In “Shorter America”, Dr Emma Shortis keeps you up-to-date on the United States with news and analysis that you can trust.
By Emma Shortis
Fri 30 Oct 2026 10.04 AEDT
Photo: The White House/Flickr
The mid-term elections are finally upon us. On Tuesday, US time, Americans head to the polls to elect a new Congress; all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and roughly a third of the Senate are up for grabs. We’ll start getting results here in Australia from Wednesday morning. Here’s what – and where – I’ll be watching.
This week:
There is some very unusual stuff going on in this election cycle. Take, for example, deep, Republican-red Kansas. Or is it? In a state where Republicans have held the Senate for the better part of a century, and where Trump won by 16 points, pollsters are calling it a toss-up. That, my friends, is wild. PBS has a decent explainer here.
Then there’s Michigan, where Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed might just manage to get over the line. Everyone wants a piece of him – he was on Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show this week. And, as I’ve written before, Michigan is a central site of the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party – the fact that former President Barack Obama was rallying there last weekend (and back, it must be said, to his rhetorical best) says some interesting things about where power might be shifting internally.
Texas is another one, along with Alaska – which is also one of the sites where the Trump administration and the Department of Justice are trying it on. The DoJ is in fact engaged in an unprecedented level of intervention in this election cycle. The NPR Politics podcast had a good explainer about that this week.
Quality research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts you can trust.
But really, if you’re anything like me, you’ll just be watching everything all at once. For coverage, I rely on the daily NPR politics show (they usually do a bunch of bonus eps too), and Chas Licciardello on both the ABC and for his (several hours long!) post-mortems on the PEP Podcast.
The other thing to watch, of course, is the potential backlash. We know Trump cannot, will not, accept a loss. Americans (and the rest of us!) are rightly worried about this – it’s telling that a bunch of my usual go-tos have had specials on election interference recently (including this one from Vox). But of course you can also find the take you want to hear – nobody really knows how it will go.
While we wait to see, I thought this discussion with a MAGA pollster on whether Trump’s support is collapsing was pretty interesting. Though it’s worth noting, we’ve been waiting for the MAGA coalition to fracture for going on a decade now, and it hasn’t happened yet. TBC, I guess.
This all matters a great deal to the rest of us, of course. Not least because Trump has mused about resuming attacks on Iran after the mid-terms – and if the results head the way polls are suggesting, that could be even more likely. Foreign policy is an area in which the President is relatively unconstrained by Congress (in as much as this President has been at all constrained). And we know Trump lashes out when he feels cornered or weak. Plus, the plans are already in place.
This week we got some more evidence that Australians are recognising, and responding to, this global re-ordering: Australia Institute polling research found only 16% of Australians still consider the US a ‘close friend’. Yikes. The brilliant and very funny Erin Cook has a great write up of the interesting results we got on Australians’ views of Indonesia on her Substack Flat White, Kopi Susu.
By next week, we’ll have a much better idea of where things are heading. Hold on to your butts.
