Trump Questions Midterm Election Results Days After Saying He Would Accept Them
President Donald Trump said Monday he doubts the midterm results were honest, reversing the pledge he made on election night to accept the outcome. He offered no evidence, and election officials have reported no major problems with voting machines or early voting.
President Donald Trump questioned the honesty of last week’s midterm elections in a social media post on Monday, six days after telling The New York Times on election night that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”
What the record shows
Most public polls before the election forecast a Democratic wave, and the results matched that forecast. Democrats won 54 seats in the Senate and 254 seats in the House, according to the BBC, giving them comfortable majorities in both chambers as counting continued in some races.
Election officials across the country have not raised major concerns about early-voting discrepancies or voting machines in the 2026 races, according to USA Today. Trump, asked later whether he believes the election was rigged, told reporters at a briefing, “I think the numbers were terrible in terms of those early votes.”
Early and mail votes are counted and reported in batches under state law, so large totals arriving at once are a normal part of the count. Democrats have done better than Republicans with early and mail votes in recent elections, while Republicans tend to do better on Election Day voting.
A separate claim about Alaska
Trump also accused Democrats of “fraud” for recruiting a candidate with the same name as Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska to peel votes from the incumbent. Democrat Mary Peltola leads Sullivan by less than 1 percentage point, a difference of 637 votes, while the second Sullivan received 3,600 votes, according to USA Today.
“They stole it,” Trump said, accusing Democrats of confusing Alaska voters. Alaska uses a ranked-choice voting system in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, and the ranked-choice tally in that race would not start until Nov. 18 under state law.
Trump acknowledged the midterm defeats in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, saying Republicans struggled because he was not on the ballot and because of the war in Iran. “They didn’t like the war. They didn’t like the fact that gasoline went up,” he said.
Trump has a long history of denying election results when he or other Republicans lose and alleging voter fraud without evidence. He still refuses to accept his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, after making groundless voter-fraud claims that came before the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, according to USA Today.
Reporting based on coverage by USA Today and the BBC.
