A year ago, the possibility of Democrats capturing the U.S. Senate seemed far-fetched. On Tuesday night, those doubts were distant memories as Democrats racked up stunning U.S. Senate victories, claiming Republican seats in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maine, and Ohio while holding Georgia and Michigan.
Democrats flipped the U.S. House, and news outlets estimated they could finish with more than 250 seats when the counting was over. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader in the chamber, will almost certainly be the first African American Speaker of the House.
The Democratic Congressional rout was echoed in the states. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott conceded his race to Gina Hinojosa, who just weeks ago had little chance of defeating the three-term Republican. Democrats picked up the governorship in Iowa, flipped both houses of New Hampshire’s legislature, and made dramatic gains in multiple legislatures. The story was the same everywhere as the much speculated-upon Blue Wave became a Bluenami. In county after county, across the country, Democrats won in Trump territory, erasing a decade of GOP gains.
President Donald Trump is hardly the first president to see his party get drubbed in Congress and the states. It happened to Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Dwight Eisenhower, among others. Still, it’s hard to think of another president who was so personally responsible for the decisions that jettisoned his party’s control. Policy decisions, most notably the Iran War and tariffs, sent prices soaring and put the kibosh on his promises to lower costs. From pushing Thom Tillis out of his North Carolina U.S. Senate seat to handpicking the political novice Darline Graham to succeed her brother, the late Senator Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Trump’s interventions in GOP races backfired. Even his push for mid-decade redistricting seems to have failed spectacularly as Democratic candidates from Florida to Ohio to Texas survived efforts to gerrymander them out of existence.
Conversely, Democratic Leader Senator Chuck Schumer appears in a much stronger position to be elected Senate Majority Leader come January. He recruited plenty of winners, despite the embarrassment this week caused by his pick for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat: Representative Haley Stevens, who endorsed the GOP U.S. Senate nominee, Mike Rogers, over the weekend in what Schumer and many Democrats dubbed “a betrayal.” The Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, won his race although he underperformed compared to his party’s nominee for governor, Jocelyn Benson, who will succeed Gretchen Whitmer.
The night kicked off with Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff winning a second term, being declared the victor just minutes after the polls closed. A year ago, the Democratic freshman senator was thought to face a significant challenge, possibly from the state’s popular outgoing governor, Brian Kemp. Still, after running a stellar campaign and facing a hapless GOP nominee, Ossoff won handily. Just four years ago, Trump easily won Georgia. Former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms took an early lead and held on to win the Georgia governorship, making her the nation’s first female African-American governor.
In New Hampshire, Democrat Chris Pappas won the U.S. Senate seat vacated by retiring Senator Jeanne Shaheen. Pappas, a U.S. representative, beat back what had been expected to be a strong challenge from former U.S. Senator John Sununu, who sought to reclaim his old seat. He will become the first openly gay male U.S. Senator. In North Carolina, former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper will succeed the retiring Senator Tillis, who declined to run again after crossing swords with President Trump, who vowed to find a challenger to Tillis. Cooper is the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in the Tar Heel state in 18 years. Annie Andrews won her U.S. Senate bid in South Carolina. The last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in the Palmetto State was the late Ernest “Fritz” Hollings in 1998.
Two U.S. Senate races have yet to be called: Alaska, where Mary Peltola, a former Democratic U.S. representative, is battling the incumbent Dan Sullivan, and Mississippi, where Scott Colom, a prosecutor, is challenging Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. The last Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate was John Stennis, a former segregationist, in 1982.
In Florida, Democrats initially seemed poised to win the gubernatorial race last night, after being shut out since 1994. Still, David Jolly, a former U.S. representative and Republican-turned-Democrat, fell short in his bid for the governor’s mansion in Tallahassee. U.S. Representative Byron Donalds will be the state’s next governor, and the first Black GOP governor since Reconstruction. But several GOP House incumbents in the Sunshine State and elsewhere were sweating, suggesting that redistricting efforts led by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis have failed to boost GOP fortunes. Kathy Castor, a Democratic House incumbent, for instance, held on to her seat, despite Florida statehouse Republicans drawing her a much tougher district. U.S. Senator Ashley Moody held on against Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist, who ran surprisingly well in her bid. Moody will serve the two years remaining in Marco Rubio’s term. She was appointed to fill Rubio’s U.S. Senate seat when he was tapped to be Donald Trump’s Secretary of State.
Independent bids by candidates who sought Democratic votes failed in Montana and Nebraska. Indeed, the Democratic brand, once toxic in parts of the country, seemed popular again in ways not seen in generations. In Texas, where Democrats had not won a statewide race since 1994, they not only won the U.S. Senate seat and the governorship but, it appears, all of the Lone Star State’s many statewide commissionerships and Supreme Court seats. Democrats won their first U.S. Senate seat in Kansas in 94 years. The last Democrat to hold the seat was born in 1879.
In Ohio, Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Sherrod Brown prevailed and will return to the U.S. Senate two years after losing his seat to Bernie Moreno. He ousted John Husted, who was appointed to take the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance.
James Talarico will be Texas’s next U.S. Senator. No Democrat has been elected to the U.S. Senate in Texas since 1988, and he won by double digits. Gina Hinojosa became the first Democrat elected governor in the Lone Star State since 1990 and the first Hispanic governor of the nation’s second most-populous state. The return of Hispanics to the Democratic fold after moving toward Trump in 2024 was stunning. Some South Texas counties in the Rio Grande Valley showed a 50-point swing to Democratic candidates from Trump’s 2024 victory.
Democrats had worried that Donald Trump’s administration might try to steal the midterm election through intimidation, theft, and other subterfuge. Still, as millions of Americans headed to the polls on Tuesday for the midterms, Democratic fears were allayed. Nothing significantly untoward has been reported at the polls.
In two marquee U.S. Senate races in Michigan and Maine, Troy Jackson ended Susan Collins’s 30-year U.S. Senate career. She became the first chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations committee to be defeated since Warren Magnuson of Washington State lost his seat in the 1980 wave that elected Ronald Reagan and flipped the U.S. Senate. El-Sayed prevailed in perhaps the year’s most discussed race.
For those trying to determine the policy fallout from Democrats capturing the House and perhaps the Senate, it’s worth looking back at presidents who lost control of chambers during their terms. Bill Clinton’s Democrats lost control of both chambers in 1994, but he went on to win reelection handily two years later. Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans lost control of the House and Senate in 1954, but Ike went on to reelection and six successful years in the White House. Politics has become much more polarized since then, but history reminds us that presidents can get things done even when an opposing party controls Congress. Last night, speaking to Politico’s Dasha Burns on the phone (broadcast live), the president said he wanted to work with Democrats: “I don’t want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything.”
This piece was updated throughout Election Night.
