Democrats Sweep the Midterms as Talarico Stuns Texas, Party Retakes House and Nears Senate Majority

Democrats swept the 2026 midterm elections on Tuesday, retaking the House of Representatives, flipping at least five Republican-held Senate seats, and scoring a string of stunning victories in states Donald Trump had carried comfortably two years earlier, according to projections from CNN, NBC News and Decision Desk HQ.

The headline result came in Texas, where Democrat James Talarico, a 37-year-old state legislator, defeated Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in the most expensive Senate campaign in American history, becoming the first Democrat the state has sent to the United States Senate since 1988. With about 80 per cent of the expected vote counted, Talarico led Paxton by nearly one million votes, according to data compiled by Reuters and USA Today.

The scale of the Democratic night went far beyond Texas. Democrats flipped Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Ohio and Texas, and Decision Desk HQ and NBC News also projected a Democratic upset in Iowa. With several races still uncalled, including Michigan and Maine, control of the Senate remained formally undecided in the early hours of Wednesday, but the party had erased the Republicans’ 53-47 advantage and stood on the brink of a majority in the upper chamber. In the House, CNN and Decision Desk HQ projected a Democratic majority, and Speaker Mike Johnson conceded the point in a late-night speech, telling supporters that “it looks like history will be kept”.

President Trump, who had campaigned relentlessly for Republican candidates in the final three weeks and told supporters to vote as though he were on the ballot, reacted by insisting that his absence from the ballot explained the outcome. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote on Truth Social. In an interview with The New York Times shortly before 10.30pm ET, he said he was “absolutely willing to accept those results” and would work with Democrats, while adding that he did not regret endorsing losing Republicans such as Senator Darline Graham and Ken Paxton.

The results amount to a sweeping rebuke of the Trump administration at the midpoint of the president’s second term, delivered by an electorate that told pollsters again and again that the cost of living was its dominant concern. Gas and diesel prices, driven higher in part by the war with Iran, grocery bills and housing costs were the issues voters raised most often, and the Democratic campaign — built around affordability, a check on presidential power and the defence of democratic norms — found an audience in places where the party had not been competitive for a generation.

Texas turns blue

No single result will be studied more closely than Texas. Talarico, a former middle-school teacher who is studying to become a Presbyterian pastor, framed his campaign around what he called a politics of love and a populist economic message that urged Texans to look past the usual liberal and conservative labels. He attacked the super-rich directly, telling a rally in San Antonio in October that Elon Musk “wants our land. He wants our water. He wants our tax dollars. He wants his very own personal United States senator.”

Musk, the world’s richest person, spent heavily in support of Paxton, with about 212 million dollars flowing to groups aligned with the Republican candidate, according to campaign finance reporting. Talarico raised a record 64 million dollars in the third quarter alone, the largest quarterly fundraising haul by any Senate candidate in history. The race as a whole cost roughly 600 million dollars, making it the most expensive Senate contest ever fought.

Paxton was a singularly damaged candidate. Trump handpicked him over the incumbent four-term senator John Cornyn, who lost the Republican primary runoff after the president’s endorsement of Paxton. Cornyn congratulated Talarico in a statement on X after the race was called, offering assistance with the transition. Talarico had spent nine days off the campaign trail in late September and early October while recovering from flu, a gap that spawned a viral and baseless rumour — amplified by Musk and by White House aide Stephen Miller — that he had secretly been treated at a mental health facility in Ohio. The hospital at the centre of the claim said Talarico had never been a patient there, and his campaign released eight days of timestamped home security camera photographs to prove he had been at his Austin home.

The Texas result was mirrored down the ballot. State Representative Gina Hinojosa defeated three-term Governor Greg Abbott, flipping the governor’s mansion from red to blue for the first time since Ann Richards left office in 1995. Hinojosa will be the first Latina governor in Texas history. She framed her campaign around affordability and presented a victory as a check on Abbott and on the state’s Republican-led legislature. Preliminary results from the Rio Grande Valley, the predominantly Hispanic region along the Mexican border that Trump had flipped in 2024, showed both Hinojosa and Talarico leading — a reversal of the trend that had seen Trump win 55 per cent of the Latino vote in Texas in 2024, a record high for a Republican presidential candidate, according to data from the Texas Politics Project.

A Senate map rewritten

The Senate flips came in a cascade through the evening. In North Carolina, former governor Roy Cooper defeated Republican Michael Whatley, becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate race in the state since Kay Hagan in 2008. Cooper succeeds Thom Tillis, who retired after clashing with Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill, the administration’s signature tax and spending law. Republican funders had stopped spending in the race in its final stretch.

In South Carolina, paediatrician Annie Andrews pulled off what USA Today called arguably the biggest upset of the night, defeating Republican Senator Darline Graham. Graham had been appointed to the seat in July after the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, who had held it for more than 23 years. Andrews, 45, is the first Democrat to win a Senate race in South Carolina since 1998 and the first woman to win a Senate election in the state. Addressing supporters, she said the result showed the office “does not belong to one family, one party, or to Washington, DC”. Graham called to congratulate her.

In Kansas, megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton defeated the incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, ending a 94-year Democratic Senate losing streak, the longest in American history. Hamilton, the senior pastor at Resurrection, the country’s largest Methodist parish, will be the first Democrat to hold a Kansas Senate seat since 1932. Marshall had the “complete and total endorsement” of Trump, who won Kansas by double digits three times, but concerns about the struggling economy, high gas and grocery prices, and Hamilton’s name recognition carried the first-time candidate over the line.

In Ohio, Democrats swept both statewide races. Sherrod Brown, 73, defeated the incumbent Republican Senator Jon Husted to recapture a seat in the Senate, two years after losing his 32-year Senate career to Bernie Moreno. Husted had been appointed to the Senate by Governor Mike DeWine after JD Vance became vice president, and Brown will serve the remaining two years of Vance’s term, facing voters again in 2028 if he seeks a full six-year term. Brown’s campaign hammered Husted as “the face of data centers in Ohio”, a message that appeared to resonate despite late campaign visits by Trump and Vance. In the governor’s race, Amy Acton, who led the Ohio Department of Health during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, defeated Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, becoming the first Democrat to win an Ohio governor’s race since 2006 and the state’s first female governor. Ramaswamy’s campaign had released an attack advertisement featuring Acton’s estranged mother in the final days of the race, an ad widely condemned, including by members of his own party.

In Iowa, Democratic State Representative Josh Turek, a two-time Paralympic gold medallist in wheelchair basketball, defeated Republican Representative Ashley Hinson, according to projections from Decision Desk HQ and NBC News. Turek will be the state’s first Democrat in the Senate in a decade, since Tom Harkin departed the upper chamber in 2015. The race tested Hinson’s ties to Trump in a state the president won by 13 points two years earlier.

The Democrats also held the seats they had to defend. In Georgia, Jon Ossoff defeated the Trump-backed Republican Mike Collins, telling supporters in Atlanta that the American people had “rebuked the depravity, corruption, and incompetence of the failed President Donald Trump”. In New Hampshire, Chris Pappas held the open seat vacated by the retiring Jeanne Shaheen. In Virginia, Mark Warner was re-elected, and in Illinois, Juliana Stratton won the Senate seat. Democrats needed a net gain of four seats to take the chamber from the Republicans’ 53-47 majority, and by the early hours of Wednesday they had flipped at least five, with Michigan — where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed faced Republican Mike Rogers — and Maine — where the 29-year incumbent Republican Susan Collins faced Democrat Troy Jackson — still too close to call. Michigan’s clerks said full unofficial results would not be available until Wednesday, with more than 1.8 million mail ballots to count.

The House falls

The House majority was called shortly after 10pm ET, when CNN and Decision Desk HQ projected that Democrats would win back control of the chamber, followed by NBC News and MS NOW. At Representative Hakeem Jeffries’ headquarters in Washington, Democrats erupted in cheers, and Jeffries, the House minority leader, was poised to become the next Speaker of the House.

The flips came from districts Trump had won, some by double digits. In Pennsylvania, Democrats took two Republican-held seats in the eastern part of the state: Bob Brooks defeated Representative Ryan Mackenzie in the 7th District, and Paige Cognetti defeated Representative Rob Bresnahan in the 8th. In Kentucky, former federal prosecutor Zach Dembo defeated Republican Ralph Alvarado in a central Kentucky district that had been in Republican hands since 2012 and that Trump won by 15 percentage points in 2024. In New Jersey, Democrat Rebecca Bennett, a former US Navy helicopter pilot, defeated Representative Tom Kean in the 7th District, home to Trump’s Bedminster golf club. In Florida, Democrat Pia Dandiya won the newly redrawn 22nd District despite a Republican gerrymander designed to flip the Palm Beach seat, defeating Casey Askar by a slim margin in a district redrawn to include Naples. In Alabama, Representative Shomari Figures held his redrawn seat against a Republican challenge despite the district being made more rural and conservative after a Supreme Court ruling struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Young voters powered much of the Democratic surge. More than two thirds of voters aged 18 to 29 — 71 per cent — voted for a Democratic House candidate, the highest youth preference recorded in a national election, according to the Tufts University Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. The most striking swing was among young men: 56 per cent of them supported Trump in 2024, but this election more than 60 per cent voted for a Democratic House candidate. Strategists cautioned that the swing may not represent a long-term realignment, but on Tuesday night it was decisive in district after district.

A night of firsts in the states

The governors’ races produced a series of historic firsts. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governor’s race, becoming the first Black woman ever elected governor of a US state and Georgia’s first woman governor. In Florida, Representative Byron Donalds made history as the state’s first Black governor, one of the few bright spots for Republicans on a bleak night. In New Mexico, former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was projected to become the first Native American woman elected governor in American history. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul won re-election comfortably, defeating Republican Bruce Blakeman. In Washington DC, council member Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist, was projected to become the next mayor, defeating the independent Rhonda Hamilton. Lewis George vowed to push back against the Trump administration and to protect the district’s Home Rule, the law that gives the capital its own government, in the face of federal takeover threats from the president.

The results were a blow to Trump and his allies, who had said they feared Democrats would spend the next two years convening hearings on the actions of the president’s cabinet. Democrats pitched the midterms as an opportunity to elect lawmakers who would serve as a check on the administration, and polling ahead of the election suggested the message resonated. Trump’s approval rating among midterm voters stood at 38 per cent, according to an NBC News exit poll, and a New York Times analysis of multiple polls put his approval at 37 per cent as of 3 November, near his lowest level ever.

Trump’s reaction

Trump watched the results from the East Room of the White House and lashed out twice on Truth Social at Fox News and at the network’s contributor Jessica Tarlov. His public line was defiance: the results were not a verdict on him, because he was not on the ballot. “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote. To The New York Times he was more conciliatory, saying he would accept the results and work with Democrats, and adding that he did not regret endorsing losing candidates such as Graham and Paxton. “I see that Darline lost,” he said. “Wow, that’s amazing. How do you think Lindsey would have done if he ran?”

The president’s allies were less sanguine in private. The night’s results arrived against a grim backdrop for the administration: a federal government shutdown now in its fifth week, a war with Iran that has pushed fuel prices higher and rattled markets, and a stock market that slid on Tuesday night as the Democratic wave became clear, with Nasdaq 100 futures falling 1.9 per cent. The White House had warned Gulf allies to prepare for a “short, intense” resumption of the war with Iran after the midterms, according to The Wall Street Journal, and the election result now complicates any such plan, with a Democratic House holding the power of the purse and the subpoena.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. A referendum the president could not dodge

Midterm elections are almost always a verdict on the sitting president, and this one was no exception. Trump campaigned as though he were on the ballot, telling supporters to “pretend” he was, criss-crossing the country for three weeks and putting his name on candidates from Texas to South Carolina. Voters took him at his word. The result is a reminder of one of the oldest rules in American politics: when a president’s approval rating falls into the high thirties, his party loses, and it loses badly. The president’s attempt to blame his absence from the ballot is an argument that cuts both ways. If the midterms were not about him, then his endorsements, his rallies and his threats counted for nothing. If they were about him, then the verdict is his to own.

2. Affordability beat ideology

The Democratic campaign was disciplined in a way the party’s recent campaigns have not always been. Candidates from Talarico in Texas to Acton in Ohio to Hinojosa in Texas talked about prices — diesel at six dollars a gallon in Georgia, groceries, rent, property taxes — and about who the economy was working for. The message was aimed squarely at the voters who had drifted to Trump in 2024 on the same issue, and it worked. The Rio Grande Valley, where Trump won every county in 2024, swung back. Young men, who backed Trump by a wide margin two years ago, voted Democratic by more than 60 per cent. The lesson is not that voters have become liberals; it is that they vote their wallets, and when the party in power cannot hold prices down, it pays.

3. Texas is no longer a one-party state

The most consequential result of the night may prove to be the one in Texas. A Democrat had not won a Senate race there since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, and the state had not elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards in 1990. On Tuesday, Democrats won both. The scale of the Talarico victory — nearly a million votes with counting still under way — suggests something more than a good night for one candidate. Combined with the swing in the Rio Grande Valley and the Democratic gains in the state’s big cities and suburbs, it points to a state whose politics are genuinely competitive for the first time in a generation. That changes the arithmetic of 2028 in a way no other single result does. A presidential candidate who must defend Texas is a candidate fighting on entirely different terrain.

4. The Senate map has flipped — and with it, the war debate

The Senate flips carry consequences beyond domestic politics. A Democratic Senate, or even a Senate in which the Democratic majority is narrow and restless, changes the politics of the war with Iran. The administration’s plans for a renewed military campaign after the midterms, reported by The Wall Street Journal, were drawn up on the assumption of a friendly Congress. A Democratic House can investigate, subpoena and refuse funding; a Democratic Senate can block confirmations and demand a vote on war powers. The president’s own party, meanwhile, will have to decide whether to keep following a leader who has just presided over one of the worst midterm defeats in modern history, or to begin the slow process of distancing itself. The first signs of that debate were visible on Tuesday night, in the silence of Republican leaders who had spent the campaign praising the president.

5. A new Democratic generation arrives

Look at the names of the night’s winners and a generational shift is visible. Talarico is 37. Hinojosa is a state legislator who built her campaign in Austin. Hamilton is a first-time candidate. Andrews is a 45-year-old paediatrician and mother of three. Turek is a Paralympic athlete who had never held federal office. Bottoms, Dandiya, Cognetti, Bennett — the freshman class arriving in Washington in January will be younger, more diverse and more populist than the one it replaces. That is a strength and a risk. A wave of new members gives the party energy and a claim to renewal, but it also gives it a caucus that will be harder to discipline on the difficult votes ahead — on the budget, on Iran, on the scope of investigations into the administration. How Jeffries manages that caucus will determine whether the night’s victory becomes a governing majority or a two-year argument.

What to Watch Next

1. Senate control: Michigan and Maine remain uncalled, and Alaska, Minnesota, Mississippi and Louisiana are still counting. The final Senate margin will determine whether Democrats can confirm judges and pass legislation, or must rely on the vice president’s tie-breaking vote in a 50-50 chamber.
2. The House margin: California’s races, where polls closed last, could widen the Democratic majority considerably. The size of the margin will decide how much room Speaker-in-waiting Jeffries has to lose votes on contentious bills.
3. The shutdown: The federal government has been shut for five weeks. A Democratic House changes the negotiation entirely, and a funding vote is expected in the Senate on Wednesday. Whether the shutdown ends quickly or becomes a first test of divided government will be the first signal of how the next two years will work.
4. Iran: The administration’s reported plans for renewed strikes after the midterms now face a Congress controlled, at least in part, by the opposition. Watch for Democratic demands for a war-powers vote and for the response of Republican senators who have been sceptical of the war.
5. Trump’s next move: The president said he would work with Democrats, but his first instinct on Tuesday night was to blame the ballot and attack Fox News. Whether he governs as a dealmaker or as a lame duck at war with his own Congress will shape everything from the economy to foreign policy — and the 2028 Republican primary, which effectively begins now.

Sources

• USA Today — “James Talarico scores stunning Texas win: Live election results”
• The Times — “Midterm election results live: Texas turns blue as America rebukes Trump”
• Associated Press — U.S. Senate election results, 2026
• The Wall Street Journal — “Midterm Election Results: Democrats Flip Five Senate Seats as Voters Deliver Rebuke to Trump”
• The Business Standard — “US midterm elections 2026 live results: Democrats build momentum with control of Congress at stake”