Will Grant
North America correspondent

After its most bruising night in more than 30 years, the introspection – and finger pointing – have begun inside the Republican Party

Voters across the country had made it clear their ballots would be a reckoning for Trump's decision to go to war with Iran.

Now some of his closest allies are distancing themselves from the conflict, most noticeably Vice-President JD Vance.

"The reason we lost is the war," he wrote on social media. "And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there."

It was a point which Trump begrudgingly accepted as he spoke to journalists at the construction site of a new ballroom at the White House.

But he insisted he still would not have done anything differently. "You can't let Iran have a nuclear weapon," he said.

Many interpret the vice-president's comments as an unofficial launch of his own presidential bid in 2028.

The results are also being seen as a sign that the US is witnessing the beginning of the end of the MAGA movement under Trump.

Image source, Getty Images

Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz says the midterm results amount not just to a "blue wave", but a "blue tsunami".

"Nowhere are the consequences of this election greater than Texas," he writes on social media, after the state elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in decades in 37-year-old James Talarico.

Democrat Gina Hinojosa also ousted Greg Abbott, one of the nation's highest-serving Republican governors.

Pointing to the cost of living and poverty, Cruz says there was "very real pain from real Americans, and too many Republican politicians seem like they didn't understand or they didn't care".

"Texas is blue. That is a hard sentence to utter," he writes, and says the Republicans need to rebuild as a "true blue-collar party" after losing core support among rural communities, Hispanic voters and young people.

Brandon Drenon
US reporter

Image source, Getty Images

Democrat Shomari Figures won re-election to Congress in Alabama, despite having to run in a district that Republican state lawmakers specifically designed to defeat him.

"We never felt that we were an underdog in this race," Figures told the BBC, after his victory in a district that Trump won in 2024 by double digits.

The Alabama Democrat was one of several candidates targeted this election in a process called redistricting – or gerrymandering – where lines on voting maps are redrawn, often to favour one party.

Both Democrats and Republicans employed the tactic this election cycle, but Republicans led the way, heeding a direct request from Trump.

But the move backfired.

Texas, which redistricted five congressional seats to Republicans' advantage, lost four of those seats to Democrats, and Florida Republicans are on track to lose all four seats they redrew.

Asked about Democrats' sweeping victories, Figures said: "I think people are just tired, man. They're tired of the overall economy. They're tired of being lied to. They're tired of the country kind of being run like it’s a reality show."

Just hundreds of votes separate the candidates in Mississippi's Senate race, which has become an unlikely battleground in traditionally Republican territory.

The BBC's Carl Nasman looks at how we got here and when the results might be called.

Lily Jamali
North America Technology Correspondent

Image source, Reuters

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman has said he was caught off guard by the backlash to data centres in these elections.

"I don't think anyone could say they were not surprised by that," Brockman said while speaking at the WSJ Tech conference in California on Wednesday.

"It is definitely an issue that's very singular. No-one's ever seen something like that in American politics."

"A lot of our shift over the course of this year has really been to realise that, from San Francisco trying to build infrastructure in Texas, Georgia, and other places, you can’t just tweet and say, like, 'this is going to be good'.

"You need to be in those communities," Brockman continued.

"We need to do a better job of really communicating to people, to local communities, about why data centres can be beneficial to them."

Mississippi's Senate race remains on a knife-edge with some 96% of the votes counted.

The latest tally shows Democratic candidate Scott Colom leading by a margin of 1,138, - about 0.1% of the total votes - as of about an hour ago.

An hour before that, his lead on Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith was just 65 votes.

Gary O'Donoghue
Chief North America correspondent in Austin, Texas

I first met Mario Guerrero, a businessman who lives in South Texas near the Mexican border, a few weeks ago. He has voted for President Donald Trump three times.

The main issues on his mind during those elections? Immigration and border security.

But years later, those same issues have driven him to flip his ballot. He voted Democrat in yesterday's midterm election, which sent Texas Democrats to the US Senate and governor's office for the first time in decades.

Guerrero tells me today he doesn't necessarily identify with either party, and Democrats will still have to prove themselves.

"I don't think that anybody gets a free pass here. Just because they (Democrats) won doesn't mean that it's all sunshine and rainbows. There's work we have to do," he says.

But "the immigration enforcement has been something that's been mishandled by the current administration," he tells me.

And he's not alone.

Hispanic voters in Texas have voted for Democrat James Talarico over Republican Ken Paxton by two to one, according to voter poll data.

This group previously backed Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential election. Now many say the "cruelty" of US immigration enforcement has pushed them away from the Republican Party.

Read more here on how the tide change in the state began.

Jake Horton
BBC News

This year’s midterms campaign is set to be the most expensive ever - with most of that money being spent on advertising.

The top five Senate races for ad spending were in the battleground states of Ohio, Texas, Michigan, Iowa and Maine, as of the end of October according to advert tracking firm AdImpact, external.

The Republican candidates are projected to lose every one of those. That's despite spending more than $280m (£207m) more than their Democratic opponents across the five contests.

In total, the Republican campaigns spent about $960m (£713m) on advertising in those unsuccessful Senate races.

The biggest spending gap was in Texas - where Democratic candidate James Talarico was outspent by more than $140m (£103m) by Republican candidate Ken Paxton on ads.

Talarico is set to win that race by more than 10 percentage points.

The only contest in which the Republican was outspent was in Iowa - where Democratic candidate Josh Turek is set to win by about five points.

Though we know the overall results of the midterm elections already, there are a few races that are still too close to call.

In states like Mississippi, where the Senate race had come down to a razor-thin margin of votes, it could take a week to know who won as mail-in ballots continue to arrive.

In some places, these ballots are hand counted.

In Los Angeles, California, officials are still counting ballots to determine who will be the next mayor. Take a look:

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

A little bit ago, we told you that more votes were not expected to be tallied in the Mississippi Senate race today, according to Mississippi's Democratic Party chairman.

But we've just had more numbers in, showing that Democratic candidate Scott Colom has widened his lead.

He is now ahead by 1,138 votes, according to data from the Associated Press.

Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, has 48.9% of the vote. Colom has 49%. Counting is ongoing.

Market perception crystalises post-election - it will have a real-world impactpublished at 23:57 GMT 4 November

23:57 GMT 4 November

Faisal Islam
Economics editor

At first markets did not quite know how to react to the Democrats' "blue wave". The significant market reaction crystallised after Vice-President JD Vance’s remarkable social media message suggested lost voters wanted to "end the war".

Crude oil markets had been factoring in a chance of a significant escalation in the Iran war in the coming days and weeks, pushing up the oil price close to $117 (£86.82) late last week.

Today saw a significant 8-9% on-the-day fall in Brent crude to below $95 (£70.49) a barrel. It showed market belief that the manner of the Democrat sweep would serve to restrain the president.

Trump still has the formal power to decide on military action, but this was an historic electoral loss directly driven by cost-of-living pressure, in turn inextricably linked to his war choices.

The markets may be wrong or right, but even this market perception will have a real-world impact. Already European gas prices, and US fuel prices have also fallen back.

It is worth remembering that in the UK an expected increase in interest rates tomorrow has been explicitly linked to expectations of higher inflation from a longer Gulf War.

It is a reminder that the rest of the world is waiting on the president.

In his message to voters, Vance is also making a pitch for 2028published at 23:36 GMT 4 November

23:36 GMT 4 November

Tom Bateman
Reporting from Columbus, Ohio

Image source, Reuters

Vance is telling Republicans not to get angry at the defeat but to win the argument.

His lengthy post is saying his party lost because it abandoned its basic promise to voters in 2024 to bring down prices and avoid foreign wars. But the movement has also been at odds with itself over all this for the last year or so.

A row broke out among MAGA Republicans, involving some of the movement’s key influencers, over support for Trump’s policies on the Iran war and US backing for Israel.

Vance opposed the war. He’s implying those, like Tucker Carlson, who implied it would tank Trump’s presidency are being proved right. His rallying cry distances him from the president and tries to burnish his credentials for “America First” retrenchment.

Make no mistake, this is the start of his pitch as battle begins for the succession to Trump. But it will have to play with a wounded president still stuck by the ongoing crisis he created in the Middle East, a stalemated war with Iran.

As we're continuing to bring you all the latest details about last night's midterm elections in the US, our reporters are taking a deeper look at the defining issues and races of this cycle.

On the major victories...

• Left-wing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed wins in Michigan to become first Muslim senator
• James Talarico becomes first Democrat to win Texas Senate seat since 1988
• The last time a Kansas Democrat was in the Senate, Judy Garland was filming the Wizard of Oz

On the reaction from Trump and Republicans...

• Anthony Zurcher: Midterm carnage weakens Trump but he still wields power for now
• 'This is a disaster': Angry Republicans blame Trump for midterms defeat

On what exactly happened...

• How America voted in maps and charts
• Five reasons why Republicans lost so badly

On the answers we're still waiting for...

• Democrat leads by razor-thin margin in Mississippi Senate race

Plus, check out detailed state- and county-level results here.

Adam Moyer
Reporting from Jackson, Mississippi

More votes are not expected to be tallied in the state today, Mississippi Democratic Party Chair Cheikh Taylor tells the BBC.

"On good intel it's my understanding that the election won't be decided until Monday," he says of the close Senate race here.

This is where the current race in Mississippi sits right now.

Democratic candidate Scott Colom is slightly ahead in the race to unseat incumbent Senator Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Colom, with 462,857 votes, at the time of writing, is ahead by 65 votes between him and Hyde‑Smith's 462,792 votes.

Independent candidate Ty Pinkins has almost 20,000 votes.

The race is too close to call after almost 96% of the votes counted.

Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson says in a statement that 70 of the 82 counties in the state have uploaded their unofficial result through a state system, and notes that counties get 10 days from election day to submit their certified results to his office.

There are some 3,600 outstanding absentee-by-mail ballots yet to be received and an unknown number of affidavit ballots to be processed in that 10-day timeframe, he says.

Carl Nasman
Reporting from Jackson, Mississippi

We're literally talking about a handful of ballots separating the two Senate candidates here in Mississippi.

Scott Colom has a very small lead - fewer than 100 votes - over the Republican incumbant Cindy Hyde-Smith.

If you looked back a few weeks ago, very few people had Mississippi on their radar, but Colom has run a grassroots campaign here.

In this election we've seen candidates like Hyde-Smith - who are aligned with President Trump - underperform.

This is another example of that - Democrats have had a strong showing in Republican strongholds.

Brandon Drenon
US reporter

We are still waiting to hear results for the Mississippi Senate race, and it could be a while before we know the winner in the race between Democrat Scott Colom and incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Mississippi does not have automatic recounts for tight races or allow candidates to request recounts.

The state also allows mail-in ballots to be counted if they are postmarked by election day and received within five business days later.

That means the race is very likely not to be called until at least 10 November, says Julie Wronski, an associate professor of political science at the University of Mississippi.

"Because the difference between the two candidates is so narrow, really, we're going to have to wait for every single vote received in any capacity to be counted," Wronski says.

The vote spread between the two candidates is currently less than 100 ballots, according to data from the Associated Press.

After the election night surge of results, ballots are still being counted for some gubernatorial, House of Representative and Senate races.

Here's where things stand:

Several House races were called earlier on Wednesday, though outstanding ballots remain for some 59 uncalled races.

In the race for Kansas governor, Democrat Cindy Holscher is leading Republican Ty Masterson by 0.51 percentage points, with about 98% votes counted. There will be recount if the margin falls below 0.5 points.

The Mississippi Senate race remains too close to call. Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 65 votes, with ballots still outstanding.

With about a quarter of ballots still left to count, Democrat Mary Peltola leads Republican Dan Sullivan by just over 600 votes in Alaska's Senate race.

Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins leads three Republicans with 49.15% of the vote for Alaska governor, with a quarter of votes still to be counted.

Election night was a fever dream for Democrats. But reality will set in when they take their seats in January. There are things the party may be able to accomplish - and others they will probably not.

What Democrats could do

• Block Trump's cabinet and Supreme Court nominees
• Push back against Trump's policy priorities
• Oversee congressional investigations
• Impeach the president or cabinet officials

What Democrats will struggle to do

• Pass major legislation without Trump's cooperation
• Influence foreign policy

Read more about the Democrats' governing prospects here.

Rachel Clun and Priya Patel
Business reporters

Oil prices have fallen below $100 a barrel while stock markets closed higher following the Democrats' decisive midterm elections victory.

Global oil benchmark Brent crude fell by more than 8% to about $95 a barrel on Wednesday afternoon, its lowest level in two months, after US Vice-President JD Vance said earlier that Republicans lost the elections due to the war in Iran.

Vance's comments prompted investors to reassess the risk of a wider Middle East conflict.

Markets seized on Vance's call to "end the war", focus on the cost of living and rethink America's relationship with Israel, interpreting the post-election political landscape as reducing the likelihood of a significant escalation involving Iran.

Key US stock market indexes closed higher on Wednesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumping 3%. The S&P 500 closed up 1.6%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 1.4%.