President Trump returns to campaign trail ahead of congressional elections — Channel NewsAsia
US President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail on Sunday, scheduling rallies in Iowa and Kansas — Republican-leaning states where the party is seeking to retain Senate seats. Voting for 35 Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives will take place on Tuesday. Republicans currently hold narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress, Channel NewsAsia reports.
Trump won Iowa in the 2024 presidential election by a double-digit margin. At the same time, polls show that Democrats are tied with or ahead of Republicans in a number of races in the state. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, Trump’s approval rating among rural US residents fell to 45% in October, a new low.
In Kansas, where a Democrat was last elected to the Senate in 1932, this year’s race has also proven unexpectedly close. Democrats and some Republicans describe the election as an assessment of Trump’s policies. The chairman of the Republican Senate election committee, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, said the president’s agenda is part of the electoral choice and predicted that Republicans would retain their Senate majority.
Early voting
According to the University of Florida’s Election Lab, more than 52 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail. This is a record figure for midterm elections: nearly 46 million voters had cast their ballots before Election Day in 2022.
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If Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives or the Senate, they will be able to block Trump’s legislative initiatives during the final two years of his term and launch investigations into the administration’s activities. The White House is preparing to implement part of the presidential agenda without Congress’s help.
Disagreement in Michigan and dispute in Alaska
In Michigan, Representative Haley Stevens, who lost the Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, publicly endorsed his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers. This came after Stevens urged El-Sayed to condemn an advertisement by an outside group that, she said, blames Israel for high food prices.
In Alaska, incumbent Republican Senator Dan Sullivan said he would accept the election results, although the Trump administration is seeking a criminal investigation into the presence on the ballot of another candidate — Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. The US Department of Justice asked a federal court not to certify Alaska’s voting results in the event of a narrow defeat for the incumbent senator. The campaign of Democrat Mary Peltola and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. himself denied coordination between them.
