Two years ago, after Donald Trump and Republicans won unified power in Washington, big tech companies, universities and virtually the whole of his party bent the knee.
On Tuesday, after a midterm campaign that laid bare deep frustration with high prices and the president’s breakneck changes to the country, voters stood up.
The result wasn’t a blue wave so much as a blue earthquake. (Other terms we considered in the newsroom last night: Megatsunami? Sharknado?)
As of this morning, Democrats have flipped seven Senate seats, notching stunning gains that could remake their party’s understanding of where they can win. They won their first Texas Senate seat since 1988 and their first Kansas Senate seat since 1932, and they ousted Susan Collins after nearly 30 years in the Senate. They even flipped South Carolina.
They defeated Greg Abbott, the Texas governor who had an iron grip on his state — and who helped to make buses of migrants and six-week abortion bans a fact of American life. They won *every* statewide race in Georgia, and made Ohio — where they won a Senate seat and the governor’s race — look like a swing state.
In the House, they were on pace to pick up dozens of seats, dominating districts that Trump had won handily in 2024. They won in suburbs across Michigan, in the mountains of North Carolina and in a rural West Texas District with a Republican tilt so strong that even Democrats once believed a G.O.P. candidate known as the “AK Guy” with a history of crude and sexist remarks was safe.
A problem of Trump’s making
The Democrats’ win guarantees them control of Congress and a constitutional ability to check the president’s power. It allows the party to reimagine its coalition and to rethink its map after a decade of Trump. History-making candidates will change the face of power, while the party itself will be changed by a new class of stars who come from opposing ideological and stylistic worlds.
Will it change the Republican Party, too?
The Republicans’ road to defeat was paved with political own goals, most of which were scored by Trump as he operated on misplaced assumptions about the depth of his own popularity.
He pushed Republicans in Texas to embark on a mid-decade redistricting project, one that did not appear to pay off for his party on Tuesday night — but that did raise the profile of a state representative named James Talarico, who repeatedly went viral as he told the country why he and other Texas Democrats were fleeing the state to stop it.
Once Talarico had secured the Democratic nomination for Senate, he faced not the Republican incumbent, Senator John Cornyn, but the state’s scandal-plagued attorney general, Ken Paxton, whom Trump backed in the primary.
“This is a win the size of Texas,” Talarico said in his victory speech last night.
The president had already made sure that Republicans like Gov. Brian Kemp, who was popular in his home state of Georgia but not at Mar-a-Lago, didn’t want to run for Senate in his G.O.P. He threatened to primary Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who decided to retire instead. Two Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Roy Cooper — won those seats by double digits last night.
And he told South Carolina Republicans something many didn’t really want to hear: that they should support Darline Graham to replace her late brother Lindsey, despite her lack of experience or conservative bona fides.
‘We pushed the envelope too far’
It wasn’t just political misfires, of course. The anger at the economy was so deep that better candidates might not have saved the G.O.P. Voters were incensed by the war Trump started in Iran, and by the high energy prices it brought. After a decade of mostly blind loyalty, Republican candidates had little muscle to distance themselves from Trump — and the two who did it best, Collins and John E. Sununu, lost anyway.
Trump sought to explain away Republicans’ losses by saying the election actually wasn’t enough about him.
“I really think the fact that I wasn’t on the ballot was the single biggest issue,” Trump told my colleagues on the White House beat on Tuesday night.
That’s one interpretation. But the other is that the nation has lost patience with the whims, the grievances and the pet projects of the president.
“We pushed the envelope too far,” Luis Gio, 59, a court translator, told my colleague Emily Davies at a watch party for the soon-to-be-former Senator Jon Husted of Ohio last night. “The White House ballroom. I mean, why push things like that when the country needs more important things?”
Taking stock of the Senate
The scale of Democrats’ success is clear in the graphic above, which shows how the vote shifted in every county between the 2024 presidential election and this year’s Senate races. (Blue arrows signal a shift toward Democrats. Spoiler: They’re almost all blue.)
Of the six races considered tossups, Democrats won five:
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Josh Turek won in Iowa.
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Adam Hamilton won in Kansas.
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Troy Jackson won in Maine.
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Sherrod Brown won in Ohio.
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James Talarico won in Texas.
And the sixth, in Alaska, is still being counted.
Of the four races rated as slightly favoring Republicans, Democrats won one — Annie Andrews in South Carolina — and are effectively tied in another. That’s Mississippi, where, as of this newsletter, Scott Colom and Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith are separated by just 43 votes.
Making history
There were quite a few historic firsts among last night’s slate of Democratic winners:
Chris Pappas of New Hampshire will be the first openly gay man in the Senate.
Keisha Lance Bottoms of Georgia will be the first Black woman to serve as governor.
Deb Haaland of New Mexico will be the first Native American woman to serve as governor.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan will be the first Muslim senator.
Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota is the first Native American woman elected to the Senate.
In One Chart
Key groups swung in Democrats’ favor yesterday, according to Times Voter Trends, which draws on exhaustive data to build a demographic snapshot of the electorate.
Young people — and young men in particular — made the most pronounced shift. But every group in our data moved to the left. Explore more of the data here.
Bellwethers, revisited
In last night’s newsletter, my colleagues shared the races they planned to watch for an early sense of the night’s direction. Let’s look back on how those races went — it’s a pretty useful frame for the Democrats’ victory.
First up were two House races in districts that backed Trump by double-digits in 2024 — Kentucky’s Sixth District and Indiana’s Fifth.
The results: Democrats flipped both seats.
Pati Mazzei told us about four House races in seats that Republicans had redistricted to their party’s advantage — Florida’s Ninth, 14th, 22nd and 25th Districts.
The results: Democrats won three. The Ninth is still too close to call, though The Times projects the Democrat to be ahead.
Reid Epstein said he was watching three House districts in Virginia — the First and Second, both classic swing districts, and the Fifth District, which Trump won by double digits in 2024.
The results: Democrats flipped the First and Second Districts. The Times projects the Republicans to win in the Fifth.
We were watching South Carolina’s First District, which was recently gerrymandered to favor Republicans and which Nancy Mace vacated to run for governor.
The result: The count is close, but The Times’s projection favors the Democratic candidate.
And Jonathan Weisman clued us in on three interesting governor’s races, in Ohio, Vermont and New Hampshire — all held by Republicans.
The results: Amy Acton, a Democrat, won in Ohio. In the other two, Republican incumbents — Phil Scott in Vermont and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire — held onto their seats.
Number of the Day
10 million
That’s the estimated final turnout in Texas, according to my colleague Evan Reynolds, an election data reporter. That is a record for a midterm in the state, and it approaches the turnout typically seen in presidential races.
On the ballots
A slate of ballot measures reshaped state laws around the country, on matters both serious …
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In Montana, voters approved a measure to bar corporations, nonprofits and unions from doing business in the state if they had made political contributions — in possible conflict with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
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In Virginia, voters backed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies upon their release.
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In Nebraska, voters passed restrictions on transgender students’ participation in sports.
… and not so serious:
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In Alabama, voters approved an initiative requiring public schools to play or arrange for a performance of the first stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner” once a week.
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In Arizona, voters passed a measure to prohibit the installation of traffic enforcement cameras.
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And in Idaho, the Winchester Model 1873 — “The Gun that Won the West” — is leading the race to become the state’s official firearm.
ONE LAST THING
Democrats’ to-do list
So Democrats won control of Congress. What now?
My colleague Annie Karni recently laid out their plans. She reported that Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who’s in line to be the next House speaker, is planning a shock-and-awe legislative sprint, aiming to quickly pass broadly popular bills that could unite the Democratic Caucus and undo Trump’s most disliked policies. In the first 100 hours, aides say, Jeffries plans to speed legislation to the floor that would:
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Reinstate expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies.
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Reverse the nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts included in the president’s domestic policy law.
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Move to end Trump’s tariffs and restore congressional power over trade policy.
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Direct Trump to end the war in Iran or seek authorization from Congress to continue it.
It’s not clear that any of this would become law, because Republicans would still have the ability to filibuster legislation — and Trump has already indicated plenty of willingness to deploy his veto power.
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