US voters have turned out in huge numbers for midterm elections that give them their first referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency. Exit polls by AP and CNN showed a majority of Americans believed their country was heading in the wrong direction under the Republican president.
Some 35 million early votes were cast before polling stations opened, eclipsing the 2014 total of fewer than 20 million, as every seat in the House of Representatives was up for grabs along with 35 seats in the Senate.
About 12 states suffered problems with voting machines on Tuesday and the Department of Homeland Security said it had found evidence that unknown entities were targeting voters with misinformation.
While the battle for the Texas Senate seat still goes on, and we wait to see if Beto or Ted will win, Republican Greg Abbott has easily won in the Texas gubernatorial race already.
The Texas vote is incredibly close: Beto O'Rourke is just 79 votes above Ted Cruz.
Marsha Blackburn is projected to win the Senate seat in Tennessee, holding onto the seat for the Republicans. That makes the Senate look even less winnable for the Democrats, since that was very much a competitive, winnable seat. The balance has tipped towards the Republicans, even more.
CNN says that 33 Democrats are now leading in Republican districts. And five Republicans are leading in Democrat districts. At that level, they'll have the all-important 25 seats, but some of them still very much hang in the balance.
One very important note about the tone of this evening: hopes for a blue wave so powerful that it would knock out the Republicans early in the evening have come to nothing. That's not to say the Democrats won't win – just that they won't win in as convincing and clear way as some had hoped or expected.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has won her seat. (She was always going to, but it marks the end of a story that was never supposed to happen at all – she beat a longstanding, establishment Democrat and identifies as a democratic socialist.)
In a statement to The Independent, Waleed Shahid, communications director at Justice Democrats, celebrated Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s historic victory to become the youngest woman ever elected to congress: “Ocasio-Cortez pulled off one of the biggest political upsets in American history and proved that America can still be a place where a working class woman of color can defeat a 10-term incumbent and his Wall Street-funded machine.”
Here's Andrew Buncombe, on a race that could have been very significant – and might well still be, though not in the way some Democrats had hoped:
Early on Tuesday evening, lots of attention was being paid to Kentucky’s 6th congressional district where Democrat Amy Mcgrath, a former Marine battling to oust Republican incumbent Andy Barr. Experts said if the Democrats were to enjoy the so-called “blue wave” many have talked about, a victory for Ms Mcgrath would be an early indicator of one.
Sadly, for Democrats, with around 94 per cent of the votes counted, the Associated Press projected that Mr Barr was set to win. He led 50.9-47.9.
It looks like the Indiana Senate race – where Republican Mike Braun is taking on Joe Donnelly – is almost certain to fall to the GOP. Braun is up with 53.7%, and Donnelly has only 42%, with half of the votes counted.
That's not so good for the Republicans, since that was one of those seats they would almost certainly have to take if they wanted to take the Senate. A full sweep of Congress by the Democrats is looking very unlikely indeed.
Donald Trump hasn't tweeted for six hours, after posting a run of endorsements for Republicans. He's said to be watching at home in the White House with family and friends, and the Pence family too.
It's worth checking in with the various measures that are on the ballot this voting period, too.
They appear to be mostly falling towards the conservative positions. In Michigan a tiny number of voters are mostly voting no on legalising marijuana and they're voting for Alabama to adopt a state policy against abortion. But there are progressive measures winning, too: in Arkansas, 73.3% of people have voted for increasing the minimum wage, but only 1% of votes have been counted so far.
There's still plenty of votes left to come in, and many of the other votes haven't even closed yet.
The Democrats are leading in 21 seats in Republican districts, according to CNN. With the seats that have been declared, that's the exact number they need to win in order to take control of the House.
But that number also relies on the GOP not flipping any Democrat seats the other way.
In Illinois, Democrat JB Pritzker has taken the governor's seat from Republican Bruce Rauner.
That race is thought to have been the most expensive fight in US election history. (This is the most expensive midterm in history, too.) The pair have together spent something like $250 million of their own money on the fight, which has also led to some ugly words exchanged between the pair.
Here is footage, gathered by The Independent, of a faulty voting machine automatically selecting a Republican candidate.
Faulty voting machine automatically selects Republican candidate
Device can be seen selecting wrong name three timesHere's the feeling in DC, from The Independent's Andrew Buncombe:
A veteran Democratic strategist who is watching the action at the Democratic Club on Capitol Hill, said things were going well, but they they would need "another hour" before they felt entirely comfortable about the party's wish of retaking the House.
There are some incredibly close Senate races. Florida has its Republican candidate ahead by just 0.45%, and in Texas O'Rourke is ahead by only a couple of percentage points.
Beto O'Rourke is still comfortably ahead of Ted Cruz: 51% to 48%.
About a third of the vote is in and the results might change drastically. But that Senate seat is looking strong.
FiveThirtyEight's real-time forecast is showing the chances of a Democrat takeover of the House is tanking.
After showing that it was most likely the Republicans would be definitively beaten back for a long time over election day, those chances have completely collapse. Interestingly, that was one of the first major things that tracked the changing likelihoods of Trump taking the presidency.
It's still wavering around roughly equal odds that the House will be controlled by each party. But that's considerably worse than it was before...
The same forecast is showing Republicans as almost certain to take the Senate. There's currently a 97 per cent chance the Democrats will fail to win enough seats to take back control.
Denver Riggleman, the Virginia Republican who became embroiled in a bizarre argument over "bigfoot erotica", looks to have won his seat in the House. (If you want to catch up on that sentence means, this might help.)
It's far from the only nail biter – an awful lot of very important races are going very close. In Virginia's 7th congressional district, Republican Dave Brat has 49.9% of the vote, and rival Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, has 48.9%.
The Florida Senate race is still looking incredibly close: Republican Rick Scott has 50.1%, and Democrat Bill Nelson has 49.9%. But there's plenty left still to be added.
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