The U.S. Capitol is seen in Washington on Nov. 4, 2026, a day after midterm elections in which Democrats secured control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, shifting the balance of power in Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s term.
Mehmet Eser | Anadolu | Getty Images
Seven Senate seats. At least 24 House districts. Five governorships. Twelve state legislative chambers. By Wednesday afternoon, that’s how far Democrats’ historic midterm rout had reached.
Republicans, meanwhile, had yet to flip a single Democratic-held congressional seat, governorship or state legislative chamber, according to Associated Press data. Their remaining opportunities for congressional pickups are largely confined to two newly gerrymandered House districts that weren’t even supposed to be competitive in the first place.
The lopsided results underscored the breadth of the GOP’s shellacking, with Democrats breaking decades of Republican dominance in reliably red states and reshaping the balance of power from Washington to state capitols.
As of late Wednesday, nine House seats remained uncalled by the AP along with two Senate seats and two governors races. The one seat Republicans may have a chance of flipping that hasn’t been redistricted ahead of this election is Maine’s 2nd District, FiftyPlusOne head of research Mary Radcliffe said by email.
In Kansas, voters elected their first Democratic U.S. senator since 1932, ending a 94-year losing streak for the party. In Texas, Democrats toppled three-term Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and captured a Senate seat that had eluded the party since 1988. Republican-held Senate seats also fell in Iowa, South Carolina and Ohio, along with seats in Maine and North Carolina.
The same wave swept through governors’ mansions. Democrats scored upsets in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Nevada — all states President Donald Trump won in 2024 — giving the party a majority of the nation’s governorships for the first time since 2010.
Upheaval even reached state capitols, where Republican legislative majorities that had endured for decades fell like dominoes.
Democrats seized control of the Texas House for the first time in more than two decades, flipped both chambers of the Wisconsin Legislature and wrested the North Carolina House from Republicans after 16 years in the minority.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats captured the state Senate for the first time since before 1994, giving the party complete control of state government. They also reclaimed lower chambers in Michigan and Minnesota, restoring full Democratic control in both states. In Arizona, unofficial results pointed toward Democrats taking both legislative chambers for the first time in roughly 60 years.
Even where Republicans held on to legislative majorities, Democrats stripped away veto-proof supermajorities in Florida, Indiana, Kansas and Missouri. Not since the aftermath of Watergate in 1974 had the GOP faced a statehouse reckoning of this magnitude, according to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.
The scale of the losses is all the more remarkable given how aggressively Republicans had tried to protect their power. At Trump’s urging, GOP lawmakers spent months pursuing an extraordinary mid-decade redistricting campaign, redrawing congressional boundaries in Texas, Florida and North Carolina to tilt the electoral map in their favor.
Yet the gerrymandering push did little to blunt the Democratic wave. And the damage might not be over. Republicans were still fighting to hold Senate seats in Alaska and Mississippi, with several House contests also yet to be called Wednesday.
— Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report.