In what will likely be his final blitz of campaign rallies after a decade full of them, Donald Trump repeatedly told voters to “pretend” he’s on the ballot the past few months. “When Trump’s on the ballot,” he told Fox News in August, “they win.”
Voters took his advice.
The 2026 midterm elections were a Trump-directed referendum about his favorite person. And the Republican president — whose popularity has fallen to historic lows — lost it in a landslide.
Democrats had anticipated a challenging path to winning control of the U.S. Senate; the party needed to win races in at least two states that Trump won by double digits. Instead, they flipped at least seven.
In Texas and Maine, voters elected the first Democrats to the Senate in their states in nearly 40 years. In Kansas, voters elected the first Democratic candidate to the Senate in nearly 100 years. By midnight, the possibility of Republicans losing a Senate seat in deep-red Mississippi wasn’t off the table, and Abdul El-Sayed was projected to defeat Trump-backed Republican Mike Rogers in a closely watched Senate race in Michigan.
Democrats also captured governor’s offices, flipped entire state legislatures and secured Democratic trifecta state governments. And after following Trump’s command to redraw congressional districts to give them a legally dubious competitive boost in midterm elections, Republicans ended up losing House seats in newly drawn districts they were expecting to win — including in districts that Trump won just two years ago.