President Donald Trump told voters to pretend he was on the ballot in this year’s midterm elections.
They did. And they resoundingly rejected both his policies and his Republican Party.
Democrats have captured full control of Congress, NBC News projects, with voters delivering a forceful repudiation of Trump’s agenda, coupled with a clear-cut message that Congress has not done enough to provide checks on his administration and needs to do more to address affordability and corruption.
Democrats’ victory in the Senate comes after a swift and decisive win in the House, where Democrats are set to have what could be their largest majority in nearly two decades.
Democrats flipped five Republican-held seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas — a state they’ve long dreamed of turning blue. In a number of those states, Trump handpicked the nominees, sometimes over the objections of members of his own party who were concerned that they would be weak in the general election.
An early warning sign that it would be a tough night for Republicans came when South Carolina — a state even many Democrats thought was out of reach — fell early. Democrats made incursions deep into the heart of MAGA country, with gains far beyond what they were able to achieve in the 2018 midterm elections during Trump’s first term.
Forty-three percent of midterm voters surveyed in the NBC News Exit Poll said one of the reasons they voted the way they did was to express opposition to Trump, whose job approval rating is lower than that of any president on Election Day in nearly two decades.
Seventy-one percent of voters — including 41% of Republicans — also said there is not enough congressional oversight of Trump. Corruption, affordability, immigration and the war in Iran were all key issues, as well.
The results were so bleak that Trump quickly ran away from them Tuesday evening. Trump said on social media that, in fact, he was not on the ballot, and that’s why Republicans lost: “I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”
The Democratic takeover will reverberate widely. With majorities in both chambers, the Trump administration will now have to contend with checks and investigations it avoided with a compliant Congress in Republican hands. The election results could influence the makeup of the Supreme Court, the arc of the 2028 presidential race and the fate of Trump’s legislative plans in the back half of his term.
But it also sets up an epic showdown with Trump that will test the constitutional power-sharing arrangement that has weathered war and civil strife over the past two centuries — but survived intact. With their newly minted majority, Democratic lawmakers will acquire an arsenal of oversight powers they’ll use to investigate a Trump administration they contend has escaped accountability.
Trump, in turn, has built a presidency rooted in a vision of unrivaled executive power. Neither side seems in a mood to compromise, meaning the next two years could bring legislative and executive branch clashes unlike anything since the Watergate era.
“What we’re going to do is lower costs, end all this rampant corruption and end the chaos. Plain and simple,” Chuck Schumer of New York, the Senate’s Democratic leader, said before the election in response to a question from NBC News about his priorities if his party won.
Democrats’ sweeping victory looked inconceivable when the midterm campaign season kicked off. The party prevailed despite an unfavorable map in which the major battlegrounds ran through red states that Trump won in all three of his presidential bids. Not since 2006 has the minority party flipped control of both chambers on a single night. Then-President George W. Bush, facing a voter backlash over the Iraq War, memorably lamented that the outcome was “a thumping.”
Trump sought to mobilize his core voters and preserve the GOP’s narrow majority in the House and the Senate by putting himself front and center. He kept up a packed campaign schedule in the final month of the campaign, but he and his party were dogged by his low job approval ratings, along with pronounced voter frustration with the economy.
Trump sought to blame his predecessor, Joe Biden, for rising prices, but voters didn’t seem to buy the argument. Gas prices spiked after Trump and Israeli leaders launched the Iran war in late February, and Americans disliked Trump’s handling of the conflict, creating another drag on Republican candidacies.
The election results are apt to make history, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., on the cusp of becoming the country’s first Black House speaker. Democrats are expected to hold their internal leadership elections the week of Nov. 16, when Jeffries will become his party’s nominee for speaker. Then, on Jan. 3, he must win 218 votes — a simple majority of all House members — to formally win the speaker’s gavel and become second in the line of presidential succession.
Schumer, who previously served four years as Senate majority leader, is expected to return to the top job once again after he exceeded expectations and led his party back from exile.
Democrats had been favored to win the House all season; they needed to flip a net of just three GOP-held seats to do so, and historically, the president’s party loses dozens of seats on average during midterm elections.
But as the campaign unfolded, Democrats grew more bullish about winning the Senate, as well. One reason was the minority vote. Latino voters helped propel Trump’s political comeback in 2024, but they turned away from him this cycle, citing high prices and his immigration crackdown. An NBC News poll released Sunday showed that Democrats enjoyed a 27-point lead among Latino voters, a marked contrast from the election in 2024, when Trump lost by only 7 points in the demographic.
The outcome could also leave an imprint on the Supreme Court. Before the election, multiple Senate Democrats cast doubt on whether they would confirm any Trump nominee to a vacancy on the Supreme Court if one were to arise in his final two years.
With full control of the Senate, Democrats are positioned to block nominees Trump puts forward.
“Well, given the history of Trump nominees, I think it is slim to none that we would support a nominee from this administration,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., a member of the Judiciary Committee, told NBC News in an interview before the elections. “Because we’ve seen this movie, we know how it ends, which is a politician in robes who is following Trump’s orders on most major questions.”
Looking ahead, the election results could recast the fight for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. The presumed GOP front-runner is Vice President JD Vance. But if the outcome amounts to a rejection of Trump and his brand of politics, Vance may find that he has no glide path to the nomination.
As the minority party, Democrats lacked the power to issue subpoenas and schedule oversight hearings. That all changes come January, when the new Congress convenes. Democratic lawmakers are already signaling that they will look to rein in the spending and war-making powers Trump has wielded with little pushback from a compliant Republican-led Congress.
House Democrats have vowed to carry out aggressive oversight of Trump’s family, business dealings and administration, including the ICE and Homeland Security immigration crackdown and Trump’s pet renovation projects at the White House and other Washington-area landmarks.
At the tip of the spear of the investigations are Reps. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Garcia has outlined his investigation strategy, focusing on what he calls “Trump family corruption,” including how Trump’s fortune has grown by billions of dollars since his 2024 campaign, as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Judiciary Committee Democrats said they also have a long list of investigative targets that includes pardons for “wealthy criminals and MAGA loyalists,” and foreign governments’ “buying influence” through gifts and payments to the Trump family’s crypto empire.
Jeffries has said that Democrats aren’t focused on impeaching Trump but that they also haven’t ruled it out. Trump was impeached twice during his first term but acquitted both times by the Senate.
“The cost of living is way too high, and Donald Trump — along with his Republican sycophantic members of Congress — have actually decided not to do anything about it because so many of them are so focused on enriching themselves, their family members, their friends and their donors. There is a cost to corruption,” Jeffries told reporters before the election.
“These are all things that are going to need to be thoroughly investigated as part of our pledge to hold the crooks accountable, beginning on day one,” he said.
Given the election results, Republicans may be motivated to usher in pieces of their legislative agenda during the lame-duck session before they officially relinquish control of the House on Jan. 3. They could include another party-line “reconciliation” bill to advance Trump’s spending and tax priorities, along with a debt ceiling increase before a 2027 deadline.
The political future of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., is unknown. He would need a majority of the Senate GOP caucus in a closed-ballot election to carry on as minority leader. But he has had an up-and-down relationship with Trump, who has vented frustration with him for failing to eliminate the filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act, which would overhaul the country’s election laws.
Another mystery is the fate of Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who has run the House for the past three years. He could stay on as minority leader, but in the face of the defeat across the board, some rank-and-file Republicans are likely to demand new leadership.
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DISCLAIMER: The Views, Comments, Opinions, Contributions and Statements made by Readers and Contributors on this platform do not necessarily represent the views or policy of Multimedia Group Limited.
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