Trump smashed in historic rebuke of his second term

US President Donald Trump told voters to pretend he was on the ballot. They listened.

If this was a vote on Trump then it was an absolute repudiation of a man who’s presided over skyrocketing prices fuelled in part by a war he started after coming to office promising not to start wars.

Deep-red Texas now has a Democratic senator for the first time since 1988, and its first Latina governor to boot. Kansas is blue in the Senate for the first time in almost 100 years.

Political commentators are making comparisons to the pasting Richard Nixon received after the Watergate scandal.

Voters so thoroughly rejected the Trump administration that the only Senate races left in play on Wednesday (Thursday morning AEDT) were Alaska, which often takes weeks to count due to all the mail-in ballots from so far away, and Mississippi, which no one was even talking about before the midterms.

Leading into polling day, Republicans were pouring money into races they would have won blindfolded two years ago and it was a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would seize the House. 

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They’ve guaranteed a minimum 10-seat majority already with almost 70 races still to call.

The wisdom was that the odds were tougher in the Senate, but Democrats still had a very good chance of pulling off the improbable – flipping four Republican states and holding all of their own. 

By the end of election day, they had flipped seven, with two more in the balance. 

It’s only the fourth time since World War II that the opposition party has flipped both chambers of Congress. 

Even the gubernatorial races were a cause for blue confetti. Amy Acton overcame an attack ad featuring her estranged mother to win in Ohio, Rod Sand took Iowa and Nevada Attorney-General Aaron Ford became the state’s first Black governor.

In the space of a few hours Texas went from the indestructible bulwark of Republican power to a Democrat stronghold, as Gina Hinojosa sailed into the governor’s office in a massive upset and 37-year-old James Talarico took the Senate.

Ousted Texas senator Ken Paxton, who had Trump and Elon Musk in his corner but couldn’t shake a string of corruption allegations, had issued a repeated warning throughout the campaign that now looks like a prophecy.

“If we lose Texas, we lose America,” he said.

Trump says ‘there was a mood’

Trump admitted anger over Iran was a “a part of” the national shellacking but denied the results were “a hit on me”.

“It’s just a point in time, Bret. Just a point in time. It’s the way it is,” he told Fox News. 

“There was a mood in the air, I guess.” 

Trump did agree to accept the results.

On Truth Social, the president hit out at Abbott for his loss and stressed that the Trump name was not on the midterm ballots.

“If I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote.

But in exit polls conducted by the Associated Press, four in 10 said they wanted to “express opposition” to Trump.

About 60 per cent blamed him for higher prices and three-quarters were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the direction of the country.

The economy (49 per cent) was unsurprisingly the top issue but it was closely followed by “the state of democracy” (32 per cent), suggesting Trump’s constant attempts to tilt courts, election districts and other institutions in favour of Republicans was having an impact.

Young voters dramatically shifted away from the GOP after warming to Trump in 2024, and the party lost ground among Black men and Hispanics.

It now remains to be seen how Trump will react and how strongly Democrats will pursue mooted plans to use their new power for a series of investigations against top members of the Trump administration and deeper scrutiny of how he's enriched his family.