Democratic control of Congress gives the party the power in the Senate to subpoena testimony and conduct impeachment trials, while Hakeem Jeffries is poised to become the first Black House Speaker.
Public polls indicated that frustration over the economy and rising fuel and food costs helped drive Democratic gains. Voters were also discontented with Republican President Donald Trump’s policies on inflation, tariffs, AI data centers and the Iran war.
As voting took place across the nation on 3 November 2026, Democrats built their Senate victory through some of the country’s most conservative states. The party flipped Republican-held Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas and Iowa.
Those results included a Democratic Senate victory in Kansas for the first time since 1932. Democrats also won a statewide office in Texas for the first time since 1994. Sherrod Brown won the Ohio Senate seat in a state that had voted for Trump in three consecutive presidential elections.
In Texas, James Talarico, a Democrat and former state representative, defeated Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, in the most expensive US Senate campaign to date, with an estimated 573.2 million spent on political ads. In his victory speech, Talarico said: “We just took back Texas. We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.”
Roy Cooper, a former governor and state attorney general, defeated the Trump-backed Republican Michael Whatley for North Carolina’s open Senate seat. In South Carolina, the pediatrician Annie Andrews unseated Republican Darline Graham.
Democrats cleared the 51-seat threshold in the Senate, which CNN called for the party at 11:35 p.m. ET. The AP then called the House for Democrats after the party passed 218 seats. CNN, NBC News and CBS News had projected a Democratic House takeover during the evening.
The outcome delivered a decisive rebuke of Republican control in Washington. Jeffries, the House minority leader, could lead the largest Democratic House majority in more than a decade.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., shortly before 11:30 p.m., Jeffries declared: “America is back.” He said: “This is a change election, and we understand as House Democrats that we need to deliver dramatic change.” He also said the American people were “crying out for transformational change.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged the loss from his hometown of Shreveport. “It looks like history will be kept tonight,” he said, warning: “If they make the next two years about retribution and lawfare and partisan games, every American will suffer by that.” Johnson said: “It’s only happened twice in 90 years that a sitting president has picked up or held seats for his party in that first two-year cycle.”
Before polls closed, Trump told CBS News that he would be “Mr. Veto”. He said: “Historically, you veto for a couple of months and then they come and say, We’ve got to make a deal.” Trump later wrote on Truth Social that he had not been on the ballot and said: “if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
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