For the third time in 10 days, voters around the world are delivering a verdict on the boundless presidency of Donald Trump. The first two, where Trump’s pick Flavio Bolsonaro lost in Brazil’s presidential election on October 25 and then two days later when Benjamin Netanyahu salvaged his tenure as prime minister by hitching himself to Trump, were split decisions. Now, the U.S. midterms will offer a final judgment on just how much of Trump’s once seemingly limitless ability to reshape the world remains.Exit polls and early results that were starting to trickle in after the 9 p.m.
ET hour, taken together, suggests a result looking closer to Brazil than Israel. In NBC News exit polls released as the first polls were closing Tuesday night, nearly half of voters viewed the midterms as a chance to deliver their disapproval of Trump – far higher than share who said the same during the 2018 midterms, when Trump lost the House but hung onto the Senate. The same exit poll found male voters splitting almost evenly – 49 to 48 – between parties.
Trump won men by 12 points four years ago. A CNN exit poll found voters broadly unhappy with the state of the economy in another warning sign for the GOP. Exit polls conducted by CBS News found Trump less popular than George W.
Bush in 2006, when he lost both chambers of Congress in a result he memorably referred to as a “thumping.” For the better part of a year, Latin America kept handing Donald Trump the election results he wanted. Argentina stuck with the party of its brash president, Javier Milei, last October after Trump’s Treasury Department engineered a $20 billion economic backstop that Trump then threatened to pull if voters went the wrong way in legislative elections.In Honduras, voters chose right-wing Nasry Asfura by a point after Trump endorsed him and threatened to cut off aid if he lost. Chile elected Jose Antonion Kast.
Peru went with Keiko Fujimori. Colombia handed its presidency – again by a single point – to Abelardo de la Espriella, who swept into office with Trump’s “complete and total endorsement”. With the inclusion of elections in Costa Rica and Bolivia, that made seven straight conservative wins across the region, and leaving Brazil – the one Trump wanted most.
Ahead of that vote, he had hit the largest economy in Latin America with 50 percent tariffs and sanctioned the judge who had prosecuted his former ally, Jair Bolsonaro, whose eldest son, Flavio, was running against the populist left-wing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. As Americans headed to the polls Tuesday in their own referendum on Trumpism, Flavio had absconded to Florida – with Trump telling him he could stay “as long as he wants” – and Lula was preparing for his historic fourth nonconsecutive term.
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