‘Today begins the great American comeback ... the people have had enough of extremism’

Texas turned blue long before midnight. James Talarico was elected as the first Democratic senator since Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, and shortly after that Gina Hinojosa, a lawyer from the border city of Brownsville, ended Greg Abbott’s hardline 12-year reign as governor of the Lone Star State.

The polls had been right – and if anything, they had been conservative in their forecasts. Donald Trump and his Maga republican movement took an unholy caning in the 2026 midterms. Texas. Iowa. Kansas. South Carolina. Ohio. All returned Democrat senators as the opposition party reclaimed both House and Senate. Just like that, the Trump era looked enfeebled, even if the president remains a volatile leader and less readable now that his power wanes.

“America is back,” proclaimed Hakeem Jeffries, who is set to become the first black speaker of the house in January. Throughout the resurgent first year of the Trump administration, Jeffries was under enormous pressure as the party sought to find its identity and voice after the 2024 presidential election calamity.

“I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn,” he told supporters in Washington.

“Union household raised in a cornerstone Baptist church. I learned very early on that a setback was nothing more than a setup for a comeback. Today begins the great American comeback. The American people have spoken all across the land. In the north, in the south, in the east, in the midwest, the American people have spoken and made clear they’ve had enough of the extremism, enough of the corruption. They want a Congress that’s going to deliver for the American people and that is exactly what House Democrats will do as soon as we get into office in January.”

It was an apt summation, even if this sudden reversal of momentum and national sentiment emanated not from party strategy so much as a combination of the Trump administration’s policies – the tariffs costs, the Iran war fuel costs, the tactical brutality of the immigration agency – and the independent emergence of a loose coalition of Democratic candidates that could loosely be termed as outsiders.

It was reported that Donald Trump stewed in the East Room watching the results, issuing social media posts grousing about Fox News, and telling the nation: “I wasn’t on the ballot and if I was, we would have run in a LANDSLIDE!”

But then, around midnight, Trump took a call – or perhaps put one in himself – to the Fox studio where he offered a valedictory note on a hugely significant night.

“It’s just a point in time, Brett,” he told the presenter.

“Just a point in time. That’s the way it is. There was a mood in the air, I guess. And if you look, I shouldn’t feel guilty because almost never does the sitting president, no matter good or bad, Republican or Democrat, you lose. I don’t know why.”

For the past month, the president had made these midterms a de facto referendum on himself, eclipsing and sometimes humiliating his candidates on the stumps for 30 straight days. The crowds still turned up, but there was a sense of a farewell tour about his pop-up shows in the heartland. If the old showmanship and menacing theatre was there, the venues were smaller than just two years ago and the energy was lacking.

Monday’s strange speech in front of the Reflecting Pool, when Trump gave a meandering and eccentric presentation on the reconstruction process, felt like an ominous sign. The show had become old – as all shows do. Trump has loomed over the United States for a full decade: a godsend to his Maga loyalists, a nightmare proposition to Democratic voters.

Less than two years after his phenomenal return to power, an emergent coalition of US voters declared an exhaustion with an unruly political carnival that all of a sudden seemed out of ideas. Trump and the administration could do nothing but watch as the cagey predictions of a blue wave took on an urgent and unstoppable momentum. After two years of black warnings about the repression of US democracy, Tuesday night represented a forceful and irrepressible demonstration of the democratic process.

But without the pure happenstance of the attacks on Iran that precipitated the fuel blockage in the Middle East, it’s unclear if this Democratic renaissance would ever have materialised.

“A part of it was Iran,” Trump himself suggested.

“But at the same time people understood the importance of what I’ve done with Iran. I think historically it is going to be much more important than this evening. I wasn’t on the ballot. Look, they got out for the rallies. They just weren’t inspired and if I wasn’t on the ballot they didn’t go. I think it was the gasoline prices. People agree with me with what I am doing with Iran, but they weren’t willing to go through the short-term consequences of paying more for gasoline. I understand that. I don’t agree with it. And I would say to people that it’s a short-term problem for long-term gain. And look, bottom line is they were not able, in many cases, to get the votes. And I think the Democrats did a good job. They fought me for a long time; this fight’s been going on a long time. This fight has been going on, really, if you look at it, 12 years.”

Trump spoke at length to Fox, where his political story began, while around the country, Democratic watch parties began to forecast a political future in which the president will no longer figure.

In Atlanta, supporters gathering at the watch party for Jon Ossoff began celebrating shortly before 8pm when CNN, with a haste bordering on indecent, forecast him as winner. By then he had amassed a 64 per cent/35 per cent lead over his Republican opponent, Mike Collins. It was a predictable conclusion to an election campaign that burnished Ossoff’s future Oval Office credentials in which he consistently attacked president Trump with brutal, cold clarity while destroying his opponent.

Keisha Lance Bottoms was elected to serve as the first black and first female governor of Georgia – and the first black woman to serve as governor in the United States.

If Ossoff’s emergence as the leader of a new generation of Democrats was anticipated, as the evening deepened, the party’s most optimistic wish list began to materialise. In Texas, James Talarico opened up a one-million vote lead on Ken Paxton with just half the votes in.

In the midwest, a quiet revolution was under way. Adam Hamilton, the Methodist megachurch pastor and political newcomer, was on his way to becoming the first Democratic senator from Kansas since 1932. History is circular. Ninety-four years ago, George McGill won that Democratic seat by convincing the Kansas farming class that the Roosevelt New Deal was the answer to the collapse in crop prices caused by the Dust Bowl and the tariff act enforced by Herbert Hoover in 1930.

Now, Hamilton could campaign on the spiralling diesel prices, on farming pain caused by the tariffs and Trump’s heedless, planless rush to war with Iran. In neighbouring Iowa, Josh Turek ran on the same manifesto, calmly espousing what he called “prairie populism”. In Michigan, the talented if fiery Abdul El-Sayed also pushed into a Senate lead.

One of the biggest shocks of the night was sourced to Charleston, one of the most beautiful cities in the United States, and where, on Tuesday, Annie Andrews’s campaign headquarters was located. Her bid to unseat Darline Graham in the South Carolina Senate race – Graham was handpicked by Trump to succeed her late brother Lindsey after his sudden death in July – had moved from outside chance to strong possibility in recent weeks. And as the red lanterns of the Republican Party began to go out in all kinds of unexpected places, Andrews became the first Democratic senator from South Carolina since 1988.

The emergence of Andrews from relative obscurity is instructive of the wild, culture-war atmosphere that has coursed through US politics for the past decade. A paediatrician, she ran for Congress just four years ago after becoming involved in curbing school gun violence following the Parkland shooting. Her opponent, Nancy Mace, targeted her with campaign ads levelling the charge of ‘child abuse’ through gender-related surgery to minors, leading Andrews to take an unpaid leave of absence while she campaigned.

“I knew politics would be ugly, but I never thought I’d see the day when my own congresswoman would accuse me – a paediatrician for over a decade – of ‘child abuse’,” she said through a statement then.

Mace won that election. Four years on, Mace is an exiting congresswoman, estranged from Trump after her stance on the Jeffrey Epstein files. And while almost all Republican candidates, and the president himself, repeatedly warned that a Democratic sweep would lead to a future of ‘men playing women’s sports’ and rampant transgender surgery for minors, the votes on Tuesday night made it clear that scare tactic has had its day.

In Dallas on Saturday morning, Ken Paxton, in the waning hours of his doomed campaign, turned up at an event with Enes Kantor, the former NBA player who has declared for the women’s professional league, the WNBA, to highlight his objection to that league’s gender and eligibility policies. The crowd cheered as he gave his spiel, but it was hollow, and halfhearted.

No, instead, new issues were on the minds of Americans, whether Republican or Democratic. Gas and cost-of-living prices may have driven a deep, kitchen-table economic unhappiness. But in the exit polls on Tuesday evening, many voters said they were worried about corruption.

In Texas, on election eve, Talarico told supporters at a rally in a funky downtown outdoor concert venue that the elite class “are coming at us with everything they got. The billionaire megadonors, the super PACs, they are spending more than 300 million dollars to try and stop us. That is the most in any Senate race in US history. They are scared. They are terrified. Elon Musk is trying to buy this Senate seat. We just found out that the richest man in the world is almost single-handedly bankrolling the effort to install Ken Paxton in the Senate.”

In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed said that rather than being interested in left versus right, he wanted to “stand with the people locked out” from the system. “I think that anybody who wants to win in the future here has to recognise that we are past left-right politics. There is a level of inequality in this country that is denying people basic access to the goods and services they need in their lives that has created an unlivable situation for a lot of folks.”

Those words pierced party loyalties and old suspicions. Much of this was self-inflicted by Trump, not least because of his insistence of choosing flawed or limited candidates like Paxton and Graham.

But such was the mood of the national voting pattern that the Republican Party could have run the ghost of Ronald Reagan and he would have struggled to convince the populus that the party mattered more than six-dollar diesel prices, farming prices, data centres, rampant house prices, or dire warnings of an AI jobs apocalypse, perhaps the reporting that Trump’s personal wealth had ballooned by two billion dollars since he returned to office, or the grim chorus line of tech and IT titans acting paying homage in the Oval Office, or the grim underlying scandal of the Epstein saga and the gargantuan presence that Donald Trump himself exerts over everyday American life.

With the 2026 midterms results came the sense that Americans, a restless nation, instinctively knew that it was time to think about the next thing, even if Trump has another two years to serve as president.

“Well, they are in control, but they are really not in control because they can send over 50 different great Bills that they are all excited about and I send them back with a nice stamp; Veto,” Trump warned on Tuesday night.

“And there’s not a thing they can do about that. I hope not to have to do that. But I can work with them on a lot of things.”

It may be too late for conciliatory gestures.

How we’re covering the US midterms

Follow Irish Times Washington Correspondent Keith Duggan and video journalist Chris Maddaloni in the final week of the campaign as they report from key battlegrounds and gauge the mood of voters across the US.

More US midterm election coverage here.