Winners and losers from the 2026 midterm elections

As results are still being tallied, here are some winners and losers from a historic 2026 midterm election.

Winners

A diverse group of Democratic candidates

Democrats won back control of the House from Republicans, with candidates including Indiana’s first openly gay state lawmaker and a Tejano pop star in Texas. More impressively, the party won control of the Senate with just as wide a range of candidate profiles: a pastor in Kansas, the first openly gay male senator from New Hampshire (and a staunch moderate), a pediatrician in South Carolina and a pugnacious liberal in Michigan. “They want an America that’s too small for some of us. We know that America is big enough for all of us,” Abdul El-Sayed, the winner in the Senate race in Michigan, said in his victory speech. Democrats certainly have their own popularity problems with voters, but they managed to demonstrate a wide tent when it mattered most and connect with young voters, White voters and Hispanic voters in red and purple states who are disaffected with President Donald Trump’s administration so far.

Free and fair elections

As Trump and his allies worried about losing, they sowed doubt about the election results. Trump declined to rule out sending troops to the polls, and Trump threw the might of the federal government into investigating an investigation of noncitizen voting the week before the election. The administration raided a Democratic member of Congress’s home and started a criminal investigation into the Senate race in Alaska. The Justice Department lost repeatedly in the courts, including at the Supreme Court hours before Election Day. Election officials prepared for federal interference and hoped for the best. Across the United States, a free and fair election took place. “We’ve been working to prepare for this election since the Wednesday after the last election,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar (D) said in an interview days before Election Day.

Most Americans believe Trump will contest the election results, though he told the New York Times he’d accept them. Election experts say there’s every reason to believe that the winners of this election will be seated in office in January.

Democratic governors

Democrats won a majority of governor’s mansions for the first time in 16 years. They won in purple Nevada and Wisconsin and in some states where they haven’t been able to for decades: Iowa, Ohio and Georgia. (Alaska’s results are still being tallied.)

Republicans have also dominated state legislatures since Barack Obama was president. Democrats clawed back some of that power Tuesday by winning control of governing in four new states: Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Wisconsin. They also broke Republican control in Georgia, Iowa Ohio and Texas. It means Democrats can rewrite state policies on redistricting, abortion, climate, education and taxes in more states than ever in the Trump era. “A lot of things are happening at the state level that are getting voters amped up,” said Carolyn Fiddler, a Democratic state legislative analyst.

The polls

Polls leading up to these elections repeatedly demonstrated Trump’s unpopularity among voters, Democratic enthusiasm in these midterm elections and the potential for Democrats to take both chambers of Congress. The unknown was what Republican-leaning voters might do. It has been hard at times for pollsters to get a hold of enough Republican voters. Ultimately, polls captured the sentiment that Democrats could be in for a big night. They arguably even underestimated the strength of voters willing to cast ballots for Democrats.

Losers

The Republicans that stood by Trump’s economic policies

Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran wrecked farming and manufacturing states. He enraged ranchers by opening the floodgates to imported beef. In conservative states including Oklahoma and Iowa, pressure began to mount for Republican candidates to distance themselves from Trump. It may have been too little too late. “If she wins — she’ll just go back to doing it,” Iowa construction manager Drew Brazie said of his Republican congresswoman supporting Trump, whom he helped elect and ultimately voted out. Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but he made himself and his policies the center of the story: He hand picked candidates and held about two dozen rallies in October despite his historic unpopularity.

Republican gerrymandering

Republicans sought to guarantee themselves a couple of extra seats because of Trump’s push to get some states to redraw their congressional lines to be friendlier to Republicans. But Republicans’ redistricting became a symbol of Democrats’ strength: Democrats won in Republican-gerrymandered districts in Texas and Florida and in the Deep South, where Democrats feared that a new wave of gerrymandering would disenfranchise Black voters. In Texas, even local redistricting backfired: In the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Republicans redrew districts for county judges with the goal of winning three of them. Democrats appear on their way to winning three instead.

Billionaires

At a time when costs are outpacing wages for a majority of Americans in swing districts, billionaires dominated political contributions in these midterm elections. They gave staggering sums to Republicans in particular. Tech billionaire Elon Musk doused Texas’s Senate race with more than $150 million for Republican’s scandal-plagued candidate Ken Paxton. Flush with cash in the final week, Republican groups spent heavily in Senate races in Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Iowa. They lost in every single one.