Agency’s Report
A political earthquake has swept through United States midterms following Democratic Party outpacing Republican Party in the Senate and House of Representatives.
Democrats have so far secured 53 Senate seats, based on post-voting projections, with many seats still undecided.
The US Senate has 100 members, with 35 of the seats up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. Democrats needed to flip four seats to take control of the Senate but already flipped seven as of the time of this report, with CNN reporting that Democrats now have 53 seats.
Republicans control the outgoing 119th Congress, with a 53-seat majority. The Democrats have 45 seats, with two independents in their caucus.
A similar victory is expected for the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, where all 435 seats are up for grabs, and the Democrats currently lead with 197 to 114. Many seats were yet to be called as of early Wednesday.
Some of the Senate seats flipped by the Democrats include South Carolina, where the party won for the first time since 1998. The seat was held by war-mongering senator Lindsey Graham, who died this year and was replaced by his sister, Darling Graham.
The Democrats also flipped North Carolina, Ohio, Kansas, and Texas, where the party had not won since 1994.
The results are seen as a huge loss for President Donald Trump, who had campaigned for many Republican candidates, many of whom he hand-picked. The American leader even urged his supporters to vote as if he were on the ballot.
However, seeing that his party was headed for a huge loss, Mr Trump deflected blame.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP,” he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Democrats have regained control of the US Senate, routing Republicans nationwide with historic victories that will give them powerful new leverage over Donald Trump for the remainder of his presidency.
Together with their likely triumph in the House of Representatives, Democrats are expected to have full control of Congress beginning next year, for the first time since 2022.
“Wow! Wow! Now, against all odds, we Democrats have won the Senate,” the minority leader Chuck Schumer said in Washington DC. “We have five words for the American people: relief is on the way.”
The Democrats will return to power after their candidates won in a host of states where they hadn’t had success in years, if not decades, including Maine, South Carolina, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Iowa and Kansas, according to the Associated Press.
Democrats will soon have the ability to hold up not just Trump’s legislative agenda, but also any appointments he makes to his cabinet or the federal judiciary – including the supreme court, where conservatives have a 6-3 majority.
Thus far, Democrats have won 53 seats, and Republicans 41. Vote counting is ongoing in Michigan – where the party hopes to replace a retiring Democrat with their nominee Abdul El-Sayed – as well as in Alaska, where they are vying to beat two-term Republican Dan Sullivan. It may takes days to determine the outcome of the latter race.
Republicans have thus far failed to unseat any of the Democrats they viewed as vulnerable after the 2024 election, including in New Hampshire, Georgia and Minnesota. However, Republicans have been re-elected or have held on to seats in dozens of red states, many of which are in the south or midwest.
But even those victories served as warning signals for the party. The Republican incumbent Ashley Moody won in Florida, but only by about three percentage points. Other Republicans have won recent elections by double digits in the former presidential battleground, which has become deeply conservative in recent years.
Julia Letlow has triumphed in the race for the open Senate seat in Louisiana, another Republican stronghold, but the margin of her Democratic opponent is just two percentage points. Trump won the state by about 22 percentage points two years ago.
The election is a stunning reversal from 2024, when voters sent Trump back to the White House and gave his allies a 53-seat majority in the Senate, ending four years of Democratic control.
In the wake of that election, it seemed unlikely that Democrats would be back in charge any time soon – most states scheduled to hold Senate elections in 2026 were strongholds of one party or another, and the tendency of voters to split their tickets between parties in congressional elections has declined in recent years.
Democrats initially named as their Senate targets Republican-held seats in North Carolina, Ohio, Alaska and Maine. The GOP, meanwhile, hoped to claim Democratic-held seats in Georgia and Michigan – both of which voted for Trump – as well as New Hampshire and Minnesota, which Kamala Harris carried by relatively weak margins.
But Trump made a series of deeply unpopular policy decisions, and his approval ratings slumped over time, particularly on handling of the economy and immigration, which were previously two of his best issues.
His decision to attack Iran and send federal agents to conduct highly public immigration raids, which resulted in the killings of two US citizens in Minneapolis, further alienated voters. As gas prices rose due to the conflict in the Middle East, Democrats became confident about winning Senate elections in Texas, Kansas and Iowa.
“Republicans had a choice of following Trump over the cliff, even though Trump policies made American families’ pain much worse,” Schumer said. “We never wavered. We listened to the American people, what they wanted. We talked to them. We sat down in their kitchens, in their living rooms, and said, ‘What should we do?’ And they told us, and we listened.”
The result is a wave of victories unheard of in modern American politics. Kansas has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932, and Texas since 1988. In South Carolina, 38 years have passed since a Democrat won a Senate race, while in Iowa and North Carolina, it’s been 18 years.
Trump’s meddling in the Republican primaries also seemed to backfire. He condemned North Carolina’s Republican senator Thom Tillis for opposing his main domestic policy legislation, leading him to announce his retirement. The Democratic nominee, former governor Roy Cooper, easily won the race to replace him.
Trump also endorsed scandal-plagued Texas attorney general Ken Paxton over the state’s longtime US senator John Cornyn, causing the incumbent to lose his primary, and giving Democrats what they believed to be a rare opening in one of the country’s most influential Republican strongholds. Democratic state representative James Talarico won that seat by a double-digit margin, according to the AP.
After the sudden death of South Carolina’s longtime Republican senator Lindsey Graham, Trump backed the bid of his sister, Darline Graham, to serve a full term, even though she’d never won elected office and there were other Republicans in the race. Graham has lost to Democrat Annie Andrews by a margin of about four percentage points.
Republicans now have less than two months remaining with unified control of government, and there’s been speculation they could quickly try to confirm a new conservative appointment to the supreme court, if one of the sitting justices retired.
Asked to weigh in on that possibility, Schumer said: “I hope Republicans learn the lesson that they failed to see up to tonight. Listen to the American people … They want us to focus on, again, costs, chaos, corruption.”
Trump to use Veto Power
With Democrats taking control of both the House and Senate and cementing his status as a lame duck, President Donald Trump is threatening to respond by using the one remaining lever of power available to him by rejecting legislation presented to him by the new Democratic-led Congress en masse.
As election results filtered in showing Republican candidates for the upper chamber losing to their Democratic challengers in Texas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Carolina and other traditional strongholds, Trump posted an image of one of his iconic red baseball caps to his Truth Social account.
On the hat was just one word: “Veto.”
The monosyllabic threat was a reference to the president’s power to reject legislation passed by both houses of Congress and presented to him for his signature, an authority Trump has exercised a total of 12 times across his two terms in the White House.
He elaborated on the threat during a phone interview with Fox News just after midnight on Wednesday, telling anchor Brett Baier: “The power of veto is one of the stronger powers that a president has, and they’ll send over things that are insane, and I’ll veto them. And after a couple of months of vetoes, they’ll call and they’ll say, “How do we get this stuff done?” And we’ll work together,” he said.
Trump added that he has “a lot of friends who are Democrats” and suggested that members of the incoming majority “want to talk.”
“That’s the power of veto, and the power of veto is, you know, impervious,” he said.
Should Trump exercise his veto power, Congress can still force bills into law by voting to override the veto by two-thirds majorities.
Most attempts to override Trump’s vetos have failed, but Congress did successfully override a last-minute veto of the annual National Defense Authorization Act during Trump’s last weeks in office at the end of his first term.
Trump’s threat to reject “insane” legislation passed by a Democratic-led Congress came on the heels of historically dismal midterm election results that saw voters deliver unprecedented rebukes to the president and his erstwhile allies on Capitol Hill.
In state after state, his hand-picked candidates for House and Senate seats lost to a broad range of Democratic challengers, including in places where no Democrat had won a statewide election in decades.
In Texas, Trump ally Ken Paxton lost decisively to Democratic state representative James Talarico despite an influx of millions upon millions of dollars from the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
Another close ally of the president, longtime Lone Star State Governor Greg Abbott, lost his bid for a fourth term to challenger Gina Hinojosa.
In Kansas, where no Republican had been elected to the Senate in nearly a century, GOP Senator Roger Marshall lost to a Methodist pastor, Adam Hamilton.
South Carolina Senator Darline Graham, the sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham, fell in her bid to fill the remainder of her brother’s term to physician Annie Andrews.
And in the House of Representatives, a glut of GOP members running in districts drawn to make them almost impossible to lose still ended up losing to Democratic challengers who were boosted by record turnout among Black and Latino voters as well as young voters outraged by gas and diesel fuel prices driven higher and higher by the war Trump started against Iran nearly nine months ago.
As he spoke to Fox News, Trump congratulated the Democrats for their victory but he declined to take any blame for the losses.
Writing on Truth Social, he claimed that had he been on the ballot this year, Republicans “would have won IN A LANDSLIDE.”
