More than a “thumping.” That’s what George W. Bush called it when Democrats won majorities in both houses by gaining 6 Senate and 30 House seats in 2006. As this is written, before sunrise Wednesday, Democrats have won majorities in both houses, gaining seven Senate seats, with chances at two more, and have gained or are ahead in 40 Republican House seats.
Quite a reversal from 2024. As Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini notes, Trump’s party may end up holding no House seat that voted for President Donald Trump by less than 9 points two years ago.
Trump likes to boast that he carried all seven target states in his 50% to 48% popular-vote reelection. This year, all seven — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — went Democratic.
Much, maybe nearly all of this is Trump’s doing. His “Liberation Day” tariffs, and the frivolous way he kept adjusting tariffs up and down, clearly kept inflation up and produced no visible positive effect. Like Joe Biden’s belief in Democrats’ historic remedy of pump-priming spending, Trump’s idiosyncratic belief in the power of tariffs proved destructive for his standing and his party’s.
Trump’s insistence on slavish loyalty in selecting candidates has also cost Republicans dearly. His choices in Georgia (2021 and 2022) and Arizona (2020 and 2024), his failure to get candidates who lost by less than 1 percentage point across the finish line in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2024, and his picks this year in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas have arguably cost the party nine Senate seats heading into 2027.
That’s the difference between a Democratic Senate with 54 or 55 seats and a Republican Senate with the same majority. Between a Senate that confirms Republican Supreme Court nominees and one that invokes the Mitch McConnell precedent to refuse even to consider them. Between a Senate that might seriously consider convicting and removing an impeached president and one that would reject the effort outright.
As always, small numbers can make big differences in a 100-member Senate. Odds tend to prevail in elections for all 435 House members. And overall, the numbers in the public polls have held up pretty well this year, as pollsters have been making reasonable adjustments to lower response rates from Republicans — a subject on which I may comment later, and many others will soon.
And the messages from comparisons between the 2026 exit poll and 2024 exit poll stack up pretty well with the county election reports pouring in over the last 24 hours.
Republican percentages this year seem to be about 6 percentage points lower than Trump’s 2024 percentages among the most-watched demographic groups — whites, men and women, white college graduates and non-graduates, and various income groups.
In the county returns, we see central-city counties post overwhelming Democratic percentages, suggesting a sweep of almost every precinct. We see Republican majorities in suburban and exurban counties atrophying in the Southeast and disappearing in Texas. We see Republican percentages holding up only in the most un-metropolitan rural counties.
We see some interesting regional patterns. In far northern states, Republican candidates for senator and governor did not lag as far behind Trump’s 2024 levels, perhaps for local reasons: Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-ME) personal popularity, Democratic scandals in Minnesota, and Abdul el Sayed’s divisiveness in Michigan kept Democrats from running more than 1, 3, and 4 points ahead of Kamala Harris.
In contrast, Democratic Senate candidates ran 11 points ahead of Harris in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia and 7 points ahead in Florida. We see here that the slow and steady movement of Northeasterners down I-95 and I-85 over the years has made the South Atlantic states, at least this year, the scene of close partisan battles, just as the once-Republican states in the Northeast became in the wake of the New Deal three generations ago. The biggest surprise was the Democratic victories in South Carolina, which had the nation’s fastest percentage population growth in 2025 to 2026.
Note also that nationally, there were significant Republican declines, by double digits, among Hispanics, Asians and “others”—groups among which Trump posted gains in 2024. Hispanics and Asians voted about 27% Republican in 2012 and 2016, 46% and 40% Republican, respectively, in 2024, and 35% and 29%, respectively, in 2026. Similarly, voters aged 18 to 29 showed increasing support for Trump in 2024 and sharply reduced levels in 2026.
This decline in Republican support wreaked havoc with the party’s efforts, urged on by Trump, to draw new congressional district lines in Republican-controlled states. These inspired similar efforts by Democrats, which in California proved successful, while declining Republican percentages among Hispanics produced “dummymanders” that backfired, especially in Texas and North Carolina. In the latter, House Republican campaign committee chairman Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) lost his seat—the first such loss I can recall since House Democratic campaign chairman James Corman lost in the San Fernando Valley in 1980.
Will those 2024 gains turn out to be a one-time phenomenon? Or do they remain harbingers of a possible future? No one knows for sure, and voters themselves are poor prognosticators of their own future attitudes. But I suspect the big drop among these volatile groups—Hispanics and Asians tend to be younger than average—can be explained by a sense that the second-term Trump hasn’t lived up to his basic campaign promise.
His most effective 2024 ad, as I wrote three weeks ago, showed video of Kamala Harris emphasizing her support for government-paid surgery for transgender prison inmates, with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” He underlined that message visually by working a McDonald’s fry station and a drive-through window in the target state of Pennsylvania.
Trump’s conduct since November 2024 has undermined his “cares about people like me” message. Tariffs and military action against Iran and in the Gulf of Hormuz suggested an indifference to the inflationary pain they seemed to cause ordinary people. The new White House ballroom, the triumphal arch (with military uses) and his threat to demolish the Kennedy Center unless his name was put on it suggested a preoccupation with celebrating himself that was capped by his election-eve address at the Reflecting Pool, inviting comparison with the mythical Narcissus who couldn’t stop looking at his own reflection.
These are personal flaws, but they damaged a party he has battered into subservience. They benefited an opposition party that most voters, polls show, view negatively and expect little from — and whose hold on twentysomethings, Hispanics, Asians and other more volatile voting groups remains uncertain.
This year’s vote is an attempt to put limits on the actions and vagaries of a disappointing incumbent president. It is not atypical of our era of polarized political parity, in which, in seven of the last nine presidential elections, voters have given the winner’s party trifectas — control of the presidency, Senate and House — and in six of those seven cases have withdrawn the trifecta in the off-year election two years later.
Are we looking at the beginning of a political realignment? Toward some period of Democratic dominance rather than the two-party parity we’ve enjoyed (or endured) since 1994? RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende, author of what I consider the best book on the 1952-92 alignment, The Lost Majority, tweeted on election night, “Just understand that you’re seeing something special, a 100-year flood. Easily the worst election for a party since 1974.”
I’m not so sure. It could turn out to be, but that depends on political decisions that have not yet been made and exogenous events (macroeconomic trends, technological advance, wars) that have not yet occurred. This year’s results sit just at the outer limits of the two-party parity we have enjoyed (or endured) since the presidential election of 1992 and the congressional elections of 1994.
Democrats have dominated the presidency, narrowly, winning four of seven elections, with an average popular vote margin of 49 to 46 percent. That’s significantly narrower than Republicans’ 52 to 45 percent average popular vote margin in the ten elections from 1952 to 1988. In seven of those ten elections, one party won more than 53 percent of the popular vote. Since then, no one has; Barack Obama came closest with 52.9 percent in 2008.
The 1992 election that brought Bill Clinton to the White House also gave Democrats their 40th year in control of the House of Representatives by a 258 to 176 margin. Democrats had won at least 243 seats in every election since 1958. Neither party has won 258 House seats since, and only twice in 30 years has either party (Democrats in 2008, Republicans in 2014) won more than 243. Democrats this year are topping 243 but will not reach 257, as they did in 2008, or top the 258 that for decades was the party’s norm.
In the 16 Senate elections starting in 1994, Republicans have ended up with majorities in 10 and Democrats in 6, with the votes split almost evenly. Only once, and for only eight months, did either party have a 60-vote filibuster-proof majority: Democrats from July 2009, when Al Franken was sworn in as winner of the contested Minnesota race, until February 2010, when Scott Brown was sworn in after winning the special election to replace Edward Kennedy.
Other than during that Congress, neither party has emerged from an election with more than 55 seats, a level Republicans reached in 1996 and 1998 and Democrats reached in 2012 and will reach again if, as is unclear at this writing, they win either of the seats up this year in Alaska and Mississippi, and will exceed if they win both.
Democrats’ House and Senate margins this week look impressive by the standards of 1994-2026, though ordinary by those of 1952-90. Do they signal the start of an extended period of political dominance, like the 36 years Republicans enjoyed after their landslide in 1894? That election overturned the 218-124 Democratic majority elected two years earlier and produced a 253-93 Republican supermajority. History offers some perspective.
Start with the two Democratic gains of 2006 and 2008, which left them, after some litigation and until a special election defeat, with a supermajority in the Senate and a 250-plus Democratic House like the one they just won. Despite the failure of the Clintons’ health care plans with similar majorities, Barack Obama decided to go with major health insurance reform and, when Democrats lost their 60th Senate seat, Speaker Nancy Pelosi plunged ahead.
The problem was, and is, that most Americans have health care plans they like. That’s why Obamacare tested negatively when Obama was in office and Obamacare repeal tested negatively when Donald Trump and Republicans threatened to repeal it. Many Democrats, notably the leftists calling for Medicare for All, want government-provided health care. It’s likely voters won’t.
The question is whether Democrats in 2027-28 can come up with policies they can enact in 2029 that won’t be rejected by voters in 2030. And by 2030, they may be facing a decision on what to do when current law requires cutting Social Security benefits. Progressives may want to cut affluent recipients’ benefits or increase taxes on those earning above $184,500, but affluent suburbanites who are now a dominant constituency in the party may not like that.
Or consider the response of Democrats after the party won 61-37 and 291-144 majorities in the Watergate year of 1974 and held them as Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976. This was a more ideologically diverse Democratic Party than today’s, with many Southern conservatives hostile to liberal policies. Dovish Democrats did cut off funding for South Vietnam in 1975, but went along as Carter increased defense spending in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
In an inflationary decade, the Democratic Congress cut capital gains taxes in 1978 and authorized 401(k) plans that later pushed out private-sector defined-benefit pensions. And led by Edward Kennedy, Ralph Nader and Carter appointee Alfred Kahn, the Democratic Congress deregulated trucking, airlines and freight rail. Under the adroit leadership of Tip O’Neill, Jim Wright and Tony Coelho, Democrats maintained House control for another dozen years, until Newt Gingrich prevailed in 1994, but were unable to prevent Republican presidential candidates from carrying 133 out of a possible 150 states in the elections of the 1980s.
Or consider the precedent of the Republican landslide of 1946, just after World War II. What Harry Truman called a “do-nothing Congress” actually did a lot, trimming back labor unions’ power in the Taft-Hartley Act, passed over Truman’s veto with Southern Democratic support, cutting tax rates sharply, and rejecting government as the prime provider of housing. On foreign policy, Republicans, led by Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, provided key support for Truman’s anti-communist policies.
But the Republicans were perhaps too successful. Taft-Hartley has lasted 79 years, and few politicians still advocate building more public housing. The Republican majorities, having done their work, were dismissed in 1948, and the party won a House majority only once in the next 46 years. Republicans did become successful, arguably dominant, at the presidential level when the G.I. generation expanded the electorate in 1952, but its thrust was to ratify rather than repeal the New Deal, albeit with 1947 modifications.
The really successful realignment year, in policy and politics, was 1894. Its enormous Republican gains were followed in 1896 by, in the title of Karl Rove’s biography, the triumph of William McKinley. Republicans won seven of the next nine presidential elections, with a popular vote average margin of 50 to 41 percent, and won majorities in Congress for 28 of 36 years.
WHAT’S AHEAD IF THE POLLS ARE RIGHT OR WRONG
But looking back, it seems that many propitious developments that fostered contentment with the governing party were the products of the private sector: mass industrialization resulting from technological advance, an industrial labor force supplied by open immigration from Europe in a country still so riven by the Civil War that there was minimal migration from the impoverished South to the growing North, the discovery of gold in the Yukon and Transvaal, stabilizing what had been deflationary currencies, the stabilization of the private sector through mergers and of banking by the creation of the Federal Reserve.
So elections which seem to trigger at least temporary political realignment can shape public policy and improve people’s lives. But not inevitably, and often not in ways intended or predicted. The 2026 election may be the harbinger of a political realignment, of a South as partisanly contested as the nation’s northern tier and of competition for the offspring of immigrants. Or it may just be another chapter in multiple decades of close competition in a politics of polarized parity, with a different cast of characters.