More than 57 million vote early as high-stakes midterm elections get underway

After months of campaigning, Americans are heading to the polls to decide who controls Congress and the direction of the country for the next two years. The final arguments have been made, President Trump has delivered his closing pitch, and now the decision belongs to the voters. More than 57 million Americans had already voted before Election Day, according to the University of Florida's Election Lab. That's nearly as many as the entire early vote in the 2022 midterms, with millions more ballots still to come. And Monday night, President Trump made his final appeal from Washington's Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. He urged the voters who put him back in the White House in 2024 to turn out again, this time to keep Republicans in control of Congress. But he also acknowledged the history working against his party. Because if the people that voted for me and voted in the last election where we had such a great victory, if they go out and vote just a good portion of them, we will win in a landslide. Now, that doesn't happen because usually whoever the sitting president is, Republican or Democrat, good or bad, good president, great president, bad. For some reason, the sitting president doesn't win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong. Shot. Vice President J.D. Vance spent his final day campaigning in Ohio, calling this the most important midterm election of his lifetime. He said he's confident Republicans will hold Congress, but acknowledged the outcome is no longer in their hands. I feel good about tomorrow, but obviously it's in the hands of voters. So all I'd say is to remind the voters, particularly in Ohio, that Sherrod Brown is a career politician who spent 50 years in Washington delivering for Chuck Schumer. John Huston has delivered for the people of Ohio. I think they're going to re-elect him, but it's up to the voters now. And across the country, some of the most consequential Senate races are coming down to their final hours. In Michigan, Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed closed their campaigns with appeals to a deeply divided electorate. The races also exposed divisions within the Democratic Party after Congresswoman Haley Stevens endorsed Rogers over her party's own nominee. It's really about the heart and soul of the country. And who we want to be, and what country we want to give to our kids. And you think about that, what happened is, doors started opening for us. People knew something was wrong. Mean, angry, divisiveness could not be the way in the future for our great state. I believe that we have the opportunity to breach those divides. Divides of geography, of race, of sexual orientation, gender identity, of faith. To build together what we only can have together. That's what this campaign has been about from the very beginning. And while they think that somehow their intimidation tactics and their division is going to pull us apart, they don't know us like we know us. The Royal Oak, when they come for us, we won't back down. In Texas, a state Republicans have dominated for decades, the Senate race has become a major test for both parties. Democrat James Tallarico says the Republican effort to defeat him shows just how competitive the race has become. Republican Ken Paxton is warning his supporters that the party's grip on Texas is at risk. In the final days of this election, they are coming at us with everything they've got. The billionaire mega donors, the super PACs. They are spending more than $300 million to try to stop us. That is the most of any Senate race in American history, and more is on the way. They are scared. They are terrified. They see what we see, that we're about to win this election tomorrow night. Texas has never been this close to slipping away. We have never been this close to losing everything that we hold dear. Our jobs, our livelihoods, our way of life in Texas. If Texas falls, we don't have another Texas to move to. Every poll shows this is going to come down to the wire. In Alaska, the final days of the Senate race have been dominated by a controversy over two candidates with nearly identical names. A New York Times report links people working with Democratic candidate Mary Peltola's campaign and National Democrats to an effort to recruit another Dan Sullivan, the same name as the Republican incumbent. The senator is accusing his opponent of trying to mislead voters. My opponent has literally been caught in the biggest election cheating scandal in Alaska history and she's bleeding support. People are pulling Peltola signs out of their yards, right? They are saying, hey, wait a minute, I did not sign up for corruption. Peltola denies knowing about the effort and says she has no interest in tricking voters. And in Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson is trying to unseat longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins. His closing message focused on turnout and what he says voters can change in Washington. Washington. Washington. Up and down the state, people are showing up like I've never seen before, and that's how we're going to change this government. Together, we can make so much of a difference. We can make so much a difference here in the state. We can make so much a difference in D.C. The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. From there, results will be coming in across the country, with the final polls in Alaska coming in at 1 a.m. Eastern Wednesday. And in some of these races, it could take longer to know who won. So buckle up, folks.