Even before millions of Americans cast their ballots on Tuesday, President Donald Trump knew what was coming.
The inevitability of an electoral drubbing that would strip his Republican Party of its majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate was looming even on Monday afternoon when he made a final campaign appearance in front of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
“For some reason, the sitting president doesn’t win the midterms, but we gave this a very strong shot,” he told reporters. It sounded like a dress rehearsal for his eventual concession, rooted in the possibility that the Democrats’ victory would be so sizeable that it would be impossible even for an election-denying president to accuse his opponents of rigging the vote.
How autism diagnoses are ‘increasingly linked to ADHD’
Experts found a rapid rise in autism diagnoses among 16-to 20-year-olds since 2010 in the UK, as well as a rise in women and white people, compared to other ethnicities.
What were the findings?
Researchers from the Medical Research Council looked at data from the UK and Sweden.
They found that new diagnoses have increased from six people per 100,000 in 2010, to 64 per 100,000 in 2023.
Analysis also showed there has been a change in the make-up of people diagnosed with autism, with a decrease in those with a prior diagnosis of epilepsy.
Instead, they found an increase in the proportion of people who had a prior diagnosis of ADHD, stress-related disorders, eating disorders, headaches and chronic fatigue.
The story in numbers
58%
The proportion of autism diagnoses in people with anxiety more than doubled form 29 per cent to 58 per cent between 2010 and 2023.
- In the UK, 24.5 million adults contributed to the study, including 141,119 with an autism diagnosis.
- Writing in , the team said this could be the result of “greater appreciation of nuanced forms of autism that may have previously been labelled as other conditions due to overlapping features, particularly in females”.
How menopause is affecting women’s careers and pensions
Half of women in the perimenopause or menopause say their career has suffered as a result, with workers cutting their hours or feeling forced to turn down opportunities for career progression, according to a new survey.
Lack of support for symptoms
Nearly one in three said their life stage had influenced their retirement savings, according to the research for Scottish Widows. A similar number also said their regular finances had been affected.
And 50 per cent of women surveyed said they would like more support at work. 17 per cent said they had been forced to take time away to manage symptoms.
Breaking down the numbers
- One in eight (13 per cent) women had reduced their working hours and 10 per cent had turned down a promotion or career progression opportunity, for menopause-related reasons.
Scottish Widows found that a 50-year-old woman in full-time work taking a six-month unpaid break could potentially cost £1,300 in pension contributions.
Gaps in pension contributions will have a bigger impact over time, as savers will also miss out on the interest that could have been earned on them.
Two-thirds of women surveyed believe employers should be required to provide better support to women experiencing menopause symptoms, including financial support.
A blow to pension pots
Perimenopause or often coincides with what should be the peak earnings potential of a woman’s career. When symptoms force women to reduce their hours, step back from promotion opportunities or leave work entirely, the ripple effect on their pension pots is huge
Susan Hope, a retirement expert at Scottish Widows
The lessons Britain can learn from France’s pensions crisis
The i Paper takes a look at why the bill for pensions keeps rising on both sides of the Channel – and what can be done about it.
What’s the situation in France?
France will be unable to resolve its debt crisis without tackling sky-high pension bills, economists have warned.
It spends a massive 14 per cent of its GDP on pensions and the costs are rising every day.
Falling birth rates and rising life expectancy in France and the UK means pensions are mounting pressure on public finances.
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Why pension burdens are becoming unsustainable
- Economists have warned that unless France takes action to overhaul the pension system, it is unlikely to end its debt crisis.
- In the UK, public spending will be further strained next year, as state pensions are set to get a 3.5 per cent boost.
- Fraser Thorne, CEO of Edison, told The i Paper: “The UK’s… trajectory is more manageable. But more manageable isn’t the same as sustainable.”
UK advantages over France
Heidi Karjalainen, senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says bigger private pension pots in the UK are making it easier to increase the state pension age, whereas “in France, it’s been really difficult to do that”.
It’s this cushion that will help the UK better navigate the trials and tribulations that come with an ageing population and falling birth rates, she says.
Giving people time to adjust
The French proposals were announced “without much notice”, Karjalainen noted, while the UK made the decision more than a decade ago.
Thorne says France offers a “pointed lesson in what can happen when governments try to reset the terms of the pension contract: five prime ministers in two years; mass street protests; and a reform ultimately diluted by political reality even when the economics were clear”.
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By the end of the night, he was admitting on Fox News that the war on Iran had hurt Republicans during the midterms, saying people “didn’t like it” when they had to pay more for fuel. He hinted that further strikes could be on the horizon, saying, “We have to do something large”, and that it could involve a “heavy hit”.
“Congratulations to the Democrats,” he said. “They did a good job. They’ve been looking for this one for 11 years, and they finally got it. But I don’t view it as a hit on me. I think we’ve done … We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency.”
As the results flooded in on Tuesday night, the Republican Party’s worst fears were confirmed. Hoping for nothing more than a blue trickle of votes in the Democrats’ favour, scores of Republican lawmakers found themselves washed away by their opponents in something close to a political tidal wave.
After Trump spent weeks telling voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, they did precisely that, offering the official condemnation of his first two years back in power that was presaged for months by his plunging approval ratings.
Exit polls showed that millions of people were putting their wallets top-of-mind as they voted, citing the soaring cost of living as the central issue driving them to the polls. Sixty-five per cent of voters told pollsters they held Trump personally responsible for the country’s worsening economic conditions.
His insistence that the nation’s “affordability” crisis is a Democratic-inspired political concoction found no purchase with voters who – on Tuesday itself – started paying the highest prices ever recorded in the United States for petrol and diesel.
Up against those numbers, Trump and his fellow Republicans stood no chance. As the evening unfolded, the scale of the disaster became quickly apparent, with North Carolina the first Senate seat to flip into the Democrats’ hands. Former governor Roy Cooper scored a whopping win over Michael Whatley, a victory made even more sweet for Democrats given Whatley’s position as a former head of the Republican National Committee.
In Texas, James Talarico pulled off the kind of result that Democrats have coveted for decades, pummelling his scandal-soaked Republican rival, the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton. Talarico became the first Democrat elected to the Senate since 1988, and his fellow party member Gina Hinojosa scored a stunning win, defeating pro-Trump Governor Greg Abbott, who was denied a fourth term in power.
South Carolina was the next domino to fall, where Senator Darline Graham was defeated by Dr Annie Andrews, a Democratic Party candidate slandered by Trump with the moniker “Trannie Annie”. Graham, sister of the late Republican Senator Lindsey Graham who died unexpectedly in July, was roundly rejected by the electorate, losing a seat Republicans have held for nearly three decades.
Kansas then handed the Democrats control of the Senate, with Adam Hamilton’s victory over Senator Roger Marshall. In a fresh indication of the scale of the wave washing over the country, Hamilton in January will become the first Democrat from Kansas to take a Senate seat since 1932.
As the evening unfolded, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, insisted he had spoken to Trump, and that the President had told him he was “feeling great”. But by 10.37pm Washington time, just 15 minutes before the Democrats secured control of the Senate, the President appeared to be struggling to accept reality. In a posting on Truth Social, he insisted: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Republican strategists, meanwhile, understood the scale of their party’s collapse, with Trump’s own former communications director, Bryan Lanza, calling the election outcome “devastating”.
“The voters are tired of this war and they’re tired of inflation,” Lanza told LBC, accusing Trump of having been “off message” on the campaign trail. “It’s definitely worse than I imagined … I never thought we would lose South Carolina.”
With both the House of Representatives and the Senate moving into Democratic hands, the Democrats will soon have big choices to make: do they try to impeach Trump yet again? Probably not, given the absence of a two-third Senate majority to convict him at trial.
Do they accept Trump’s overture, in an interview with , for talks to try and find common ground? Again, probably not.
Do they instead launch sweeping investigations of some of his top aides, including “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth and former attorney general Pam Bondi? Almost certainly.
But Democrats will also have to contend with divisions within their own party, as left-wing supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America jockey for position with the centrists and elites who have dominated the party and its platform for generations.
For Trump, events will also move quickly now. Even before the final votes were tallied, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida – who will be leaving office in January – sounded the klaxon intimating his own plans to seek the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2028.
“Some of these Republicans are saying, ‘well, the gas, it’s no big deal’. Like, or they’re trying to blame Biden for it. No, listen, we just gotta be honest. Gas is higher.
“It hurts people,” he told Sirius XM radio, in a veiled jab at Trump’s efforts to shirk responsibility for a worsening economy. “If you can’t admit that to voters, you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.”
On Fox News, as reality dawned, pro-Trump host Jesse Watters levelled with his audience. “It’s not a red wave,” he glumly told viewers as the results streamed in.
Then, referring to the cash payments Trump had promised every adult if Republicans retained control of the House and the Senate, he added: “I don’t think we’re going to get our $5,000 [£3,700] cheques.”