Democrats have won control of Congress in Tuesday’s 2026 midterm elections in a widespread repudiation of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, a drubbing that reached deep into reliable GOP territory.
Democrats flipped at least seven Senate seats in ruby-red states and battlegrounds alike: Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in nearly a century, Iowa, Texas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina. They held on to battleground seats in Georgia and Michigan. In the House, Democrats flipped more than two dozen districts, some that voted for Trump by double digits in 2024.
Democrats Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Amy Acton in Ohio, Rob Sand in Iowa and Gina Hinojosa in Texas won races for governor, flipping GOP-held offices.
Trump faces a profoundly reshaped Washington for the last two years of his presidency. Democrats will have the power to block his legislative agenda, reject his appointees and investigate his administration.
After telling voters repeatedly to “pretend I’m on the ballot,” Trump tried to shift the blame away from himself, saying Democrats “did a good job” in their campaigns and blaming GOP candidates for losses. Most voters appear to blame his administration for high costs and want Congress to impose more checks on him, according to The AP Voter Poll.
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The country’s first Black female governor, the first Native American female governor, the first Native female senator and the first openly gay male U.S. senator had been declared winners on Tuesday.
By early Wednesday, the first Muslim U.S. senator was added to the list of barrier-breaking milestones.
The astonishing Democratic wave also means the United States will likely have its first-ever Black speaker of the House.
“These firsts show how our country is changing,” Alexis Anderson-Reed, president and CEO of State Voices, a network of advocates for civic engagement and equity in democracy, said in an email.
A California measure to tax the net worth of billionaires that divided liberal leaders nationally and triggered one of the most expensive ballot fights in state history was too early to call Wednesday morning as the vote tally continued.
Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the wealth of Californians whose net worth exceeds $1 billion, with most of the revenue dedicated to replacing federal funding cuts to healthcare. The measure left ultra-rich people, some of whom spent heavily to defeat it, scrambling to figure out whether they would pay the tax or leave California.
After more than a decade with Donald Trump at the epicenter of U.S. politics, most voters appear exhausted and exasperated by him, according to The AP Voter Poll, a survey of midterm voters in all 50 states.
The president’s failure to deliver on key promises — most prominently, his vows to tame inflation, which has worsened instead — clearly weighed on his fellow Republicans in Tuesday’s midterm elections for the House and the Senate. The polling shows that voters generally saw Trump as being more focused on his own fortune and gold-leafed existence than their needs.
The president also helped elevate candidates with obvious flaws, amplifying their struggles in an already challenging year.
But the poll also contains a serious note of caution for Democrats. Many voters dislike the party — and while Democrats hold an advantage on key issues such as the economy, their edge is relatively slim. About 7 in 10 voters said that Congress isn’t doing enough to provide checks and balances for the president, setting the bar for Democrats who won back the Senate and the House.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says the Democrats taking control of the House and the Senate in the U.S. midterms is going to “introduce a new era in world relations.”
Ramaphosa says he hopes South Africa will be able to improve its bilateral relationship with the United States after his country became a target for criticism during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Trump’s Republican administration has made several moves against South Africa’s government, which he has baselessly accused of discriminating against its white minority. Those moves include excluding South Africa from meetings of the Group of 20 countries this year in the U.S. and suspending it from AGOA, a key U.S.-Africa trade program.
