Ahead of the midterms, Democrats wargamed dozens of scenarios looking at how President Donald Trump might try to undermine the election, everything from seizing voting machines to falsely declaring a foreign attack.

But when the blue tsunami arrived Tuesday night, Trump seemed to let it wash right over him.

In a series of late-night interviews, the president said he would accept the results. He acknowledged that Democrats had performed well as they retook the House and Senate. And while he refused responsibility for Republicans’ newfound misfortune, he also spoke of cutting deals with Democrats.

“Yes, I’ll accept them,” Trump said on Fox News when asked about the results. He added a short time later, “Congratulations to the Democrats, they did a good job.”

The comments marked a stunning departure for a mercurial president with a long history of alleging elections were stolen in response to unfavorable results. 

They also stood out because this year’s midterms were his first election while in office since 2020, when he led a campaign to overturn his loss that helped spur the mob that sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“My first thought was, ‘Well, I’m glad that’s on tape,’” Pamela Smith, president and CEO of the election security nonprofit Verified Voting, said in an interview.

Fears of federal interference

Election officials spent months planning for the possibility of federal election interference on Election Day. After the FBI seized ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton County, Georgia, in January, state and local leaders across the country weighed how they would respond if the Trump administration tried to take their ballots or voting equipment. 

They mapped out what poll workers would do if federal agents showed up at the polls. Some states even passed new limits on federal law enforcement and military servicemembers at the polls, even though federal law already prohibits armed personnel at election sites.

“There have been so many different kinds of threats and it’s just been so far to get to this day, far too hard for the election officials,” Smith said Wednesday.

None of those extreme scenarios came to pass on Election Day. Instead, Democrats won resounding victories up and down the ballot.

As of midday Wednesday, Democrats had secured 54 Senate seats, according to The Associated Press. Democrats had also won at least 228 seats in the House, well above the 218 necessary to control the chamber. 

The not-close race for control of Congress and a high voter turnout “made it impossible to challenge these results,” David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, told reporters.

Trump blamed the loss on his absence from the ballot, even though he had exhorted Americans to vote as if he were on the ballot. Vice President JD Vance blamed the war with Iran. 

“The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026,” Vance wrote on social media.

Both men sought to explain Republicans’ deep losses — not claim that they didn’t happen. 

Ballot fight consumed officials

But despite Trump’s pledge to accept the results, voting rights advocates said the Trump administration very much attempted to interfere ahead of Election Day and influence how states ran their elections.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued California over the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens and Alaska over alleged voter confusion in the U.S. Senate race. 

California election officials had warned the Justice Department’s demand would have thrown the election into chaos and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the request Monday. Meanwhile, a federal judge tossed the Alaska lawsuit on Sunday.

Justice Department lawyers raised the possibility that election officials could be prosecuted if they counted the ballots of noncitizens or if they failed to follow federal recordkeeping laws. They issued subpoenas to election workers in Los Angeles County, demanding records that suggest prosecutors are examining whether election officials were “aiding and abetting” noncitizen voters.

The DOJ also sued dozens of states for unredacted copies of their voter rolls containing sensitive personal data. Federal judges have rejected those lawsuits in at least 27 decisions so far, and the Trump administration has won none of its cases.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran election-related field operations that federal judges found could intimidate voters. The department also launched a powerful computer program to identify possible noncitizen voters, but Democrats and election experts said its results were unreliable and prone to falsely flagging U.S. citizens.

More broadly, Trump urged GOP state lawmakers across the country to redraw their congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans — a process that accelerated after the Supreme Court weakened limits on racial gerrymandering. But in Alabama, North Carolina, Texas and elsewhere, the new maps did little to shield GOP candidates.

Earlier this year, Trump also pushed the U.S. Postal Service to impose restrictions on mail ballots, a move blocked by the Supreme Court. And he unsuccessfully demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, which would have immediately imposed stringent rules requiring voters to prove their citizenship, leaving states with no time to prepare.

“Despite unprecedented executive branch efforts to interfere in election administration, state and local officials responsible for running our elections have continued to do their jobs and uphold the process,” Michael McNulty, senior policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said in a statement.

Some legal wrangling continues

Trump’s admission of defeat may not fully end his administration’s pressure campaign over elections.

Late on Election Day, the Justice Department secured a rare court victory when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a decision by a three-judge panel removing limitations on the Trump administration threatening election workers with prosecution. 

The decision came after a federal judge in California last week issued an order prohibiting the DOJ from threatening election officials with criminal charges if they didn’t comply with demands related to setting aside the ballots of alleged noncitizen voters.

“We will conduct our criminal investigations without fear or favor,” Bill Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, wrote on social media Tuesday.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to require California to set aside the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizens also remains unresolved. Even though the Supreme Court declined an emergency request by the DOJ, a federal judge has scheduled a hearing on Nov. 13 to examine the list that could include witness testimony.

The consequences of any ruling now aren’t clear. California’s ballots are currently being counted, meaning it would be effectively impossible now to identify whether a ballot came from a suspected noncitizen. The hearing will take place several weeks before election officials must certify results, however.

The hearing could reveal new information about how the Trump administration developed the list. The DOJ has said Homeland Security compiled it based on a public copy of California’s voter roll that was checked against government records and data from the Lexis Nexis research service. 

California election officials have said they’ve found evidence that U.S. citizens are on the list, and in a court hearing on Monday, a Justice Department attorney acknowledged it has a “high error rate.”

Jonathan Miller, chief program officer of Public Rights Project, which represents Los Angeles County in the lawsuit, in a statement framed the dispute in simple terms.

“State and local officials run our elections — and the federal government cannot interfere,” Miller said.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in two cases challenging the constitutionality of the state’s congressional maps. One challenge is based on the claim that the maps unfairly benefit Republicans and the other is on the grounds that the maps are intentionally anti-competitive to protect incumbents. 

Both cases were previously dismissed by panels of three circuit court judges. In both, the Court is not deciding the merits of the arguments but determining if the circuit panels were correct to dismiss the cases. If the Court determines that the dismissals were incorrect, the cases will be sent back to the circuit court level for discovery and trials on the merits of the argument. 

Because of that process, neither case will change Wisconsin’s maps ahead of this year’s midterm elections, but could install new maps ahead of the 2028 elections. 

Wisconsin’s congressional maps were instituted by the Court in 2022 after Gov. Tony Evers and the Republican-controlled Legislature were unable to reach a compromise on new maps. In that case, the Court installed a “least change” principle in which the newly proposed maps had to match as closely as possible to the maps instituted in 2011 — which were widely considered to be the most gerrymandered in the country. 

The maps selected by the Court in 2022 were drawn by Evers, but followed the least change standard. Democrats and fair maps proponents have argued the least change standard poisoned the maps while Republicans have said the argument falls flat because a Democratic governor created them. 

Wisconsin’s congressional maps have repeatedly been challenged since the initial 2011 gerrymander and since the 2022 update. 

In the first part of the day, the Court heard the arguments of the partisan gerrymandering challenge, in which attorney Abha Khanna said that the Wisconsin Constitution’s equal protection clauses give voters in the state protection against maps designed to benefit one party. 

“Was partisan vote dilution the predominant purpose? Was that in fact the effect of the map, and is there any legislative justification outside of sheer partisan dominance that would justify the configuration of these districts?” Khanna said. 

A trio of attorneys argued in favor of the existing congressional maps, saying that the lawsuit was brought so late in the decade it can’t be litigated in the courts anymore, that if the Court wants to rule that partisan gerrymandering isn’t allowed then this case isn’t the right one and that the lawsuit doesn’t give a good enough standard for assessing what counts as an extreme partisan gerrymander. 

During the first arguments, the two conservative justices on the panel expressed skepticism with the claim that the state Constitution protects against partisan gerrymandering. 

“I actually don’t care what happens in other states. I don’t care at all. I care about our Constitution and our laws and what our law says,” Justice Brian Hagedorn said. 

“I know that some states have explicit prohibitions against partisan gerrymandering, however that’s defined. I don’t know what that means,” he added. “But you’re asking for us to just invent a new right that has never been recognized, that even though our founders were well aware of it, as even your own brief recognizes, from the time of our founding, but have never addressed. And you’re appealing to just democratic self-governance, not our actual Constitution, your just sense of what democracy ought to protect.”

The Court’s liberal majority appeared to give some deference to the argument that the lawsuit didn’t properly set up how to assess the extent of a partisan gerrymandering claim, but often got into extended back and forths over the harm that partisan gerrymandering represents. 

Luke Berg, one of the attorneys arguing to protect the existing maps, said in an exchange with Justice Chris Taylor that partisan gerrymandering “doesn’t implicate the right to vote.” 

“How can you say that there is no remedy if it’s demonstrated that partisanship has led to the dilution of the disfavored group’s vote?” Taylor said. “It makes no sense to me, if our whole government is derived from the people, and the power that they give is through the vote, that’s how the people give the power to the government. And so if their right to vote is diluted because of partisanship, I just don’t understand why you’re saying we have no ability as a state court to remedy that.” 

Khanna said Republicans, including some of the attorneys arguing the case in Madison on Wednesday, have made the exact opposite arguments in other states and that they’ve argued map opponents aren’t following the proper process no matter which process is followed. 

“What we’ve seen from just the last couple of years, and frankly, from this argument, where intervenors have said, ‘Oh no, you can’t do this. Oh, you can’t reopen Johnson. Oh wait, you can’t hear this original action. Oh wait, you can’t appoint a three-judge panel. And now that you have appointed a three-judge panel, you can’t hear this appeal,’” she said. “These are just part and parcel of their strategy, which has been to draw this out, and now they say, ‘you know what? The decade’s almost over. There’s really nothing more that this court can do.’”

In the second part of the day, attorney Nicholas Stephanopoulos argued that the congressional maps are illegally anti-competitive. 

“Our position here is a straightforward one,” he said. “Wisconsin’s Constitution does not tolerate officeholders entrenching themselves in power and cutting out the people by suppressing electoral competition.”

But liberal and conservative members of the Court appeared confused by the distinction between a map that is anti-competitive and a map that is gerrymandered to benefit one party. 

“Because it seems to me that what’s underlying that is that the district lines are drawn in such a way to have it be a foregone conclusion that a particular party will win that district, and so I don’t see a whole lot of airspace between this claim and the partisan gerrymandering claim,” Justice Susan Crawford said. 

Stephanopoulos said the difference is that a map drawn to be anti-competitive isn’t concerned with which party wins. 

“It’s relevant what the odds of re-election would be for a candidate, but the anti-competitive theory is uninterested in which party actually,” he said. 

But opponents argued that designing maps to be as competitive as possible comes with trade-offs that might not be ideal. 

“There is a fundamental tension when you maximize for competitiveness or you increase for competitiveness, you are taking away other legitimate values such as representation, such as incumbency protection, such as bipartisan agreement,” Misha Tseytlin, an attorney for Wisconsin’s Republican members of Congress, said. “If you make a map more competitive, then you make it less likely that their incumbents will retain their seats. You also make it more likely that a larger number of the constituents of a particular district are going to be unhappy with the result. There is a legitimate policy dispute as to whether more competitiveness or more representation, incumbency protection is better. Nothing in the Constitution’s text, history, or discourse precedent settles that question as a matter of text.”