Explosive spending, ugly ads and courtroom battles set stage for tense midterm elections

WASHINGTON — When the polls close Tuesday night, the 2026 U.S. election will go down as one of history’s most expensive and extraordinarily ugly midterms — galvanizing record-breaking early voter turnout among a deeply divided electorate. Voters on Saturday crossed the high-water mark of 52.7 million early votes cast, surpassing the midterm record set in 2022, though analysts were reluctant to translate it into a Democratic wave on the way. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continued to run into a firewall of federal judges, losing its previous cases to take over mail-in balloting and obtain state voter rolls in advance of the midterms. The Trump DOJ actions nonetheless rattled state officials who hold the constitutional responsibility to conduct their elections. “My hope is that this trend will continue and that our worst-case scenarios don’t come to fruition,” former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson told States Newsroom. A federal appeals court on Friday denied Trump’s efforts to force state officials to quarantine up to 20,000 voter ballots. The department continues to pursue its preemptive lawsuit against Alaska’s U.S. Senate race results, depending on who wins. When asked by reporters Tuesday if he’ll accept a Democratic victory, Trump said, “I will, if they’re honest elections,” refusing to rule out federal interference feared by Democratic critics. Trump insisted in September that his supporters “ pretend” he is on the ballot, as his base has turned out in higher numbers during presidential elections to vote for him. “When I’m on the ballot, we kill everybody,” he said at his midterm convention in Texas. He also promised a $5,000 “Trump dividend” to voters if Republicans retained congressional majorities. With GOP control of the House and Senate during the last two years of the Trump presidency in play, campaigns are on track to shell out $11.6 billion on ads, according to the firm AdImpact. The hard-fought Ohio and Texas Senate races led the way in spending. Democrats need to net four seats to control the Senate, while Republicans hold a narrow majority in the House. Campaign advertising hit a low point when Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy aired a $4 million ad in which the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, called Acton “a liar.” The woman, Donna Arthur, has not been in communication with her daughter since the late 1970s, when court records show she lost custody and fled the state with her husband, Acton’s stepfather, after he was indicted for raping Acton. Ramaswamy’s campaign pulled the ad Friday, roughly 10 days after it began to circulate. The ad drew outcry including from outgoing Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, though both Trump and Vice President JD Vance defended it. Voters feel punished by cost of living While ugliness punctuated the campaign season, poll after poll revealed the cost of living remains the top motivator for voters — including fuel prices and the cost of food and everyday goods that have been driven up by Trump’s war with Iran and an erratic tariff policy. “It ranks as one of the most important issues for over 80% of voters, and the majority of the electorate disapproves of Trump’s handling, not just of the economy in general, but of cost of living,” economist and former Biden White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein said Tuesday, during a virtual press briefing organized by the Democrat-aligned advocacy group Defend America Action. The GOP also risks losing Latino support on account of the administration’s dragnet immigration enforcement tactics that have targeted legal immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens, and have ended in injury or even death…