2026 U.S. midterm elections

Incumbent presidents pretty much hate midterm elections. That’s because the party in power often faces devastating losses. In 2010 Pres. Barack Obama called the Democratic defeat a “shellacking.” He was not alone. On only two occasions in modern history (1934 and 2002) has the president’s party gained seats in both the House and the Senate in midterm races.

The 2026 midterm election proved to be the rule and not the exception as Pres. Donald Trump’s Republican Party lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in a stinging rebuke from voters. While incumbent presidents often face rough midterms, they are rarely as rough as those in 2026. Since 1954, both chambers have changed hands only two other times: in 1994 and 2006.

What follows is a look at the results of the 2026 midterms as well as the issues that led to the outcomes.

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Results in key U.S. Senate races

Background on the key races

In the world of red states (Republican) and blue states (Democratic), sometimes it’s the purple states (where voters may choose a Republican for one office and a Democrat for another) that decide the national outcome of elections. Here is a look at some of the states that both parties focused on as they fought for control of the Senate.

• Alaska: The state is generally regarded as reliably red, which bodes well for incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan. But his Democratic opponent is former representative and Alaska Native Mary Peltola, a popular politician who may appeal to the state’s ruggedly independent streak. And Peltola has a track record of beating Republicans: She won her House seat over former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. In the lead-up to the election, charges that her team recruited another Dan Sullivan to run for the Senate in order to sow voter confusion rocked the campaign and led to concerns that the result would not be certified if Peltola won. She denied knowledge of the tactic, which, while ethically dubious, appeared not to be illegal.

• Georgia: At the beginning of the cycle, it appeared that first-term Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff would face a formidable reelection race. He was the only Democrat seeking reelection in a state won by Trump in 2024. His Republican opponent was U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, who was endorsed by Trump and portrayed Ossoff as too liberal on issues such as immigration. For his part, Ossoff raised his national profile during the race, sharply criticizing the Trump administration on the stump and grilling Trump appointees on the Senate floor. In the end, Ossoff easily won reelection and set himself up for a potential 2028 presidential run.

• Iowa: In September 2025 incumbent Republican Sen. Joni Ernst announced that she would not seek a third term in the Senate in 2026, giving Democrats the chance to pick up her Senate seat. Josh Turek, a two-term member of the Iowa state House of Representatives and a Paralympian who won gold medals in 2016 and 2020 as part of the U.S. men’s national wheelchair basketball team, won the Democratic primary. Turek also picked up a key endorsement from former president Barack Obama on his way to defeating Republican U.S. Rep. Ashley Hinson. The last Democrat to hold a Senate seat from Iowa was Tom Harkin, who did not run for reelection in 2014.

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• Kansas: Like Texas, Alaska, Iowa, South Carolina, and Ohio, Kansas was long seen as a Republican stronghold, with Trump winning the state in the 2024 presidential election by 16 points. In fact, Kansas had not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. But that changed in 2026 in a race that featured a first-term Republican incumbent, obstetrician Roger Marshall, against moderate Democrat Adam Hamilton, the pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country. How moderate is Hamilton? He says he spent most of his life as a registered Republican. But his win as a Democrat helped the party regain control of the U.S. Senate.

• Maine: Democrats saw the Senate seat held for five terms by Republican Susan Collins as deeply vulnerable. She was the only Republican senator representing New England and the only one representing a state that Kamala Harris won in the 2024 presidential election. But the state’s race was thrown into upheaval in July 2026 when Collins’s opponent, progressive oyster farmer Graham Platner, withdrew from the race amid allegations of sexual misconduct. With Platner out, Democrats scrambled to pick a new candidate, choosing former state Senate president Troy Jackson. A progressive and a former logger, Jackson ran for governor in 2026 but lost in the primary. Collins had faced Democratic opposition before and always prevailed, but in 2026, in the wake of widespread Democratic wins across the country, she lost to Jackson.

• Michigan: There was no incumbent in this race, as Democratic Sen. Gary Peters was not seeking reelection. Republicans nominated former representative Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in the 2024 election. In a deeply divisive primary on the Democratic side, Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate who supports Medicare for All and limiting aid to Israel, defeated moderate Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens. In the last days of the campaign, Stevens stunned Democratic leadership when she broke with her party and endorsed Rogers; but El-Sayed prevailed, winning the seat to become the first Muslim elected to the Senate.

Mississippi: In September 2025 Mississippi Democratic district attorney Scott Colom announced that he would run for the Democratic nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Mississippi. He won his primary race in a landslide, but faced Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith who had won her 2020 Senate race by 10 points, and in the 2024 presidential election Trump won the state by 23 points. Colom was given little chance of getting close to Hyde-Smith, let alone defeating her. But Colom ran a disciplined, moderate and mainstream campaign, telling voters he wanted to bring costs down, end the Iran War and put criminals behind bars. More than a week after voters went to the polls, Colom was declared the winner becoming Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.

• North Carolina: When Republican Thom Tillis announced his retirement from the Senate, Democrats recruited Roy Cooper, the popular former governor, to run in a bid to turn one of the state’s Senate seats blue. Cooper, who has never lost a statewide election in North Carolina, faced former Republican National Committee chair Michael Whatley. The race seemed like it would be one of the most expensive and closest of the season, but Cooper’s statewide winning streak remained unbroken as he recorded a resounding victory. The size of Cooper’s win may have helped in down-ballot races, as Democrats also flipped several U.S. House seats from the state.

• Ohio: The Republican incumbent Jon Husted was appointed to the Senate seat vacated by JD Vance when he became vice president. The former lieutenant governor of this reliably red state seemed on a glide path to easy victory until former senator Sherrod Brown, a much-respected Democratic fixture in Ohio politics who lost his reelection race in 2024, agreed to run again. Ohio voters rejected Husted, returning Brown to the Senate to complete Vance’s term, which ends in 2029.

• South Carolina: In one of the most stunning upsets of the year, Republican Sen. Darline Graham—who was appointed to complete the term of her late brother, Lindsey Graham—lost her bid for a six-year term to Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician. The loss of a Senate seat in the deep-red state of South Carolina demonstrated the nature of the rebuke of the Republican Party that voters delivered.

• Texas: For Texas Democrats, winning a U.S. Senate seat was part quest for the white whale, part myth of Sisyphus. The last Democrat to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Texas was Lloyd Bentsen, in 1988. That all changed in 2026 when the Democratic state legislator James Talarico emerged as the winner over Trump acolyte and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton was dogged by scandal and struggled in the polls. In the waning weeks of the campaign, Elon Musk gave some $224 million for campaign advertising in a failed bid to bolster Paxton, helping to make the campaign the most expensive Senate race in history. Texas also made history in electing Democrat Gina Hinojosa to the governor’s mansion. Hinojosa, who defeated incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, will become the state’s first Hispanic governor.

• Explore what it means to be “progressive” in the 21st century

What were the main issues in the 2026 midterm elections?

What is true by definition about midterm elections is that the president is not on the ballot, but that doesn’t mean his issues and policies aren’t. Two key issues that were likely on voters’ minds as they went to the polls—the economy and immigration—were typically winning ones for Trump.

But the deeply unpopular immigration crackdowns across the country, particularly in Minnesota, as well as Trump’s tariff policies, some of which were struck down by the Supreme Court and which most economists agreed acted as a tax on U.S. consumers, changed that. A February 2026 Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll found that 58 percent of Americans were opposed to the way the president was handling immigration and that 57 percent felt the same about his handling of the economy.

The economy was a particularly complicated issue: While the stock market remained near record levels, the continuing 2026 Iran war led to an increase in gas prices. But, as the Democrats learned during the 2024 election, the data doesn’t matter if voters don’t feel more prosperous, if it doesn’t seem to them that they have more money to save or to spend. In early 2026, according to a New York Times poll, 40 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 44 percent in September 2025. An October 2026 poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 35 percent of Americans supported his economic policies.

Immigration was typically a strong issue for the president, who throughout his campaign said that he wanted to target “the worst of the worst” for expulsion from the country. In the 2024 election, 82 percent of Trump supporters listed immigration as a top issue, according to Pew. But immigration enforcement around the country, especially the high-profile operation in Minnesota, had Republicans—voters and elected officials alike—questioning whether the administration had gone too far. A voter in Louisiana who supported Trump in 2024 told The New York Times, “He thinks he’s picking up criminals, but he’s picking up too many U.S. citizens, as far as I’m concerned.” Brian Fitzpatrick, a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, told Politico, “They need to show more balance in enforcement and more compassion and empathy in enforcement.”

As the U.S. war against Iran continued, it became an additional key issue on voters’ minds as they considered their choices in the midterm elections. The war, which began in late February 2026, had a profound impact on the U.S. economy, including the aforementioned price of gas increasing to near-record highs. That, in turn, led to inflated prices for other goods. Additionally, American voters indicated to pollsters an increasing displeasure with Trump, who campaigned on keeping prices low and the United States out of foreign conflicts. An October Pew poll found that 33 percent of Americans approved of how Trump was conducting the war.

Another issue that likely affected the 2026 midterms was a topic repeatedly raised by Trump: the fairness of elections. Trump continued to maintain that he won the 2020 presidential election. (He didn’t; Joe Biden did.) Despite claims from the Trump administration about voter fraud being widespread, a study by the Brookings Institution showed incidents of fraudulent voting account for less than 1 percent of ballots cast—and are often well below that number. (For example, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation, elections in North Carolina between 1986 and 2024 generated more than 81 million votes and only 58 cases of voter fraud.)

In February 2026 Trump stirred controversy by calling for “corrupt” elections to be “nationalized.” Elections are run by the states, not the federal government, as specified in the U.S. Constitution. In September the U.S. Supreme Court blocked an executive order signed by Trump that would have limited mail-in voting. Democrats speculated that the widespread discussion of voting irregularities was intended to call into question the results of the 2026 midterms should the Democrats prevail. In Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola is running against incumbent Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan and a third candidate also named Dan Sullivan, the Trump administration filed a lawsuit saying that the election should not be certified unless Senator Sullivan wins. A judge threw out the lawsuit, but election integrity remains a central issue.

In the same vein as election fairness was the question of gerrymandering, which dominated headlines and court action early in 2026. In general, redistricting (the redrawing of electoral maps) occurs every 10 years, after the taking of a census. Gerrymandered redistricting traditionally favors the political party in power, allowing members to draw maps that maximize the electoral strength of their party. (You can read more about gerrymandering and how it got its name here.) Although both racial and political gerrymandering have been challenged in the courts, they have long been staples of the political process. What made 2026 unique was Trump’s call for the redrawing of congressional district lines to happen in the middle of a decade. When Texas redrew its districts, it set off a tit-for-tat rejiggering that affected a number of states.

The issue of artificial intelligence (AI) also dominated the 2026 election season, as voters expressed economic and safety concerns about the technology. Polling showed that as many as 7 in 10 Americans opposed the construction of AI data centers in their area. In September the issue of greater regulation of AI came to the fore as Anthropic’s chief executive Dario Amodei issued a call for AI development to slow over growing safety concerns.

Why exactly do we have midterm elections?

In the United States, midterms are held every four years. They get their name from the fact that they occur in the middle of a presidential term.

Midterms are an outgrowth of the election process outlined in Article I of the U.S. Constitution, by which all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and roughly a third of the members of the U.S. Senate are on the ballot every two years. (The House of Representatives currently has 435 members, and the Senate has 100.) In addition to elections for members of Congress, many states hold their gubernatorial elections during the midterm cycle, and many local races and citizen-generated initiatives appear on midterm ballots.

In general, fewer Americans vote in midterm elections than in presidential elections. About 60 percent of eligible voters typically cast ballots in presidential election years; that percentage falls to about 40 percent for midterms. (Voter turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was 50 percent, the highest since 1914. Turnout for the 2022 midterms was about 47 percent.)

Congressional election results in the 2020s

Learn more

The history of midterm elections

Gerrymandering explained, including the name

What are purple states?