For the past nine weeks, The Telegraph’s US writers have travelled across America to examine the issues that could shape Donald Trump’s fortunes in the midterm elections. This analysis brings together their findings. Whatever happens on Tuesday, Donald Trump will remain in the White House. But the vote will decide whether he keeps his power.

The US president has cast an oversized shadow over American politics for the past decade, but his time is coming to an end.

If the Democrats regain control of Congress, he will be consigned to spend the rest of his time in office as a lame duck.

Mr Trump and the electoral landscape have both transformed since he stormed back to the White House in 2024, promising no foreign wars and an end to inflation on “day one”.

Now there is widespread anger among voters over rising prices, and the president is eight months into a war in Iran – a conflict he once declared would last just five weeks.

And while the Epstein files had been a talking point on the Right before the 2024 election, the president isolated many of his allies after initially refusing to release the documents.

Despite his best efforts, Mr Trump has proved unable to shake his association with the late paedophile, and the files are a useful stick with which Democratic candidates can beat their Republican rivals.

Some things are out of the president’s control, such as the independent movement that has eaten into the Republican vote share and menaces the GOP in ways Democrats cannot. There are opportunities for Mr Trump, too.

Republicans are trying to make headway with Jewish voters amid an anti-Israel movement among Democrats – but many are sceptical that it will pay off, and there is also a rising tide within the GOP.

If the election results do not go his way, the US president has also laid the groundwork for fraud investigations in an attempt to contest them. Whether Mr Trump loses his grip on Congress comes down to nine key issues.

What was billed as a weeks-long excursion to prevent Iran gaining a nuclear weapon has turned into a quagmire that threatens to derail Mr Trump’s second term in office.

The president often describes the Middle Eastern conflict as a “little detour” to play down his broken promise of ending foreign wars. But ahead of election day, it has emerged as an unforced error and a key focus of voters this midterm cycle.

Republican strategists privately acknowledge that the war is severely damaging the party’s push to retain control of Congress for the final two years of Mr Trump’s presidency.

Veterans in Virginia are among those demonstrating against the war in the Middle East The conflict is also becoming increasingly complicated, with Iran-backed Houthi rebels carrying out attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil infrastructure and airports. In one of them an American was killed.

It’s a hard sell for Republicans on the campaign trail, especially in states such as Iowa and Alaska, where diesel underpins the local economy.

The midterm elections are not just a referendum on the president but on his decision to drag America into another foreign conflict after he explicitly promised that he would not.

The US president would prefer that voters not worry about inflation. But it’s hard for them to ignore. Filling up a basic Ford F-150 pickup truck now costs about $100, which is $30 more from a year ago.

Mortgage rates have jumped to levels that have depressed home sales and, for the past 12 months, consumer prices have risen faster than pay cheques, making the average family poorer.

Mr Trump has struggled to deliver on his campaign promise to bring down costs. The same frustration that powered his comeback to the White House could now cost Republicans control of Congress.

In less than two years, Mr Trump has tried to remodel the US economy. He has slapped huge tariffs on many trading partners and caused trade wars with traditional allies, such as Canada and the EU.

But the persistent challenge of inflation has continued, overshadowing the positives of continued economic growth and a low unemployment rate.

Inflation was 3 per cent when Mr Trump took office in January 2025. By September 2026, it had reached 3.7 per cent.

Democrats are now seizing on the message Mr Trump had campaigned on: an end to high living costs brought about by an incompetent president.

Mr Trump’s second term in office has, so far, been less chaotic than his first. But there is one scandal that he has been unable to shake – the Epstein files.

Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide while awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell, was a convicted sex offender and paedophile, infamous for his connections to wealthy and powerful people. He became the subject of intense conspiracy theories about a cabal of elites pulling the strings of “the deep state”.

Following the full release of the files last November, many of Epstein’s former associates have faced uncomfortable questions about their relationships with the financier, including Mr Trump.

Donald Trump continues to be dogged by his relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein The US president’s initial opposition to the Epstein bill and the administration’s subsequent botched handling of the documents’ release only served to further fuel the conspiracies.

Mr Trump has always insisted that he ended his friendship with Epstein long before the financier was suspected of any criminal wrongdoing.

Despite considering the case closed, Mr Trump cannot seem to escape his shadow. The issue has become a political sledgehammer for Democrats, and they are ramping up their efforts to turn the scandal into a voter issue.

As well as the ongoing saga, voters normally considered solidly in Mr Trump’s base have been put off by his ruthless Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crackdown; plans to livestream the execution of a terrorist – which were later scrapped – and blasphemous AI images posted on Easter Sunday depicting Mr Trump as Jesus.

When Mr Trump ran for office in 2024, Americans’ television screens were filled with images of migrant chaos. There were tent camps on both sides of the border, caravans of people trudging through Central America and concerns about newcomers overwhelming communities.

His vow to crack down on illegal border crossings is thought to have earned him record Hispanic votes from legal migrants and their descendants who had an unfavourable view of undocumented migrants they believed were giving their community a bad name.

But not long after he was inaugurated, those images were replaced by chaotic and sometimes violent scenes of ICE rounding up illegal migrants in public and from their homes. An estimated 660,000 people were deported in the past fiscal year, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Minneapolis was the turning point. More than 2,000 federal officers were sent to the city, and scenes of masked agents spilling from convoys of unmarked vehicles became commonplace. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets.

Two US citizens – Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both 37 – were killed during confrontations with agents. In the weeks that followed, the White House pushed out border chief Gregory Bovino and Kristi Noem, the then homeland security secretary.

While Mr Trump maintains some support for his handling of the border, polling shows voters disapprove of his approach to ICE raids, a striking turnaround that could undermine Republican attempts to maintain control of Congress.

Mr Trump has repeatedly portrayed illegal migrants voting in the midterms as a grave threat to election integrity. It was a core argument in his claim that the 2020 election, which Mr Trump lost to Joe Biden, was “stolen”.

Back in office, the president has launched a sweeping investigation to try to prove his claims and apparently lay the groundwork to contest results in the midterm election.

In a nationally televised address in July, Mr Trump said his administration had identified more than 275,000 non-citizen voters, which the White House said were in four Democratic-leaning states.

Federal prosecutors are continuing to report suspected new cases. In Washington state this week, they said they had identified more than 400 non-citizens who appear to be registered to vote.

This month, the Justice Department said that in California it had charged 28 people – all legal, permanent residents – with voting as non-citizens or making false statements on voting or naturalisation paperwork.

The continuing drumbeat about voter fraud and non-citizens casting ballots has election officials and Democrats bracing for the possibility of Mr Trump intervening in Tuesday’s vote.

Democrats and civil rights groups have filed lawsuits to try to prevent the Trump administration from sending armed agents to the polls, something the administration insists it will not do. Whether it will encourage Republicans to go out and cast their ballots remains to be seen.

The hardening of the Democratic Party’s stance against Israel has strained its relationship with Jewish voters. Still, many strategists question whether Mr Trump and the Republicans will be able to exploit it.

A major hurdle is that Jewish voters, who form a critical bloc in swing states such as Michigan, are significantly more liberal than the average American. Many are sceptical of Mr Trump, who has never performed strongly among the demographic, and do not want him to maintain his control of Congress.

Despite the surge of anti-Israel and Israel-sceptic candidates among the Democrats, some Jewish voters, particularly the younger generation, are more animated by domestic issues such as healthcare.

Some will undoubtedly abandon the Democrats, but the president will struggle to peel away a meaningful proportion. And defectors will not necessarily vote Republican but could instead cast their ballot for a third-party candidate or sit out the contest altogether.

Asher Lopatin, a rabbi based on the outskirts of Detroit, campaigned for Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate in Michigan, but believed he would lose to the Democrats’ Abdul El-Sayed.

Mr Rogers was too close to Mr Trump to appeal to Jewish voters, he told The Telegraph. And “for maybe a third of the Jews, Israel’s not a big issue for them”.

At the same time, polling shows Arab-American voters have shifted back into the Democrats’ column after many abandoned the party in the 2024 election, angered by Mr Biden’s stance on Israel and Gaza.

Independents have made inroads in traditionally Republican territory. Voters, disillusioned with Mr Trump but reluctant to leap into the arms of the Democrats, have a viable third option in several states.

Candidates have cut through with populist messaging, exploiting public anger over data centres and Flock surveillance cameras. Many of them are veterans and have hammered Mr Trump for risking American lives and fuelling inflation with the Iran war.

Independents are more organised and better-funded than at any time in recent memory, and have ploughed millions of dollars into what they believe are winnable races.

In Nebraska, some polls give Dan Osborn, a navy veteran and former union leader, an edge over the Republicans’ Pete Ricketts. Even GOP-sponsored surveys give their candidate only a tiny lead.

Perhaps most importantly, independent candidates provide a “permission structure” for voters to stray outside their normal partisan lanes.

Whether or not they prevail, the independent surge has thinned out Republican defences, forcing them to shore up what ought to be their heartlands and diverting resources from other must-win races.

Mr Trump seems to believe that his best midterm weapon is the weakness of the Democrats. At rallies, he hammers his rivals as anti-American radicals who will fling open the borders and “turn your children transgender”.

That worked in 2024, but Mr Trump has two major issues. The first is that the midterms are a referendum on a president whose approval ratings are underwater.

The second is that polling shows the Democrats have enjoyed a moderate resurgence since September and, while still broadly unpopular, are favoured over Mr Trump. In generic congressional polling, they lead Republicans by almost 10 points.

That means banking on the Democrats’ toxicity is unlikely to be a winning strategy.

Even though Mr Trump has barnstormed around the country trying to galvanise his base, he has had limited success. Democratic voters are significantly more likely to turn out than their Republican counterparts by a margin of 17 points, according to the Pew Research Centre.

That enthusiasm gap could well be fatal to Republican chances, especially because independent voters almost always swing against the incumbent party in the midterms.

The silver lining for Mr Trump is that John Fetterman, the Democratic senator for Pennsylvania, has suggested he could abandon his party if it becomes too anti-Israel. Even after the final votes are tallied, control of the Senate could still hang in the balance.

In an increasingly divided country, data centres are one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement.

The developments are highly unpopular over concerns they will force up electricity prices and consume vast amounts of water, and are a millstone around the neck of any candidate associated with them.

Mr Trump supports them anyway, warning that opposition means losing the AI arms race to China and spurning local investment by big tech.

Communities who reject data centres will end up “being backwards and poor”, he declared in August. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let data reign.”But polling shows seven in 10 voters oppose construction of the centres. Republicans who once enthusiastically backed development have furiously backpedalled, while Democrats have been hammering them on the issue.

According to modelling by The Economist, almost one in five voters who supported Mr Trump in 2024 and live within 2km of a data centre intends to vote Democrat, which is three times higher than those who live elsewhere.

In a state such as Texas, which has the second-highest number of data centres in the country, and is hosting a knife-edge Senate race that could turn the state blue for the first time since 1994, that is a serious consideration.

Mr Trump may want data to “reign”. But the centres may end up handing power to the Democrats.