The 2026 election, state by state

On November 3 Democrats won control of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House and finished with more governors than the Republicans. With 632 of the 653 races we follow called, they hold 55 Senate seats to the Republicans’ 44, 254 House seats to 165, and 29 governorships to 20. They went into the election with 47, 215 and 24.

Eight Republican-held Senate seats are called for Democrats, in Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, and no Democratic seat is called for a Republican. Nine of the Democratic winners ran in states Donald Trump won in 2024, the reddest of them Mississippi, which he took by 22.9 points. The Senate count includes the two independents who caucus with the Democrats. The one race still open is Alaska’s, where the Democrat, Mary Peltola, leads by 2.3 points.

In the House, 44 seats are called as Democratic gains and three as Republican gains: the Texas 32nd District, the Maine 2nd District and the Tennessee 9th District, the last two by 1.6 and 1.1 points. Another 16 seats are still open, with Republicans ahead in eight of them and Democrats in eight; the majority, 218 seats, does not depend on them. Two of the open seats, Louisiana’s 5th and 6th, go to runoffs on December 12.¹ In the nine states whose districts were redrawn after 2024 (Alabama, California, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and Utah), a gain is counted against the party that held the district of the same number, which is not always the same ground.

Democrats took governorships from Republicans in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas and lost none. Republican governors won again in New Hampshire and Vermont, two states Kamala Harris carried,^{2, 3} and Republicans held Florida by 1.3 points, Tennessee by 2.5 and Alabama by 3.9. Democrats kept Kansas by 0.7. The one governor’s race still open is Alaska’s.

Democratic candidates for the House have 66.3 million votes to the Republicans’ 49.9 million, a lead of 13.8 points of all votes cast. Republicans won the House vote by 2.7 points in 2024 and by 2.9 in the last midterm, 2022, so the swing is 16.5 points from one and 16.7 from the other. The raw figure flatters the Democrats a little: the count shows no Republican votes in 17 districts and no Democratic votes in two. In the 416 districts where the count sets a Democrat against a Republican, the Democratic lead is 11.7.

Set against the 2024 presidential vote, the answer is nearly the same. In the 3,112 counties we can compare, the top race on the ballot ran 15.2 points more Democratic than the presidential race had two years earlier: R+1.6 then, D+13.6 now. Of those counties, 2,985 moved toward the Democrats and 127 toward the Republicans. In 411 of the 416 contested House districts the Democrat ran ahead of Harris’s margin there, by 14.6 points in the median district.

Every state we can measure moved toward the Democrats except Maine and Vermont, and in both the top race had a Republican incumbent in it. Maine’s was the Senate race, in which Susan Collins, the Republican senator, lost by 6.1 points in a state her party’s presidential nominee had lost by 6.9.⁴ Vermont’s was the governor’s race, which the Republican governor, Phil Scott, won for a sixth term.³ The comparison sets one office against another, and a candidate with a following of their own moves a state along with the national mood.

The South moved most: 19.0 points, against 13.6 in the Midwest, 12.9 in the Northeast and 12.6 in the West. Within it, Texas moved 25.8 points, Mississippi 23.7, North Carolina 22.9, South Carolina 22.4. Among the states we can measure, 15 that Trump carried gave the Democrats a win or a lead in the top race.

About 120 million votes have been counted in the most-voted contest in each state. That is 108% of the same figure for the 2022 midterm and 77% of the 2024 presidential vote, and the count is not finished. It already exceeds 2022 in 39 states.

The drop from 2024 was not shared evenly by the two parties. Democratic candidates in each county’s top race drew 89 votes for every 100 Harris won in the same counties. Republican candidates drew 65 for every 100 of Trump’s. A party’s vote falls when its voters stay home and when they cross over, and county totals cannot tell the two apart. What they show is where the Republican vote went missing.

It fell in every group of counties we measure, and furthest where at least 30% of residents are Black: Republicans drew 61 votes per 100 of Trump’s there. They drew 62 in the fifth of the vote cast in the lowest-income counties and 64 in the fifth with the fewest college graduates, in each case the fewest of the five fifths on that measure. Democrats held their vote best in counties where at least 30% of residents are Hispanic, at 95 per 100, in the fifth with the lowest median age, at 95, and across the South, at 94.⁵

Sorted by who lives in them, the counties still vote as they have. The fifth of the vote cast in counties with the fewest college graduates went Republican by 17.7 points and the fifth with the most went Democratic by 37.4. But the move from 2024 was larger at the bottom of that ladder than at the top: 17.2 points against 12.0. Income runs the same way, from 18.2 points in the lowest-income fifth to 11.4 in the highest. So does age: the fifth of the vote cast in the counties with the lowest median age moved 19.5 points and the fifth with the highest 11.7.

Counties where at least 30% of residents are Hispanic moved 18.8 points, the most of our four groupings by race and ethnicity, and counties at least 30% Black moved 16.5. The counties that are at least 85% white and not Hispanic moved least of the four, 12.3. City, suburb and country moved nearly together: 14.8 points in urban counties, 15.4 in suburban ones and 13.9 in rural ones, where Republicans still won by 20.3.⁵

Part of this is a return. From 2020 to 2024 the same counties had moved 5.9 points toward the Republicans, and the heavily Hispanic counties had moved 10.1, the most of any group. This year 2,667 of the 2,778 counties that had moved right moved back toward the Democrats, and 2,804 of 3,112 counties finished more Democratic than they had been in the 2020 presidential race.

These are counts of places. A county with few graduates that moved 17 points has graduates in it, and nothing here says how any group of people voted.⁵

Twenty states chose a senator and a governor on the same ballot with a Democrat and a Republican in both races. The same party won or leads both in all but two: New Hampshire and South Carolina, which each elected a Democratic senator and a Republican governor. In New Hampshire the Senate race went Democratic by 13.8 points and the governor’s race Republican by 4.4; in South Carolina the two margins were 4.5 and 4.5.

The average gap between the two races was 7.3 points, and 55 of the 1,584 counties in those states chose a senator of one party and a governor of the other. The gaps ran in both directions. In Oklahoma and Tennessee the Democratic candidates for governor lost by 6.0 and 2.5 points while the party’s Senate candidates lost by 17.9 and 12.2. In Georgia the Democrat won the Senate race by 18.1 and the governor’s race by 8.7.

Before the election 22 Democrats sat in House districts that Trump carried in 2024, measured on this year’s lines, and eight Republicans sat in districts Harris carried. Among the seats called so far there are 54 of the first kind and zero of the second.

The Senate had 10 Democrats from states Trump carried and will have at least 17. Its one Republican from a state Harris carried, Collins, lost. States whose two senators sit with different parties go from three to at least nine. Among governors, Democrats will lead at least 12 states Trump carried, up from seven, and Republicans lead two that Harris carried, as before.

On the ground, 263 counties that voted for Trump in 2024 voted Democratic in their top race, and 184 of them had voted for him in 2020 as well. The largest are Maricopa County, Arizona; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and Tarrant County, Texas. Ten counties went the other way, nine of them in Vermont.

The map itself did not break. Republicans carried 2,408 of the 3,112 counties and Democrats 704. The counties Trump won by forty points or more moved 15.9 toward the Democrats and still voted Republican by 38.0.

Our count settles control of 73 of the 98 state legislative chambers, 91 of which held regular elections. In the chambers on the ballot where it read every seat, Democrats gained a net 350 seats and Republicans lost 334. For the chambers we could not read in full we rely on local newsrooms and on Ballotpedia, cited in each state’s section.

Put together, on the results reported so far, Republicans lost their majorities in 11 chambers: the Arizona Senate, Arizona House, Georgia House, Michigan House, New Hampshire Senate, New Hampshire House, North Carolina House, Pennsylvania Senate, Texas House, Wisconsin Senate and Wisconsin Assembly. Democrats also turned a tied Minnesota House into a majority. No chamber is reported to have moved to the Republicans. Ballotpedia’s tally on November 5 listed ten of the eleven. The Georgia House came afterward, on Associated Press race calls, and still had three seats unresolved on November 9.^{6, 7, 8}

Before the election Republicans held the governor’s office and both chambers in 23 states and Democrats in 16, by Ballotpedia’s count.⁹ On the results reported so far, Democrats add six: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Republicans lose five: Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio and Texas, where a Democratic governor or a Democratic chamber now sits across from them. That would leave 22 states under full Democratic control, 18 under Republican control and 10 divided. Arizona’s Democratic trifecta is the first there in 60 years and Pennsylvania’s the first in 33, Bolts reported.^{10, 11}

The quieter change is in supermajorities. Ballotpedia counts new Democratic supermajorities in the Colorado House, the Nevada Assembly, the New York Senate and the Vermont Senate, and the end of Republican ones in chambers that include both of Florida’s and the Iowa House. Stateline adds the Indiana House.^{6, 10} None of these counts is final, and no source we read described a result as certified.

We follow 147 statewide offices below governor that were on the ballot, and 144 of them are decided. Of those, 27 went from Republican to Democratic and one went the other way, a seat on Louisiana’s Public Service Commission that John E. Atkins, a Republican, took from the Democrats by 18.3 points. Seven of the Democratic gains are in Georgia and six in Texas; in both, Democrats won every statewide office in our count. Ohio’s attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer changed party, and so did Indiana’s secretary of state and comptroller. The rest are attorney general in Iowa and Kansas, treasurer in Arizona and Wisconsin, lieutenant governor in Nevada and Vermont, controller in Nevada, the superintendent of public instruction in Arizona and a seat on California’s Board of Equalization. Three are still open: Iowa’s auditor and treasurer, where the leads are 0.6 and 0.6 points, and Arizona’s Corporation Commission, which fills two seats.²¹

Who held each office before comes from our results index for attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer. For the other offices it comes from MultiState’s list of officeholders as of July and, for seats on commissions and offices that list lacks, from the offices’ own pages and local reporting. Every office counted as changing party was checked against a second source on November 13. One office whose holder was an appointee with no party on record, South Carolina’s comptroller general, is counted as neither held nor flipped.²²

In Indiana, Beau Bayh won the secretary of state’s office by 9.1 points; Bolts reported that he will be the first Democrat to hold the office in three decades. Ballotpedia reports that Democrats also gained the elected schools chief in Arizona and Georgia.^{11, 23}

Twenty-three states voted on supreme court seats in November, by Bolts’s count, and no court’s majority flipped.²⁴ In Texas, Democrats defeated four Republican incumbents, among them the chief justice, and a court that had been entirely Republican now has a 5-4 Republican majority.^{24, 25} In Ohio, Justice Jennifer Brunner was re-elected and Marilyn Zayas defeated Justice Daniel Hawkins, which narrows the Republican majority from 6-1 to 5-2.^{24, 26} Democratic justices kept their seats in Michigan and North Carolina, and Montana voters wrote nonpartisan judicial elections into the state constitution.^{24, 27}

Our count holds 135 statewide measures in 34 states. It records the votes for and against, and a measure’s fate depends on its state’s rule. New Hampshire’s Question 1, which would have removed the register of probate from the state constitution, drew 65% and failed: New Hampshire Public Radio reported that it needed a two-thirds majority.²⁸ What follows on outcomes comes from Ballotpedia, NPR and the Brennan Center’s State Court Report.

On abortion, Nevada voters approved a constitutional right with 63.2% in unofficial results. Missouri voters defeated Amendment 3, which would have repealed the reproductive-freedom amendment they passed in 2024, and Idaho voters defeated a measure to put abortion rights into state law.^{9, 27, 29} On voting rules, amendments requiring citizenship to vote passed in Arkansas, Kansas, South Dakota and West Virginia. Voter identification requirements passed in Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio and failed in Arizona, California and Colorado.^{9, 27, 29, 30}

Congressional maps were on the ballot in Missouri, Maryland and Colorado. Missouri voters rejected the map their legislature drew in 2025, 62% to 38%. Maryland voters approved an amendment that allows a congressional redraw. Colorado voters turned down an amendment that would have made it harder to redraw the state’s congressional map before 2028.^{27, 30} The redrawing of House maps between censuses is the subject of a separate piece.

On taxes, North Carolina voters approved a lower cap on the income tax rate, Iowa voters approved a two-thirds legislative vote for income tax increases, and Washington voters kept the state’s tax on household income over $1 million.²⁹ Massachusetts voters kept legal marijuana sales, with 75% voting against repeal.²⁷

We found no single count of the country’s school boards, sheriffs and county commissions, so what follows is a sample. It was assembled on November 13 from four kinds of contest: the mayoral elections that Ballotpedia listed for November 3 in the 100 largest cities; the prosecutor and sheriff races that Bolts wrote up; school board and schools-chief results reported by Chalkbeat and Ballotpedia; and the local measures that KQED, NPR, Ballotpedia and the transit trade press treated as part of a national pattern.¹² It leaves out whatever could not be read that day, including Harris County, Texas, Cook County, Illinois, and Louisville. Nearly every figure in it comes from an unofficial count, and no source we read described a result as certified.

Each state’s own section adds a second sample, the same four looks in every state: the seats on the state’s highest court that were on the ballot, the mayor of the largest city that elected one on November 3, the chief prosecutor of the most populous county, and the board of the largest school district that voted. Researchers found a result for the court in 16 states, the mayor in 14, the prosecutor in 13 and the school board in 15. Where a state elects none of these in November, or not in 2026, its section says so from the state’s own rules: that was the case for the court in 13 states. The rest are gaps in what could be read in a day, from pages that open without an account, and not evidence that nothing happened. In a few states the result found is the nearest one that was reported, a smaller city or district or a court race decided in the spring, and the section names it as such.

In Los Angeles, City Council member Nithya Raman defeated Mayor Karen Bass. NBC Los Angeles’s count on November 13 had Raman at 54.8% with 98.9% of the vote counted, by its estimate; Bass had been the first Los Angeles incumbent forced into a runoff since 2005, Ballotpedia noted.^{13, 14} In St. Petersburg, Florida, former Governor Charlie Crist defeated Mayor Kenneth Welch.¹² Washington, D.C., elected Janeese Lewis George to the seat Muriel Bowser is leaving, on the Associated Press’s call as reported by FOX 5 DC, which described her as the first mayor of the capital associated with democratic socialist politics.¹⁵

Of the 15 mayoral elections in the 100 largest cities that day, Ballotpedia counts at least one office that changed party control, Reno’s, where Democrat Kate Marshall was elected to succeed a nonpartisan mayor. Corpus Christi and Laredo go to runoffs, Corpus Christi’s on December 12, and the races in Anaheim, Irvine and Santa Ana, California, were uncalled on November 9.^{12, 16}

Tarrant County, Texas, which holds Fort Worth, moved from R+5.1 for president to D+19.2 in the Senate race. Its county government went with it. Democrat Alisa Simmons defeated the Republican county executive, Tim O’Hare, Democrats won a majority on the five-member commissioners court, and Democrat Tiffany Burks defeated the Republican district attorney. Bolts called Tarrant the Republicans’ last urban stronghold in Texas.³¹

Two sheriffs whom Bolts had covered for their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement lost. In Frederick County, Maryland, Democrat Karl Bickel leads Sheriff Chuck Jenkins, who was seeking a sixth term, 59.18% to 40.70% in the state’s unofficial count. In Alamance County, North Carolina, Shannon Long, a pastor who ran unaffiliated, defeated Sheriff Terry Johnson, a six-term Republican, by nearly five points.^{32, 33, 34}

Among prosecutors, Democrat Amara Hunter defeated District Attorney Jim O’Neill, a Republican seeking a fifth term, by nearly nine points in Forsyth County, North Carolina, and Cedrick Frazier won the open race for Hennepin County attorney in Minnesota.^{35, 36}

Chicago elected its whole school board for the first time, 21 seats. Jessica Biggs won the citywide race for board president. Chalkbeat reported on November 5 that candidates backed by school-choice groups were on track for 11 seats and that candidates endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union could reach nine if their leads held, with four district races too close to call.^{37, 38}

In Cobb County, Georgia, a Democrat defeated a Republican incumbent and the school board went from a 4-3 Republican majority to a 4-3 Democratic one.¹² The Texas State Board of Education stood at seven Democrats and seven Republicans with one district uncalled, in the count Ballotpedia published on November 9.²³ In Arizona, Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz won the office of superintendent of public instruction from the Republicans, by 6.6 points in our count.^{23, 39}

Twenty-two of 27 transit measures on the ballot passed, METRO Magazine reported. A regional sales tax for Bay Area transit had about 62% and Seattle’s transit measure passed with 72%. The exceptions included Fresno County’s transportation tax, which trailed with about 47%, and a Tempe, Arizona, measure that about 59% opposed.^{40, 41}

Ballotpedia counted 41 local measures on data centers and found that voters took the restrictive side in 40 of them. Trenton, Ohio, banned data centers above 25 megawatts. The exception was Harwood, North Dakota, where 75% voted against restrictions, NPR reported.^{6, 30} Oakland voters approved a strong-mayor charter with 73.8%.⁶ Honolulu voters rejected ranked-choice voting on the same day that Longmont, Colorado, adopted it.¹²

Winning seats and winning the power to pass laws are different things, and the second happened in fewer places. On the results reported so far it happened in six states, where Democrats will hold the governor’s office and both chambers: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In Arizona and Wisconsin they won both chambers from the Republicans in one night. In Pennsylvania they needed the Senate and took it 26 to 24. In Michigan and Minnesota the missing piece was the House, and in Nevada it was the governor’s office, which Aaron Ford won by 7.6 points.^{8, 10, 11, 17}

In five more states Democrats ended Republican control without gaining their own. Texas elected a Democratic governor, Gina Hinojosa, by 7.2 points, and Democrats to every other statewide executive office on the ballot, and Democrats lead for a majority of the state House, while the Senate stays Republican. Ohio and Iowa each elected a Democratic governor to face a Republican legislature. Georgia elected a Democratic governor and, on the calls so far, a Democratic House. New Hampshire kept its Republican governor and gave Democrats the legislature.^{2, 6, 7, 10}

Counted by the offices decided in our count, the largest gains are in Texas, where Democrats won a Senate seat, the governor’s office, six other statewide offices and two U.S. House seats; in Georgia, with the governor’s office and seven other statewide offices; and in Ohio, with a Senate seat, the governor’s office, three U.S. House seats and three other statewide offices: attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer.

Republicans won 13 Senate races, every one in a state Trump carried by 13 points or more. The closest were Louisiana, by 1.8, and Florida, by 2.9; in Nebraska the Republican beat an independent by 6.2. Trump’s margin did not settle a seat: Republicans held Florida, which he carried by 13 points, and lost South Carolina, which he carried by 18.

Republican candidates for governor had close calls of their own. Marsha Blackburn won Tennessee with 45.5% of the vote and Tommy Tuberville won Alabama by 3.9 points, in states Trump carried by 30 and 31. The two Republican governors in states Harris carried both won again.^{2, 3} Kelly Ayotte won New Hampshire by 4.4 points while her party’s Senate candidate lost there by 13.8, and Phil Scott won Vermont by 6.6 in a state Trump lost by 32.

In the states, Republicans kept full control of 18 governments on the results so far, Florida among them, and no chamber is reported to have moved to them. Their three gains in the U.S. House came in districts Trump had carried and Democrats had held: the Texas 32nd District, which he won by 17.7 points, the Tennessee 9th District, by 20.9, and the Maine 2nd District, by 9.0. Florida moved 10.2 points against the South’s 19.0, and there Republicans kept the Senate seat, the governor’s office and both legislative chambers while losing their supermajorities in both.^{6, 42}

The Senate class that faces voters in 2028 has 34 seats. After this election Democrats hold 16 of them and Republicans 18, counting the two special elections held this year, in Florida and Ohio, whose winners must run again in two years.⁴

Democrats will defend five of those seats in states Trump carried in 2024: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Republicans will defend none in a state Harris carried, and two, in North Carolina and Wisconsin, in states Trump won by fewer than ten points.

In five states Republicans no longer hold both the legislature and the governor’s office, which matters before 2028 wherever a legislature draws the maps and a governor can veto them. The state-by-state tally of who holds the pen is on our power page, and the congressional maps redrawn since 2024 are covered in The redraws.

The offices that run elections changed too.¹¹ Democrats won the secretary of state’s office from Republicans in Georgia, Indiana and Ohio.

Of the 653 races we follow, 21 were not called when this report’s data was fixed, on November 13, 2026: one for the Senate, one for governor, 16 for the House and the rest for statewide offices. None of them is counted in a party’s seats in this report. Where a sentence says a candidate leads, the race is open.

No result used here was described as certified in the sources we read. Vote totals will rise, and the turnout comparisons will rise with them. KTTC reported three legislative recounts still to come in Minnesota, and two U.S. House races in Louisiana go to runoffs on December 12.^{1, 18} Our count could not read every legislative seat: 25 of 98 chambers are incomplete in it, and for those the seat totals in this report are other people’s, with their names attached.

The comparison at the center of this report sets a midterm against a presidential election and one office against another. The electorate was about three-quarters the size of 2024’s, and it was a different electorate. A county’s move adds together people who switched sides and people who voted in only one of the two elections, and county returns cannot divide it. Nothing here measures how any group of voters behaved.

Candidates matter to the comparison as well. A governor with a following of his own makes a state look as if it lurched, as in Vermont. The state sections name the race each comparison uses.

The research on what the results change was done on November 13 and November 14, ten and eleven days after the election, from pages that could be opened without an account. Each state’s section and the national text were then checked, claim by claim, by a reader who had not written them, against the count and the cited pages. The National Conference of State Legislatures’ pages could not be opened at all, and nothing here is quoted from them. Each citation was reopened by a script that looked for the quoted passage on the page. Ballotpedia’s main site and a few newsrooms refused that script; where a claim rests on such a page, the claim says whose count it is.

Vote counts are each state’s election office, read by Call the Map, with civicAPI’s aggregation of the same official counts where an office could not be read. Every computed figure in this report comes from the counts as published on November 13, 2026, at one fixed version of our results data (6a2dbf6973), by a script that is rerun when the counts change. A margin is the Democrat’s votes minus the Republican’s as a share of all votes cast. A shift is a place’s margin this year in its state’s top race, which is the Senate race, or else the governor’s, or else the House vote added across districts, minus its margin for president in 2024. In Idaho, Montana, Nebraska and South Dakota, where an independent finished second for the Senate, the next race in that order is used.

A county is compared once its count reaches a quarter of its 2024 presidential vote; 3,112 counties pass. Alaska counts its votes by its 40 state house districts, not by borough, so its own section compares those districts, using the first choices for the Democrat and the Republican in its Senate race, and the national county figures leave it out. County characteristics are the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey estimates for 2019 to 2023: education, race and ethnicity, median household income, median age and density. Fifths are fifths of this year’s vote. Urban, suburban and rural are our own cut by density. Metro areas inside a state are the Office of Management and Budget’s 2023 definitions. The 2022 and 2024 House votes are the MIT Election Data and Science Lab’s returns, with blank and exhausted ballots left out.^{5, 19, 20}

A race counts as called here when our results desk has called it, when the state’s election office marks its results official, as Wyoming’s does for seven races, or when one candidate was on the ballot, as in four U.S. House districts. Nothing in this report compares a result with anyone’s prediction of it.