In the 2026 midterm elections, the Democratic Party took control of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. The election proved to be a stinging rebuke of Pres. Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Among the states that Republicans lost, there was perhaps no result more surprising than the loss by Sen. Darline Graham (the sister of the late senator Lindsey Graham), whose bid for a full term in deep-red South Carolina failed. In another stunning result, in Texas the Democratic state legislator James Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton to become the state’s first elected Democratic senator since 1988.
Veteran Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine lost her reelection bid to Democrat Troy Jackson. Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan to become the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate. Democrats also picked up Senate seats in other typically Republican strongholds, including Kansas and Ohio.
In perhaps the most stunning upset of the cycle, Mississippi Democratic district attorney Scott Colom narrowly defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith to become Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction.