal columnist Anthony J. Constantini argued in May, even a Democrat-run Congress would lack the votes to stop the President withdrawing US troops from Europe or weakening NATO.
