Trump Questions Midterm Integrity After Pledging to Accept Results, Offers No Evidence

On Monday, President Donald Trump posted a question on Truth Social that sat uneasily beside what he had said days earlier. "Does anybody really believe that this 'Election' was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong?" he wrote, a week after midterm elections in which Republicans lost badly. He gave no specific evidence for the suggestion.

The post appeared to contradict what he told the New York Times on election night, when he said he was "absolutely willing" to accept the results. He added then that he looked forward to working with Democrats and that the two sides would "probably work something out." His Monday message made vague references to polling, voting "dumps" and "machines," without saying what he meant by them or whether he believed there had been error or wrongdoing.

The results themselves are lopsided. Democrats retook both chambers of Congress. As the count stands, they hold 54 Senate seats and 254 House seats, comfortable majorities even with counting still under way in some races. Senate contests in Alaska and Mississippi have yet to be called. State and local officials across the country said voting went mostly without problems, though extreme weather forced some polling locations to close and a handful of administrative or technical issues slowed work in some local jurisdictions.

Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at MIT, said election night reporting followed familiar lines. "We saw across the nation the standard patterns we see in terms of when the votes are reported," he said. He noted that in states such as Florida and Georgia, early results come in quickly because early and mail ballots are already tabulated. Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said some states simply take longer under their laws and practicalities. "That doesn't mean anything nefarious is occurring," she said, adding that the task is to trust local officials to count every vote and report when they finish.

On the polling question Trump raised, surveys from several pollsters and news outlets ahead of the vote had suggested Republicans could lose seats in both the House and Senate. Trump himself was not on the ballot. After the losses were confirmed, he told CBS News, the BBC's US partner, "We would have won easily if I was on the ballot."

He has also offered explanations that point elsewhere. On Fox News he acknowledged that the Iran war contributed to the defeat. "People agree with what I'm doing on Iran but they really probably weren't willing to do the short term consequences of paying more for gasoline - I understand that," he said. Vice-President JD Vance has likewise blamed the war, which began in February and has severely disrupted global oil and gas supplies, sending costs soaring.

The doubts echo earlier episodes. Trump and his allies claimed for months that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was rigged, and his lawyers and allies spent weeks in litigation that courts repeatedly rejected. In the run-up to these midterms he again spoke of widespread voting fraud, despite evidence that it is rare. His administration's Justice Department has made unprecedented attempts to assert federal control over elections, a power the Constitution primarily gives to the states. Days before the vote it filed lawsuits in federal courts challenging the count and certification of votes in states including California and Alaska; judges ruled against it in nearly all instances.

Election law experts, state officials and local election offices told the BBC they had spent months preparing for the possibility that the White House or election sceptics would question the legitimacy of the vote. What to watch now is whether the uncalled races in Alaska and Mississippi finish as expected, and whether the Justice Department continues its election challenges.