Democrats secure historic majorities in the midterms — and are poised to win even more seats
By Lauren Kent, Alex Stambaugh, Molly English, Billy Stockwell, Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough, Elise Hammond, Annie Grayer, Lex Harvey, Kevin Liptak, Alejandra Jaramillo, Aaron Blake, Fredreka Schouten, Kathryn Squyres, Lucas Lilieholm, Eric Bradner ·
• Momentous sweep: Democrats have flipped control of both the House and Senate in a resounding and historic victory, CNN projects. They capitalized on President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity to win significant power to check his final two years in office.
• President’s response: Trump told The New York Times he will accept the results, shutting down — for now — questions about whether he would challenge the outcome. And in an interview with Fox News, he said he didn’t see the GOP losses “as a hit on me.”
• Democratic Senate wins: Abdul El-Sayed will win the Michigan Senate seat, CNN projects, becoming the first Muslim senator in US history. Democrats flipped seven other Senate seats – in Ohio, Iowa, South Carolina, Maine, North Carolina, Kansas and Texas.
• Stay with us: See all the latest House and Senate results here. And sign up for CNN’s breaking news alerts.
After Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan was projected to win the state’s open Senate race, the Democrat told supporters that Tuesday signaled a sweeping repudiation of the Trump administration.
“Minnesota, you just beat Donald Trump again. And you know what, America did, too. You said no more war, no more healthcare cuts, no more taking food away from children and seniors, no more selling this country off to the highest bidder,” Flanagan, the first Native American woman elected to the chamber, told the crowd.
“Let today be the start of a new American movement,” she said.
Flanagan said it was her “duty to deliver,” vowing to shake up the status quo, lower living costs, support farmers, tackle corruption and “rip ICE apart.”
“All of this is possible, friends,” she declared.
“My family is the Wolf Clan,” Flanagan told her supporters. “And the role of our clan is to ensure we never leave anyone behind. And that’s been the purpose of our campaign.”
Former President Barack Obama on Wednesday praised Democrats’ election-night victories, highlighting the “outstanding candidates” who ran on shared values of public service and “a commitment to putting the people of their districts and states first.”
He urged party members to build on their gains by beginning to “make changes wherever we have the power to do so, prevent damage, and lay the groundwork for the future.”
Democrats are projected to take control of the House, putting Hakeem Jeffries on the path to becoming the first Black House Speaker, though he will first have to win the gavel in a floor vote once the new Congress convenes.
Several other candidates are already making history tonight. Here’s a recap:
CNN’s Ethan Cohen and Emilie Plesset contributed reporting.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, will defeat Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan’s Senate race, CNN’s Decision Desk projects, delivering a battleground state victory for the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.
El-Sayed’s win means the seat of retiring Sen. Gary Peters will remain in Democratic hands.
El-Sayed cuts a much different figure from typical politicians. The 42-year-old typically wears a tight V-neck T-shirt, a dive watch on a rubber strap, jeans and dark sneakers.
His win comes despite struggles to unite Democrats after a bruising August primary that pitted El-Sayed against moderate Rep. Haley Stevens — a contest El-Sayed won by less than a percentage point.
Stevens roiled the race in its final days by announcing Sunday that she was endorsing Rogers and appearing with him at a church in Detroit. The stunning move infuriated Democratic leaders nationally and in Michigan — and it led the party to rally around El-Sayed, who spent months attempting to consolidate the support of Black and Jewish voters who had backed Stevens in the primary.
Now, he is poised to make history: He’ll become the nation’s first Muslim senator when he is sworn in in January.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man who has become one of the Republican Party’s largest-ever donors during this year’s midterms elections, sounded off on social media early Wednesday after Democrats were projected to secure historic majorities.
“Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X, adding a shrug emoji.
Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars in this midterm elections cycle, making him the single largest disclosed donor in modern American politics.
“Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Musk said in another post.
CNN previously reported that Musk donated nearly $216 million to America PAC, the super PAC at the center of his political operation.
Musk particularly spent huge sums of money in Texas, where he lives and has headquartered parts of his large business portfolio.
Texas Democrat James Talarico, who is projected to win the senate seat there, appeared to call out Musk specifically in his victory speech, saying, “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas.”
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten contributed previous reporting to this post.
James Talarico, who CNN projects will win a Texas Senate seat that has eluded Democrats for 38 years, was all smiles as he visited with voters during a stop late Tuesday at Whataburger.
He was joined by Gina Hinojosa, who is projected to turn the governor’s office blue, at the restaurant in Austin, Texas:
As the scale of Democrats’ midterm victories came into focus Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump said he had fielded phone calls from members of the opposing party.
In an interview with Politico, he insisted his administration will work with Democrats to “make things work out well for the country.”
In a subdued tone, Trump said that although he has the right to veto legislation that comes across his desk from a Democratic-controlled Congress, he doesn’t “want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything.” Trump has previously suggested the opposite, even saying he would become “Mr. Veto.”
“They’ve already called and they want to work with me,” Trump told Politico, refusing to say who exactly has phoned him.
Although Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran likely contributed to the GOP’s major losses, the president defended his choice.
“A lot of people say the oil price because of Iran, but I’m very, I am totally convinced that my decision on Iran for the long-term good of our country and even the world was an absolutely correct one, and it continues to be,” he said.
Heading into the midterm election, many Texas Republicans imagined that the worse-case scenario would be Ken Paxton losing the US Senate race to James Talarico.
But as the night continues to unfold, Texas Republicans are beginning to envision a scenario where they lose most statewide offices and even control of the Texas legislature.
Matt Mackowiak, Sen. John Cornyn’s campaign communications director, said in a social media post “The end of Texas as we know it.”
He went on to write, “It was a very bad year to run the worst candidate in history at the top of the ticket who ran the worst campaign in TX in the modern era.”
Another veteran Republican political consultant said simply this is “Giant D wave. Blue, blue, blue.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson alluded to the challenging political headwinds the party in power typically faces during midterm elections.
House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged it has been a tough night for Republicans and that he was “disappointed” with the results, promising Republicans will take back the House in 2028.
Johnson argued that historic precedent was working against Republicans from the beginning.
“From the first day of this election, we knew that to keep the House and sustain our majority, we would have to defy more than a century of midterm history, OK,” Johnson said. “It’s only happened twice in 90 years that a sitting president has picked up or held seats for his party in that first two-year cycle, and there’s a lot of reasons for it. It’s very, very difficult to overcome, and it looks like history will be kept tonight.”
But Johnson said that there is still a long night ahead.
“It’ll be a long night. You know, they haven’t even closed the polls in some states out there in the West,” he said.
Comparing his war room to the Situation Room, Johnson said, “We’re watching every race.”
“Once we know the final results, I’ll speak a lot more about the midterms in the coming days,” Johnson said.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed supporters Tuesday after CNN projected Democrats would regain control of the US House of Representatives. Jeffries is expected to become the first Black man to serve as House speaker.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said “today begins the great American comeback,” Monday night, after Democrats were projected to flip the House.
“House Democrats have taken back control of the United States Congress,” said Jeffries, who is now on the path to become the first Black speaker of the House.
House Democrats understand “we need to deliver dramatic change,” he said. “Things are broken.”
“We will deliver a Congress that puts everyday Americans first,” he added.
By the time the House and Senate had been called for Democrats on Tuesday, a consensus among members of both parties was forming: voters had rejected President Donald Trump’s record in office, and he would face a starkly different political reality for the remainder of his term.
“But I don’t view it as a hit on me,” Trump told Fox News in a live phone interview. “We’ve had the greatest two years in the history of the presidency in terms of the economy, in terms of all the things that we’ve done.”
The stunning results across a swath of America were not primarily the fault of the Iran war he began eight months ago — he told the Wall Street Journal that was only a “piece” of it — or the tariffs that drove up prices or his fixation on topics far from voters’ minds, Trump insisted.
It was the candidates who were to blame, he argued, helped along by favorable coverage of Democrats on his once-favorite channel, Fox News. The results were only a “little surprise,” he would later tell that channel. The winds of history were always against him, he’d long warned. He neglected to mention that he had selected many of the candidates himself.
“I thought they’d do better,” he told Fox, referring to Republicans in the third person rather than the party he is currently leading. Later, he attributed the losses to a “mood in the air.”
He also insisted Tuesday night that his governing agenda would continue apace, despite the dramatically altered political conditions in Washington.
President Donald Trump said he will accept tonight’s results, shutting down — for now — questions about whether he would challenge the outcome. “I am absolutely willing to accept those results,” he told the New York Times.
As voters delivered a massive rebuke to President Donald Trump on Tuesday night, he took to social media to vow that he will become “a political pundit.”
CNN projects that Democrats will win control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, ending the GOP’s stranglehold on Washington.
Democrats will flip control of both the House and Senate in the 2026 midterm elections in a resounding and historic victory, CNN’s Decision Desk projects.
Democrats capitalized on President Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity to win a major victory and significant power to check a previously untethered Trump and his administration over the final two years of his presidency.
To win the majorities, Democrats swept through even starkly red territory and won races that haven’t gone Democratic in decades. That included winning a Senate seat in South Carolina, which Trump won by 18 points in 2024, and another in Texas, which hadn’t voted for a statewide Democrat since 1994 and even breaking through in Kansas, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1932.
The change in control of Congress completes a whirlwind last 22 months. It featured Trump coming into office like a wrecking ball and gobbling up executive power with the acquiescence of the Republican-controlled Congress and many institutions. It ends with Republicans suffering a major defeat in the midterm elections.
Only twice in the last 50 years had control of both chambers changed in the same cycle.
The main culprits appear to be inflation, Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war, and voters’ concern about Trump’s conduct and self-enrichment.
CNN’s Voter Poll currently shows more than 6 in 10 voters disapproved of Trump, and more than a majority strongly disapproved. Two-thirds said he had made the economy worse with his policies.
Democrats’ victory in the House was largely expected, given they only needed to net three seats to accomplish it, and the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections.
But Democrats ability to flip the Senate caps a remarkable election. In order to do that, they had to win multiple seats that Trump had carried in 2024 by double digits. They wound up winning in South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Kansas and Iowa.
The exact sizes of Democrats’ majorities is still yet to be determined as the final election results are counted. But Democrats appear set to have some room for error in both chambers. And both Trump’s veto and the 60-vote threshold for most Senate legislation mean they’re very unlikely to be able to pass much of their preferred agenda.
But controlling the chambers does give Democrats more power to investigate what they see fit to and gives them subpoena power for those investigations. Meanwhile, controlling the Senate means Democrats can halt Trump’s judicial picks, including if there is a Supreme Court vacancy.
Democrat James Talarico’s big win in Texas is a big loss for the world’s richest man.
Tech mogul Elon Musk poured $168 million into two Texas super PACs aimed at salvaging Republican Ken Paxton’s bid for the Senate and helping the GOP retain its majority in the chamber.
He also devoted millions more to voter outreach in Texas, through his own political group, America PAC, and contributed more than $5 million to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s reelection campaign. CNN Decision Desk projects that Abbott will lose to Democrat Gina Hinojosa.
Overall, Musk has pumped nearly half a billion dollars into federal committees in this election cycle to become the country’s largest publicly disclosed political donor.
Iran’s parliament speaker has weighed in on the US midterm elections, calling the electoral wipeout for President Donald Trump’s Republican party an anti-war message from voters.
“Conscience or the cost of living, Americans said NO TO WAR, and we endorse this message,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wrote in a post on X.
High energy prices and inflation caused by the US-Israel war with Iran have frequently been cited as major reasons for voters’ frustrations with the Trump administration in the run-up to Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Top Republicans have already begun blaming their party’s losses on the fallout from the conflict, which began in late February.
Trump has said he is in no hurry to end the war unless Iran meets his demands, and said Tuesday that the US “might have to go after” Pickaxe Mountain, where Israel believes Tehran has stored part of its enriched uranium stockpile and advanced enrichment centrifuges.
Ghalibaf concluded his message with a warning to the US administration.
Originally published by CNN