The Democratic Party is on track to win its biggest midterm victory since 1974, when a wave of anti-Republican sentiment followed the Watergate scandal. Pending final counts in about two dozen seats, the Democrats will emerge from the 2026 midterm elections with at least 250 seats in the House of Representatives and 54 seats in the Senate — and with as many as 260 and 56 in the House and Senate, respectively, if votes break their way.
The victory represents a monumental crackup of the coalition that put Donald Trump in the White House in 2024. According to a review of vote-choice estimates from the MS NOW Voter Poll among a dozen demographic groups, the Republicans lost the most ground with Latinos, young people and lower-income Americans — three groups that also swung hard to Trump from 2020 to 2024. My analysis of county-level returns also shows Democrats making disproportionate gains with these groups.
An anti-Trump re-realignment
The backlash against Trump and the Republican Party is largest among Latino voters. According to estimates calculated by the Pew Research Center, Latinos gave 2024 Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a 3-percentage-point margin over Trump nationally in 2024. But the MS NOW Voter Poll shows Latinos giving Democrats a whopping 27-point margin last night. My best guess, based on a statistical model extrapolating the current election results to counties without final vote tallies, is that the Democrats will end up with a 14-point margin in the House popular vote, an increase from their current 10-point margin. (This could be as low as 12 or as high as 15 points, depending on how ballots break in California, which counts ballots very slowly.)
A 27-point swing for Democrats would be even larger than the gains Trump made in 2024 among Latino voters, which Pew estimated at 22 points. (The demographic voted for Democrats by 25 points in 2020.) It looks like this could be Democrats’ largest share of the vote among Latinos since the 2018 midterm elections.
But the national average swing glosses over some truly remarkable shifts at the county level. For example, take majority-Latino Webb County in South Texas, which gave Donald Trump a plus-2-point margin in the 2024 presidential election. Last night, voters there opted for Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico over Republican nominee and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton by 45 percentage points as of Wednesday afternoon.
The table below shows similar calculations for other demographic subgroups in the electorate, and is sorted by the size of the swing among the group from 2024 to 2026.
While not the largest change in voter behavior, the most surprising shift on this table may be the swing among rural voters. They have moved 22 points left since 2024. The shift may be one of the most consequential for 2026, given that Republicans were defending Senate seats in rural states like Iowa, Texas and Kansas — all of which Democrats have now flipped.
Overall, all these swings have helped power the Democrats’ biggest popular vote margin in the U.S. House since 1974.
Polls understated Democrats
A 12- to 14-point victory for Democrats in the popular vote will be larger, however, than most pollsters estimated. When compared to the average of generic ballot polls calculated by FiftyPlusOne, which had Democrats up 9 points among likely voters, a 14-point win would be a 5-point miss for the polls. Even the more modest error would be 3 points — on the high end of recent generic ballot misfires, but not unprecedented. A full analysis of Senate polling error will have to wait for more votes to be tallied, but the error there across states is looking closer to 5 points.
What has surprised most election observers is not the size of the error, however, but the direction. Before last night, polls had overstated support for Democrats in four of the last five elections. This led many analysts to prematurely write off the possibility of a Democratic victory in the Senate. But at FiftyPlusOne, our model worked from the historical baseline that the direction of polling error is not predictable based on errors in past cycles. Next time, poll watchers should ignore predictions of polling bias ahead of the election.
Two years ago, Trump’s gains with Latino, young and lower-income voters were heralded as the start of a political realignment. But last night, those voters snapped back to their predominantly Democratic past voting habits. Voters who were willing to try something new to get prices down in 2024 were just as willing to change their mind in 2026. Yet despite the Democratic Party’s triumph tonight, this should be a warning for what’s in store for them in 2030 if they don’t deliver for the American people.
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