US midterm elections 2026 live updates: Democrats win control of Congress as voters punish Trump

Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of Donald Trump’s most prominent supporters in conservative media, has acknowledged that the scale of public “hatred” towards the US president contributed to the Republicans’ heavy midtern election losses.

“Hatred is a hell of a motivator,” he told fellow panellist Harold Ford Jr.

He added: “I think the hatred for this man is unprecedented. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

In another historic first, the Democrats are projected to win Nevada’s second congressional district for the first time since its creation in 1981.

Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson is in the lead ahead of Republican David Flippo, although the race has not yet been called by the Associated Press.

If she holds on to that lead and flips the House seat, it will mark the first time since 1947 that Nevada has had an all-Democrat congressional delegation. Democrat incumbents have swept all of Nevada’s three remaining House seats, whose races have been called by AP.

“One of the biggest upsets in Nevada history, a district never held by a Democrat in its 45 years of existence,” said Jon Ralston, founder and CEO of the Nevada Independent, of Benitez-Thompson’s projected win.

Democrat James Talarico has won the US Senate race in Texas, breaking a 38-year drought for his party in the Republican stronghold and delivering a stunning blow to Donald Trump.

Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and a staunch ally of the US president, in one of the most closely watched contests of the midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

“We just took back Texas!” the 37-year-old told jubilant supporters at an election night party in Austin, the state capital and his home city. “We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas. We have just shown that a politics of division is no match for a politics of love.”

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Nevada has elected Democrat Aaron Ford as its next governor, making him the first black person to hold the office in the state’s history.

His win toppled the Republican incumbent Joe Lombardo in a closely watched race, and delivered an important victory for the Democrats in one of the country’s key battleground states.

Ford ran his campaign with the backing of California governor Gavin Newsom and former vice-president Kamala Harris, focusing on the cost of living, housing affordability and student debt.

There’s a certain freedom in low expectations. Going in to Tuesday’s midterm elections, forecasts were so grim for the Republicans that poll watchers started trading a kind of knowing joke: that the results would either mean the end of the Trump era, or the end of the polling profession.

Amid those sorts of predictions, any Republican victories would have seemed like a minor miracle. The expectation was that Democrats would have a blowout; Republicans, counting on the final tally to be a bit more mixed, would therefore almost certainly have the freedom to claim that they’d done better than anyone had thought they would.

It will be difficult to credit those spins today. The electorate issued the president a message of dissatisfaction with the second Trump term, and voted decisively to curb his power.

Now, with a Senate majority, Democrats will be able to investigate the president and his cabinet members, draw public attention to their own agenda items, assert Congress’s constitutional prerogatives, and block Republican judicial appointments.

In the coming days and weeks, Trump will alternately say that the Republican losses were fake – the result of fraud by a nefarious but ill-defined conspiracy of Democrats and illegal immigrants – and that they were real, but somebody else’s fault.

His administration has signaled over the past weeks that it could make efforts to contest the certification of especially close Senate races, notably Alaska.

But the wind may have gone out of the sails of that plan for now: for what it’s worth, which isn’t much, Trump told the New York Times on Tuesday night that he would accept the results of the midterms. What’s certain is that he will rail into microphones and complain in all caps on social media. But it is not likely that any of that will go anywhere. Because Tuesday night – almost exactly 10 years after he won the presidency in an upset victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016 – the Trump era effectively came to an end.

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Former US president Barack Obama has welcomed the midterm election results as a clear rejection of divisive politics.

In a statement on X, he said:

Tonight, the American people sent a clear message – they want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them, and leaders who offer concrete solutions to the challenges they face.

These results were only possible because outstanding candidates stepped forward in every region of the country – including in areas once considered long shots. They came from different backgrounds and represented a range of political perspectives, but were united by shared values, a belief in public service, and a commitment to putting the people of their districts and states first.”

Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez – who has been Donald Trump’s most vociferous European critic – is celebrating last night’s results, hailing them as proof of a progressive fightback and of the “crumbling” of what he called the “ultra wave”.

“Yesterday, the American people voted against policies that only serve to impoverish people,” he posted on X. “Against hate. Against sexism. Against climate denialism and against the privileges of the elites.”

Sánchez, who faces an uphill battle to secure another term in office in Spain’s general election at the end of the month, added: “It happened in Brazil. It just happened in the US. And it will happen soon in Spain.”

The incumbent Democratic governor of Oregon, Tina Kotek, has won her re-election bid against Republican Christine Drazan.

It is the second time Kotek has defeated Drazan, after the two faced off in the 2022 governor race.

Republican senator Pete Ricketts has won his re-election bid in Nebraska, defeating independent candidate Dan Osborn.

Ricketts, a former Nebraska governor, was appointed to the Senate in 2023 to replace Republican senator Ben Sasse and won a special election in 2024 to serve the final two years of his predecessor’s term.

History was made in Michigan as Abdul El-Sayed, an Egptian American doctor, became the first Muslim ever elected to the US Senate, beating Mike Rogers for the key battleground seat.

His victory is all the more remarkable given the ugly campaign of anti-Muslim rhetoric that sought to undermine his candidacy, led by Donald Trump and his Republican allies.

The Democrat’s faith was weaponised throughout the race, with Trump calling him a “jihadist” and Rogers questioning his loyalty to the US. El-Sayed met the attacks with defiance, telling Trump that he could “just go on and call me senator after November”.

In his victory speech, El-Sayed told a jubilant crowd:

My name is Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, and I am so proud and honoured to stand here as your Senator-elect from the great state of Michigan.

Up until right about now, you might have noticed I always say inshallah, or God willing, whenever the outcome of this race was mentioned. But today, tonight, we can turn that inshallah into an alhamdulillah (praise be to God).”

My colleague Joseph Gedeon has more:

It’s 3am ET in Washington/8am GMT, and as people start seeing their phones ping with notifications, here are where things stand at the moment.

• Democrats have won control of Congress in a stunning rebuke of Donald Trump’s agenda, delivering an astonishing result and a widely predicted “blue wave” across the country. As of now, Democrats have clinched 54 seats in the Senate (they needed 51 to reclaim the majority) and 225 House seats (they needed 218 to take control of the lower chamber). We’re still awaiting the results for several races – namely in Alaska.

• There were several seismic and historic wins in federal and state races for Democrats. James Talarico became the first Democrat in 38 years to win a US Senate seat in Texas; Adam Hamilton is now the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in Kansas since 1932; In Maine, progressive Troy Jackson unseated Susan Collins after a thirty-year grip on the state’s US Senate seat; and Abdul El-Sayed won the US senate race in Michigan – one of the cycle’s most closely watched competitions.

• We’re waiting on a number of nail-biting races to be called. The race for US Senate in Mississippi is extremely close, and could see a Democratic upset, and it’s still to early to call the Senate contest in Alaska.

• Democrats also made history in a number of gubernatorial races. Keisha Lance Bottoms’ victory in Georgia means that she will be the first Black female governor in US history. Gina Hinojosa makes history as Texas’ first Latina governor, and the first Democrat to occupy the governor’s mansion since 1990. Meanwhile, David Crowley became Wisconsin’s first Black governor after winning his race tonight.

• Donald Trump said he was “absolutely willing to accept those results” in an interview with the New York Times. He added: “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them [Democrats] … We’ll probably work something out.”