Votes are still being counted, but the 2026 midterms can be safely described as a crushing Democratic Party victory. They flipped Senate seats in Kansas, Maine, Ohio, Iowa, and North Carolina – the latter by a 20-point margin. Democrats flipped the Senate seat in South Carolina – a state where Republicans had won the last Senate election by more than 25 points – by about 4 points.
In Texas, Democrat James Talarico curb-stomped Ken Paxton in the Senate race by 12 points, and Dems won the governor’s race, may take the Texas House, and came close to taking the Texas Senate. The Senate elections in Mississippi – Mississippi, for Pete’s sake – and Alaska remain too close to call, but in the former, Democrat Scott Colom is ahead by a whisker, while his co-partisan Mary Peltola is ahead by a slightly wider margin at time of writing.
So in the Senate, Democrats will have between 54 and 56 seats in 2027. In the House, many races have not been called yet (particularly in California, which always takes forever to count), but it will probably be around 250 seats or more.
These are huge majorities, particularly in our hyper-polarized times. That large margin has implications for the upcoming Democratic Congress. On the one hand, it won’t be possible for any small caucus, whether it is the “Squad” on the left (which has five new lawmakers from the Democratic Socialists of America ) or centrist sellouts like Senator John Fetterman (D-Pa.) on the right, to hold the whole party agenda hostage.
On the other hand, with such a sweeping victory, the Democratic leadership will face strong expectations for action against a wildly corrupt and criminal Trump administration, and a caucus that is not at all unified either ideologically or tactically.