The campaign for control of the United States Congress entered its final weekend on Saturday with early voting running at a record pace for a midterm election and the Trump administration intensifying its legal intervention in a key Senate contest in Alaska.
More than 49 million Americans had already cast ballots, either in person or by post, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. That exceeds the nearly 46 million who had voted before election day in the last midterms, in 2022, and puts the total on course to pass 50 million before polling day on Tuesday.
Voters will decide all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 Senate seats, contests that will shape the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term. A Democratic victory in one or both chambers could open the way to congressional investigations of an administration that has so far enjoyed largely compliant Republican majorities.
The sharpest focus has fallen on Alaska, where the Senate race is seen as crucial to Democratic hopes of taking the chamber from the Republicans. The Justice Department accelerated its criminal investigation in the state on Friday after reports that aides to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola recruited a retired schoolteacher from a remote fishing village to stand because he shares the name of the Republican incumbent, Dan S. Sullivan.
The department has also pursued a civil case, which Trump has said he instigated, seeking to block Alaska from certifying the result if Sullivan loses a close race on a ballot that includes the non-partisan candidate Daniel J. Sullivan Jr.
At a press conference on Friday, the department’s top prosecutor in Alaska, US Attorney Michael Heyman, said a recent New York Times report on the alleged recruitment had driven a “surge” of FBI resources, with several prosecutors assigned and investigative steps taking place “intensely and swiftly”. He described the second Sullivan as a “sham candidate” but declined to say what crime may have been committed.
Peltola has denied knowing about any effort to recruit the second Sullivan, and the retired teacher has denied coordinating with her campaign.
The Alaska action is part of a wider pattern of administration involvement in election administration across the country. The administration has sued California in an attempt to prevent the counting of ballots cast by more than 20,000 registered voters it alleged could be non-citizens, and has sued roughly 30 states and the District of Columbia seeking unredacted voter rolls, moves that have alarmed election officials.
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Justice Department to stop threatening to prosecute California election officials who do not comply with the administration’s directives on alleged voting by non-citizens.
Sean Morales-Doyle, director of the voting rights and elections programme at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the administration’s actions echoed tactics used by election deniers after the 2020 presidential election. While the administration was unlikely to win in court, he said, the efforts could create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear that might pressure state officials.
Even so, most voters retain faith in the process: 76 per cent said they were confident their ballots would be counted accurately, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from 30 September to 5 October, with confidence about equally high among Republicans and Democrats. Some 15 per cent were not confident and the rest were unsure or did not answer.
Trump, who has campaigned in multiple states over the past month, was not scheduled to travel on Saturday, when politics collides with Halloween and college football across the country. He returns to the campaign trail on Sunday in Kansas and Iowa.
Sources: Reuters, “US campaign for control of Congress enters final weekend”, 31 October 2026, https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-campaign-control-congress-enters-final-weekend-2026-10-31/
