The biggest winners and losers of the 2026 midterm elections
By Aaron Blake ·
The results are still rolling in on the 2026 midterm elections. But the overall contours of what just happened are already obvious: A historic Democratic victory, and a historic setback for what is now the lame-duck presidency of Donald Trump.
A look at some of the big winners and losers that tell the tale.
Black political power: Before Tuesday, only three Black governors had ever been elected. Next year, we’ll have five serving at the same time. That’s after wins by Florida GOP Gov.-elect Byron Donalds, Wisconsin Democratic Gov.-elect David Crowley, Nevada Democratic Gov.-elect Aaron Ford and Georgia Democratic Gov.-elect Keisha Lance Bottoms, who will be the first Black female governor ever. Also, Democrats won in the South due in large part to a surge of Black voters. And if a Black Democrat — Scott Colom — can beat Mississippi GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith in a Trump +23 state with its fair share of history with race issues, it will be perhaps the biggest statement of all.
The religious left: Two of the biggest Democratic over-performers Tuesday were Kansas Sen.-elect Adam Hamilton, who is a pastor, and Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, who basically sounds like a youth pastor and often cited his faith on the trail. Bet on Democrats looking for more candidates like them, starting today.
Jon Ossoff, times two: He won reelection to the Senate by a stunning 18-point margin in a swing state, bolstering his fast-rising national star. And Lance Bottoms’ win means he can run for president in 2028 without worrying about a major obstacle: a governor who would replace him with a Republican.
James Talarico: He had a deeply flawed opponent in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, yes. But virtually nobody had him winning by double-digits. (He’s currently ahead by 12, in a state Democrats where the party hadn’t won in a statewide race since 1994.)
Gina Hinojosa: But don’t sleep on the other big statewide Democratic winner in Texas, Gov.-elect Hinojosa. She appealed to voters of all walks from all corners of the state, and she beat a three-term GOP governor in Greg Abbott who was on nobody’s radar at the start of the election.
Annie Andrews: Also expect plenty of focus on the South Carolina senator-elect. The pediatrician benefitted from appointed GOP Sen. Darline Graham’s problems, but Andrews was well-liked in her own right in preelection polling. She ran a very strong campaign.
Democrats’ presidential hopes: Not only do Ossoff, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and other potential 2028 hopefuls emerge smelling like roses, but Democrats proved they can compete all over the place. If they can make Texas competitive — a big if, sure — it completely recasts the Electoral College math in their favor. And Tuesday’s results suggest the Trump coalition, which we already knew didn’t turn up as much when he’s not on the ballot, is crumbling.
Democrats’ power in the state: We’re still awaiting some key results, but Democrats have gained full control of at least six state governments, per Bolts magazine’s Daniel Nichanian. The GOP has long benefitted from superior control in the states.
The Supreme Court’s left flank: The size of Democrats’ Senate majority makes the GOP’s ability to confirm a conservative justice to replace Samuel Alito and/or Clarence Thomas appear rather distant — possibly as distant as the early 2030s, Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis argued late Tuesday.
Ron DeSantis: OK, it’s not just him. But Tuesday was an argument for the GOP to look outside the Trump administration — and beyond Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — for their 2028 nominee. Florida was at least one of the few states were Republicans notched some key wins, and DeSantis has created some distance from Trump’s political approach of late. Also keep an eye on outgoing Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who is even less tethered to Trumpism. (Vance’s X post Wednesday blaming the Iran war for GOP losses suggests he sees the need to distance himself, too.)
Washington, DC, lawyers: The Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to ethics and self-enrichment has given Democrats a bevy of potential targets. Incoming Democratic House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Robert Garcia of California said it all late Tuesday in a two-word statement: “Lawyer up.” (And administration figures already had been.)
Donald Trump: It’s obvious, but it’s hard to overstate what a rebuke this election was to the president personally. Not only did Trump suffer a crippling loss that leaves him as a lame duck; he made the GOP campaign overwhelmingly about him. He took sole ownership of the economy with his tariffs and the Iran war in ways that clearly backfired. He meddled in GOP primaries in ways that produced a slate of less-electable candidates (a repeat of 2018 that suggests he didn’t learn any lessons there). And his conduct down the stretch in the campaign was downright bizarre, dismissing affordability concerns and frequently focusing on overwhelmingly unpopular things like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool less than 24 hours before Election Day. There are no good signs about what lay ahead for the GOP and Trump over the next two years, but Republicans are still clearly afraid to blame him.
JD Vance: Trump is now the millstone around his neck. He can try to distance himself from Trump on the Iran war and Israel — as he clearly set about trying to do on Wednesday — but it’s going to be an exceedingly difficult thing to do. Trump, after all, won’t want his VP constantly undercutting his policies and supposed legacy items like the Iran war. And Trump isn’t one who willingly takes the heat to help other members of his party.
Elon Musk: He spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the GOP — including much of it specifically on one of the party’s biggest flops, the Texas Senate race. Indeed, much like in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race, it seemed to give Democrats a bogeyman to run against — their own Republican version of George Soros. Also, he moved Tesla to Texas in recent years, and now it’s governed by Democrats.
The tariffs: This was Trump’s and the GOP’s original sin. Voters seemed open to the idea, but it’s not clear they really knew what tariffs were. Then Trump implemented them in bizarre, scattershot and on-again-off-again fashion. A recent study from the New York Federal Reserve found that the overall cost of consumer goods would have fallen without his tariffs in 2025. Congressional Republicans must be ruing that they didn’t assert their authority — or at least try harder to talk Trump out of it.
Mike Johnson: The GOP House speaker claimed for weeks that the polls were wrong and — rather laughably — that Republicans were going to “defy history” by keeping their House majority. He was either just saying stuff, or he has terrible political intel. And now he’s not even going to try to stay in charge of the House GOP; he won’t run for House minority leader (though maybe he’s looking forward to giving up one of the most thankless jobs in Washington).
GOP poll denialists: But Johnson wasn’t the only one; a whole bunch of Republicans confidently predicted that the polls were under-sampling Trump’s supporters. In the end, the polls actually under-estimated Democrats — and often by some significant margins.
The GOP’s gerrymanders: Not only did the GOP’s map in North Carolina majorly blow up in its face (they’re either on track to lose or are trailing in 10 out of 14 seats), but the party might fail to win any of the five seats it drew for itself in Texas and the four it drew for itself in Florida. It looks like the GOP’s whole brazen mid-decade redistricting push gained it next to nothing, at least in this election. And Democrats newfound control in many states means they could redraw their own maps ahead of the 2028 election, thanks to the precedent the GOP has now set.
Previous wave elections: Sorry, 2010 and 2006. Apologies, 1994. The 2026 election appears to have set the post-Watergate benchmark for a political rout in a midterm election. Democrats appear to have won the popular vote by around 13 points, which would be the largest margin for any party since 1976, per the Economist.
Darline Graham: It almost seems cruel to put her here, because she never seemed to truly ask for any of this after her brother died. And you could certainly blame Trump for the weird decision to elevate her. But the appointed senator turned out to be a disastrous candidate, with voters overwhelmingly saying she didn’t have the qualifications to be a senator. It’s a cautionary tale for anyone who might feel compelled to throw themselves into the cauldron of national politics.
Roger Marshall: It can feel difficult to isolate the truly bad candidates when voters were generally so against the GOP. But Marshall is certainly near the top of that list. His fundraising was anemic and he didn’t seem to really have much of a campaign operation until it was too late. He also reportedly went rogue late in the campaign by cutting a video explaining his pursuit of his medical patients’ debts. In the end, he lost a Trump +16 state by around 5 points.
Ken Paxton: Paxton’s under-performance was even bigger. He is losing a Trump + 14 state by 12 points — a massive 26-point swing.
Haley Stevens: The Democratic Michigan congresswoman’s late decision to flip her endorsement from her former primary opponent Abdul El-Sayed to Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race doesn’t seem to have made any difference, judging by El-Sayed’s seven-point win. About all it appears to have done is doom any shot Stevens had at a career in Democratic politics.
Really ugly campaign tactics: Vivek Ramaswamy’s ugly and controversial ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s mom didn’t work; he did worse than any other statewide Ohio Republican. The GOP’s transgender slurs about Andrews and efforts to suggest James Talarico was a gay vegan seemed to do basically no good, as those two were among Democrats’ biggest over-performers. The situation is a little less clear in Alaska, where Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola might still win after the New York Times reported that her campaign recruited a decoy Dan Sullivan; counting those votes will still take some time. Politics has plenty of ugly campaign tactics, but maybe voters don’t like ones that are so transparent and desperate? At the very least, these gambits didn’t seem to help.
Democrats stepping aside for independents: Independent Dan Osborn’s six-point loss to Nebraska GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts suggests Democrats didn’t glean much from their strategy of trying to let independents run with no Democratic opponents in dark-red states. Independents also lost by more than 20 points in similar set-ups in Idaho and South Dakota. And in Montana, their failure to get the Democratic nominee to drop out meant she and the independent split about half the vote. Tuesday’s results suggest Democrats might as well run moderate Democrats who fit those states.
Originally published by CNN