Five takeaways on a midterm rout for Democrats
Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the GOP.
The bottom line is that Democrats have won control of the Senate and the House. And while the precise tally in each chamber remains unclear, the party will have bigger majorities than many were projecting just weeks ago.
Trump sought to pin the blame on Republican candidates — a case he made on social media and in a midnight interview with Fox News.
But plenty of people in his party are murmuring about his role in the debacle, given his low approval ratings and the fact that his preferred candidates in key Senate races went down to defeat.
There are other questions only time will answer, including what Democrats will do with their newfound power, and what impact the results will have on the 2028 race for the White House.
But here are the main takeaways from Tuesday.
Democrats had gone into Tuesday buoyed by strong opinion polls and by the belief that the nation was growing tired of Trump’s antics amid worries about the economy.
But liberal America had also grown nervous about elections, wounded by Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories, and cognizant of his propensity to outperform the polls.
In the end, the night could hardly have gone better for Democrats.
In the battle for the Senate, they won, or are set to win, virtually every competitive race.
Seats that seemed at the outer edges of their ambitions, including in South Carolina and Kansas, have turned blue. Adam Hamilton’s victory over Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) was the first Democratic Senate victory in Kansas in almost one hundred years.
Democrats have 54 seats in the Senate, with races in Alaska and Mississippi still too early to call or too close to call.
In the House, where Democrats were reasonably confident of achieving the 218 seats needed to take the majority, they went way beyond their mark. As of 1 a.m. Eastern Time, The Hill’s data and polling partner Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) was projecting that Democrats would win 256 seats, a majority just shy of the high watermark during the Obama years.
Before Tuesday, some experts had suggested that wave elections were a thing of the past, thanks to a combination of deepening polarization and partisan gerrymandering. The voters proved that wrong. This was a Democratic tsunami.
The president told his supporters to vote as if he was on the ballot. He toured the country for rallies targeted to rev up the MAGA base. He assailed Democrats in language that was inflammatory even by his standards.
None of it worked.
Voter dissatisfaction over the cost of living, the economy, the war in Iran and Trump himself all proved too strong to overcome.
At one level, perhaps that should not have been a surprise. The DDHQ polling average puts Trump’s approval rating 20 points into negative territory. But Trump has defied the laws of political gravity before, and it was striking to see his party so comprehensively rebuked on Tuesday.
Trump tried to put distance between himself and the result.
“They didn’t like the candidates,” he mused during his Fox News interview.
On social media, he protested, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Outside of the most fervent MAGA base, there are not many people who take such claims seriously.
The Lone Star State has dashed Democratic dreams several times in recent decades. The party’s hopes that figures like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) could win statewide races ran aground.
That all changed on Tuesday, when 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico (D) emphatically defeated state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the battle for a Senate seat. Even more shockingly to some, three-term Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was vanquished by state Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D).
There will be deep Republican recriminations about the Senate race, where Trump was instrumental in Paxton’s defeat of incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R) in the GOP primary.
Plenty of Republicans had concerns from the get-go about Paxton’s checkered personal history, which includes settling charges of securities fraud, facing accusations of adultery and suffering impeachment by the state House.
Talarico prevailed with startling ease in the end. With 90 percent of ballots counted at 2 a.m. Eastern Time, he was ahead by roughly 10 points.
Abbott’s supporters figured he could draw on the strength of his political brand to escape any drag from Paxton and the national environment.
They were wrong. He has conceded the race to Hinojosa and looks on track to lose by about seven points.
Abdul El-Sayed was projected the winner of the Senate race in Michigan by DDHQ shortly before 1:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
The former public health official will become the nation’s first Muslim senator. He withstood extraordinary turbulence to get there — including the Democrat he defeated in the primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), endorsing his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) on Sunday.
El-Sayed also faced Islamophobic attacks from Trump, who repeatedly branded him a “jihadist.”
He was one of three Democrats who prevailed in especially contentious races.
Amy Acton (D) will be the next governor of Ohio after she beat GOP nominee Vivek Ramaswamy.
Their contest made national headlines after the Ramaswamy campaign ran an ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother calling her a “liar.” The backstory was even more disturbing. During Acton’s childhood, her stepfather had been charged with sexually abusing her. He skipped the state, accompanied by Acton’s mother, to avoid a full trial. The ad appeared to backfire, earning the condemnation of the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and his predecessor, John Kasich.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Trump’s nickname for Talarico (“Talafreako”) and insinuations about his sexuality from Republicans including Vice President Vance did little to damage his performance.
The polling industry will be breathing a sigh of relief. Another big miss would have seen fundamental questions grow sharper about their whole enterprise.
Counting was not complete in some of the most high-profile races in the early hours of Wednesday, making it hard to provide a precise accounting of how well the pollsters did.
But what matters is that their projections of a very good night for Democrats, which drew derision especially from some conservatives, were basically accurate.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at The Hill ↗
Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the…
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the GOP.
The bottom line is that Democrats have won control of the Senate and the House. And while the precise tally in each chamber remains unclear, the party will have bigger majorities than many were projecting just weeks ago.
Trump sought to pin the blame on Republican candidates — a case he made on social media and in a midnight interview with Fox News.
But plenty of people in his party are murmuring about his role in the debacle, given his low approval ratings and the fact that his preferred candidates in key Senate races went down to defeat.
There are other questions only time will answer, including what Democrats will do with their newfound power, and what impact the results will have on the 2028 race for the White House.
But here are the main takeaways from Tuesday.
Democrats had gone into Tuesday buoyed by strong opinion polls and by the belief that the nation was growing tired of Trump’s antics amid worries about the economy.
But liberal America had also grown nervous about elections, wounded by Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories, and cognizant of his propensity to outperform the polls.
In the end, the night could hardly have gone better for Democrats.
In the battle for the Senate, they won, or are set to win, virtually every competitive race.
Seats that seemed at the outer edges of their ambitions, including in South Carolina and Kansas, have turned blue. Adam Hamilton’s victory over Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) was the first Democratic Senate victory in Kansas in almost one hundred years.
Democrats have 54 seats in the Senate, with races in Alaska and Mississippi still too early to call or too close to call.
In the House, where Democrats were reasonably confident of achieving the 218 seats needed to take the majority, they went way beyond their mark. As of 1 a.m. Eastern Time, The Hill’s data and polling partner Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) was projecting that Democrats would win 256 seats, a majority just shy of the high watermark during the Obama years.
Before Tuesday, some experts had suggested that wave elections were a thing of the past, thanks to a combination of deepening polarization and partisan gerrymandering. The voters proved that wrong. This was a Democratic tsunami.
The president told his supporters to vote as if he was on the ballot. He toured the country for rallies targeted to rev up the MAGA base. He assailed Democrats in language that was inflammatory even by his standards.
None of it worked.
Voter dissatisfaction over the cost of living, the economy, the war in Iran and Trump himself all proved too strong to overcome.
At one level, perhaps that should not have been a surprise. The DDHQ polling average puts Trump’s approval rating 20 points into negative territory. But Trump has defied the laws of political gravity before, and it was striking to see his party so comprehensively rebuked on Tuesday.
Trump tried to put distance between himself and the result.
“They didn’t like the candidates,” he mused during his Fox News interview.
On social media, he protested, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Outside of the most fervent MAGA base, there are not many people who take such claims seriously.
The Lone Star State has dashed Democratic dreams several times in recent decades. The party’s hopes that figures like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) could win statewide races ran aground.
That all changed on Tuesday, when 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico (D) emphatically defeated state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the battle for a Senate seat. Even more shockingly to some, three-term Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was vanquished by state Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D).
There will be deep Republican recriminations about the Senate race, where Trump was instrumental in Paxton’s defeat of incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R) in the GOP primary.
Plenty of Republicans had concerns from the get-go about Paxton’s checkered personal history, which includes settling charges of securities fraud, facing accusations of adultery and suffering impeachment by the state House.
Talarico prevailed with startling ease in the end. With 90 percent of ballots counted at 2 a.m. Eastern Time, he was ahead by roughly 10 points.
Abbott’s supporters figured he could draw on the strength of his political brand to escape any drag from Paxton and the national environment.
They were wrong. He has conceded the race to Hinojosa and looks on track to lose by about seven points.
Abdul El-Sayed was projected the winner of the Senate race in Michigan by DDHQ shortly before 1:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
The former public health official will become the nation’s first Muslim senator. He withstood extraordinary turbulence to get there — including the Democrat he defeated in the primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), endorsing his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) on Sunday.
El-Sayed also faced Islamophobic attacks from Trump, who repeatedly branded him a “jihadist.”
He was one of three Democrats who prevailed in especially contentious races.
Amy Acton (D) will be the next governor of Ohio after she beat GOP nominee Vivek Ramaswamy.
Their contest made national headlines after the Ramaswamy campaign ran an ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother calling her a “liar.” The backstory was even more disturbing. During Acton’s childhood, her stepfather had been charged with sexually abusing her. He skipped the state, accompanied by Acton’s mother, to avoid a full trial. The ad appeared to backfire, earning the condemnation of the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and his predecessor, John Kasich.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Trump’s nickname for Talarico (“Talafreako”) and insinuations about his sexuality from Republicans including Vice President Vance did little to damage his performance.
The polling industry will be breathing a sigh of relief. Another big miss would have seen fundamental questions grow sharper about their whole enterprise.
Counting was not complete in some of the most high-profile races in the early hours of Wednesday, making it hard to provide a precise accounting of how well the pollsters did.
But what matters is that their projections of a very good night for Democrats, which drew derision especially from some conservatives, were basically accurate.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at The Hill ↗
Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the GOP.
The bottom line is that Democrats have won control of the Senate and the House. And while the precise tally in each chamber remains unclear, the party will have bigger majorities than many were projecting just weeks ago.
Trump sought to pin the blame on Republican candidates — a case he made on social media and in a midnight interview with Fox News.
But plenty of people in his party are murmuring about his role in the debacle, given his low approval ratings and the fact that his preferred candidates in key Senate races went down to defeat.
There are other questions only time will answer, including what Democrats will do with their newfound power, and what impact the results will have on the 2028 race for the White House.
But here are the main takeaways from Tuesday.
Democrats had gone into Tuesday buoyed by strong opinion polls and by the belief that the nation was growing tired of Trump’s antics amid worries about the economy.
But liberal America had also grown nervous about elections, wounded by Trump’s 2016 and 2024 victories, and cognizant of his propensity to outperform the polls.
In the end, the night could hardly have gone better for Democrats.
In the battle for the Senate, they won, or are set to win, virtually every competitive race.
Seats that seemed at the outer edges of their ambitions, including in South Carolina and Kansas, have turned blue. Adam Hamilton’s victory over Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) was the first Democratic Senate victory in Kansas in almost one hundred years.
Democrats have 54 seats in the Senate, with races in Alaska and Mississippi still too early to call or too close to call.
In the House, where Democrats were reasonably confident of achieving the 218 seats needed to take the majority, they went way beyond their mark. As of 1 a.m. Eastern Time, The Hill’s data and polling partner Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ) was projecting that Democrats would win 256 seats, a majority just shy of the high watermark during the Obama years.
Before Tuesday, some experts had suggested that wave elections were a thing of the past, thanks to a combination of deepening polarization and partisan gerrymandering. The voters proved that wrong. This was a Democratic tsunami.
The president told his supporters to vote as if he was on the ballot. He toured the country for rallies targeted to rev up the MAGA base. He assailed Democrats in language that was inflammatory even by his standards.
None of it worked.
Voter dissatisfaction over the cost of living, the economy, the war in Iran and Trump himself all proved too strong to overcome.
At one level, perhaps that should not have been a surprise. The DDHQ polling average puts Trump’s approval rating 20 points into negative territory. But Trump has defied the laws of political gravity before, and it was striking to see his party so comprehensively rebuked on Tuesday.
Trump tried to put distance between himself and the result.
“They didn’t like the candidates,” he mused during his Fox News interview.
On social media, he protested, “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
Outside of the most fervent MAGA base, there are not many people who take such claims seriously.
The Lone Star State has dashed Democratic dreams several times in recent decades. The party’s hopes that figures like former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D) could win statewide races ran aground.
That all changed on Tuesday, when 37-year-old state Rep. James Talarico (D) emphatically defeated state Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) in the battle for a Senate seat. Even more shockingly to some, three-term Gov. Greg Abbott (R) was vanquished by state Rep. Gina Hinojosa (D).
There will be deep Republican recriminations about the Senate race, where Trump was instrumental in Paxton’s defeat of incumbent Sen. John Cornyn (R) in the GOP primary.
Plenty of Republicans had concerns from the get-go about Paxton’s checkered personal history, which includes settling charges of securities fraud, facing accusations of adultery and suffering impeachment by the state House.
Talarico prevailed with startling ease in the end. With 90 percent of ballots counted at 2 a.m. Eastern Time, he was ahead by roughly 10 points.
Abbott’s supporters figured he could draw on the strength of his political brand to escape any drag from Paxton and the national environment.
They were wrong. He has conceded the race to Hinojosa and looks on track to lose by about seven points.
Abdul El-Sayed was projected the winner of the Senate race in Michigan by DDHQ shortly before 1:30 a.m. Eastern Time.
The former public health official will become the nation’s first Muslim senator. He withstood extraordinary turbulence to get there — including the Democrat he defeated in the primary, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), endorsing his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich) on Sunday.
El-Sayed also faced Islamophobic attacks from Trump, who repeatedly branded him a “jihadist.”
He was one of three Democrats who prevailed in especially contentious races.
Amy Acton (D) will be the next governor of Ohio after she beat GOP nominee Vivek Ramaswamy.
Their contest made national headlines after the Ramaswamy campaign ran an ad that featured Acton’s estranged mother calling her a “liar.” The backstory was even more disturbing. During Acton’s childhood, her stepfather had been charged with sexually abusing her. He skipped the state, accompanied by Acton’s mother, to avoid a full trial. The ad appeared to backfire, earning the condemnation of the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, and his predecessor, John Kasich.
Meanwhile, in Texas, Trump’s nickname for Talarico (“Talafreako”) and insinuations about his sexuality from Republicans including Vice President Vance did little to damage his performance.
The polling industry will be breathing a sigh of relief. Another big miss would have seen fundamental questions grow sharper about their whole enterprise.
Counting was not complete in some of the most high-profile races in the early hours of Wednesday, making it hard to provide a precise accounting of how well the pollsters did.
But what matters is that their projections of a very good night for Democrats, which drew derision especially from some conservatives, were basically accurate.
Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Read the full story at The Hill ↗
This lens runs the verified story through Cinnamon's AI — wired in the next step.
- Tuesday saw seismic results in the midterm elections as Democrats virtually ran the table of competitive races, and voters delivered a powerful rebuke to President Trump and the…