Polls open this morning for a midterm election that will decide control of Congress, with all 435 House seats, 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships on the ballot and more than 57 million early ballots already cast. Two developments overnight frame the vote. US forces struck Qeshm Island off Iran’s southern coast late Monday, the first American attack on the island since June; Iranian state media reported the explosions, and US officials speaking anonymously to the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press characterized the action as “defensive strikes.” The attack followed an Iranian report that the Revolutionary Guard had destroyed an American MQ-9 drone east of the Strait of Hormuz. In Washington, the Supreme Court denied the Justice Department’s request to set aside 20,000 California ballots, a one-line order that leaves the state counting. Polymarket, the prediction market, puts the House at 94.5 percent Democratic and the Senate at 77.5 percent Democratic on election morning.

The administration and the rule of law

The register’s two-day window carried 183 documents: two presidential documents, 15 rules, 10 proposed rules and 156 notices.

The presidential documents are a memorandum delegating authority under section 8335 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, which carries no abstract and can be named here but not described, and a proclamation adjusting imports of robotics, industrial machinery and their parts and components. Proclamation 11077, signed October 28 and published Monday, is a Section 232 trade action that imposes no tariff yet. It records a finding that the covered imports “threaten to impair the national security of the United States” and directs the Commerce Department and the US Trade Representative to negotiate agreements, with an update due within 180 days. The president reserved the right to consider “imposing or modifying tariffs, duties, quotas, and fees” later. As trade policy, it is a negotiating instrument rather than a new duty.

Among the 15 rules, four are worth naming. HHS finalized its revision to the section 504 regulation, clarifying that the statutory exclusion of “gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments” covers “gender dysphoria not resulting from a physical impairment”; it amends the 2024 final rule and takes effect January 4, 2027. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission finalized its streamlining of contested adjudications in licensing proceedings, responding to the ADVANCE Act of 2024 and Executive Order 14300, effective December 3 for proceedings noticed on or after that date. The FCC deleted a broadcast and cable equal employment opportunity rules section to conform to the Fifth Circuit’s decision in National Religious Broadcasters v. FCC, effective today. The FEC published a one-page correction to its compliance procedure at 11 CFR part 111.

Among the proposed rules, the Transportation Department opened a comment period on amendments to its liquefied natural gas facility pipeline safety rules.

The 156 notices were the usual administrative volume: trade enforcement, foreign-trade zone approvals, information collections and meetings. The day’s trade docket ran from a NAFTA panel decision on Canadian softwood lumber to an amended preliminary determination on truck bed covers from China and an amended final determination on corrosion-resistant steel from Mexico.

The courts

The Supreme Court’s opinion feed recorded nothing in the window, and the D.C. Circuit’s recorded nothing. The Court was not absent from the election. On Monday it denied the Justice Department’s application to stop California from counting 20,000 disputed ballots, in a one-line order: “The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied.” Two lower courts had already refused the request, and California election officials had argued that the process used to identify alleged non-citizens was inaccurate. The order leaves the count standing on the eve of the vote.

CourtListener recorded eleven new district-court entries in the District of Columbia. Among them was a suit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington against the Department of Defense, along with M.B. v. Venturella, Khan v. Connell, Diawara v. Percival and Curium US LLC v. Oz. The rest were criminal or magistrate matters, including United States v. Babula, United States v. Madson and United States v. Taverez. The pack carries case names and docket numbers, not complaints, so this report can say who sued and not what they allege.

Of the five watched dockets, three moved. D.C. Preservation League v. Department of the Interior, the East Potomac golf case, recorded twelve entries on November 2, including docket entries 121 through 125, and has now moved on six consecutive days. Phang v. Blanche recorded entries 62 and 63. MSW Media, Inc. v. Department of Justice recorded one minute entry. Beatty v. Trump, the Kennedy Center matter, recorded nothing, and so did the consolidated Phang appeal in the D.C. Circuit.

Markets

Equities closed Monday mixed. The Dow rose 213.67 points, or 0.41 percent, to 51,983.98, while the S&P 500 fell 38.67 points, or 0.51 percent, to 7,541.40, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 272.636 points, or 1.07 percent, to 25,164.363, all as of the November 2 close.

On election morning the VIX was 21.54, up 0.39 or 1.84 percent, at 6:59 Eastern. The live ten-year Treasury yield was 4.935 percent, up 4.1 basis points, at 7:00; front-month WTI crude rose $2.06, or 2.14 percent, to $98.52 at 6:50; gold fell $53.20, or 1.34 percent, to $3,916.40 at 6:50; and the dollar index was 101.834, up 0.089 or 0.09 percent, at 7:00. Those times are Eastern, one hour ahead of Central.

Treasury’s curve for November 2 ran 4.59 percent at two years, 4.91 at ten and 5.28 at thirty, a 2s10s spread of +0.32. October 30 ran 4.56, 4.94 and 5.31, or +0.38, so the short end rose three basis points, the long end fell three, and the curve flattened by six. Total public debt outstanding was $40,524,510,013,062 on October 30, down $69,127,249,821 from October 29. Of that, $32,738,422,032,177 was held by the public and $7,786,087,980,886 was intragovernmental.

The economy

The BLS published nothing in the window, so September remains the newest month. The all-items consumer price index was 336.940 on the 1982-84 base, up from 334.980 in August and 333.918 in July; on the unadjusted index that is a 0.59 percent monthly rise in September against 0.32 percent in August. Unemployment was 4.2 percent in September, a tenth above August and July. Payrolls were 159,044 thousand in September, a gain of 29 thousand after August’s 133 thousand. Prices firmed while hiring slowed.

Elections and the midterms

The mechanics are set. Polls opened first in Vermont, New Jersey, Virginia, Connecticut and Kentucky, with hours set by each state. All 435 House seats are contested, along with 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats and 36 governorships. Republicans hold 53 Senate seats to 47 for Democrats and aligned independents, and a four-seat majority in the House. More than 57 million Americans had cast early ballots, with heavy turnout reported in Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

Al Jazeera reported that Democrats made their closing argument on the cost-of-living crisis and on ending what the outlet called Trump’s war on Iran, while Republicans hoped to defy political gravity by relying on their most loyal voters and on distrust of progressive politics. The overnight strike on Qeshm made the war an election-day fact rather than a campaign theme. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said “consultations through mediators are very intensive,” and the parliament speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned that “Iran will not submit.” President Trump wrote that “Iran wants a settlement, as soon as possible. It could happen!” and told Axios he was “in no rush.”

Polymarket’s board is close to a verdict on the House and somewhat less so on the Senate. The House contract is 94.5 percent Democratic on $3,970,329 of twenty-four-hour volume, against 5.5 percent Republican on $1,544,835. The Senate contract is 77.5 percent Democratic on $1,333,304, against 21.5 percent Republican on $1,253,852. A Democratic sweep is 75.5 percent on $2,694,251; a Republican sweep is 5.5 percent on $5,427,717, the heaviest pool on the board at a fraction of the price, which is the shape of a hedge rather than a forecast. In the states, Michigan has Abdul El-Sayed at 80.5 percent on $911,175 against Mike Rogers at 19.5 percent on $642,852. Texas has James Talarico at 74.5 percent on $959,660 against Ken Paxton at 25.5 percent on $1,362,531. These are the venue’s prices, not this publication’s view.

The world

Russia struck a city clinical hospital in Kharkiv with ballistic missiles and aerial bombs overnight and damaged energy infrastructure across nine regions, from Odesa and Chernihiv to Dnipro and Rivne. President Volodymyr Zelensky said, “the Russians directly struck a city clinical hospital. Seventy-three people were injured,” and that the cardiology department was damaged. He described the wider assault as “a complex, massive attack” and said Russia fired 289 attack drones, 17 ballistic missiles and 59 cruise missiles. Mayor Ihor Terekhov reported more than 1,000 shattered windows. The governor of Zhytomyr, Vitalii Bunechko, said more than 180,000 people in his region had no power on Tuesday morning, and Odesa began scheduled outages.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it targeted electricity facilities in Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv that supplied the Ukrainian military and defense factories. Ukrainian drones set a fire at a refinery in Yaroslavl, injuring two employees, according to the region’s governor, Mikhail Yevrayev. The diplomatic track ran alongside the strikes: the American envoy Steve Witkoff said talks in Abu Dhabi would cover “post-war security arrangements, de-escalation, humanitarian efforts, and next steps toward peace.”

Sources

Market, yield, debt and prediction-market figures were collected at 06:00 CT on November 3, 2026 from CNBC’s quote service (the November 2 close for the equities, and election-morning prints for the VIX, gold, crude, the dollar and the ten-year), the U.S. Treasury daily yield curve (November 2), FiscalData (October 30) and Polymarket’s Gamma API (twenty-four-hour volume). The BLS public API supplied the three series named above. The Federal Register counts and document descriptions were read from the register’s own API, and the courts section draws on CourtListener’s search API and its watched-docket feeds. The account of the California ballot order, the Qeshm strike and the Kharkiv strikes draws on the BBC and Al Jazeera reports linked above.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman