Polling and election analysts pointed to Democratic gains in the 2026 midterms, but the results brought wider margins and bigger upsets that even some of the most ambitious predictions didn’t see coming.
This included a historic Democratic breakthrough in Texas and other deep red strongholds.
Democrats won control of the Senate and House in Tuesday’s election in what could be their largest House majority in nearly two decades.
The results marked a stunning rebuke to President Donald Trump, who ran in 2024 on fixing the economy and ending all wars. He launched a campaign blitz in the final weeks of the campaign cycle to rally Republican voters — but it wasn’t enough to save the party’s floundering message.
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That rejection was especially striking in Texas, where Democrats pulled off twin upsets, with James Talarico defeating Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gina Hinojosa unseating Gov. Greg Abbott. The victories defied expectations in a state Trump carried by double digits just two years earlier.
A Fox News poll in October showed Talarico and Paxton nearly tied, with Abbott leading Hinojosa. Both Democrats ultimately won by wide margins.
The Texas Senate race was marked as a “toss-up” by the bipartisan Cook Political Report that gave Republicans an advantage with an R+6 ranking. But as of the early morning hours of Wednesday, Talarico held 53.9% of the vote to Paxton’s 44.2% — a 9.7% gap in a race where polls were showing a clean match-up.
Abbott’s race was the biggest miss when it came to ratings and polling versus real results. Hinojosa flew mostly under the radar, with Cook ranking the race a “lean Republican” — but the Democrat candidate ran away with a nearly 7% victory gap as of 3 a.m. on Wednesday.
And the Texas results came amid a broader Democratic tsunami.
Texas’ Democratic upsets came as voters nationwide voiced dissatisfaction with Trump and the economy. A Fox News poll found Trump’s approval at 36%, while 74% of voters rated the economy negatively.
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Democrats’ sweeping gains extended beyond Texas, with Senate upsets in Kansas and South Carolina, two states Trump carried by double digits in 2024.
In Kansas, Adam Hamilton scored a historic defeat over Sen. Roger Marshall, ending Republicans’ 94-year winning streak in Senate races in the state. Kansas will send to the U.S. Senate their first Democrat elected senator in nearly a century.
While the race was ranked a “toss-up,” it still marks a historic departure for the ruby-red state.
And in deep red South Carolina, Annie Andrews defeated Sen. Darline Graham, who had been appointed to succeed her late brother, Lindsey Graham, but couldn’t secure a victory at the ballot box.
The race was ranked “lean Republican,” but the divide was 4.2 points as of Wednesday morning, marking a significant upset and an end to the more than two-decade reign of Grahams’ holding onto the South Carolina Senate seat after Lindsey was first elected in 2002.
While Maine has long been considered a purple state, its 30-year-tenured Republican Senator, Susan Collins, was ousted in Tuesday’s midterm by Democrat Troy Jackson. Collins was widely viewed as a career politician and served five terms in the U.S. Senate.
Cook rated the race a “toss-up,” but the 6-point divide was still viewed as a major political upset.
Taken together, the results showed that the Democratic wave reached well beyond the usual battlegrounds, sweeping into states and seats that Republicans had long counted on carrying.