Some maps stay one colour for so long that people stop treating the colour as a choice. Kansas had not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1932. On Tuesday, 3 November, it chose Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister. Iowa had not elected a Democratic senator since 2008, and it elected one too. In Maine, Troy Jackson, a former logger, beat Susan Collins, ending what the Associated Press counted as nearly 30 years in the Senate. As Euronews reported, Collins’s seat was the seventh the party took from Republicans that night.
The House fell. Then the Senate.
Seats were still being counted the next day. CBS News projected that Democrats would hold at least 54 Senate seats, with two races undecided, and between 251 and 268 in the House. Before polling day, Republicans held 53 Senate seats. On Wednesday Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the House, said he expected at least 255 seats. Speaking to reporters, according to Al Jazeera, he chose his metaphor carefully: “It wasn’t simply a blue wave. It was an American tsunami.”
The provinces
Most of the change came from places that had long voted Republican. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews, a paediatrician who ran on healthcare and affordability, beat Darline Graham, the candidate Trump had endorsed. Andrews is the state’s first Democratic senator since 1998 and the first woman it has elected to the Senate. In Texas, a state Trump won by double digits two years ago, James Talarico, 37, defeated Ken Paxton. Talarico is a former middle-school teacher and a Presbyterian seminarian, and he said he had beaten “Goliath”. Gina Hinojosa unseated Governor Greg Abbott in the same state, ending decades of Republican rule there.
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed beat the former Republican congressman Mike Rogers and became the first Muslim elected to the Senate. He had faced attacks on his faith. Haley Stevens, the Democrat he beat in the primary, endorsed Rogers two days before the vote, and afterwards she faced a backlash and resignations among her own staff. “You chose hate and Michigan chose hope,” El-Sayed told Rogers, as Tamara Khandaker of Al Jazeera recorded.
The results ran down the ballot. In Indiana, J.D. Ford ousted Representative Victoria Spartz in a district Trump had carried by 17 points. Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, as the first Black woman governor in US history. In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy lost the governor’s race to Amy Acton. His campaign had run an ad in which Acton’s estranged mother accused her of lying about her childhood, without mentioning that the mother lost custody after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for raping her. The campaign pulled the ad after spending about $1m to keep it on air. Republicans held on in Florida, where Byron Donalds became the state’s first Black governor and Ashley Moody kept her Senate seat, though both faced unexpectedly strong challenges.
The price of fuel
Voters’ complaints were concrete: the cost of living, tariffs, and the war on Iran, which has driven fuel prices sharply higher. Party machinery mattered less than the price of groceries. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, spent more than $400m backing Republicans, Paxton among them, and both chambers were lost anyway. George Washington University professor Todd Belt called the night “a big wipeout and a strong repudiation of Donald Trump and his policies.”
The ruler’s two voices
Trump has a long record of questioning elections, but this time he told The New York Times he was “absolutely willing” to accept the result. “I think the Democrats did a good job, I really do,” he told Fox News. “They fought hard.” He added: “I don’t view it as a hit on me.” He conceded that “a part of it was Iran” while still defending the war.
He also said other things. On Tuesday he told CBS he would be “Mr Veto” and block Democratic bills. On social media he wrote that Republicans would have won “IN A LANDSLIDE” if he had been on the ballot, although during the campaign he had told supporters to “pretend I’m on the ballot.” A White House official told AFP: “The White House mood is defiant.”
One reflection: a ruler who loses often praises the winners in one sentence and denies the loss in the next. He needs both sentences.
What a majority cannot buy
Democrats campaigned on lower living costs, ending the Iran war, holding Trump accountable and pushing back on his immigration crackdown. Whether they can deliver is the question Al Jazeera now asks. The arithmetic is hard. They can block bills and appointments, but they do not have the two-thirds of both chambers needed to override a veto. In the Senate, MS NOW noted, the filibuster still requires 60 votes.
Trump went to war on Iran alongside Israel in February without authorisation from Congress. Federica Marsi of Al Jazeera writes that Congress could withhold new funding when the current spending bill expires on 11 December. James Boys of University College London warned that, with troops deployed, cutting off money would “be seen to be placing American lives at risk.” A war powers resolution would face a veto, as earlier attempts did. Scott Lucas of the UCD Clinton Institute pointed to Republicans who are distancing themselves from Trump, and noted that Vice President JD Vance “opposed the war and has done so from the start.” Boys offered a darker possibility: a president who cannot run again may feel “unleashed to act with impunity on the world stage.”
Tariffs are similar. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s original levies 6-3 in February. He then signed a new order under a different law, raising the rate from 10% to 15%, and those tariffs expire after 150 days unless Congress extends them. Larger changes to trade policy may have to wait for 2028.
Lawyer up
The clearest new power is the subpoena, and it is what Trump’s allies feared losing. Democrats will chair every committee. Possible inquiries include the conduct of the Iran war, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, immigration enforcement, the Trump family’s businesses and his ties to Epstein. Musk could be called to testify under oath about his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency and his companies’ federal contracts. A third impeachment is possible. Representative Robert Garcia, expected to lead the House Oversight Committee, posted a message to Republicans: “LAWYER UP.”
Chuck Schumer, who had been criticised inside his own party, now looks set to return as Senate majority leader. “We have five words for the American people: ‘Relief is on the way’,” he said. When the new Congress meets in January, Jeffries could become the first Black speaker of the House.