Well, that was fast. On Tuesday night, American voters handed control of Congress to the Democrats — both the Senate and the House — and by Wednesday morning, Washington was a different place. Two years of one party running everything are over.
Let me say what jumped out at me first. This did not happen in the usual swing states. It happened in places where Democrats are not supposed to win at all. Kansas elected its first Democratic senator since the Great Depression, nearly a century ago. In South Carolina, a state Trump carried by nearly 18 points in 2024, voters turned aside his hand-picked Senate candidate. In Texas, the biggest Republican state in the country, Democrats won a Senate seat and ousted three-term Governor Greg Abbott. When Texas flips, you know something big moved.
The names tell the story. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, a megachurch pastor, beat incumbent Republican Roger Marshall — in Seward County, home to one of America’s biggest beef plants, Hamilton led by 13 points two years after Trump won that county by 39. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown took back a seat that had belonged to Vice-President JD Vance. In Maine, Troy Jackson ended Susan Collins’ 30-year Senate career, even though she had spent the campaign stressing how often she broke with the president. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham, who had been anointed by Trump after her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham, died earlier this year. Trump backed Ken Paxton, the scandal-hit Texas attorney general, over the sitting senator John Cornyn — and Paxton lost too.
The House went the same way. Democrats won all 20 of the competitive House races decided so far on Tuesday night, and a Republican plan to redraw several House districts in their favour mostly failed, with Democrats holding on to most of the targeted seats. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries is now in line to become the first Black speaker of the House when the new Congress sits in January.
The night also made history in the governors’ races. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman ever elected governor of any US state. In Texas, Gina Hinojosa will become the state’s first Latina governor. In Florida, Byron Donalds won to become the first Black Republican governor in the country, and in California, Xavier Becerra will be the state’s first Latino governor. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed was reported to have won, which would make him the first Muslim elected to the Senate — though one early-Wednesday report still had Michigan uncalled, so I am treating that one as reported, not yet final.
Why did it happen? Ask the voters. Exit polls found half of voters nationwide saw the election as a chance to rebuke the president, and three-quarters said they are angry or dissatisfied with the way the country is headed. Seven in ten said they want Congress to put more checks on the president. People kept saying the same two things: the cost of living, and the war with Iran, which has pushed fuel prices up. Democrats ran on corruption and affordability, blaming Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war for higher prices. Republicans ran on culture-war issues. Voters picked their wallets.
To his credit, Trump did something many people feared he would not do: he accepted the result. He congratulated the Democrats on Fox News, said they fought hard, and said he would work with them on issues like immigration. Then, in the same breath, he threatened to veto any “insane” bills they pass, and posted on social media that he was not on the ballot and would have won in a landslide if he had been. He had spent the final weeks of the campaign telling crowds to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” You cannot have it both ways, but that is politics.
So what changes now? A lot, and also less than the headlines suggest. Democrats can now block Trump’s legislation, run the committees, launch investigations into his administration, and block his nominees, including any Supreme Court pick if a vacancy comes up. That is real power. But Trump still holds the veto pen, and he still runs foreign policy, tariffs and immigration from the White House. Divided government means deals, or it means deadlock. The next two years will show which one we get.
Here is what I take from it. Midterms are usually a verdict on the president, and this one was louder than most. Republicans lost ground in all but a handful of the roughly 1,700 counties where most votes had been counted on Tuesday night. Rich counties, poor counties, college towns, farm towns, heavily Latino border counties in Texas that had moved toward Trump in 2024 — they all moved the other way. That is not a narrow win. That is a country saying it wants a check on power.
The hard part starts now. Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, said Americans voted for change and now Democrats must deliver. He is right, and it will not be easy with a president holding a veto and an eye on 2028. But for one night, the voters spoke clearly, and even the winners and losers agreed on that much. Washington just got a lot more interesting.
Source: BusinessDay (Reuters), “Democrats thump Trump and trump his agenda in Congress victory”
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