The Democrats are still processing just how big their victory was on Tuesday. Today, as more votes were counted, their majority surged past 250 seats — the biggest for either party in nearly two decades.
How did they do it?
Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become the next speaker of the House, pointed yesterday to the willingness of candidates to run in difficult districts — the kinds of places that might have seemed out of reach.
Here are five very different contests that help explain how the Democrats won so big.
New York’s 17th: The end of the blue-district Republican
A handful of congressional districts have bedeviled Democrats for years: The ones that elect Democrats for president and moderate Republicans to the House. On Tuesday night, Democrats captured three of those targets.
One of them was in New York’s Hudson Valley, where Cait Conley, a former Biden administration official with a long military résumé, beatRepresentative Mike Lawler, a two-term Republican who hoped his efforts to lower taxes in his affluent district could save him.
More races like this:
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Pennsylvania’s First District, in the Philadelphia suburbs, where the Democrat Bob Harvie beat the longtime Representative Brian Fitzpatrick.
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Nebraska’s Second District, in and around Omaha, which had long been held by the retiring Republican, Don Bacon. There, Denise Powell, a Democrat, beat the Republican Brinker Harding.
North Carolina’s Ninth: A stunning upset
Representative Richard Hudson, a Republican, is the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was his job to try to protect Republicans’ House majority. But on Tuesday night, he narrowly lost his seat to Richard Ojeda, a military veteran who first came to prominence in West Virginia during a 2018 teachers’ strike.
The race was barely on national Democrats’ radar, although Ojeda got some support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee late in the game.
There were plenty more shocking upsets:
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Missouri’s Second District, outside St. Louis, where Fred Wellman beat Representative Ann Wagner.
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North Carolina’s 14th District, where Lakesha Womack, a Democrat whose campaign raised just $56,000, beat Representative Tim Moore.
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Indiana’s Fifth District, which President Trump won by more than 16 percentage points in 2026. There, Representative Victoria Spartz, a Republican, lost to J.D. Ford.
Texas’ 35th: Latino voters remake Trump country
Republicans gerrymandered this majority-Latino district, in the San Antonio metropolitan area, under the assumption that the Hispanic voters who backed Trump in 2024 were part of their coalition for the long haul.
That assumption turned out to be wrong. Now, Democrats are hoping that Johnny Garcia, a sheriff’s deputy and former construction worker from San Antonio’s West Side, can keep the district blue.
More Texas races where Latino voters lifted Democrats:
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The 23rd District, where Katy Padilla Stout beat Brandon Herrera, a Republican gun influencer best known as “the AK guy.”
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The 15th District, where the Tejano singer Bobby Pulido won by 25 points.
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The 28th District, where Representative Henry Cuellar easily fended off a challenge.
Iowa’s First: A big win in a rural area
After their defeats in 2024, Democrats worried that their deep losses among white voters had put rural areas permanently out of reach. But Trump’s economic policies buffeted farmers and ranchers, fomenting a backlash that lifted the likes of Christina Bohannan, a state representative and law professor, over Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Southeastern Iowa. Democrats flipped Iowa’s second and third districts, too.
More rural districts Democrats picked up:
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Wisconsin’s Third: Rebecca Cooke defeated Representative Derrick Van Orden.
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Montana’s First: The smokejumper Sam Forstag defeated the combat veteran Aaron Flint to become the first Democrat to represent the state in the House in decades.
Alabama’s Second: Defying a gerrymander with deep support from Black voters
Alabama Republicans went all-out to oust Representative Shomari Figures. They delayed primaries so they could redraw his district after a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way this year, removing his hometown, Mobile, and shifting the district to Montgomery. If the district had existed in 2024, it would have backed President Trump by more than 14 percentage points.
But Montgomery is the birthplace of the civil rights movement. And it was an ideal place for Figures to seize on the anger of Black voters, many of whom believed Republicans had tried to disenfranchise them after the weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
In a sign of the district’s symbolic importance, Representative Hakeem Jeffries made a stop there in the final days of the campaign.
Figures won by more than seven points.
Get Caught Up
Midterm Elections
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The stock market had its worst day in nearly two years. Investors are newly concerned about the durability of the A.I. build-out after Democratic victories stoked fears of tighter industry regulation.
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Nithya Raman, a democratic socialist, defeated Karen Bass to become the next mayor of Los Angeles.
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Tech billionaires spent years donating to Trump’s favored causes. Overnight, their political alignment with him became a liability.
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Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. 2 House Democrat, is set to become the majority leader. Her friends say she’s a lot like Senator Elizabeth Warren.
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Victory has a thousand fathers, and Democratic heavyweights are clamoring for a piece of the party’s midterm triumph. Here are a few whose big bets on candidates paid off.
In Washington
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Times Exclusive: The Justice Department is pursuing a criminal investigation into who leaked the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overturning the right to abortion.
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Melania Trump, the first lady, made an unusual announcement last month about a local cease-fire in a Ukrainian city besieged by Russia. How did that happen?
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In his first interview since fleeing Brazil last week, Flávio Bolsonaro told The Times he got “help from absolutely no one” in his secretive voyage to the U.S. after losing his country’s presidential election. (Trump directly granted his entry, U.S. officials said.)
More News
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Iran is reviewing “concrete proposals” on its nuclear program, according to officials. It’s a potential breakthrough in stalled diplomatic efforts to end its war with the U.S.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom of California commuted the sentences of all 548 death row inmates in the state. It’s the largest mass commutation of death sentences in modern U.S. history.
Number of the Day
$30,000
That’s how much Trump’s super PAC paid in mid-October to air a commercial in Anchorage, Alaska. It was more than 10 times as much as what the leading Democratic super PAC paid for the same slot — because the Trump group hadn’t reserved it far enough in advance.
Read the full inside story of how Team Trump lost the midterms.
Still counting
Election Day is over, but the counting is not.
Here’s the latest on the two major Senate races that haven’t yet been called:
Mississippi: The closeness of the Senate contest between the Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith and Scott Colom, her Democratic challenger, was an election night stunner. And their race, which remains too close to call, has grown even tighter as officials tabulate a trickle of mail and provisional ballots. As of this afternoon, Colom leads by just over 1,800 votes.
Alaska: The Senate race between Mary Peltola and the incumbent Republican, Dan S. Sullivan, is another nail-biter. About a quarter of expected votes remain uncounted, and Alaska, a notorious ballot-counting laggard, can keep adding them up until Nov. 18. At that point, ranked-choice tabulation will begin, should neither candidate cross the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright. (Check the results here.)
Got a tip? The Times offers several ways to send important information confidentially.
In One Graphic
Democrats seized control of the Senate by flipping seats in at least seven states. Most of them had not elected a Democratic senator in nearly two decades; for Kansas, it had been almost a century. A lot has changed in the two years since Trump stormed back to the White House. See what shifted in these battlegrounds.
The last Republican bastion?
During an election awash in blue, one state stayed red: Florida.
The state, once a major presidential battleground, has transformed itself into a Republican stronghold — and, at least in the midterms, the last remaining one after voters nationwide turned against President Trump and his party.
Don’t get it twisted: Democrats still made gains in Florida. They flipped at least 17 state legislative seats and broke the Republican supermajority in the State House. But the blue wave wasn’t quite big enough to translate into statewide victories, and Republicans hung onto a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion. Those G.O.P. triumphs were a point of pride for the party on a night with few celebratory moments, especially in the South.
Read more about how Florida withstood a national Democratic surge.
one last thing
Some have described the midterm results as a “blue wave.” Others went a little bigger, calling them a “blue tsunami.”
But in Japan, which has a painful history with such natural disasters, some were bothered by a New York Post cover that repurposed the Japanese masterpiece known as the “Great Wave.”
“That’s not really how these pieces were intended to be enjoyed,” a museum dedicated to the work’s artist, Katsushika Hokusai, said through a spokesman.
Evan Gorelick contributed reporting.
The post These 5 Races Tell the Story of the Blue Wave appeared first on New York Times.
