Trump White House plans to govern without Congress if Democrats win
Americans vote on Tuesday for all 435 House seats and 35 in the Senate, with Democrats ahead in the polls and the White House preparing to work around an opposition Congress.
The Trump administration has drawn up a path to keep governing without congressional approval if Democrats win control of Congress in Tuesday's midterm elections, Reuters reported.
Voters go to the polls on Tuesday to fill all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 Senate seats, in a contest MercoPress described as a test of Donald Trump's second presidency.
Democrats led Republicans by 51% to 42.6% on the generic congressional ballot, according to a polling average of surveys collected by The New York Times and cited by MercoPress. The Cook Political Report has moved several races towards the Democrats in recent weeks, MercoPress reported, with close Senate contests in Texas, Michigan, Kansas and Iowa. Polls suggest Republicans will lose the House, and MercoPress reported that a loss of the Senate was not ruled out, a possibility it said had been considered remote before the summer.
Trump has headlined 28 rallies during the campaign, all in Republican-leaning states, and urged supporters to vote "as if I were on the ballot", according to MercoPress. Early voting has passed 51 million ballots, it reported, pointing to high turnout. Elon Musk has spent at least $267m supporting Republican candidates, MercoPress reported, citing The New York Times.
MercoPress listed the cost of living, the war with Iran and immigration policy among voters' main concerns, against a backdrop of low presidential approval ratings. Congress's own approval rating stood at 14%, one of the lowest recorded ahead of a midterm election.
A Democratic majority in either chamber would allow the opposition to block White House initiatives and open investigations into the first half of Trump's term. The Reuters report on the administration's plans to work around Congress could not be retrieved in full, and it did not specify in its headline which mechanisms the White House is examining.
Beyond Congress, Americans will elect thousands of state and local officials and vote on hundreds of ballot measures, including a proposal to tax billionaires in California and a Montana initiative to curb the influence of undisclosed money in campaigns.
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