Credit, Getty Images
The President of the United States, Donald Trump, questioned this Monday (09/11) the legitimacy of the results of the midterm elections, in which the Republicans suffered significant defeats, days after the Republican said he would accept the result.
"Does anyone really believe this 'election' was honest? How could the polls be so wrong?" Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The new statement contradicts what the president told the New York Times on election night, when he said he was "absolutely willing" to accept the results.
Democrats regained control of both houses of Congress in last week's midterm elections. Local officials across the country said voting went generally smoothly.
Some key races, including Senate elections in Alaska and Mississippi, have not yet had clear results.
On Truth Social, Trump made vague accusations about polls, vote "dumps" and "machines" without providing specific evidence of what this means and whether he believes there were any errors or irregularities.
The results were released normally, according to Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"We've seen across the country the usual patterns regarding when votes are released," he said.
End of Most read
Stewart adds that in some states, like Florida and Georgia, the initial release of some results happens quickly because those places already have the results of early voting and mail-in votes.
Trump has previously tried to cast doubt on the reliability of elections, even though he himself was not on the midterms ballot.
"We would have won easily if I had been on the ballot," Trump told CBS News [a BBC partner in the US], following the news that his party had lost control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The role of war in the election
Watch news from Brazil and the world on the BBC World Service
Download here
End of app promotion
Surveys carried out by various institutes and media outlets during the election campaign indicated that Republicans could lose seats in both legislative houses.
So far, Democrats have won 54 seats in the US Senate and 254 in the House of Representatives, giving them comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress, even with vote counting still ongoing in some races.
“State laws and practicalities mean that some states simply take longer to count,” explains Ruth Greenwood, an election law expert at Harvard Law School.
"This doesn't mean anything nefarious is occurring — we just need to trust that local election officials will count all the votes and report the results to us when the count is complete."
The result was already clear from election night.
"We look forward to working with [the Democrats]," Trump told the New York Times at the time. "We will probably reach an agreement."
He also analyzed the Republicans' defeat, acknowledging on Fox News that the war with Iran played a role.
"People agree with what I'm doing on Iran, but they probably weren't willing to deal with the short-term consequences of paying more for gas. I understand that," he said.
Vice President JD Vance also blamed the war with Iran for the defeat. The conflict began in February and has severely disrupted global oil and gas supplies, causing costs to skyrocket.
In the midterm election campaign, Trump made accusations of widespread voter fraud, despite evidence that it is rare.
He and his allies alleged for months that the 2020 presidential election, in which he lost to former President Joe Biden, was rigged. His lawyers and allies spent weeks trying to challenge the results, but the courts rejected the charges.
During the Trump administration, the Justice Department made unprecedented attempts to exert greater federal control over elections — a power that the Constitution delegates primarily to the states.
Days before the midterms, the agency filed controversial lawsuits in federal courts, challenging aspects of the elections in states such as California and Alaska in advance, but the judges ruled against the government in almost every case.
Election law experts and state officials told the BBC they had spent months preparing for a scenario in which the White House and groups that typically contest elections questioned the legitimacy of votes.
Extreme weather conditions forced some polling locations to close, and administrative or technical issues delayed the process in some local jurisdictions.
But so far, top local election officials have reported a relatively smooth process in the 2026 midterm elections.
Discover more
Watch
End of Watch
