Published: 12:00 AM, 05 November 2026
Democrats win the US House and Senate
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress, delivering a decisive rebuke of Republican governance in Washington and ushering in a new era of congressional resistance to President Donald Trump.
Tuesday's midterm elections laid bare voters' deep frustrations over high prices, the Iran war and concerns over government corruption. Democrats routed their rivals across the map, flipping states that have voted Republican for decades and that Trump won by double digits just two years ago, AP reports.
That includes James Talarico's stunning Senate victory in Texas, where no Democrat had won statewide office in more than 30 years, and Annie Andrews' upset victory over Sen. Darline Graham in South Carolina. Trump had thrown his full weight behind both losing candidates.
In Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed - one of a crop of left-wing candidates who prevailed in Democratic primaries - topped Republican Mike Rogers. Even Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a battle-tested survivor of difficult elections, lost to Democrat Troy Jackson. The results marked a fundamental unraveling of the coalition that returned Trump to the White House two years ago, with young people and Latinos moving away from Republicans, according to The AP Voter Poll. Only about one-third of Hispanic voters said they backed the Republican in their local U.S. House races.
It was all a major blow to Trump, who spent nearly every day of the last month holding rallies to energize his supporters but was unable to stop a wipeout.
While Trump has proven adept at steamrolling efforts to rein him in, Democratic control will profoundly reshape Trump's final two years in office and hamstring his legislative agenda.
Party leaders have signaled they'll use their new power to ensure Trump's final two years in office are dominated by a series of investigations of top members of his administration and deeper scrutiny of how he's enriched his family. Impeachment of Trump and his Cabinet officials is not off the table. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and tech titan Elon Musk, a former top Trump adviser, are among possible targets for investigations.
In celebratory events Tuesday night, Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer called the results a "generational remake of the Senate map." Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries said "the American people are crying out for transformational change."
Trump immediately sought to shift blame for his party's losses, posting on his social media site before polls even closed on the West Coast that he wasn't on the ballot - even though he spent weeks asking voters to act like he was. He vowed to veto Democrat-controlled legislation, sharing a picture of a red baseball cap with "VETO" stenciled in the style of his trademark "Make America Great Again" campaign swag.
In a late-night phone interview with Fox News, Trump said he didn't consider the elections to be a personal defeat. Voters, he said, "didn't like the candidates."
Democrats had braced for Trump to again try to undermine the results if they won after he warned that noncitizens would cast ballots en masse and filed lawsuits in Alaska and California. Instead, he said on Fox that he would accept them.
Despite the results, Senate Majority Leader John Thune wrote on X that "Senate Republicans will not stand idly by as the far-left, socialist wing of the Democrat Party attempts to unwind everything we've done." He said they will work with Trump "to stop the worst impulses of Democrat extremism."
