2026 Election Results Live Updates: Democrats Expand House Majority as Lead in Mississippi Senate Mi
Democrats picked up more victories in tight House races on Thursday, keeping hold of a North Carolina seat that had been the target of Republican redistricting and flipping seats in Virginia, Arizona and Montana, where a former smokejumper disrupted decades of G.O.P. dominance.
The latest race calls by The Associated Press increased Democrats’ margins in the House, though they also hoped to add Senate seats in Alaska and Mississippi , where their nominees held narrow leads over the Republican incumbents.
In Mississippi, Scott Colom, a Democratic prosecutor, increased his lead over Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to a little more than 1,700 votes, while in Alaska, former Representative Mary Peltola was leading Senator Dan S. Sullivan by an even smaller margin.
Republicans picked up House wins in Virginia and New York in the races called on Thursday, but Democrats continued their run of wins in traditionally conservative areas.
In Montana, Sam Forstag, a union leader who used to parachute into remote areas to battle wildfires for the U.S. Forest Service, will succeed Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican who did not run for re-election. Mr. Forstag’s pro-labor platform won endorsements from progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
More than 30 House races were still uncalled as of midday Thursday, and the uncalled Senate contests remained front and center.
In Mississippi, the vote counts were rising slowly. Mr. Colom’s lead, which had been a few dozen votes on Wednesday, grew as more ballots were tabulated. But an unknown number of provisional and mail-in ballots were still to be counted.
In Alaska, the bulk of the remaining ballots was expected to be mail-in votes, which tend to favor Democrats, but the race will proceed to a ranked-choice tabulation on Nov. 18 if no candidate reaches 50 percent of the vote.
Earlier Thursday, President Trump renewed his complaints about the race in Alaska, where a spoiler candidate with same name as Mr. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, was recruited by Democrats to be on the ballot, a longstanding tactic used by both parties known as ballot stacking.
In a social media post, Mr. Trump said the votes for the similarly named candidate, as well as for a second candidate, should be transferred to the Senator Sullivan, arguing it was the only “fair solution.”
A federal judge previously had dismissed a Trump administration effort to pre-emptively block certification of the results if the incumbent suffered a narrow loss because of the ballot-stacking effort.
Republicans are still grappling with a series of losses that have stunned members of the party and sent them seeking answers.
Senator John Curtis, a Utah Republican, rejected Mr. Trump’s assessment that Republicans lost because the president was not on the ballot , saying that voters care about corruption and the economy.
“This was about the president and the president’s policies,” Mr. Curtis said. “And I think that to pretend otherwise is not realistic.”
Here’s what else we’re covering.
Ousted: Susan Collins, Maine’s five-term Republican senator, had long seemed invulnerable to ordinary politics. But on Tuesday, she said, she was “caught up in the Trump tsunami” that forced many in her party out of their seats. Read more ›
Japan reaction: After Tuesday’s election, pundits and politicians around the world are talking about the “blue tsunami.” But in Japan, the word and its imagery, are complicated, evoking destruction and despair. Read more ›
Ballot measures: Voters across the country also weighed in on a range of statewide issues, including abortion, how future elections would be run and how their own votes would be counted. And in Washington, voters passed a measure restricting transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports. Read more ›
Lawyers for Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and her campaign have formally written to Mississippi state officials to demand “the immediate separation, secure custody, and preservation of all affidavit ballots,” a signal that litigation may be ahead in the Republican incumbent’s race against Scott Colom, a Democrat and district attorney. Hyde-Smith is 1724 votes behind Colom, with more than 95 percent of ballots counted. Officials are continuing to count affidavit ballots across the state.
Reporting from Charleston, S.C.
A new wall of blue states emerged from the midterm election map. It was not along the edges of the Great Lakes but along the Atlantic Ocean, from Virginia to Georgia.
Democrats won competitive races in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia on Tuesday, gaining ground across the South .
In North Carolina, Roy Cooper, the popular former governor, won the Senate race by nearly 20 percentage points, a resounding victory that appeared to make waves down-ballot, helping flip control of the state’s congressional delegation and State House.
In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff won re-election by 18 points, helping to lift Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became the nation’s first elected female Black governor. Democrats won every statewide race in Georgia and flipped the State House.
Even in South Carolina, which had hardly been on the battleground Senate map, Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, upset Senator Darline Graham, the interim Republican incumbent, by more than four points. Democrats also flipped a House seat and 10 state legislative seats in a traditionally Republican state.
And Democrats’ power in the South could expand even further: The Mississippi Senate race remained too close to call on Thursday, with the Democratic nominee, Scott Colom, a district attorney, leading Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent, by a razor-thin margin.
Democratic Senate nominees in the South benefited from the national mood punishing President Trump and his party over high prices and the unpopular war in Iran. They also harnessed anger from Black voters over redistricting efforts that diluted some Black representation in Congress.
The winning nominees made key decisions at pivotal campaign moments that contributed to their victories. Here are some of them:
In North Carolina , Mr. Cooper knew that voters knew him and mostly liked him . But he also knew that Republicans would spend vast sums to defend the Senate seat in North Carolina, a state that Mr. Trump won three times. So he raised money knowing that national Republican political groups would be able to outspend Democratic ones.
His campaign went on television early, reminding voters who he was and defining Michael Whatley, his Republican rival, who was little-known to most voters, as a Washington lobbyist for energy companies. When Mr. Whatley’s campaign attacked the former governor as soft on crime, Mr. Cooper’s team pushed back with fact-checking ads — and tied Mr. Whatley to a convicted sex offender who held roles with the state Republican Party.
Mr. Cooper wanted a short and direct campaign slogan that could cut across party lines and demographic groups, and he found it: “Make Stuff Cost Less.”
By the time October arrived, Mr. Cooper was so consistently ahead that Republicans pulled their advertising money from the state. Then, so did Democrats, allowing them to spend in competitive races elsewhere.
In Georgia , Mr. Ossoff laid the foundation to win a second term during his first. He built a robust constituent services operation. He maintained strong relationships with Black communities and churches. He befriended local Republican officials, including mayors and county commissioners, and tried to fulfill their federal needs. Some of them later endorsed him.
The senator’s fund-raising prowess helped scare off potential opponents. When Representative Mike Collins won the Republican primary, Mr. Ossoff tagged him as a bigot, an attack that resurfaced following several news reports connecting his aides and his son-in-law to white nationalism and racism. (Mr. Collins said in a debate last month that he had “condemned racism, antisemitism, hate.”)
Mr. Ossoff’s message was an aggressive critique against President Trump and his administration — not only on tariffs and the war in Iran but also on corruption. When he started delivering it, some Democrats worried he might be going too far. By the end of the campaign, corruption was a motivating issue for many voters.
In South Carolina , Ms. Andrews’s original opponent, Lindsey Graham, died in July . That gave her an opening to run not against a four-term incumbent but against his sister, an inexperienced candidate .
Ms. Andrews campaigned with well-known Black Democrats, such as Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. She gave interviews to conservative media outlets. She held town hall-style events in rural and Republican parts of the state. She leaned into a message of rejecting family dynasties in politics.
Ms. Andrews saw a way to win over independents and Republicans after Representative Ralph Norman lost to Ms. Graham in a bitter Republican primary. Mr. Norman’s son, Warren, said he was leaning toward voting for Ms. Andrews. They spoke; in her final rallies, she referred to the support she was getting from her “new friend” — Warren Norman.
Democrats in the South hope that their wins will persuade national Democratic leaders to run year-round organizing and voter registration in states that had previously been seen as unwinnable.
Back in April, some Democratic donors laughed when Mr. Warnock, who campaigned for candidates across the South, suggested they consider investing in Mississippi, according to an audio recording of a private fund-raiser obtained by The New York Times.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Warnock said that he hoped donors would now see “a multiracial coalition” rising in the region. Democratic wins in Georgia, he noted, came after a decade of work organizing, educating and registering voters.
“It felt like it happened all of a sudden,” he said. “It wasn’t sudden.”
“We know the formula,” he added. “We need to enact it in Mississippi, in South Carolina, in North Carolina, in Florida, in Texas.”
Nithya Raman widened her lead over Mayor Karen Bass today, as California’s vote count continued in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Raman, a democratic socialist and former ally of Bass’s on the City Council, was ahead by about 35,000 votes with more than three-fourths of the expected vote in.
While Democrats are certain to end up with a large House majority, it’s still unclear whether they will beat their 2008 performance, when they won 257 seats alongside Barack Obama’s victory.
Democrats have won 247 House seats so far, and they lead in 13 of the 35 competitive races that have not yet been called. But those tallies are based on the reported vote so far, and the margin in these races will change as more ballots are counted. (There are five additional uncalled races between candidates of the same party, and we have already added them to the balance of power tallies.)
The uncalled races include five in West Coast states that typically take longer to count and have reported 70 percent of their votes or less. They also include several seats that have come down to tight margins, like six North Carolina seats that analysts had expected Republicans to win easily.
Follow all of the uncalled House races .
Votes continue to arrive in the Mississippi Senate race, with 2,058 additional votes reported so far today. The new votes, which are likely a combination of provisional and mail-in ballots, pushed the Democrat Scott Colom’s lead over Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith to 1,724 votes in one of the two remaining Senate races that have yet to be called.
It is unknown how many provisional ballots have been cast or how many will be accepted before next week’s deadline. With each of the state’s 82 counties reporting its own results, small batches will likely trickle in over the coming days. The state is also waiting on late-arriving mail ballots, which can arrive as late as Nov. 10, provided they were postmarked by Election Day.
Dr. Amish Shah, a moderate Democrat and a former sideline physician for the New York Jets, defeated Jay Feely, a Republican and a former N.F.L. kicker, in a battleground House race for a prized Phoenix-area seat, according to The Associated Press. An endorsement from President Trump lifted Feely to the Republican nomination, but he could not overcome the president’s unpopularity. Shah, a former state lawmaker who evangelizes about the power of door-knocking, is set to replace Representative David Schweikert, a Republican, who gave up his seat to run for governor.
Nick LaLota, a two-term incumbent Republican, has won re-election in New York’s First Congressional District, according to The Associated Press, beating back a challenge from Chris Gallant, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot. The Long Island district has been reliably Republican in recent years and was formerly represented by Lee Zeldin, a Trump ally and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
The race was marked by revelations that Gallant had been a model in an explicit ad campaign for leather bondage gear almost two decades ago. Gallant said he was unashamed of the photos and argued that they had no bearing on his qualifications.
Sam Forstag, a Democratic union leader and former smoke jumper, won a House seat in Montana’s First Congressional District, according to The Associated Press, disrupting decades of Republican dominance in western Montana.
He will succeed Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican who did not run for re-election, and become the first Democrat to represent Montana in the House this century. The district, which President Trump won by 12 percentage points in 2024, includes the liberal cities of Bozeman and Missoula.
Forstag’s campaign had centered on a blue-collar, pro-labor message and his victory supported the theory that left-leaning politicians can do better in Republican strongholds in general elections than moderates. He won endorsements from progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
A Democratic prosecutor narrowly toppled Representative Rob Wittman, a Republican first elected in 2007, on Thursday, according to The Associated Press , as a tsunami of voter anger reached his Virginia district.
Shannon Taylor, the winner, ran on her long record as the top prosecutor in Henrico County, in the Richmond suburbs. She accused Mr. Wittman of having profited from stock trading and from tax breaks that he voted for, centering her campaign on a fight against corruption and entrenched “Washington insiders.” (Mr. Wittman vehemently denied the claims.)
Mr. Wittman kept the margins close, even as many Republicans in districts that President Trump narrowly won fell by large margins. On the campaign trail, he leaned on his deep familiarity with the district and promoted the investments he had secured during his nearly two decades in office.
The Democratic establishment viewed Ms. Taylor as a star recruit, and she easily cleared the primary field. During her campaign, she also built on the name recognition she had established during an unsuccessful run for state attorney general in 2025.
The congressional district, Virginia’s First, stretches from the Richmond suburbs to the so-called Historic Triangle of Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg, and out to the Tidewater region on the state’s eastern shore.
Mr. Trump won the district by five percentage points in 2024, but Ms. Taylor’s victory signals it might be moving to the left. In her campaign, Ms. Taylor worked to tie cost-of-living increases to Mr. Trump’s policies.
Ms. Taylor’s victory came even after a costly redistricting plan meant to benefit her and other Democratic candidates fell through. The state Supreme Court blocked the voter-approved map in May.
Representative Don Davis, Democrat of North Carolina, won re-election over his Republican challenger, Laurie Buckhout, according to The Associated Press, overcoming redrawn district lines that favored the Republican. Back in 2024, Davis had narrowly defeated Buckhout, but then state lawmakers approved a new map that wove heavily Republican communities into the First Congressional District, in eastern North Carolina, and siphoned part of the area’s Black Belt into a neighboring district. The race tightened after Kalshi, a prediction market, suspended Buckhout’s account in August after she bet on her own chances to win.
Reporting from Washington
Representative John McGuire, a Virginia Republican, won re-election to the House, according to The Associated Press , holding a seat for his party that had appeared vulnerable earlier this year.
Mr. McGuire defeated former Representative Tom Perriello, a Democrat who in 2008 won one term in an earlier version of the district, which stretches from Charlottesville to the state’s border with North Carolina.
Mr. Perriello entered the race against Mr. McGuire last year, when it appeared Virginia Democrats would redraw the state’s congressional maps to create a district that former Vice President Kamala Harris had carried by three percentage points in 2024.
But when Virginia courts invalidated the redistricting effort , the lines reverted to the 2024 district that Mr. McGuire won by 15 percentage points and Mr. Trump carried by 12 percentage points. Even in 2025, when Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, sailed to a double-digit victory for governor, the district went for her Republican opponent by seven percentage points.
After his term in Congress, Mr. Perriello served in the Obama administration as a diplomat in Africa and then worked for the Open Society Foundations, the philanthropic network funded largely by George Soros. Though he remained in the race after the redistricting reversal, his candidacy did not attract large amounts of spending by supportive outside groups.
Mr. McGuire will return to Congress for a second term in the House. He was first elected in 2024, emerging after he ousted an incumbent, Representative Bob Good, during a primary campaign that split the MAGA movement . Mr. Good had endorsed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida during the 2024 presidential primary campaign, which angered Mr. Trump’s supporters even though Mr. Good was among the most conservative members of the House.
Sam Forstag, a former union leader and smoke jumper, won western Montana’s House race, becoming the first Democrat elected to the House in the state in more than 30 years, according to The Associated Press , which called the race on Thursday.
Mr. Forstag narrowly beat Aaron Flint, a conservative radio host running as a Republican who was endorsed by President Trump.
“We aren’t just winning; we’re winning with authority, sending a message about what can happen when working people come together,” Mr. Forstag said to enthusiastic cheers on Tuesday night at the Florence Building, an event space in Missoula, Mont.
“We can again be a state that bends the course of this country’s history for the better,” he added later.
More than 200 supporters, many in their 20s and 30s, attended the party. Some attendees noted that the crowd was far younger than what was typical at congressional election night parties in Montana.
Mr. Forstag campaigned as a progressive focused on lowering housing and health care costs, protecting public lands and giving working people a stronger voice in Washington. He gained high-profile endorsements from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, which Mr. Flint mocked, suggesting that their alliance proved how radically liberal and out of touch with Montanans he was.
Mr. Flint’s campaign emphasized his commitment to making Montana more affordable and countering a progressive agenda. But in the end, Mr. Forstag’s pro-labor message resonated more than Mr. Flint’s with the roughly 580,000 residents of the district.
Mr. Flint acknowledged Mr. Forstag’s victory in a social media post on Wednesday morning.
“Before the race had been officially called last night, I placed a phone call to my opponent congratulating him on his win, and I also offered my assistance if ever needed,” he wrote.
Representative Pat Williams, who died last year, was the last Democrat to hold a House seat, leaving it in 1997 after 18 years. In an interview, his daughter Whitney Williams noted similarities between Mr. Forstag and her father.
“I really think it’s exactly the same set of stuff that got my sweet dad elected in the ’70s,” she said. “It was electing a working person who was an insanely hard worker, who literally knocked on nearly every door in the district, who was authentic, who was a good listener, who led with compassion.” She also drew a connection between voter frustrations with Republicans in the post-Watergate era, when her father was first elected, and voter frustrations with Republicans connected to President Trump.
Senator John Curtis, a Utah Republican, rejected President Trump’s assessment that Republicans lost on Tuesday because the president was not on the ballot.
“It turns out voters care about corruption,” Curtis said in an interview. “It turns out voters care about the economy.” Curtis cited voter anger about Trump’s tariff policies and the Iran war. “This was about the president and the president’s policies,” Curtis said. “And I think that to pretend otherwise is not realistic.”
The congressional race in northern Maine between Paul LePage, the Republican candidate and former governor, and Matthew Dunlap, the Democratic candidate and state auditor, will be decided by ranked choice voting, the state’s Secretary of State said today.
Though LePage is ahead — and has declared victory , even though The Associated Press has yet to call the race in the state’s Second Congressional District — he did not receive a majority of first-choice votes, setting off a ranked-choice tabulation process that is scheduled to begin Monday. LePage has received 50.35 percent of the vote, while Dunlap has received 49.6 percent.
Write-in candidates and blank votes have accounted for the rest. The ranked choice tabulation process will be livestreamed on the Secretary of State’s YouTube page . Click here for an explanation of how it works.
The Associated Press has not called three House races in Tennessee. But one Democrat, State Representative Justin J. Pearson, conceded in his narrow loss in one of the Memphis-area seats carved up earlier this year after the weakening of the Voting Rights Act.
“I accept the results of this election for Congress. But, I will not concede to rigged maps, attacks on democracy in Tennessee, or to billionaire control of our political system,” Pearson said.
It wasn’t long after Democrats claimed victory across huge swaths of the nation on Tuesday night that Republicans started pointing fingers at one another. Meanwhile, Democrats, riding high on the promise of a congressional majority, started pointing to their work.
Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, posted more than 30 photos of himself campaigning with winning candidates as their race calls rolled in. Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky each posted a dozen such photos.
The biggest names in Democratic politics had helped midterm candidates raise money, court voters and generate buzz, in some cases spending months traveling the country to campaign. Now they want to share in the victory lap, even if they themselves weren’t on the ballot.
Their efforts weren’t always purely altruistic: Many of this cycle’s busiest campaign surrogates are mulling 2028 presidential runs, and hitting the trail can be a prime opportunity to road-test ideas and build a national brand. And picking winners, of course, is generally a good look.
Here are some of the Democratic heavyweights who made big bets that paid off this midterm season.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist from the Bronx, focused much of her campaigning this year on New York , but there was a major exception: Michigan.
One of the party’s top fund-raisers, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Abdul El-Sayed for Senate in Michigan, then campaigned with him and transferred $1 million to an account to help him get elected — a huge sum for a House member to devote to a Senate contest.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who is considering a run for president in 2028 , made clear that she saw Mr. El-Sayed’s race as a test of the broader progressive movement’s electoral appeal. During a private fund-raiser , she said that “if Abdul can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere.” This week, he did just that.
Former President Barack Obama has considerable sway in a Democratic Party without an obvious standard-bearer. So it was notable when, in May, he showed up at a taco joint in Austin, Texas, with Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico.
“Do you know our outstanding next governor and senator?” Mr. Obama asked as he went from table to table. His wishful question proved prophetic: Both candidates won their elections .
Aside from a late blitz in a handful of battlegrounds , the former president was very selective about showing support for candidates. But he used those occasional interventions to cultivate a new generation of Democratic leaders who, like him, aim to build bridges across party lines.
His record this cycle was strong: Mr. Obama made one of his first formal endorsements in July by filming a video in which he shot hoops with Josh Turek, a centrist state lawmaker and Paralympian running for Senate. Mr. Turek won , becoming Iowa’s first Democratic senator in a decade.
The Rev. Raphael Warnock, a Democratic senator from Georgia, has been one of the loudest voices calling on Democrats to invest more resources in the South .
Mr. Warnock, who may be eyeing a 2028 presidential bid, focused his own midterm efforts there and urged others to do the same: “As goes the South, so goes the nation,” he said while campaigning in North Carolina.
And this week, Democrats delivered some of their most stunning electoral performances in the region in races that Mr. Warnock had prioritized earlier and more heavily than many other Democrats had.
He campaigned in South Carolina with Annie Andrews, a pediatrician who defied expectations by flipping a Senate seat in one of the country’s most conservative states; in North Carolina with Roy Cooper, a former governor who flipped another Senate seat ; and in Mississippi with Scott Colom, a prosecutor who remains locked in a close Senate race against a Republican incumbent.
“We can win in Mississippi, but even if we don’t, it would be foolhardy for Democrats not to lean into that state,” Mr. Warnock told The New York Times before the election.
Mr. Buttigieg was one of the cycle’s most prolific campaigners.
He endorsed more than 100 candidates and appeared at events in more than 30 states. He focused his efforts on Democrats running to flip Republican-held House seats, and those candidates scored victories across the country.
Mr. Buttigieg campaigned with 29 candidates running to flip seats this year; at least 20 of them pulled it off.
He was the only national surrogate to campaign in North Carolina with Jamie Ager, a farmer who won a House district that President Trump had carried by 10 points , according to Grayson Barnette, Mr. Ager’s campaign manager. And Mr. Buttigieg was early to endorse Mr. Turek during a competitive primary in which some polls had shown him trailing.
President Trump has called on Alaska to transfer votes from Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr, a retired teacher and nominee for Senate, who was recruited to dilute the support of incumbent Dan S. Sullivan. Trump claimed in a social media post that the latter would “easily win” the race that is currently being led by Democratic candidate Mary Peltola.
A federal judge in Alaska recently dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit that pre-emptively sought to block certification of the state’s U.S. Senate election results if Sullivan the incumbent loses but would have won had votes cast for Sullivan the retired teacher gone to him instead.
John Yoon and Jim Beaugez
Jim Beaugez reported from Jackson, Miss.
Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Mississippi, went from a long shot months ago to holding a lead of over 1,700 votes over the Republican incumbent, Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, leaving the race too close to call on Thursday.
The tiny margin has given Mississippi an unexpected turn in the national spotlight as the only state other than Alaska where the Senate race has not yet been called. With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, it also sets up a nail-biting wait to learn whether Democrats will expand their already large Senate majority through a state that has not elected a Democrat to the chamber in more than 40 years.
Here’s how the race became this close:
In Mississippi, which President Trump won by about 23 points in 2024, Ms. Hyde-Smith was favored to win throughout her campaign. But the deep-red state became an unexpected battleground in October when one of Mr. Colom’s campaign ads went viral.
The roughly 30-second video mocks Ms. Hyde-Smith’s response to a local television anchor’s comment on the rising price of beef: “You have so many proteins to choose from,” she says in a clip.
The video cuts to a man grilling burgers. “Pick another protein?” he says. “I’d rather pick another senator instead.” The message, which aligned with Mr. Colom’s focus on affordability, amplified a gaffe by Ms. Hyde-Smith that turned off voters.
National Democrats noticed. Not long after the ad’s debut, the Senate Majority PAC, the flagship super PAC for Democratic Senate candidates, poured $1.2 million into the race, and later invested another $1 million. The Senate Democrats’ campaign arm also put $500,000 into the state.
High-profile Democrats campaigned for Mr. Colom. Former President Barack Obama filmed an endorsement ad. Former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Raphael Warnock of Georgia all campaigned with him in Mississippi.
Republican super PACs invested into the race, and Mr. Trump campaigned with Ms. Hyde-Smith as the race tightened.
Mr. Colom, a Black prosecutor running against a white incumbent senator, appealed to Mississippi’s Black residents, a crucial group that typically leans Democratic and accounts for about 37 percent of the state’s population, the largest share of any state . He had the biggest margins in predominantly Black counties, according to election data compiled by The New York Times.
If Mr. Colom wins, he would be Mississippi’s first Black senator since the Reconstruction era, though he downplayed the milestone during his campaign.
He also employed an unusual strategy: He attended Mr. Trump’s rally in Mississippi for Ms. Hyde-Smith the week before the election — not to confront voters but to walk the line and listen to them discuss issues like health care, grocery bills and gas prices.
He posed for selfies with rally-goers and later said he had converted some to his camp. In an interview with CNN last week , he made an appeal to Republican voters.
“I’m going to get you what you were promised in 2024,” he said, citing three issues he brought up with them: lower grocery prices, an end to wars and the full and transparent release of the Epstein files.
The wait could drag on because the deadline for every county to accept mailed ballots is not until next Tuesday. The same deadline applies to affidavit ballots, also known as provisional ballots, which voters can cast if they show up at the polls but are not in the voter rolls or have forgotten to bring a photo ID.
Mr. Colom urged residents to mind the deadline and provide the required documentation, such as a proper ID, to their circuit clerk’s offices to ensure their affidavit ballots are counted.
Counties must process those ballots by Nov. 13, the deadline to submit certified results to the state. After that, the result is virtually fixed. Mississippi’s secretary of state, Michael Watson, will compile each county’s numbers and certify the cumulative total by Dec. 3, said Elizabeth Jonson, a spokeswoman for Mr. Watson. There will not be a runoff, in accordance with state election laws.
A quirk in Mississippi’s statutes — the lack of a mechanism allowing recounts in statewide general elections — means the candidates may have to wait to see every last ballot being tallied. Without an option to contest the results, candidates can file a legal challenge only to include or exclude a specific group of ballots before the vote is certified, said Derek Muller, an election law expert at Notre Dame Law School.
“ We have hundreds of volunteers, we’ve got local lawyers that are going to be at the county meetings in each county,” Mr. Colom said in a news conference on Wednesday. “We will protect the process of this election, we will protect the integrity of this election.”
Analysts said they could not remember a Senate race this close in Mississippi. Some supporters of Mr. Colom said they believed that even if Ms. Hyde-Smith wins, the thin margin would diminish her power in Washington.
“I’m pretty amazed,” said Ervin Ricks, 55, who works at a church in Brandon, Miss. “I thought for sure that Cindy Hyde-Smith would retain her office pretty easily.”
Some voters also blamed Ty Pinkins, who is Black and ran in the race as an independent after leaving the Democratic Party last year, for splitting Democratic voters. A lawyer and an Army veteran, Mr. Pinkins disputed this claim, saying that he had not drawn voters away from Mr. Colom and hoped the Democrat would win.
“I didn’t expect it to be this close,” Mr. Pinkins said in an interview. “I am happy that the Democrat is leading.”
An earlier version of this article misattributed a quotation from a voter in Mississippi about Cindy Hyde-Smith. It was Ervin Ricks — not Christi Payton — who said, “I’m pretty amazed. I thought for sure that Cindy Hyde-Smith would retain her office pretty easily.”
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more .
President Trump used to gloat about his near-perfect endorsement record, reveling in the control he exerted over the Republican nomination process during this year’s primary season. Voters overwhelmingly rewarded the candidates he backed and punished those who displeased him, muscling numerous less loyal candidates out of contention.
“If you pushed back” on Mr. Trump, said Justin Evans, a Republican strategist in South Carolina, “you’d get your head chopped off.”
Mr. Trump has little to brag about this week. Senate candidates he had helped elevate, including Darline Graham in South Carolina, Michael Whatley in North Carolina and Ken Paxton in Texas, lost by margins previously unimagined by even the most optimistic Democrats. Those high-profile defeats contributed to what Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a one-time Trump rival for the presidential nomination, called as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans” as the country has seen in a century.
“The people who did the best last night were the people who distanced themselves from the president,” Mr. Evans said, calling the results “a universal repudiation of the bullying that’s been taking place during this primary” by Mr. Trump.
Here’s a look at what happened to some of the candidates who tied their fortunes most closely to Mr. Trump.
After Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, died in July, Mr. Trump threw his weight behind Mr. Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, in a snap primary election. While many Republican insiders objected, primary voters listened, narrowly nominating Ms. Graham over Representative Ralph Norman, despite her self-described lack of experience or policy expertise.
On Tuesday, the wider South Carolina electorate rejected Ms. Graham , choosing to send a Democrat to Washington for the first time in nearly 30 years.
“It wasn’t that voters rebuked Trump,” Mr. Evans said, noting that the Republican nominee for governor had earned at least 90,000 more votes than Ms. Graham. “It was that the entire Washington machine pushed this woman on South Carolina, and South Carolina resoundingly pushed back.”
Senate Republicans begged Mr. Trump to endorse Senator John Cornyn over Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in the state’s Republican Senate primary. Many argued that Mr. Paxton’s scandal-ridden past would make it significantly more difficult, and more costly, to win in a general election. They also said a contentious intraparty battle would waste resources needed in more competitive states. Mr. Trump ignored them, waiting until days before a May primary runoff to back Mr. Paxton.
On Tuesday, despite dramatically outspending Democrats, Republicans lost the Senate seat, the governor’s mansion, and every other statewide race in Texas, breaking a more than three-decade-long streak of G.O.P. dominance.
Some Texas Republicans speculated that Mr. Paxton would have won the primary regardless of Mr. Trump’s choice. It is also not clear that Mr. Cornyn could have defied the tsunami of voter anger that propelled Democrats to victory up and down the ballot. But some blamed Mr. Paxton, and Mr. Trump, for the extent of the losses.
“You stand by Trump at your own peril at this point,” said Dade Phelan, the former Republican speaker of the State House. He recalled how Mr. Trump asked voters in Texas and elsewhere to “pretend I’m on the ballot.”
“Well, voters imagined he was on the ballot,” Mr. Phelan said. “And it was an absolute apocalypse for Republicans.”
Mr. Trump’s fingerprints were all over North Carolina’s Senate race. First, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican who has served in North Carolina for more than a decade, announced he would retire rather than run for re-election after the president threatened to back a primary opponent against him.
Then, Mr. Trump handpicked Michael Whatley , a former Republican National Committee chairman, and Mr. Whatley spent millions touting Mr. Trump’s endorsement ahead of his victory in the Republican Senate primary. On Tuesday night, Mr. Whatley fell to former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper , a Democrat, by around 20 points, a stunning leftward shift for a state that Mr. Trump won in 2024.
Meghan McMichael, 33, a voter in Canton, N.C., said on Tuesday that she had voted for Mr. Cooper and other Democrats in order to hold the Trump administration accountable for its treatment of immigrants, and the state of the economy.
“I’m just hopeful that certain people will be held accountable for things that have happened over the last two years,” she said.
Senator Jon Husted, Ohio’s Republican Senate nominee and a former college football player, was little known nationally until President Trump started talking about his rear end while on the campaign trail. Mr. Husted also joined Mr. Trump at several Ohio rallies in the final weeks of the campaign, tying himself to the president.
Mr. Husted lost to former Senator Sherrod Brown on Tuesday , making Ohio one of seven states that Democrats had flipped as of Wednesday evening.
The president’s comments about Mr. Husted’s backside may also have backfired, with voters across the country telling The New York Times they had disapproved of his remarks that Mr. Husted had a “great ass” and a “pile of muscle.”
In Lincoln, Neb., on Tuesday, Deondre Webster, 36, said he didn’t believe Mr. Trump is a good role model for his three daughters.
“We don’t want to see the leader of the country talking about male behinds or stuff like that onstage,” he said. “When he’s supposed to be the leader, and that’s not what we’re teaching our kids.”
Mark Barrett in North Carolina and Justin Diep in Nebraska contributed reporting.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Senator Jon Husted of Ohio is a former professional football player. Mr. Husted is a former college football player but never played professionally.
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at [email protected] . Learn more .
Caroline Soler and Christine Zhang
Control of the U.S. Senate has already been determined , with 33 of the 35 contests being called within hours of polls closing. In Alaska and Mississippi , however, no race calls have been made for the Senate and it could be quite some time until either contest is decided, even as some additional vote totals trickle out in the coming days.
In both cases, the Democratic nominee is clinging to a slim lead, but the reasons for the lack of a call are far different.
Alaska’s Senate race could take days or weeks to be called. Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee, had a lead of fewer than 1,000 votes as of Wednesday afternoon, but nearly a quarter of the expected votes remain uncounted.
The bulk of the remaining vote is in the form of mail-in ballots. Some were cast close to Election Day, while others were postmarked by Election Day and will be received in the days after. A smaller chunk of early in-person ballots are also outstanding.
The deadline to tabulate all ballots, including provisional ballots, is Nov. 18. That is also the date that ranked-choice tabulation will begin, should neither Ms. Peltola nor Senator Daniel S. Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, cross the 50 percent threshold needed to win the election in the first round.
While the late mail vote typically leans toward Democrats, multiple factors could undercut Ms. Peltola’s possible advantage, including how many ballots will be received and how many are from voters who did not rank additional candidates beyond their first choice. There is also the potentially confounding presence of the other two candidates on the ballot, Gerald L. Heikes and Daniel J. Sullivan Jr .
A New York Times analysis of the available ranked-choice data pulled from each voter’s ballot shows that more than a third of voters who ranked Mr. Heikes or Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. as their first choice did not rank another candidate. That means these ballots would not count toward either Ms. Peltola or Senator Sullivan in subsequent rounds of the ranked-choice tabulation.
As of Wednesday evening, Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee in Mississippi, had a lead of roughly 1,000 votes over Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent. Because the margin is so tight, The Associated Press may not be able to make a race call until the state certifies a winner.
Mississippi is somewhat of an outlier in that it does not have a mechanism for automatic recounts, and has no method for a candidate to contest the election, so a court order would be required to initiate a recount.
Nearly all of the votes have been counted in the race, but a smattering of provisional ballots — which are ballots given to those with questions about their eligibility to vote — are still waiting to be counted, as are some late-arriving mail ballots. According to Mississippi's secretary of state, there are approximately 3,600 outstanding mail ballots that could arrive in time to be counted.
Mississippi’s Supreme Court ruled in June that the state must accept mail-in ballots that arrive by the Tuesday after Election Day — this year, Nov. 10. And provisional ballots in the state must be tallied by that day as well. For a provisional ballot to be accepted, the voter is required to provide proper identification to elections officials, obtain a state voter ID card, or submit a religious exemption.
Some counties in the state have said they hope to begin releasing some results of provisional ballots on Wednesday. It is currently unknown how many ballots remain uncounted statewide. Adding a layer of complexity, ballot processing and counting, which includes ruling on provisional ballots, is conducted by each county’s five-person elections commission rather than a single elections official.
In 2024, the state had just under 15,000 provisional ballots, of which 70 percent were accepted. In 2022, the state had about 5,700 provisional ballots, of which 75 percent were accepted.
Evan Peng contributed reporting.
Reporting from Bangor, Maine
As Susan Collins campaigned in York County, Maine, recently, a woman approached to inform the Republican senator that she had always supported her and “absolutely” loved her. But she wasn’t going to vote for her this time.
“She said it was the only way she could send a message to Trump,” Ms. Collins recounted in an interview on Wednesday, a day after she lost to the Democrat Troy Jackson in her attempt to win a sixth term.
That was the story of the election for Ms. Collins, the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee and a force in the Senate for three decades.
“I was caught up in the Trump tsunami that swept away many incumbent Republican senators who have served their states well for many years and really care about our country,” she said.
The five-term Republican senator had long seemed invulnerable to the ordinary laws of politics because of her singular political brand as a New England centrist with a gift for constituent service and an ability to steer federal dollars back home. In 2008, she triumphed in Maine while Barack Obama was romping and other Republicans were falling. In 2020, it seemed like her number might be up when polls had her down against a well-funded state lawmaker, but she again won easily.
Democrats saluted ruefully in respect.
But 2026 turned out to be a different case entirely as Ms. Collins was brought down by a combination of factors, most of which were attributable to President Trump and the war with Iran. There were soaring fuel prices in a state reliant on home heating oil. The punishing tariffs the president imposed on neighboring Canada. An immigration crackdown that resulted in a fatal shooting by federal agents in one Maine community. And always the perception that she wasn’t doing enough to stand up to the president, even when she was one of the few Republicans to occasionally break with him.
“Everybody ignores the fact that I voted to convict him in the second impeachment trial,” Ms. Collins said. “What bigger break could there be? It is never enough. I want results and they want angry rhetoric.”
On top of dissatisfaction that she hadn’t distanced herself sufficiently from the president, some voters harbored resentment about her vote in 2018 to confirm Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, given his later role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
The coming result was evident from talking to voters on Tuesday as they exited the central polling place in Bangor — home turf for Ms. Collins. Several of them said they had repeatedly marked their ballots for “our senator,” as her ubiquitous yard signs proclaimed, but they would not do so this time.
“This time,” said Deborah Hanson of Bangor, “I’ve got to try something new. Susan Collins has voted with Trump on so many things.”
“To me, it is a close thing,” said Bob Kelly, another longtime Bangor voter. “But I can’t support anybody that supports Trump.”
In rejecting Ms. Collins, Maine voters gave up a tremendous amount of influence over federal spending by turning out the woman at the helm of the influential committee that controls federal spending. It is unusual but not unheard-of for voters to reject senior leaders.
Voters in Washington State dumped Representative Tom Foley, a Democrat, when he was speaker of the House in 1994. Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, lost his re-election bid to Senator John Thune, now the majority leader, in South Dakota in 2004.
Ms. Collins leaned heavily on her role in spending as she campaigned around the state, visiting the fire stations, community projects and infrastructure improvements for which she had secured funding, noting that if she were no longer in office, that money might dry up.
“I wanted to make sure people know what their choice was,” she said.
The man who defeated her, Mr. Jackson, will be a junior member of the Senate with little ability to steer to the state anywhere near the kind of financial aid that Ms. Collins had helped win.
“What she has been able to do over the last six years is extraordinary,” said Steve Abbott, her campaign manager and longtime senior aide. “Every town you go to, you see a project that was funded and work that needed to be done. That’s an opportunity that the state has walked away from.”
Up until the end, Ms. Collins and her team had hoped they could pull out a win as they watched from a hotel suite in Bangor. They had been cheered by the “rock star” reception they received around the state, an outpouring they said was better than during some of her winning races in the past.
“We went all over the state and I’ve got to tell you, the crowds were huge, the reception was warm and the response could not have been better,” Ms. Collins said as she addressed and thanked supporters in Bangor before the results were known.
But results from the Democratic stronghold of Portland overwhelmed her.
The race was chaotic, and Ms. Collins and her advisers like to note that they basically had to run against three opponents: Gov. Janet Mills, who initially appeared to be the likely challenger before she dropped out; the oyster farmer Graham Platner, who won the Democratic primary but dropped out after sexual abuse allegations; and Mr. Jackson, who had lost the state’s Democratic primary for governor but was then selected to replace Mr. Platner on the ballot.
Democrats have been frustrated for years both by Ms. Collins herself and their inability to defeat her. They poured huge amounts of money into the campaign, trying to highlight her ties to Mr. Trump and her votes for his policies. Ms. Collins pushed back, noting her own differences with the president on the Iran war, tariffs, the immigration crackdown and safety net cuts.
Over the course of her career, Ms. Collins was at the center of many major legislative negotiations on such tough issues as gun safety, health care and, following the Jan. 6, 2021, assault at the Capitol, a bill overhauling how electoral votes were counted. Her absence in the Senate will be felt on big legislative fights. She has not missed a vote in her Senate tenure.
Her political career was inspired in part by Margaret Chase Smith, the Maine Republican who served in the Senate from 1949 to 1972. Ms. Collins once met Ms. Smith, who had delivered a famous denunciation of Joseph McCarthy, and noted that some constituents encouraged her to have a Smith-like moment of conscience when it came to Mr. Trump.
“I would argue that I have, like Margaret Chase Smith, taken a lot of tough votes and stood up for what I believe in,” she said. “But I think the best comparison is we each lost our last race for the Senate.
“I have now had my Margaret Chase Smith moment.”
As voters elected state and local officials on Tuesday, they also set policy, voting on ballot questions that covered issues ranging from abortion and transgender rights to taxation and affordability.
Some of the choices voters made reflected the trend of Democratic victories in candidate races. In others, voters bucked the trend, answering conservatively on social issues.
As the focus shifts to the 2028 presidential election, how the measures performed across more than 140 statewide ballot questions will help set the tone for political debate by pointing to the issues that were important to midterm voters.
Here’s a brief rundown:
In a show of disgust over the role of “dark money” in politics, Montana voters approved a ballot measure to ban corporations, nonprofits and labor unions from doing business in the state if they had made political contributions.
The result appears likely to create a legal test of Citizens United , the Supreme Court decision that said independent political spending by businesses is protected free speech.
Michigan voters approved a similar measure, deciding to bar electric and gas utilities as well as many government contractors from making political donations.
In Virginia, voters backed a constitutional amendment to restore voting rights to people convicted of felonies upon their release.
In Massachusetts, voters rejected a proposition that would have ended closed-party primaries and instead allowed all candidates to appear on the same ballot, with the top two advancing to the general election.
Measures to ban noncitizen voting or require voters to present identification passed in a several states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota and West Virginia.
But voter identification initiatives were rejected in California and Colorado.
John Matsusaka, a professor at USC Marshall School of Business, said in an email that those rejections of voter identification marked a notable departure from what once had been solid support for the policy.
Mr. Matsusaka said the shift might be attributed to Democratic leaders coming out against voter identification.
“This suggests a trend that I think of as a form of tribalism,” he said. “The tendency of many voters to follow the party line on issues, often overriding their independent judgments.”
In Maryland, voters cleared a path for a new congressional map that could boost Democratic representation in 2028. In Missouri, they rejected a redrawn map that could have provided Republicans an advantage.
Those moves followed a redistricting blitz that came at the urging of President Trump, with the intention of gaining more Republican seats. Ultimately, the efforts did not stave off significant Democratic victories.
“Given the blue wave it’s basically what you’d expect — voters blocking a Republican gerrymander in Missouri and greenlighting a future Democratic gerrymander in Maryland,” Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard Law School professor, said in a text message. “It’s a partisan story, not one of consistency with respect to redistricting.”
In Missouri, voters rejected an attempt by state lawmakers to repeal a constitutional right to abortion, recently approved by voters, by pairing the initiative with a ban on gender-transition care for minors.
An initiative to undo abortion restrictions in Idaho, which was pitched as a way to stop an exodus of doctors from the state, was rejected by voters.
The result in Idaho is “one of a small handful of wins for conservatives on abortion in ballot measures since the fall of Roe, and one of the most significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis in a text message.
“The lesson for future campaigns will be that money counts in this kind of race — the LDS Church gave a major late cash infusion to the no campaign that seems to have made a difference,” she said.
Conversely, Virginia and Nevada voters enshrined abortion rights into their state’s constitution.
Taken together, on the issue of abortion in their states, voters upheld the status quo.
In Nebraska and Arizona, voters passed restrictions on transgender students’ participation in sports.
Voters’ views on transgender rights were also tested in deep-blue states on Tuesday . One approved in Washington State restricts transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports. Another, in Colorado, hadn’t yet been called by Wednesday morning.
In Alabama, voters passed a measure requiring public schools to have pupils recite the Pledge of Allegiance every day and allow for student-led prayer. They also approved requirements for public schools to play or arrange for a performance of the first stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner” once every week.
A Florida ballot measure to cut homeowners’ property taxes also passed. Opponents said that limiting property taxes would tighten a major source of funding for services like police and fire departments and programs for low-income residents. But supporters billed it as a way to provide relief for homeowners as the cost of living has ballooned.