The gap between the reality the president described on the campaign trail and the one voters said they were living closed decisively at the ballot box. By the time polls closed on 3 November, hundreds of congressional races across the country had been decided, and past Trump voters were among those who delivered the verdict.

A final pitch of all-time highs

In his closing argument, delivered in an extraordinary speech at Washington's Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on the last day of the campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly declared that a new "golden age of America" was under way. He told the crowd his administration had achieved more in less than two years than any in American history, and that he had kept every single promise he made. He implored voters to "pretend I'm on the ballot" and judge the policies he had enacted.

The speech stacked claim on claim:

• •The war in Iran was not really a war, because "we've done very little fighting"
• •The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs
• •Affordability, he said last year, was a "con job" perpetrated by Democrats
• •In October, he said the United States oil and gas business is making hundreds of billions of dollars, despite high consumer fuel prices
• •People who don't want datacenters in their communities will end up "backwards and poor", he said this summer
• •He was "willing to do tariffs" and they had helped US companies, he said in Kansas just before the election

This constructed reality - described as a "mirror world" - was a central pillar of his victorious bid to reclaim the White House two years earlier. In the midterms, it stopped working.

The voters who stopped believing

Voters said they did not approve of the Iran war and were not experiencing a "golden age" as they filled up their cars and paid for groceries. The economy - particularly an inability to afford their lives - was central to their decisions, alongside corruption, the Iran war, tariffs, datacenters, healthcare costs and deportations.

The repudiation came from people who had supported Trump before. Ron Miller, in Kansas, said he was for Trump but acknowledged that the president "hasn't done anything" to lower the cost of living. Linda Olson, also in Kansas and a previous Trump voter, said the president was now working to "make himself richer instead of really helping the people".

That was Jim Conrad, a voter in Ohio. Todd Cox, in Maine, cited "the disregard for the rule of law". Stacey, a ticket-splitting voter in Iowa, put it bluntly: "I wanted to vote for no Republicans". Klaus, quoted in October, said it is really hard to continue to be told things that aren't true and feel almost like you are being mocked for the hardships you are enduring.

Republicans on the damage

Republican and independent figures did not dispute the scale of the defeat. "One by one," said Tom Galvin, a Republican on the Maricopa county board of supervisors in Arizona, "everything that was important" to the 2024 coalition fell by the wayside. His party's stay-home or crossover voters, he said, were sending a message to stop excusing corruption and trafficking in election lies, and get to work on real issues.

So said Paul Bentz, an independent pollster at HighGround, an Arizona public affairs firm, who added that it was not the right strategy. A colleague of his described the midterms as the reflecting pool election - a metaphor drawn from Trump's final speech before an algae-beset pool he had spent $14m renovating, which they called "Narcissism 101".

In Minnesota, Jim Abeler, a Republican state senator who lost his reelection bid, had knocked on the doors of about 80% of the homes in his district. He encountered a lot of "outright hostility" toward Trump over gas prices and the Iran war, with some voters refusing to talk to him at all.

Half the people he spoke to were "unforgiving", he said, and the problem was the economics themselves rather than Trump's rhetoric. One woman who had previously voted for him told him: "I'm sorry, it's just a bad year to be you".

Chris Madel, a Minneapolis attorney, ran in the Republican primary for Minnesota governor until he dropped out and criticized his party over the deportation onslaught into the state. He said he knew in January - amid the Operation Metro Surge crackdown - that this would end poorly for Republicans.

"The people that were showing that fealty towards him and towards this one person," Madel said. "The tone deafness was really without equal". He said he asked Trump-supporting family members whether it was acceptable for the president to take a free 747 from Qatar, and that he never thought the US would look like "a banana republic with respect to corruption".

What the results and Trump's response show

Democrats had centered their campaigns on in-person town halls, county fairs and a return to retail politics. The results followed.

• •In Arizona, Republicans lost up and down the ballot: both chambers of the state legislature flipped, and the Democratic governor won her reelection bid by nearly 13 points
• •Rebecca Cooke, a Democrat running in a Republican-held congressional district in western Wisconsin, said people "don't feel that the federal government really gives a damn about them" - and she won
• •Bob Brooks, a Democrat who flipped Pennsylvania's 7th congressional district, said voters were "frustrated with a guy who was promising them one thing" but gave them "something completely different"

Brooks added that "they felt lied to by the Trump organization, anybody that supported him, and they're looking for change", because the status quo is not OK.

Republicans, for their part, had not seriously tried to distance themselves from Trump before the vote, because breaking with him would have been a major political risk in primaries where the party faithful remained supportive.

Trump's own response came on Thursday, when he wrote on Truth Social: "I JUST WASN'T ON THE BALLOT. IF I WERE, WE WOULD HAVE WON IN A LANDSLIDE!". Later in the week, he elevated Stephen Miller, one of the most controversial figures in his administration, to chief of staff.