4 Numbers to Know on Election Day

By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey

Trump with Netanyahu last December

Happy Election Day! Polls are closing tonight after voters have their final say on 35 Senate and 435 House races as well as 36 gubernatorial elections and 6,139 state legislative contests. More than 60 million Americans have cast their votes early, either in person or by mail, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. The early turnout represents a record surge for a midterm election, far surpassing the roughly 46 million votes cast ahead of Election Day in 2022. The early vote can't predict the final results, but the details and polling data available so far suggest a "blue wave" coming this year. Democrats need a net gain of three seats to win control of the House and four seats to gain a majority in the Senate.

Trump Says $4 Billion Aid Program for Israel Will End

President Trump said Tuesday that the United States will stop giving Israel roughly $4 billion in annual aid, starting at the beginning of next year.

Appearing on "Fox & Friends" as polls opened on Election Day, Trump said he had discussed ending the aid with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu months ago, and the leaders agreed to make the change since Israel no longer needs the assistance. Israel will still be able to purchase U.S. arms, Trump said, and may receive additional aid if necessary.

"Bibi Netanyahu and I have made a deal," Trump told the Fox News morning hosts. "We give Israel $4 billion a year, and we made a deal months ago that we're stopping - and they're fine with it, because, you know, they've become a very successful country."

Trump also framed the cessation of aid in fiscal terms, saying he would like to balance the federal budget, and the aid is "a lot of money."

The U.S. and Israel are currently operating under a military assistance agreement signed in 2016 during the Obama administration under which the U.S. provides $3.8 billion a year in aid to Israel through 2028. Of that total, $3.3 billion is provided through the Foreign Military Financing program, which helps foreign partners acquire U.S. military equipment through grants and loans, and $500 million is for joint research and development of missile defense programs.

In addition, outside the agreement, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $21.7 billion in military aid in the two years following the October 7, 2023, attacks by Hamas, according to an analysis by the Costs of War project at Brown University.

Trump did not address the status of the military assistance agreement or provide details about how the aid would be cut off, but the agreement is not a legally binding treaty. Funding for the assistance is subject to congressional appropriation, raising questions about lawmakers' role in continuing or ending the aid program.

Trump also did not discuss ongoing cooperation and joint operations between the U.S. and Israeli militaries, which could expand significantly under the terms of the proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act.

The politics of aid to Israel: Trump indicated that the agreement to end the aid was informed by rising criticism of the arrangement in American politics, especially from "lunatics" on the left.

"The left uses the $4 billion payment that everybody knows about, it's no secret, as a signal of unfairness, and we can't allow that to happen," Trump said. "I don't like that because, you know, it's too easy. It's almost too easy a target."

Although criticism of military aid to Israel has come from both the left and the right, Trump singled out one Democratic critic in particular: Abdul El-Sayed, the Senate nominee in Michigan.

"When you see their rallies, when you see this lunatic that's running in Michigan, he talks about the money that we pay them all the time," Trump said, referring to El-Sayed, who has sharply criticized the aid. "He says, 'Why are we giving Israel $4 billion?' You take that off the table. They don't need it."

Trump said that ending the aid would eliminate the "best talking point" of the left. "Why should we suffer the slings from lunatics like El-Sayed when they don't need it?" Trump said. "It's a bad talking point."

El-Sayed welcomed the news, however caustically. "Even a broken clock can be right twice a day," he told reporters after meeting with voters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. El-Sayed reportedly declined to answer questions about whether he thought the end of military aid to Israel was a permanent policy shift or a political tactic timed for Election Day.

Netanyahu signals shift: The Israeli prime minister has referred to ending U.S. military aid in recent months, telling The Economist magazine in January that he wanted to phase out American aid over a period of years. In May, he told CBS News that he wants the U.S. and Israel to act more as partners than as patron and client. "I want to taper off American support for Israel to zero," he said. "We've come of age."

Last week, while warning Israelis that U.S. aid would be coming to an end, though not perhaps on the rapid timeline laid out by Trump today, Netanyahu gave a different sense of what was driving the change in the relationship between the two countries. "If you think we will continue receiving what I secured twice - tens of billions of dollars in American aid for the defense budget - you'd better prepare yourselves and get used to the idea that this will not continue," Netanyahu said, per Bloomberg. "That is because America has changed, not because Israel has changed. It will end. It is only a matter of time."

4 Numbers to Know on Election Day

$4.15: The national average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline is $4.15 today, according to AAA, making it the highest ever on an Election Day and the highest ever for this date in any year. Gas prices are up almost 40% since the start of the Iran war at the end of February. The national average price for diesel, meanwhile, is about $6.29, down from a record of almost $6.53 in late September, but up from $3.68 a year ago.

$12 billion: Total spending on campaign ads this year is reportedly expected to top $12 billion, helping make this year's midterm elections the most expensive in U.S. history, exceeding even the 2024 presidential contest.

$2.1 billion: The Republican Party had a massive fundraising advantage in this midterm cycle, as the party and three super PACS affiliated with President Trump and House and Senate GOP leaders reportedly raised more than $2.1 billion in total, according to Bloomberg, far exceeding the roughly $1.4 billion raised by their Democratic counterparts.

Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC reportedly spent over $300 million on the midterms, including more than $277 million over the final weeks of the campaign, Reuters reported last month. Trump himself had announced that he would spend more than $400 million total by Election Day.

And as Republicans scrambled to try to keep control of the House, the Congressional Leadership Fund, the House Republican super PAC, announced on Tuesday that it had set records for both fundraising and ad spending in the 2026 election cycle, with $244.8 million spent on advertising across 55 districts, up from more than $242 million spent in 2024. CLF and its affiliated American Action Network raised a combined $370 million.

$474 million: Elon Musk has donated nearly half a billion dollars to political campaigns in this election cycle - more money, The New York Times reports, "than any donor has ever spent in a single election cycle, apart from wealthy candidates who have funded their own runs for office." The $474 million total includes disclosed donations to federal and state political groups since the beginning of 2025. Musk gave $168 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the main Senate Republican super PAC, with almost all of that money going to back Ken Paxton's Senate campaign in Texas.

Quote of the Day

"We don't want to count our chickens before they hatch, so I'd characterize our mood as nauseously optimistic."

− Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, telling reporters in Brooklyn that Democrats are hopeful that they can win control of the Senate.

Democrats are favored to win a majority in the House, according to the Cook Political Report, which projects 222 seats in that chamber to at least lean blue, with another 18 toss-up races. Control of the Senate is less clear and is expected to depend on the outcome of six races that the Cook report classifies as toss-ups along with five others that are seen as leaning toward one party or the other.

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