Democrats’ House majority is trending toward historic
By Aaron Blake ·
The 2026 midterm elections have clearly been very good for Democrats across the board. But their House majority is trending toward historic numbers.
CNN is projecting that Democrats have won more than 250 House seats, with a net gain of around 40 seats. And they could hit or even exceed 260 total seats by the time all is said and done.
That would give them around an 85-seat majority and make it the biggest Democratic majority since the early 1990s — the tail end of decades of Democratic domination of the House.
After flipping more seats on Thursday afternoon, Democrats have won or hold leads in 259 districts. If those margins hold, Republicans would end up with 174 (two Louisiana races are headed to runoffs).
Democrats lead by around a point or less in six districts: South Carolina’s 1st, Colorado’s 4th, Florida’s 9th, Minnesota’s 1st, North Carolina’s 5th and Tennessee’s 4th.
If Democrats get to 260 seats, it would be their biggest House majority since 1991-93, when they had 267. They had 258 seats in the following Congress and 257 after former President Barack Obama’s big win in 2008 swept Democrats into power.
By winning more than 250 seats, Democrats’ House majority is already bigger than any Republican House majority since the Great Depression. (The GOP’s high watermark since then was 247 seats after the 2014 election). If they won 260, it would mean Democrats have won 60% of the available House seats.
That’s compared to winning between 54% and 56% of the Senate (depending upon how the last two races in Alaska and Mississippi shake out).
It looks as though Democrats will have gained somewhere around 50 seats by the time all races are settled.
If they win the 259 seats where they’re currently ahead, it would be a net gain of 44 seats.
That would be the third-largest gain in the past half-century, behind 2010 (Republicans gained 63 seats) and 1994 (Republicans gained 54).
It would also surpass Democrats’ biggest recent midterms: the 2018 election (41 seats) and the 2006 election (31 seats).
But drilling into the details, the number of seats flipped might be even more significant than all of those.
The GOP flipped so many seats in 2010 in large part because Democrats had such a big majority after the 2008 election. That meant Republicans had lots of low-hanging fruit in conservative-leaning territory to go after.
Republicans were also chipping away at a nearly 260-seat Democratic majority in the 1994 election.
By contrast, the 2026 election began with nearly an even split in the House: Republicans at 220 districts to Democrats’ 215. Democrats were also contending with the fact that Republicans redrew several of their maps to give themselves more conservative-leaning territory (it didn’t work).
The other big metric here is the popular vote. Currently, Democrats lead by about 12 percentage points — a margin which could grow in the coming days as more votes are reported, especially from western, Democratic-leaning states.
There are some caveats with that. It’s skewed somewhat by the fact that California’s top-two primary system means that a handful of races are Republicans-versus-Republican and Democrat-versus-Democrat — rather than having all 435 districts include votes for both major parties.
This will mark only the second time since 1982 that a party won the House popular vote by double digits — with the other one being the Obama election of 2008 (an 11-point Democratic margin), according to data from the Brookings Institution.
And the last time either party won the House popular vote by at least 13 points was in the post-Watergate election of 1976.
Originally published by CNN