2026 Midterm Results: Democrats Sweep Both Chambers in a Historic Rebuke of Trump
Democrats won control of the House and the Senate on Tuesday night, in a midterm rout that flipped seats in places the party hadn’t won in generations — and put President Donald Trump, who had urged voters to treat the election as a referendum on him, at the center of the story.
The Bottom Line
The Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats at 11:37 p.m. ET on election night and the House at 1:28 a.m. ET on Wednesday, according to election trackers. NBC News projected Democrats will win at least 244 of the House’s 435 seats, well above the 218 needed for a majority, while the AP’s early count had already called 222 Democratic House seats. In the Senate, Democrats flipped seven Republican-held seats — more than the net gain of four they needed for a majority.
Results remain unofficial until states certify them, and dozens of House races were still being counted on Wednesday morning. But control of both chambers is settled: after two years of unified Republican government, Washington is headed for divided government when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027.
The Biggest Surprises
Texas turned blue — at the top of the ticket. Democrat James Talarico won the open Senate race, defeating Trump-endorsed Attorney General Ken Paxton in what became the most expensive Senate race in American history. Talarico, 37, took a 12-point lead in a state Republicans have dominated for decades. In an even more striking result, Democrat Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Republican Governor Greg Abbott. It was the first time Democrats won statewide office in Texas since 1994.
Kansas elected a Democratic senator for the first time since 1932. Democrat Adam Hamilton’s win in Kansas underscored the breadth of the wave. In Seward County, Kansas — home to one of America’s biggest beef processing plants, where about half of eligible voters are Hispanic — Hamilton led incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall by 13 points, two years after Trump won the county by 39 points.
South Carolina flipped. Democrats won a Senate seat in South Carolina that they had lost when Strom Thurmond switched parties in the 1960s, turning aside Trump’s hand-picked candidate in a state Trump carried by nearly 18 points in 2024.
The wave ran through the Midwest. Democrats won both the governor’s office and a Senate race in each of Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio — including Iowa, where Rob Sand was elected governor. Democrats also won House races in districts Trump carried by 20 percentage points just two years ago, and toppled Republican state legislative supermajorities in states like Indiana and Missouri.
Even Mississippi was close. The Senate race in Mississippi — a state Trump won with more than 60 percent of the vote in 2024 — was still too early to call at 1 a.m. in Washington, a measure of how far the shift extended. Mississippi is one of two states that require an outright majority, with a runoff set for December 1 if no candidate clears 50 percent.
How Trump Impacted the Race
Trump made the election about himself — and that may have been his biggest miscalculation. He urged his supporters to vote as though he were on the ballot, despite approval ratings in the 30s, and the results became, in the words of multiple news organizations, a visceral rejection of his second term.
His endorsed candidates lost. Candidates who aligned themselves closely with the president and mimicked his approach to controversy fared badly. Paxton lost in Texas. Vivek Ramaswamy lost the Ohio governor’s race. In South Carolina, Trump’s hand-picked Senate candidate went down. CNN’s analysis noted that had Trump’s team not pushed Senators Joni Ernst and Thom Tillis out of politics, Republicans might have held on in Iowa and North Carolina.
His redistricting gambit fell flat. Trump’s push to redraw congressional maps in red states to protect the GOP’s narrow House majority did not save it — Democrats won seats even in states where Republicans had redrawn the maps to limit their odds.
The issues broke against him. Exit polls showed the cost of living — gas, housing, consumer goods — topping voters’ concerns, along with corruption. Democrats campaigned on affordability and corruption, blaming Trump’s tariff policy and the war with Iran for driving up prices, while highlighting the billions the Trump family has made since he returned to the White House. Republicans lost ground in all but a handful of the roughly 1,700 counties where most votes had been counted Tuesday night, according to tallies compiled by Reuters and USA Today.
Even the money didn’t help. Hundreds of millions of dollars from conservative donors poured into the races, including Elon Musk’s spending in the Texas Senate race — reported at nearly $500 million overall — to little effect.
The aftermath. Despite worries that Trump might challenge the results as he did in 2020, the president accepted the outcome, congratulating Democrats in an interview with Fox News, according to Reuters. The White House, meanwhile, has begun deflecting blame. But the new balance of power accelerates Trump’s lame-duck status: Democrats are expected to use their majorities to investigate his administration, block his nominees — including any Supreme Court vacancy — and demand concessions on major legislation, while attention in both parties turns to the 2028 presidential race.
What’s Next
Counting continues in dozens of House races, and the final size of the Democratic majorities is still coming into focus. But the shape of the next two years is clear: a Democratic Congress, a Republican president barred from seeking a third term, and a political map redrawn in a single night.