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Wall Street surged at the open, after Democrats scored historic victories in midterm elections and secured control of US Congress.

The Dow Jones rose 2%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the benchmark S&P 500 both gained more than 1%. That’s quite a reversal: Overnight, stock futures fell sharply as investors worried about the prospect of tougher regulation of the AI sector and the impact on economic growth.

Excitement over midterm election results tempered by worry of return to ‘business as usual’

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Guardian readers from around the world have shared their reactions to the results of the US midterm elections on Tuesday night. Here’s what they had to say.

Stance signals vice-president seeks to distance himself from the unpopular conflict ahead of possible 2028 run

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JD Vance said on Wednesday that the war against Iran doomed the Republican party in the US midterm elections, which are widely seen as a sweeping rebuke of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The intervention signals that the vice-president, once the face of the Trump administration’s deal-making efforts with Tehran, seeks to distance himself from the unpopular conflict before a possible 2028 White House run.

Democrats have taken back the House and Senate in the 2026 midterms. Here’s what a majority in Congress means for them – and for Trump

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• Democrats win control of Senate as US voters reject Trump’s agenda

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Democrats have flipped the US Senate and House of Representatives in a massive rebuke of Republicans and Donald Trump’s agenda. With Democrats majorities in both chambers, the final two years of Trump’s presidency will look markedly different from the first half. But what can Democrats actually do with congressional power?

Donald Trump and his Republican party have been dealt a devastating blow in the midterm elections with Democrats taking control of the House and Senate

After the party regained control of both houses of Congress, stars including Viola Davis, Bette Midler and John Cusack have been celebrating

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Celebrities have been reacting to last night’s historic midterm victory for the Democrats after the party regained control of both the House and the Senate.

The night saw a string of major victories for the party as voters expressed their disapproval of Donald Trump and his failing economy.

The Democrats have taken control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. These charts and maps reveal the key trends and races behind this result

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The Republicans have lost seven Senators, 25 House districts and five governor races.

As of 9.25am Eastern Time (ET) on Wednesday, more than 1,900 of nearly 2,500 counties with Senate elections had returned more than 90% of their votes. Americans did not turn out in significant numbers for the Republicans amid high fuel prices and dissatisfaction with the president.

With many seats still to come in, the Democrats have taken control of the Senate, House and several key governorships. Find live updating results in full here

• Visual analysis: the key states and trends behind Republicans losses

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The US legislature, Congress, has two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Iran celebrates its claimed role in ‘regime change’ amid pressure on Trump to ‘finish the job’ with attack

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Iran this week unveiled a huge billboard and banners over Enqelab Square in central Tehran. The billboard pledged in English: “We will kill Trump” – elevating the degree of personal animus with which Donald Trump is viewed in official Iranian circles.

The poster depicts the US president behind bars with his head bowed. And in a sense, given the US midterm election results on Tuesday, Iran has indeed killed Trump, or at least the second term of his presidency. Trump’s reverse is all the more piquant because it comes on the day Iran’s leadership celebrates the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in 1979, an event that ensnared Jimmy Carter, and a reminder of how Iran has ruined the prospects of more than one US president.

With Democrats in power, Trump may be under siege and lose his dominance over the Republican party – but his id will relish the prospect of fighting

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Donald Trump posted a document on social media this summer by a supposed historian that compared him with, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. That now seems fitting: the US president has himself fought one battle too many, and appears to have brought about his own destruction.

Tuesday’s US midterm elections were a thumping, shellacking and extinction-level event rolled into one. Ruby-red Republican strongholds once deemed safe toppled like dominoes. Democrats won Senate seats for the first time in Kansas since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998.

Rebecca Solnit and other leading writers on the epic changes to the political map

This is a special election edition of How We Win, a Guardian opinion series with leading thinkers, offering bold ideas for America’s political future. Sign up here to receive future editions in your inbox.

Fox News pundits hardly criticized the US president in midterms coverage but Trump was still quick to cast blame

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In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterm elections, Donald Trump made clear that he would place some blame on his favorite cable channel, Fox News, if his party did poorly.

On election day, he didn’t disappoint.

This article was amended on 4 November 2026; a previous version incorrectly stated that Karoline Leavitt is Donald Trump’s most recent press secretary, when it is in fact Katie Zacharia.

US voters elected the first black female governor and the first Muslim to the Senate on a night of history

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The US midterm elections have ushered in a slew of historic wins, shattering racial and gender ceilings, among other barriers, for races at the state and national level.

Here are some of the ways winning candidates are making history:

Jonathan Freedland and Shrai Popat run through the results of the US midterms, on a historic night for Democrats and a night to forget for Republicans

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President’s party stripped of control after he spent weeks pleading with Americans to pretend he was on ballot

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Donald Trump has been dealt a devastating blow to his authority with a succession of crushing defeats in the midterm elections, in which his Republican party was stripped of control of the Senate and the House as his handpicked “Maga” candidates were swept away by a blue tsunami.

The president spent weeks before the election pleading with the American people to pretend he was on the ballot. He may now rue that tactic: the American people took him at his word, and delivered him a bloody nose of historic proportions, flinging his presidency into lame duck status.