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By Jesus Mesa
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Eight years ago, Democrats rode a midterm wave back to the House majority. The election also brought a new class of progressives to Washington, ready to push Nancy Pelosi's party to the left. Three years later, in January 2021, the party held the White House and both chambers of Congress, then watched President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan collapse amid a fight among its own ranks.
Both times the Democratic Party came away with power and without a settled answer about what it wanted to be.
The question is back. Democrats won control of the House and the Senate on Tuesday, flipping seven Republican-held Senate seats to reach at least 54 and, by an Associated Press estimate, finishing with about 255 House seats, in the first nationwide vote of President Donald Trump's second term.
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At least five candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, including Melat Kiros of Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier of New York, are headed to Washington alongside moderates such as James Talarico of Texas and Roy Cooper of North Carolina, who flipped Senate seats in states Trump carried, and each side will argue the victory belongs to them.
It was a result not even the most hopeful Democrat could have foreseen after the humbling defeat of 2024. Trump swept all seven swing states and won the popular vote, while Republicans took the Senate and held the House. Months later, an NBC News poll found just 27 percent of registered voters viewed the Democratic Party favorably, the lowest mark since 1990.
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Democrats spent much of 2025 debating what to do next. The party had no clear leaders or direction, while Trump and Republicans faced little resistance as they pushed their agenda. But in 2026, a mix of Trump's erratic leadership and a group of strong candidates gave Democrats a formula that helped the party regain momentum. In March, few thought Democrats could win control of both chambers of Congress. But as the months passed, the map fractured.
The blue wave that followed was driven by the war with Iran, which began in February, persistently high prices and, perhaps above all, a president and a party that seemed to have lost touch with the voters who helped bring them to power. Seven in 10 Americans said gasoline was unaffordable in an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll last month. Trump's approval rating also fell to a record low of 31 percent in a Reuters/Ipsos survey.
The election results give Democrats a chance to regain power, but they leave a bigger question unanswered: What kind of party do voters want them to be? Experts who spoke with Newsweek said the strong results would not settle that debate, largely because the vote was a rejection of President Trump rather than an endorsement of Democrats.
"The party's job now is to show that Democrats, when given the responsibility to lead, can address the economic challenges facing the middle class," Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, told Newsweek.
"And so everything should be focused there," she said.
What Happened on Election Night
Republicans entered Election Day with a 53-47 majority in the Senate. Democrats needed to make a net gain of four seats to take control, since Vice President JD Vance can break a 50-50 tie.
The Associated Press called the Senate for Democrats late Tuesday after Josh Turek defeated Republican Representative Ashley Hinson in Iowa. Democrats also flipped seats in:
- North Carolina, where Roy Cooper beat Michael Whatley
- Ohio, where Sherrod Brown ousted Senator Jon Husted
- Texas, where James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win a Senate race there since 1988
- Kansas, where Adam Hamilton became the state's first Democrat elected to the Senate in nearly a century
- South Carolina, where Annie Andrews defeated Senator Darline Graham
- Maine, where Troy Jackson unseated Senator Susan Collins
- Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed beat Republican Mike Rogers
Democrats also held Georgia, where Senator Jon Ossoff beat Republican Representative Mike Collins, and New Hampshire, where Chris Pappas defeated John Sununu. Republican Senator Ashley Moody held Florida against Angie Nixon.
The final forecasts favored Democrats. Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin gave the party an 80.1 percent chance of winning the Senate, while its generic ballot average showed Democrats leading by 8.9 points on Monday.
Democrats also won control of the House, where they needed a net gain of three seats. Bobby Pulido's win in Texas' 15th Congressional District was among the most striking, and Republican Representative Mike Lawler of New York conceded to Democrat Cait Conley.
It is only the fifth time since World War II that a party has flipped both chambers in a midterm election.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Tuesday a "change election" and said Democrats "need to deliver dramatic change." He also acknowledged that "trust has been broken between the Congress and the American people."
"Americans voted for change, and now Democrats must deliver," Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday night.
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The Republican redistricting push fell short. Republicans aimed to flip 15 seats in seven states, but CNN projected that Democrats would keep at least eight of those seats, including three in Florida and two in Texas. Democrats also picked up at least four seats through new maps in California and Utah.
Democrats flipped governorships in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and Texas, where Gina Hinojosa defeated Governor Greg Abbott to become the state's first Democratic governor in more than three decades. Keisha Lance Bottoms' win in Georgia makes her the first Black woman elected governor in U.S. history, and Amy Acton beat Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio. Republican Byron Donalds won in Florida.
A Rejection of Trump or a Vote for Democrats?
Former Democratic officials, strategists and academics who spoke with Newsweek largely agreed that the results said more about Trump and Republicans than about Democrats.
Mike Madrid, a former Republican strategist who cofounded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told Newsweek that "nothing that happened on Tuesday night is about something positive for the Democrats."
"It's all against the Republicans," he said.
Heitkamp said the conditions had been "very bad for the Republican Party" from the start. She pointed to consumer sentiment, concerns about corruption and "a strong sense of betrayal because of the war in Iran."
Campaign polls showed that the cost of living was voters' biggest concern. A Pew Research Center survey in early October found that 74 percent of Americans were very concerned about gas and energy prices, up from 43 percent in January, before the war with Iran began. The same poll found widespread concern about food, healthcare and housing costs. Immigration also hurt Trump, with an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll giving Democrats a 2-point advantage over the GOP on the issue.
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But the cost of living mattered more.
"This win is not about the Democrats or the Republicans," James Talarico said in his victory speech in Texas on Tuesday night.
Yet, polling before the election showed that both parties were unpopular. An October Pew Research Center survey found that 40 percent of Americans viewed the Democratic Party favorably and 58 percent unfavorably. For Republicans, the figures were 37 percent and 61 percent, respectively.
"Put simply, voters dislike President Trump but still do not trust Democrats," Doug Gordon, a Democratic strategist with Upshift Strategies, told Newsweek. "The midterm election let them express the first feeling without ever resolving the second."
Gordon said the results showed that "Democrats won in spite of themselves." He pointed to the 2022 midterms, when the party avoided the expected Republican wave, which he said President Joe Biden used to justify running again in 2024.
Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston who closely followed the Texas races, told Newsweek that anti-Trump sentiment helped Democrats most when paired with an economic message.
"The biggest danger is reading this as a mandate for the entire Democratic agenda," he said. "Democrats could lose that support quickly if they mistake a demand for balance and competence for an ideological blank check."
Which Democrats Won
Each wing of the party will now claim the results for itself.
Democrats ran candidates across the political spectrum this year, from James Talarico, who ran as a moderate and flipped a Senate seat in Texas, to progressives like Abdul El-Sayed, who beat Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan. Yet most avoided the culture wars that had driven many voters away from the party in 2024 and earlier, a strategy that paid off, strategists say.
Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist think tank Third Way, told Newsweek that the lesson belongs to moderates. He wrote that Democrats won by nominating mainstream centrists in states Trump carried, candidates who he said "ignored the far-left social issues and the siren song of socialism."
"The majority makers are in the center and they delivered crushing defeats to Republicans," Kessler said. "Democrats would be foolish to ignore them."
But every rule has an exception. Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive and outspoken critic of Israel, defeated centrist Representative Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary before going on to win a state Trump carried in 2024.
Progressives make the opposite case.
"If there is a blue wave, it will have been powered by a progressive wave," Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the progressive group Our Revolution, said in a statement to Newsweek. "We are the center of gravity in this party right now."
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He credited Senator Bernie Sanders and the left with connecting the concentration of wealth to people's everyday struggles, and called El-Sayed and Troy Jackson in Maine "important tests" of that approach.
"Affordability is a question of power: who sets the prices, who suppresses wages, who gets government assistance and who gets told there's nothing government can do," Geevarghese said.
Voters "rewarded a broad coalition more than any single ideological faction," in Rottinghaus' view. The party's best model, he said, is a candidate who tailors the message locally and stays on costs and competence.
Heitkamp said she was looking at what united the party's candidates more than what divided them.
"I think everybody's united on what the problems are," she said, describing a campaign built around affordability.
The left is also gaining seats. At least five DSA-backed candidates won House races, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez in New York, Melat Kiros in Colorado, Donavan McKinney in Michigan and Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, a result that puts the number of DSA members in the House on track to more than triple. Republicans spent the campaign portraying Democrats as beholden to socialists, but Democrats who spoke with Newsweek dismissed the idea of a left-wing faction able to disrupt a majority. Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist, compared a handful of DSA members with a caucus of about 235.
"It's not going to be an issue," Cardona told Newsweek. "I guarantee that."
Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has rejected comparisons with the House Freedom Caucus, a group representing some of the most conservative Republicans in the House. "The Freedom Caucus breaks things," he told The Associated Press last month. "But if you're a progressive, you want to pass things."
What Voters Told Democrats
The clearest shift Democrats' allies pointed to was among Latino voters, who moved significantly toward Trump in 2024.
"The turnout with Hispanics is off the charts," Madrid said. "I've never seen it this way and I've been watching it for 35 years."
He attributed the increase to young Latinos and first-time voters. A Pew survey released last month found Latino registered voters favored Democratic candidates over Republicans in House races 51 percent to 24 percent, and put Trump's approval among them at 24 percent, down from 38 percent in February 2025. Latino voters backed Democrats by 21 points in 2022 and 47 points in 2018, Pew said.
The NBC News Exit Poll found that 60 percent of Latino voters backed Democratic House candidates on Tuesday and 35 percent backed Republicans. Two years ago, 51 percent supported Kamala Harris and 46 percent supported Trump. Eighteen percent of Latino voters said it was their first time voting in a midterm.
Cardona said Republicans "made a massive miscalculation" by treating their 2024 numbers as a permanent realignment and drawing new congressional maps in Texas and Florida around them.
If Democrats did recover those voters, the people who spoke with Newsweek said they may not stay.
"The Latino vote swung back to the Democrats but it will be temporary if the Democrats can't make a policy impact for them," Rottinghaus said, calling them the largest swing vote in the country.
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For Cardona, keeping them means delivering on costs and pairing "common sense enforcement" with a pathway to citizenship. Kessler proposed a narrower formula, "tough on the border and compassionate in the interior," and said it would keep Latinos with Democrats "as long as we don't sway too far left on economic issues."
Madrid pointed to Texas, and to Democrat Bobby Pulido's challenge to Republican Representative Monica De La Cruz in the 15th Congressional District, as the central race. Trump carried that district by about 18 points in 2024. Pulido won, leading De La Cruz 61.6 percent to 38.4 percent with about 89 percent of the vote counted.
"Texas is everything," Madrid said, because "it's got the right mix of white suburban voters in the urban core, rural white voters and Latinos in South Texas."
The NBC News Exit Poll showed independents backing Democrats 56 percent to 39 percent and voters under 30 backing them 72 percent to 25 percent. The AP Voter Poll found that about 7 in 10 voters under 30 supported the Democratic House candidate, after the youngest voters were roughly split in 2024.
What Democrats Are Likely to Do Next
Control of both chambers would give Democrats committee chairmanships, subpoena power and, in the Senate, a say over Trump's judicial and Cabinet nominees for the last two years of his term. Trump would keep his veto.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is in line to become speaker, has said the party will open with an affordability agenda, including reinstating Affordable Care Act tax credits and reversing Republican Medicaid cuts. He created five working groups on housing, healthcare, gas and utilities, groceries and goods, and caregiving, and tasked the top Democrats on the Oversight and Judiciary committees with preparing investigations of Trump, his family and his administration. Jeffries has said impeachment is neither on nor off the table.
Most of the people who spoke with Newsweek put costs first.
"They've got to focus on economics, economics, and economics," said Madrid, who argued that the party must commit to building a blue-collar working class economy or lose those voters in 2028. He described the model as "more of an FDR party" than a return to centrism.
"It's very rare that you get a second opportunity in politics this quickly," he said.
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Heitkamp said Democrats need policies that bring immediate relief, because talk of systemic change will not resonate with people looking at their paychecks and bills. Democrats have to be "razor focused" on those promises, she said, and should send bills to Trump's desk to "put it flatly and directly into the lap of the White House."
She pointed to the bipartisan housing bill that passed the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32 this year and became law in July without Trump's signature, after he refused to sign it in protest over the Senate not passing the unrelated SAVE America Act, which would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
Less settled is how much of the next two years goes to investigations. Probes of deals made by Trump, his family and his administration are coming, Cardona said, and Democrats will be able "to walk and chew gum at the same time."
Oversight will matter, Rottinghaus said, but not if every committee hearing turns into political theater. He would tie investigations to things like government spending and corruption that voters can see.
The Trump Factor
Trump's approval stood at 38 percent in the Silver Bulletin average heading into Election Day.
A New York Times/Siena University national poll of 3,494 voters, conducted from October 12 to 19, put Trump's approval among likely voters at 36 percent—with 59 percent disapproving. Seventy-three percent disapproved of his handling of gas prices.
The final Times/Siena polls of seven Senate battlegrounds, conducted from October 23 to November 1, found voters in all seven trusted the Democrat more than the Republican on the cost of living, on foreign wars and on "what's best for ordinary people."
Several Trump-endorsed Senate candidates lost on Tuesday, including Ken Paxton in Texas, who beat Senator John Cornyn in the primary with the president's backing, and Darline Graham in South Carolina. Collins, who emphasized her disagreements with Trump on immigration enforcement, tariffs and the war with Iran, also lost in Maine.
A CBS News exit poll put Trump's approval at 38 percent, lower than exit polls found for him or any of the three previous presidents at their midterms. In the AP Voter Poll, about 4 in 10 voters said they wanted to express opposition to Trump with their vote for Congress, just under 2 in 10 wanted to express support and roughly 4 in 10 said he was not a factor.
Democrats said Republican culture war attacks that worked in 2024 had less force this year.
"It is tired old rhetoric, and it's false rhetoric," Heitkamp said. Cardona said voters "want to hear about how you're going to help them make ends meet."
Former GOP strategist Madrid said the results will force Republicans to confront Trumpism itself.
"They're going to have to abandon it, but even if they do abandon it, it's generational damage," he said. "There's going to be a lot of people pretending like this never happened."
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The 2028 Primary Starts Now
No major Democrat has formally entered the 2028 race, and most potential candidates were expected to wait until after the midterms. Polling trackers have regularly listed California Governor Gavin Newsom, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, former Vice President Kamala Harris and Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff among the most tested names.
Governors and others with executive experience "will have a particularly strong argument," Rottinghaus said. He expects the party to reward economic populism delivered in a pragmatic style.
Kessler predicted a contest between a progressive and a centrist.
"In presidential primaries, those two lanes are roughly equal in size," he said. "But only one of those lanes goes all the way to the White House and that is the center lane."
He also warned Democrats against assuming the midterms predict the next presidential race, noting that Bill Clinton was reelected after the Democratic Party's 1994 defeat and Barack Obama won a second term after it suffered heavy losses in the 2010 midterms.
Heitkamp expects a "wide open" primary and said a competitive process would help the party because "it's not good when people feel like there hasn't been an effective vetting of their candidates." Asked about specific names, she described the field as "an embarrassment of riches."
Gordon also looked ahead to the next race.
"The midterm wins are borrowed time from voters who wanted to register their displeasure with Trump," he said. "A presidential win in 2028 has to be earned from voters who need a reason to choose you."
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