Democrats retake Congress in blue wave that reaches deep into GOP territory

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Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Texas. Kansas. South Carolina. Democrats pushed the map well past the Rust Belt, and the polls missed it again.

Washington Times national politics reporters Susan Ferrechio and Seth McLaughlin join George Gerbo to discuss what drove the results, why the wave could recede, and how Trump and congressional Republicans respond.

[GERBO] It was a wave, a tsunami, and it wasn’t really close. Democrats have swept back into control of Congress and in multiple state houses across the country in a repudiation of President Donald Trump and his policies.

Welcome to our Decision 2026 coverage here at The Washington Times.

I’m George Gerbo. Pleased to be joined by our talented national politics reporters, Seth McLaughlin and Susan Ferrechio.

Susan, I will start with you in Texas, a state that has long been talked about. If it’ll ever go blue, when will it go blue? You guys have written extensively in the lead-up to this. There may be some cracks in the red wall, but the red wall still held. And that was until last night, as James Talarico becomes the first Democratic senator to represent the Lone Star State in nearly 40 years.

And joining him in office will also be Gina Hinojosa, the first Democratic governor since Ann Richards in the 1990s. It truly ends up being a historic night for Democrats across the map, and it was led by those efforts in Texas.

[FERRECHIO] It was a really close race here, and the results were not what I don’t think anybody expected. It was predicted to be much closer. The polls had them running neck and neck, Ken Paxton and James Talarico. But ultimately, like other states and other House races, the margins of victory for Democrats are much bigger. You’re looking at a double-digit loss potentially for Ken Paxton right now. Nobody saw that coming. I don’t think anyone really thought that Greg Abbott was going to lose the governor’s mansion in Texas. And they’ve also flipped the House in Texas, too. So it was really overwhelming.

And it just reflected what happened in the rest of the country. You know, Texas is an interesting place because it’s got, you know, not only a full slate of Republican lawmakers who are now thrown out, but people are eyeing 2028 because Texas is 40 electoral votes. And that’s a huge chunk of what’s needed to win the White House. Now you have Democrats will eye it as a possible win in 2028.

And the saying goes, you know, once Texas falls, you know, to Democrats in the presidential election, then it will be almost impossible for Republicans to ever win the White House. And that’s really what this has opened the door to for Democrats, it’s a real opportunity for them. They can get in here and get a state to vote for a Democratic president. You’re not going to need the Rust Belt states anymore. You’re not going to need Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. It’s like you’ve made it all up for it in Texas.

I think Republicans are really shell-shocked right now, and they should be. And they’re probably thinking, you know, what I’m thinking right now, which is, OK, it’s bad right now, but this could actually get, for their party, much worse.

[GERBO] And Seth, to you in Michigan, a Rust Belt state, as Susan mentions, has a history, of course, of Democratic members going to the House and Senate, long a blue-collar working-class state. But the dynamics in this year’s race, specifically in the Senate, which was one of those pickups, mean Democrats will control the Senate with at least 54 seats in the new Congress.

That includes Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated Mike Rogers in a race with plenty of October and November surprises as we approached the final days of the campaign, where El-Sayed’s challenger from the Democratic primary, Haley Stevens, decides to flip and endorse Mike Rogers. Rogers, a former congressman, kind of a quasi-establishment candidate, but nothing’s ever establishment anymore in this day and age in either party. But El-Sayed ran a pretty disciplined campaign. He didn’t fall for attacks on his faith and on his positions. He becomes the first person of Islamic faith to be elected to the United States Senate, and he ends up winning with a pretty big margin that will be somewhere around six or seven points when all is said and done.

[McLAUGHLIN] Yeah, I think it’s at seven at the moment. But from the start, the interesting thing about this race was it has been a test case for how far you can go when you’re running on a liberal agenda, a progressive far-left platform that includes Medicare for all. And really, the bigger thing in this race is pushing the Democratic Party to rethink the way it approaches U.S.-Israel relations.

That sort of formula has worked in blue areas across the country, most notably with Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City. And so, you know, even going into that New York City race last year, people had a lot of questions about, you know, will that work in New York? And obviously it did. And then they carried some of that momentum into this race. And again, the question hung over this one in a purple state like Michigan, a perennial battleground now that President Trump won in 2024. Does it work here?

And I think, like you said, El-Sayed did run a pretty disciplined campaign. And, you know, the thing I think I keep thinking about him, I think the best description of him has been that he’s a political athlete. Like, he was nonstop. He held events all the time. He was doing interviews all the time and really showed that he had quite the battery on him. It seemed like that helped him in a lot of ways cut through some of the questions perhaps that are out there about his positions on Israel. You know, allowed him to, you know, ride. I mean, I think it’s important to keep in mind the political climate, right? So pro-Democrat that, you know, some people are going to read into this that perhaps it wasn’t El-Sayed’s liberal agenda that really propelled him to victory, but more the climate, right? So there’ll be reads coming from both sides on that.