2026 midterm elections live updates: Democrats regain control of the Senate with Iowa flip

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) said Tuesday he expects results for New York’s 17th Congressional District to bleed into the “wee hours” of Wednesday morning after ballot scanning problems in Westchester County prevented voting machines from accepting ballots.

Lawler, appearing on CNN, said his campaign, the state board of elections, and the campaign of his opponent, Cait Conley, have come to a “tentative” agreement about how to count the affected ballots. According to Lawler, uncounted ballots will be brought to the state board of elections, where attorneys and both parties can watch, to be counted.

“All of the ballots that have already been cast but not accepted by the machines and placed in the emergency orange bag will be police escorted to the Board of Elections from across the county, and it will be counted at the Board of Elections, a central location,” Lawler said. “Everybody will be able to see all of the ballots be counted tonight.”

However, Lawler said he expects the counting of the affected ballots to “take a few hours,” as machines are only able to process about 2,000 ballots an hour.

“There’s going to be roughly 10 machines at the Board of Elections to process them,” Lawler said. “So about 20,000 votes an hour will be processed and scanned. So it’s going to take a few hours, but we expect to have results certainly into the wee hours of tomorrow morning.”

Alaska’s polling locations closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday local time, or 1 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, closing out Election Day voting.

The closure marks the end of in-person voting in the 2026 midterm elections, although ballot counting and reporting will continue nationwide.

Alaska’s Senate contest is among the most consequential remaining races, with Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) facing a challenge from former Rep. Mary Peltola. The governor’s race and the state’s lone House seat are also being closely watched.

The race has attracted national headlines as a civil and criminal investigation unfolds over the presence of a different Dan Sullivan on the ballot, who was allegedly recruited by Peltola and Democratic leadership to syphon votes away from the Republican incumbent of the same name.

The investigation into “Decoy Dan” could delay the Senate election results. 

Democratic Bucks County commissioner Bob Harvie has unseated Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) in Pennsylvania’s 1st congressional district, flipping the seat blue.

Harvie won the race with 52.7% of the vote, according to the Associated Press, which called the race at 12:37 a.m., with 95% of the vote counted. Fitzpatrick garnered 47.3% of the vote.

Fitzpatrick, who was one of the few House Republicans running without a Trump endorsement, has long attempted to distance himself from Trump in the district. Fitzpatrick had retained his seat since 2019, despite his district voting for former Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Joe Biden, but lost his seat on Wednesday.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) released a statement shortly after midnight on Wednesday to outline the path forward for the Republican caucus following Tuesday’s blue wave for Democrats.

“As we head into 2027, Senate Republicans will not stand idly by as the far-left, socialist wing of the Democrat Party attempts to unwind everything we’ve done. Thankfully, we still have President Trump in the White House, and we’ll work with him to stop the worst impulses of Democrat extremism,” Thune said.

Republicans lost their majority in the Senate with Democrat Josh Turek flipping Iowa’s Senate seat blue. According to the Associated Press as of about 12:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Democrats hold 52 seats in the Senate, while Republicans have 41.

“We cannot let their fringe positions become the mainstream,” Thune said.

Texas’s Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton congratulated Senator-elect James Talarico on Tuesday evening in his concession speech.

“Let me start off by congratulating James Talarico,” Trump-endorsed Paxton said. “I will commit that I will be praying for him that he will do good for Texas and the nation.”

“We’ve had a difficult night tonight across the country, but it’s not over,” Paxton continued.

Shortly after midnight, Talarico led Paxton by over 11 percentage points. Talarico is the first Democrat the Lone Star state has elected since 1988.

Minnesota Lt. Gov. Penny Flanagan beat former sports broadcaster Michelle Tafoya on Tuesday in the race to succeed Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

The Associated Press called the race for Flanagan just after midnight, with Flanagan earning 54% support against Tafoya’s 43.3%. About 75% of the votes were counted.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), won the state in the 2024 general election by more than four points against President Donald Trump.

Flanagan led Tafoya in every poll up until Election Day but never by more than five points. That lead had shrunk to just three in surveys published in mid-October when the Cook Political Report moved the race in the Republican Party’s favor. Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket both still gave Flanagan a nearly 90% chance of winning at the end of October.

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Trump gave the members of his Cabinet a vote of confidence early Wednesday morning, despite the blue wave that handed Democrats majorities in both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate.

The president called Fox News for an interview just after midnight, where host Bret Baier asked the president point blank if he was “going to make changes” to the Cabinet.

“No, I don’t think so. It had nothing to do with my Cabinet. It was just a point — honestly, look. I’ve been doing a lot of great things for a long time, and it’s just a point in time,” he answered.

TRUMP SPENDS NEARLY HALF OF HIS MIDTERM CLOSING PITCH TALKING ABOUT THE REFLECTING POOL RENOVATIONS

Some White House aides told the Washington Examiner after the elections that they believed War Secretary Pete Hegseth would be in the crosshairs regarding his counsel to the president regarding the war in Iran.

Donald Trump claimed to already be working the phones Wednesday morning after Democrats took control of both congressional majorities in the 2026 midterm elections.

The president did a live phone interview with Fox News just after midnight, where he claimed to be “friends” with several members of the opposing party and would “work together” on several unspecified issues.

“Believe it or not, I’ve already spoken to some of them,” he stated. “Two senators and three congressmen, actually. So it’s a total of five, and I have three waiting to call me.”

“They obviously want to talk, but I have the power of veto, and the power of veto is, as you know, it’s impervious,” Trump concluded.

Cape May’s Democratic Mayor Zack Mullock has flipped New Jersey’s 2nd Congressional District blue after Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) called Mullock to concede.

Van Drew has served four terms in the House, representing the South Jersey district. His seat was ranked as a likely Republican seat by the Cook Political Report, with Trump winning the district by over 12 points in 2024. The result leaves just one Republican seat in the Garden State, held by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ) in the 4th District.

Mullock has 51.05% of the vote, according to the Associated Press as of midnight, while Van Drew has 47.9%. The outlet has not called the race yet, with 85.8% of the vote reported.

What the Democrats have pulled off in tonight’s elections, especially for Senate, shouldn’t have been possible based on the available map.

In 2018, the blue wave midterm election of President Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans actually gained red-state Senate seats despite the anti-GOP national environment. On Tuesday night, they lost six such seats and are trailing in two or three more (Mississippi — Mississippi! — has been going back and forth). Democrats hadn’t elected a senator in South Carolina since 1998, Texas since 1988, or Kansas since 1932. All happened tonight.

Many of these races weren’t even close. Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) defeated Republican Mike Collins 58.9% to 41.1%. Former Gov. Roy Cooper is on track to hold former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley to under 40% of the vote. State Rep. James Talarico, with all his woke baggage, is beating GOP state Attorney General Ken Paxton by 12 points. Trump won all of these states just two years ago.

The sky is the limit in the House, as attention shifts to the West Coast. The collapse of the red firewall in the Senate suggests no House seat will be safe either, though some Republicans will paradoxically be spared because they attracted less money and attention than the upper-chamber contests. Republicans didn’t lose a single House seat in 2018 in a district Trump had carried by at least 20 points two years earlier. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) fell in a Trump +18 district before 11 p.m.

In 2018, Republicans were defending 25 House seats in districts won by Hillary Clinton. This year, they were just eight GOP-held seats carried by Kamala Harris. It was only three before this year’s redistricting wars. The low-hanging fruit has been picked. Republicans are losing in places where all that is necessary is turning out Republican voters.

Some political analysts thought that because of gerrymandering, political polarization, migration trends, and past wave elections benefiting both parties back to 1994 that new wave elections were no longer even possible. Democrats may yet fall short of the 41 House seats they gained in 2018 or the 63 Republicans picked up in the Tea Party wave of 2010, though nothing would surprise at this point. But this is an epic collapse in Republican strongholds that shouldn’t have been possible given the House and Senate maps.

President Donald Trump pointed the finger at Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) for his loss after his Democratic opponent Gina Hinojosa became the first governor-elect since 1990.

“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost. He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!” Trump wrote in Truth Social.

Abbott, once considered a potential presidential prospect, conceded to Hinojosa after Hinojosa won 57% of the vote to the incumbent’s 42%, with 70% of the vote counted.

Abbott’s campaign, in part, was dogged by cost of living concerns, with energy prices exacerbated in the Lone Star State thanks to the construction of more data centers.

The conservative movement is split into two camps tonight, each blaming the other’s pet policies for the blue tsunami that just crashed on America. The NatCons slam the decision to go to war, while the traditional conservatives blame the “Liberation Day” tariffs.

Missing in the exchange is a frank discussion about the lasting negative effect of President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation regime. NBC News’s exit polls found that 49% of Americans “strongly disapprove” of the way Immigration and Customs Enforcement is handling its job, while another 11% “somewhat disapprove”. In all, the country disapproved of ICE’s performance in Trump’s second term at a 60-40 clip. This result tracks with most public opinion polls on the subject.

Trump clearly misread his mandate in a variety of ways following his 2024 victory. And while he correctly identified securing the border as a top priority for the nation, he incorrectly read the public’s demand for order as a license for masked agents to sweep up longtime residents with no criminal records. The mass deportation programs were chaotic and ugly, and because of that, Trump lost the public on the issue.

Republicans who were uncomfortable with these tactics were largely afraid to speak up before the midterm elections. It will be interesting to see how this debate evolves as we enter presidential primary season.

Trump said he will dive into the reasons why Republican candidates lost the midterm elections so badly.

“I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost!” he wrote in one of his late-night Truth Social posts.

The president was publicly reflecting on the results as they came in on Tuesday. So far, Democrats are significantly outpacing Republicans in the House and Senate.

In a prior post, Trump complained that Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) lost his gubernatorial race because he had become a Republican In Name Only, or RINO, “in the last six months of his Political Life.”

Polls in Hawaii have closed at midnight Eastern on Wednesday as results across the country have begun rolling in, showing significant wins for Democrats.

Hawaii’s two House districts, governorship, and other state and local seats are on the ballot this election cycle.

The state is not considered a major battleground in the national fight for control of Congress, but voters are deciding both of Hawaii’s House seats, along with state and local contests. Both of the Aloha State’s congressional seats are considered safe for Democrats.

Hawaii does not have a Senate contest this cycle. The state’s congressional and local results will add to the nationwide tally as election officials continue reporting returns and major wins for the Democratic Party from across the country.

Democratic candidates have flipped the Senate blue in the 2026 midterm elections, with Democrat Josh Turek’s win in Iowa against Rep. Ashley Hinson (R-IA) dealing the final blow.

The Democrats have won 51 seats in the Senate, according to the Associated Press as of 11:39 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday. Democrats have won four of the six Senate seats listed as toss-ups by Cook Political Report, with the results of Maine, Michigan, and Alaska still outstanding.

Democrats pulled off wins in typically red states such as South Carolina, Texas, and Kansas to flip the upper chamber.