It was a Democrat tsunami. By the time the counting settled on Wednesday, Democrats had taken the House of Representatives, taken the Senate, flipped the governorships of Ohio, Nevada and Texas, and beaten sitting Republican senators and governors across the map — a sweeping midterm defeat for President Donald Trump and the Republicans, delivered in race after race on the same night.
The House fell first. Democrats reached 218 seats — the mark for control — when Johnny Garcia won Texas' redrawn 35th District over Trump-endorsed Carlos De La Cruz, and they kept going, putting the House in Democratic hands and Hakeem Jeffries in line for the speaker's gavel.
The Senate followed. Democrats won control of the chamber by flipping six seats — Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, James Talarico in Texas, Adam Hamilton in Kansas and Josh Turek in Iowa — for at least a 51-49 majority. In Maine, Troy Jackson beat five-term Republican Susan Collins 291,798 to 258,555, ending one of the longest Senate careers in the state.
The governorships told the same story. In Ohio, Democrat Amy Acton defeated Trump-backed Vivek Ramaswamy to become the first woman elected governor of the state. In Nevada, Attorney General Aaron Ford beat sitting Republican Governor Joe Lombardo 506,653 to 432,732, becoming Nevada's first Black governor. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott, who conceded, by 4,073,877 votes to 3,018,215. In Iowa, Rob Sand won the governor's race, and in Oregon, Democrat Tina Kotek held on for a second term.
It was not a shutout, and the map still has fights in it. Republicans held Nebraska's Senate seat through Pete Ricketts and won Montana's open seat with Kurt Alme. Mississippi's Senate race is a dead heat — Democrat Scott Colom leads Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes with affidavit ballots still to count — and Alaska's Senate race is too early to call, with Republican Dan Sullivan ahead of Mary Peltola on first choices and a ranked-choice count still to come.
Republicans themselves named the weight the president carried into the night. On Fox News' election-night coverage, Sean Hannity admitted Republicans would have done dramatically better without the Iran War — “I think 100 percent,” he said — pointing to rising gasoline costs and voters' attitudes toward the conflict. Trump, posting through the night on Truth Social, blamed others for the losses and reminded supporters: “I wasn’t on the Ballot.”
For ordinary Americans, the meaning of the tsunami is a changed Washington. The president's agenda — on spending, on the war, on the cost of living — now runs through a Congress his party does not control, with the investigations, vetoes and budget fights that follow from that. What voters decided on Tuesday will be argued over in that Congress for the next two years.
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