Democrats win control of House & Senate

Democrats have won control of Congress after flipping Republican-held House and Senate seats in Texas, South Carolina, Iowa, Michigan and Kansas in the midterm elections.

The results are being seen as a major rebuke to US President Donald Trump’s Republicans, who were previously in control of both houses of Congress.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the Senate’s 100 seats were contested in Tuesday’s elections, including special elections in Florida and Ohio to fill the seats vacated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance.

Voters in 36 states also elected governors, as well as state legislators and local officials.

Counting continued throughout Tuesday evening and night in the US. Results in some races may, however, not be known until Wednesday or later.

Democrats have won 228 seats in the House of Representatives so far, according to the Associated Press’s tally, and are leading in 34 others. That means they could end up with in excess of 260 seats in the House, the party’s biggest strength since 1990, when the Democrats won 267 seats in the lower chamber.

The Republicans held 220 seats in the House after the 2024 elections, while the Democrats had 215.

In the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress, Democrats have won 54 seats and are leading in another, while the Republicans have won 44 seats and are leading in one. To control the Senate, a party needs 51 seats. In the 2024 midterm elections, the Republicans had a majority with 53 seats, while the Democrats won 47 seats.

The Democrats have not had such a clear majority in the Senate since 2008, when the party won 56 seats in the slipstream of Barack Obama’s historic first presidential election.

Amid governors leading in each state, Democrats now have 28 governors, while 20 governors are from the Republican Party. Races in two states currently remain uncalled. Following the 2024 midterms, 27 governors of states were Republican while 23 governors were Democrats.

Not all seats have been called, and Democrats are projected to win more, but they have already flipped 25 seats in the House of Representatives from the Republicans – more than the 21 they took in 2008 when they last held the largest majority in Congress.

Trump loses both houses of Congress

This is the first time in 20 years that a Republican president has lost control of both houses of Congress, after George W Bush in 2006.

But Trump’s losses are far deeper than Bush’s: In the 2006 midterms, the Republican strength in the House went down from 232 to 202, while the party’s numbers in the Senate fell from 55 to 49.

This time though, the party is projected to fall short of 180 seats in the House, and is not expected to win more than 45 seats in the Senate.

In the House, in 18 of the 20 midterms held from 1946 to 2022, voters have taken House seats away from the party in power. The average loss was 26 seats across both houses. Only Bill Clinton’s Democrats in 1998 and George W Bush’s Republicans in 2002 bucked that trend by gaining seats or holding them all.

In the Senate, the governing party has lost seats in 13 of the 20 midterms since 1946 but lost overall control of the chamber in only six: 1946, 1954, 1986, 1994, 2006 and 2014.

In the current midterms, while President Trump’s name was not on the ballot, he regularly urged voters to imagine that it was, and the results are seen as a verdict on his presidency. (Al Jazeera)