Trump rallies in Iowa and Kansas as Senate control hangs on midterms

President Donald Trump holds rallies in Iowa and Kansas on Sunday, two days before midterm elections that will decide control of Congress. Republicans hold narrow majorities in both chambers, with 35 Senate seats and all 435 House seats on the ballot on Tuesday.

Trump spent Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after weeks of campaigning across several states, Reuters reported. He carried Iowa by double digits in 2024, but polls show Democrats tied with or leading Republicans in many of the state's races. His approval among rural Americans fell to 45 percent in October, according to Reuters/Ipsos polling. Kansas, which last elected a Democratic senator in 1932, is also in an unexpectedly close race.

Democrats and many Republicans have described the election as a referendum on Trump's policies. "His agenda, without any question, is on the ballot," Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who leads the Republican Senate campaign committee, told NBC's Meet the Press. Scott predicted his party would keep its majority. Troy Jackson, a Maine Democrat challenging Republican Senator Susan Collins, told MS Now that if Democrats win they can "get Congress back to work to their job and have their oversight".

Control of either chamber would let Democrats block Trump's legislative agenda for his final two years in office and open investigations of his administration. The White House has been preparing to implement parts of that agenda without Congress.

More than 52 million Americans have already voted in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab, a record for a midterm and up from nearly 46 million who voted before Election Day in 2022.

In Michigan, a split between Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and US Representative Haley Stevens widened into public view. A photo posted by a spokesperson for El-Sayed's Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, showed Stevens beside Rogers at a Detroit church on Sunday morning. Stevens then endorsed Rogers on social media. She had been scheduled to appear with El-Sayed at an event billed as a show of party unity. The rift opened after Stevens called on El-Sayed to condemn an outside group's advertisement that she said blames Israel for high grocery prices.

El-Sayed's campaign asked Stevens to skip his events through Election Day so as "not to distract from the central issues of the campaign", a person familiar with the matter said. "It's certainly unhelpful to the El-Sayed campaign to have continued visible division within the party just before Election Day," said Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University.

In Alaska, polls show Republican Senator Dan Sullivan in a tight race with Democrat Mary Peltola. Sullivan told CNN's State of the Union on Sunday that he would accept the result, and said of a third candidate with a similar name: "They got the decoy guy on the ballot." The Justice Department has asked a federal court to prevent certification of Alaska's vote if Sullivan loses narrowly, and Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, has suggested he may not certify a Peltola victory after the New York Times reported her campaign was involved in recruiting Daniel J Sullivan Jr.