US President Donald Trump has questioned the integrity of last week’s midterm elections, reversing course less than a week after congratulating Democrats on their victories and saying he was willing to accept the results, Al Jazeera reported.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump alleged that some early voting ballot counts were so large that they made it impossible for Republicans to win. He provided no evidence of fraud or wrongdoing. Over recent days he has also shared posts carrying graphs that question voter turnout data.
It is his first explicit public challenge to the integrity of the overall result since Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress, along with a run of wins in traditionally Republican strongholds.
A reversal within a day
The claim came a day after the CBS “60 Minutes” interview in which Trump appeared to accept the outcome and called his own deportation drive “too tough”. It also reverses the position he took immediately after the vote, when he said he would accept the result.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer criticised what Al Jazeera characterised as Trump’s poll denialism, calling it an avoidable return to baseless claims.
What the polling actually showed
Before the vote, Republicans had questioned whether surveys were again underestimating their support, as happened in the 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential elections. The results went the other way.
Polls had largely pointed to a strong night for Democrats, indicating the party was well placed to take the House of Representatives and had a realistic chance in the Senate. A Pew Research analysis of pre-election polling found the data had understated the Democratic margin by at least two points in 23 of 27 races for governor and the US Senate — the opposite of the error Republicans had anticipated.
Not reported
Al Jazeera does not identify which races or states Trump’s ballot-count claim refers to, and cites no election official responding to it. It does not say whether any legal challenge has been filed or whether Republican officials have endorsed the claim.
This report is sourced to Al Jazeera alone. Other newsrooms covered the statement, but this desk could not fetch and date a second verified report before publication, so none is cited here.
