2026 Midterms: 145 Ballot Measures Test Trump’s Agenda
Meta description: Voters in the 2026 midterms decide 145 ballot measures on abortion, redistricting, voter ID and more, putting Donald Trump’s agenda to a direct public test.
Voters across the United States are deciding 145 proposed laws and constitutional amendments on Tuesday, alongside the candidates on their ballots, in votes that will shape abortion access, congressional maps, voting rules and transgender rights for years to come. The measures form the undercard of the 2026 midterms, an election that will settle which party controls Congress, fill 36 governorships and decide 35 Senate seats, and they give voters a direct say on several of President Donald Trump’s most contested priorities. Where Congress has stalled on voter identification, courts have blocked new district maps, and legislatures have deadlocked on abortion and transgender policy, the ballot box itself is now the arena. The results will not only change law in individual states; they will be read in Washington as a verdict on the direction of the Trump presidency in its final two years.
The scale of the ballot is unusual even for a midterm year. Voters are settling questions that legislatures either could not resolve or chose to hand to the public: some measures would write new rights into state constitutions, where lawmakers could not easily reverse them, while others would set the rules for future elections themselves, deciding who can vote, what identification they must show, and how primaries work. Several are deliberately framed as tests of the president’s agenda, from redrawing congressional districts to restricting transgender athletes and medical treatments for young people.
Abortion Rights: Missouri’s Reversal Vote
The most closely watched abortion fight is in Missouri, where voters are being asked to undo what they did only two years ago. In 2024, Missouri became the first state in the country where voters used a ballot measure to overturn an existing ban on most abortions, writing a right to reproductive freedom into the state constitution. Now voters must decide whether to repeal that amendment and replace it with a new prohibition, this time with exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal anomalies, and for cases of rape or incest up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. The Republican-led Legislature placed the repeal on the ballot, and national progressive groups have greatly outspending the measure’s supporters, making Missouri the centre of the national abortion debate for a second cycle in a row.
Three other states are voting on measures that would move in the opposite direction, creating an abortion right along the lines that applied nationally before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and returned the question to the states. In Idaho and Nevada, the proposals would prevent bans on abortion before fetal viability, generally understood to fall after 21 weeks of pregnancy. Nevada’s voters have already approved their measure once, but the state’s constitution requires initiated amendments to pass twice before they take effect, so the question is back on the ballot for a second, decisive vote. In Virginia, the amendment on offer would guarantee that abortion remains allowed through the first two trimesters. The contrast between Missouri, where an existing right is under threat, and the three states where voters could establish one, shows how unsettled abortion law remains four years after Roe fell.
Redistricting: The Fight Over Congress Maps
Redistricting is the second great theme of the ballot, and it carries consequences well beyond this election. Nine states are already voting under new congressional districts this year after a rare wave of mid-decade redistricting encouraged by Trump, who pressed Republican-led states to redraw maps to help his party hold the House. But several of the most consequential map fights concern 2028, not 2026, and voters are deciding now whether those future maps can go ahead at all.
Missouri is again at the centre of it: its Republican lawmakers adopted new House districts designed to hand their party an additional seat, but courts ruled the maps cannot be used unless voters approve them in a November referendum. If it passes, the new districts take effect for the 2028 election. In Maryland, voters are deciding on a constitutional amendment that could open the door to new congressional districts for 2028, with Democratic supporters, backed by former President Barack Obama, urging a yes vote as a way of pushing back against Trump. Colorado presents a different model: a citizen initiative there would bar any 2028 redistricting that favours one political party, and would require both an independent commission and the state Supreme Court to sign off before new maps could take effect.
Voter ID and Citizen Voting Rules
No theme on the ballot is more directly tied to the president’s stated priorities than voter identification. Trump’s push for a nationwide voter ID requirement has stalled in Congress, so citizen activists have taken the question directly to voters in states where Democratic-led legislatures would not act. New voter ID requirements are on the ballot in California, Colorado and Nevada, each requiring voters to present government-issued identification, such as a driver’s license, or in some cases a partial Social Security number. Nevada’s amendment already won approval in 2024 and, like its abortion measure, needs a second vote to become law. In North Carolina and Ohio, measures referred by Republican-led legislatures would strengthen existing voter ID rules by writing them into the state constitutions.
Analysts tracking the cycle have noted that 2026 has produced more voter ID measures on ballots in a single year than any previous cycle, and the pattern extends beyond identification itself. Six states, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota and West Virginia, are voting on measures that would reinforce the existing practice of limiting voting to United States citizens. Critics call those measures largely symbolic, noting that voting by noncitizens is rare and already forbidden in federal elections, though noncitizens may vote in some local contests in California, Maryland, Vermont and the District of Columbia. Two years ago, similar amendments passed in all eight states where they appeared. For voters, the practical question is what new paperwork and checks will stand between them and the ballot box in future elections.
Transgender Sports and Medical Measures
Voters in five states, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Washington, are also deciding measures restricting transgender athletes or medical procedures, an issue on which the Trump administration has pushed hard, particularly for young people. Most Republican-led states already bar transgender women and girls from female school sports teams, so the new proposals largely extend that approach into new territory. Citizen-led initiatives in the Democratic-led states of Colorado and Washington would impose similar sports restrictions there, while Arizona’s measure would stretch existing public school sports rules to cover private schools, and Nebraska’s would write its existing restrictions into the state constitution.
On the medical side, a second Colorado question would ban some transgender medical treatments for minors, and Missouri’s abortion amendment would also write existing restrictions on such treatments into the state constitution. Supporters frame them as protections for children and fairness in school sports; opponents say they single out a small and vulnerable group of young people. Because several of these proposals would be embedded in state constitutions, their effects, if approved, would be difficult for future legislatures to undo.
How States Run Their Elections
Beyond the headline issues, voters are deciding a set of questions about how elections themselves work, and several of them would make it harder, or easier, to change the rules in future. In Massachusetts, a measure would scrap separate party primaries in favour of open primaries, in which the top two finishers, regardless of party, would advance to the general election. In Alaska, voters are deciding for the second election in a row whether to abandon their system of open primaries and ranked choice voting, a system narrowly retained in a 2024 referendum.
Other measures would raise the bar for changing state constitutions: proposed amendments in North Dakota and South Dakota would require 60 percent of voters, rather than a simple majority, to approve future changes, while a similar threshold is proposed in Utah for citizen initiatives that raise taxes. Missouri is voting on a measure that would make it harder for lawmakers to rewrite voter-approved initiatives, requiring revisions to win an 80 percent vote in both chambers. These procedural questions rarely attract the attention of the abortion or redistricting fights, but they determine how much power voters keep and how much they hand back to legislatures.
Immigration, Cameras and Taxes on the Same Ballot
Two further measures show how wide the ballot’s reach is. In Colorado, a constitutional amendment placed on the ballot by conservative activists would chip away at state laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration agents, a proposal that could boost Trump’s immigration enforcement even in a Democratic-led state. It would require officers to notify the Department of Homeland Security when someone with an illegal or unknown immigration status is charged with a violent crime, or faces a new charge after a prior felony conviction. In Arizona, voters are deciding a proposal to limit traffic cameras used for speeding and red-light violations, referred by the Republican-led Legislature after Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed a ban on the cameras. Hobbs argues the cameras improve road safety; opponents cite privacy and past misuse. The proposal would bar new traffic camera contracts from 2027 and require local governments to hold elections on whether to keep existing systems.
California’s ballot adds a fiscal dimension. Alongside its voter ID proposal, the state is voting on Proposition 40, described as the first state wealth tax of its kind: a one-time tax of up to 5 percent on the covered assets of billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026. The measure has drawn national attention because no state has tried anything like it before.
What Happens Next as Election Results Arrive
The first polls close at 6 p.m. Eastern time, with the last regularly scheduled polls closing at 1 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday in Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands. Early returns will say little on their own, because the earliest states to report are generally safe for one party or the other. Voter turnout in a midterm is always lower than in a presidential year, so organised campaigns on individual measures, from Missouri’s abortion fight to Nevada’s second votes, can matter as much as the national mood.
Not every result will be final on election night: counting mail-in, provisional and overseas ballots takes time, and California in particular can take weeks to count all of its ballots. Some measures carry their own delays: Nevada’s amendments need second approval before taking effect, Missouri’s new districts would apply only from 2028, and Arizona’s camera limits would bar new contracts from 2027. The full picture, in other words, will emerge in stages, with election night providing the direction of travel and the weeks that follow providing the certified detail. The decisions made on Tuesday will be felt in state law, in congressional maps and in the rules for the next election long after the last projection has faded.
Source: Associated Press via The Week