Trump questions midterm elections integrity after previously accepting results

US President Donald Trump has questioned the legitimacy of the midterm election results in which Republicans suffered sweeping losses, days after saying he would accept the outcome.

"Does anybody really believe that this 'Election' was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong?" Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday.

This appeared to contradict what he told the New York Times on election night that he was "absolutely willing" to accept the results.

Democrats retook both chambers of Congress in last week's elections. State and local officials across the US said voting had been mostly problem-free.

Some key races, including Senate contests in Alaska and Mississippi, have yet to be called.

In the Truth Social post, Trump made vague claims about polling, voting "dumps", and "machines" without providing specific evidence of what this referred to and whether he believed there had been error or wrongdoing.

The reporting of vote counts on election night proceeded as normal, according to Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"We saw across the nation the standard patterns we see in terms of when the votes are reported," he said.

Stewart added that in some states, like Florida and Georgia, some initial reporting of results happens quickly because they already have the results of early and mail ballots.

Trump has previously attempted to cast doubts on the integrity of elections he has lost, although he himself was not on the ballot in the midterms.

"We would have won easily if I was on the ballot," Trump told CBS News, the BBC's US partner, after it was confirmed his party had lost both the Senate and the House.

• US midterm elections results 2026

Surveys ahead of the election from several pollsters and news outlets suggested that Republicans could lose seats in both the House and Senate.

As it stands, Democrats have won 54 US Senate seats and 254 US House seats in the midterms, giving them comfortable majorities in both chambers of Congress even as counting continues in some races.

Networks have yet to call some key races, including Alaska and Mississippi's Senate seats.

"State laws and practicalities are such that some states will just take longer to count," said Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School.

"That doesn't mean anything nefarious is occurring—we just need to trust local election officials to count every vote and tell us the results when they are done."

The outcome has been clear since election night. Trump told the New York Times then: "We'll, you know, look forward to working with [Democrats]", adding: "We'll probably work something out."

He has also offered his own analysis of why Republicans lost, acknowledging on Fox News that the Iran war had contributed to the defeat.

"People agree with what I'm doing on Iran but they really probably weren't willing to do the short term consequences of paying more for gasoline - I understand that," he said.

Vice-President JD Vance has also blamed the Iran war, which began in February and which has severely disrupted global oil and gas supplies - causing costs to soar, as the reason their party lost the election.

In the run-up to the midterms, Trump made claims about widespread voting fraud, despite evidence that it is rare.

He and his allies alleged for months that the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden, had been rigged against him. His lawyers and allies spent weeks attempting to litigate the results, but courts repeatedly struck them down.

The justice department during his administration has made unprecedented attempts to exert more federal control over elections - a power the Constitution primarily delegates to individual states.

Days before these midterms, it filed controversial lawsuits in federal courts challenging the count and certification of votes in states like California and Alaska, but judges ruled against them in nearly all instances.

Election law experts, state officials, and local elections offices told the BBC they had spent months preparing for a scenario in which the White House or election sceptics questioned the votes' legitimacy.

Despite the intense focus around election integrity on both sides of the debate, top state and local election officials have reported a mostly smooth process so far for the 2026 midterms.

Extreme weather did force some location closures, and a handful of reported administrative or technical issues slowed the process in some local jurisdictions.