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The Democratic Party hadn’t experienced a night like this in many years. On Tuesday, November 3, following the midterm elections, the Democrats took control of the Senate and the House of Representatives. U.S. President Donald Trump, who is usually reluctant to acknowledge his opponents’ victories, conceded the Republican Party’s defeat. Nevertheless, he couldn’t resist the temptation to put himself in the spotlight by declaring, in a post on Truth Social: “I wasn’t on the ballot, and if I had been, we would have won by a landslide!” Donald Trump blamed the Republican candidates for the Democrats’ success. Yet it seems clear that this historic shift in power is more akin to a harsh rebuke from the American electorate toward the policies pursued by President Trump and his administration—whether economic, immigration-related, or foreign policy, particularly the war in Iran alongside Israel.
In the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party now holds 218 seats, compared to 125 for the Republicans. The remaining 95 seats are still to be decided following the final vote count. More surprisingly, in the Senate, the Democrats will now hold 54 seats, compared to 44 for the Republicans. Two seats had not yet been decided as of Wednesday morning. Symbolic of what many observers have called a “blue wave” are the victories of James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. The former, a 37-year-old former seminarian, becomes Texas’s first Democratic senator since 1988. The latter did even better: with his victory, this 62-year-old pastor brought down a Republican stronghold that had stood since… 1932. This success came despite a Republican offensive that saw the party spend more than $8.2 million on advertising in Kansas during the campaign. Other standout figures in these midterm elections were Democrats Keisha Lance Bottoms and Deb Haaland. The former, who served as mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, from 2018 to 2022, becomes the first Black woman elected governor of a state. The last Democratic victory in Georgia was in 1998. Until now, no woman had ever been elected by voters in this Southern state. The latter, in New Mexico (southwest), becomes the first Native American woman to be elected governor. She had already made history as the first Native American woman to hold a cabinet-level position when she became Secretary of the Interior under former President Joe Biden.
Speaking to two New York Times reporters on the evening of Tuesday, November 3, Donald Trump said he was ready to work with the Democrats. “We look forward to working with them,” the U.S. president said. “We will undoubtedly find common ground.” A prospect that is hard to imagine. In the weeks leading up to the election, Donald Trump had compared Democrats to communists whose goal was to ruin the United States. The final two years of his current presidential term are therefore likely to be marked by numerous confrontations and disagreements between Donald Trump and both houses of Congress.
