DEMOCRATS won control of the Senate and the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, ending Republican control of Congress for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The party took seven Republican-held Senate seats, several in states Trump carried comfortably in 2024.
In Texas, state Representative James Talarico defeated Attorney General Ken Paxton, Trump’s handpicked candidate, despite Elon Musk spending at least $212m to back the Republican.
Talarico is the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Texas since 1988. ‘Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,’ Musk wrote.
Adam Hamilton unseated Roger Marshall in Kansas, where Democrats last won a Senate seat in 1932.
In South Carolina, Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham, appointed to the seat after the death of her brother Lindsey Graham earlier this year.
Troy Jackson defeated Susan Collins, Maine’s senator since 1997, while Sherrod Brown, Roy Cooper and Josh Turek took Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Iowa.
Democrats held Georgia, New Hampshire and Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed became the first Muslim elected to the Senate.
In the House, Democrats had taken at least 29 Republican seats by yesterday morning, ousting four incumbents in Pennsylvania and winning a Kentucky district Trump carried with 57 per cent in 2024.
Hakeem Jeffries, in line to become the first Black Speaker, said ‘the American people have spoken and made clear they’ve had enough of the extremism’.
Chuck Schumer, set to return as Senate majority leader, said: ‘It’s a new day in America. Democrats have remade the Senate map.’
Democrats also won a majority of governorships for the first time in two decades. Keisha Lance Bottoms won Georgia to become the first Black woman elected governor in the US, and Gina Hinojosa unseated Greg Abbott in Texas.
Nearly nine in ten voters said the cost of living was a major factor in their decision and around two-thirds blamed Trump for high prices, exit polls found.
The US-Israeli war on Iran, which has driven up fuel prices, fed that anger.
Trump, who had urged supporters to vote as though he were on the ballot, wrote afterwards: ‘I was not on the ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’
He said he did not ‘view it as a hit on me’, though he conceded the war had played a part.
‘I have the ultimate power, it’s called “veto”,’ he said before polls closed, welcoming the prospect of being known as ‘Mr Veto’.
He also cited the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v Slaughter on presidential authority over federal agencies. ‘We won the Slaughter case, and the Slaughter case gives the president tremendous powers that it never had before,’ he said.
Democrats in line to chair committees are preparing investigations into the administration, including Trump’s crypto dealings and the jet donated by Qatar.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, expected to chair the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said in September: ‘We will use our subpoena power, absolutely.’
Jamie Raskin, likely to chair the House Judiciary Committee, said: ‘Accountability and affordability are not a fork in the road for us politically. They are two sides of the same coin.’
In the new Congress’s first week, House Democrats plan a resolution requiring Trump to end the war on Iran or seek congressional authorisation to continue it.
