Democrats Win the Senate

Mother Jones illustration; Erik S. Lesser/AFP/Getty; Win McNamee/Getty; Laura Brett/Zuma Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. First Jon Ossoff won. Then Chris Pappas won. Roy Cooper won. So did Annie Andrews. And James Talarico. And Sherrod Brown. And Adam Hamilton. And Josh Turek. Well before midnight, the outcome was clear: Democrats will win control of the US Senate. The massive shift in power comes on a night when Democrats also flipped control of the US House. But in some ways, the Senate was even more significant. Winning the upper chamber posed a far greater challenge for Dems, and they will now have the power to block Donald Trump’s nominees for key administration posts and lifetime federal judgeships—including any potential vacancies on the US Supreme Court. Following the 2024 election, it appeared that Democrats faced long odds. The Senate was “potentially out of reach for Democrats” in 2026, declared Inside Elections two years ago. “No one thinks Democrats can win the majority in 2026 barring some political tsunami,” concurred Punchbowl News. Democratic Senate majorities, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics explained in December 2024, tend to rely on having “at least a few members from states that were unfavorable to the party at the presidential level”—and Democrats were increasingly finding that all but impossible: “The recent historical trend in such places is, for Democrats, daunting to say the least.” But on Tuesday, Democrats pulled it off. They successfully flipped Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, and Iowa, while defending seats in swing states like Georgia, and New Hampshire. The political tsunami has arrived.