South Carolina. Texas. Kansas.
Democrats cruised to victory in deep-red territory on Tuesday night, notching shock pickups that will reverberate for the final two years of Donald Trump’s presidency. Republicans not only lost the House, but watched as their hope of keeping a Senate majority slipped away, too — a blue tsunami that was quickly interpreted as a rebuke of the president and his agenda.
It didn’t take long before Republicans were predicting a doomsday scenario. Their efforts to engineer more favorable House districts in Florida, Alabama, and Texas backfired, with Democrats winning most or all of them. Democrats won Senate races from Iowa to Kansas, capturing seats that have been held by Republicans for decades.
In one of the biggest upsets of the night, Democrats are expected to unseat Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC), an outcome that was as symbolic as it was unexpected. Hudson runs House Republicans’ campaign arm and was projected to keep his seat leading into Election Day.
Democrats had long been the favorites to retake the House given the political headwinds that typically face the party in power and only needed a few seats due to the narrow Republican majority in the first place.
But what took place on Tuesday night far exceeded their most rosy expectations and amounted to a rout that will fundamentally change the balance of power in Washington. “Bloodbath” and “devastating” were just a couple of the words operatives used to describe the electoral drubbing in interviews with the Washington Examiner.
“Think Titanic meets Hindenburg,” said one former official with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
Another GOP operative, speaking on condition of anonymity, called redistricting a “spectacular failure” and questioned why Republicans recruited “absolute duds” to run for Senate, naming Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina and Michael Whatley in North Carolina.
“Just so many unforced errors compounding what was already going to be a bad election,” said the GOP operative.
Trump speculated that it would have been a different outcome had he been on the ballot, but many Republicans saw him as squarely to blame after months of privately fretting that tariffs, a war in Iran, and the general tumult of his second term would push voters into Democrats’ arms.
Retiring Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), one of the few Republicans to carry a House district that Trump lost in 2024, argued that the election was a referendum on the president and said his party needed to return to the “principles of Ronald Reagan that made us great.”
Bacon’s seat in Omaha, Nebraska, was one of more than two dozen to flip on Tuesday night, a number that could rise to around 40 seats, according to an NBC News projection.
In the Senate, Democrats were expected to add at least seven seats as of early Wednesday morning and were seriously at risk of losing another in Mississippi, a state Trump carried by more than 20 points in 2024.
The pickups drew immediate comparisons to 2006, when George W. Bush was president and presiding over an unpopular war in Iraq, but could ultimately wind up worse once all races are called.
The scale of Democrats’ victory was not limited to Congress. Their party is on track to win a majority of governorships and expand its reach in state legislatures from Wisconsin to North Carolina.
But the impact of a blue wave will be most acutely felt in Washington, where Democrats will be able to block Trump’s nominees and launch investigations into his conduct as president. Even a historic third impeachment has not been taken off the table by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who is slated to become the first black speaker of the House in January.
For weeks, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) insisted to reporters that polls suggesting a blue wave were wrong and that Republicans would keep their razor-thin control of the House.
He was wrong, and on Tuesday night far more somber, acknowledging the reality that Republicans had to “defy more than a century of midterm history” to win on Tuesday.
“And it looks like history will be kept tonight,” Johnson said at a watch party in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.
BLUE WAVE CARRIES SENATE DEMOCRATS BACK INTO POWER FOR FINAL YEARS OF TRUMP PRESIDENCY
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who had been cautious about the outcome for weeks, promised that “Senate Republicans will not stand idly by as the far-left, socialist wing of the Democrat Party attempts to unwind everything we’ve done.”
Republicans have until now protected Trump from Democratic attempts to roll back his tariffs, force an end to the war in Iran, and investigate his administration. But they will be largely powerless in the minority and could have trouble clawing back power for years to come due to the size of their losses on Tuesday.
Hailey Bullis contributed to this report.
