At the beginning of this year’s midterm campaign, it seemed that everything would have to go right for Democrats to win the Senate.
On Tuesday, everything went right for Democrats, and more.
This was an electoral tsunami: a complete collapse of the Republican coalition and the largest victory by either party in half a century.
When all the vote is in and counted, Democrats will win the national popular vote in all House races combined by 13 percentage points, according to our estimates. That would be the largest margin of victory since the post-Watergate elections in 1974 and 1976.
And by one measure, it’s even larger: Democrats could flip as many as seven Senate seats that leaned Republican by more than 10 points in the previous presidential election.
There’s simply no modern precedent for either party to do so well in states that had leaned so heavily toward the other side.
For good measure, the Democrats didn’t just win in any red states — they won in Texas and Kansas, two states that have epitomized the Republican hold on the heartland for a generation. And they didn’t just eke out victories — they won big, including by double digits in Texas.
It was hard to imagine that this kind of tsunami was still possible in this polarized era of American politics. But while all of the close election results over the last few decades have given the impression that America’s political divides are intractable, there have been extraordinary changes just beneath the surface.
Over the last decade, President Trump destroyed the Republican Party as we once knew it. He replaced it with a younger, more diverse, less affluent, less politically engaged, working-class party — one that was less conservative, less likely to vote and more sensitive to economic concerns.
In his second term, Mr. Trump dismantled his coalition, piece by piece.
His tariffs and the high gas prices under his watch alienated the working-class voters who were drawn to him by his record of economic stewardship in his first term and his promise to lower costs.
His decision to go to war with Iran alienated a generation of voters who grew up bemoaning the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The corruption that became a campaign issue and even his handling of the Epstein files repelled the anti-establishment voters who were suspicious of the Washington elite.
The excesses of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies helped alienate the Hispanic voters who had surged to him in 2024 — and who had been singularly responsible for keeping Texas a red state, despite Democratic gains among the state’s metropolitan white voters.
This morning, we published our Times Voter Trends analysis, a new way of assessing how demographic groups voted across the country. According to the preliminary estimates, Democrats made extraordinary gains with young and nonwhite voters.
In the nationwide House vote, Democrats won young voters, 70 percent to 28 percent, up from Kamala Harris’s 53-44 victory.
Hispanic voters swung just as much. Democrats won them, 69-30, according to our estimates, up from 54-44 for Ms. Harris in 2024.
But Democrats didn’t just make gains among traditionally Democratic constituencies. In these preliminary estimates, they won 48 percent of white voters. They won men. White voters without a degree swung more toward the left than college graduates.
And the Democratic breakthroughs in traditionally Republican areas, from Wichita, Kan., to Greenville, S.C., were possible only because a crucial sliver of Republican-leaning voters decided to vote for Democrats. They may have been skeptical of Mr. Trump all along, but they always voted for him and his party. This time, they did not.
You can explore our estimates for the results by demographic group for House and Senate here.
Graphics by Rachel Buigas-Lopez.
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