Democrats’ capture of both chambers of Congress puts the legislature in a stronger position to check President Donald Trump, an outcome sought by 71% of voters in Associated Press exit polls.
Politico reported that Trump’s tariffs, a costly war in Iran and political vendettas left Republicans struggling to hold their congressional majorities during the campaign.
Trump entered the election with his approval rating down from 48% to as low as 36% in poll averages following the war in Iran. Exit polls found that 62% of voters believed Trump put his own interests ahead of the country’s, while more than 60% disapproved of his performance as president. Another 62% directly blamed him for higher prices.
In Texas, James Talarico, the 37-year-old Democratic Senate candidate, defeated the Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton by 12 percentage points, or 1.1 million votes. His victory made him the first Texas Democrat elected to the Senate since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. In Starr County, Talarico led by nearly 60 points, a 75-point reversal from two years earlier.
Gina Hinojosa, a Democratic state lawmaker, beat the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who was seeking a fourth term, by 7 percentage points or almost 700,000 votes. She will become Texas’ first Latina governor. Democrats also took two Texas congressional districts that Trump had carried in 2024 by at least 14 points.
The gains extended well beyond Texas. In Maine, Troy Jackson defeated the Republican Senator Susan Collins, a 30-year incumbent. Adam Hamilton, a Methodist pastor, became Kansas’s second Democratic senator and its first since George McGill in 1932, ending a 94-year Democratic losing streak in the state. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governorship of Georgia, becoming the first Black woman elected governor in US history. Roy Cooper won North Carolina’s Senate race, the first Democratic victory there in 18 years.
On Tuesday, 3 November 2026, Democrats ended Republican control of the House of Representatives and the Senate. They are on course to gain as many as 40 House seats and at least seven Senate seats. The Republican 53-seat Senate majority has collapsed. Democrats could hold 54 Senate seats, with 55 or 56 possible if remaining contests in Alaska and Mississippi go their way.
Democrats flipped Texas, South Carolina and Kansas, breaking Republican strongholds. They are also on course for their largest House majority since 2009, potentially holding as many as 255 seats, and won a majority of state governorships. Both chambers changed hands in the same midterm election for the first time since 2006.
The Associated Press nationwide voter survey found that roughly 70% of voters under 30 backed Democratic House candidates, as did 60% of Hispanic voters. Four in 10 voters in exit polls said they had voted to send a message to the sitting president. Three-quarters described themselves as ‘angry’ or ‘dissatisfied’ with the country’s direction as they cast their ballots.
The New York Times called the result a ‘national rebuke to Donald Trump.’ The New York Post described it as a ‘blue tsunami.’ Politico’s headline read ‘Voters pummel GOP out of power.’
The result has been described as one of the broadest repudiations of a sitting president in modern American history, on a scale compared with the post-Watergate reckoning of 1974. Politico argued that no president had previously been so extensively held solely responsible for a midterm defeat.
On election night, Representative Robert Garcia, the incoming chairman of the House Oversight Committee, wrote ‘LAWYER UP’ on X.
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