Democrats retake Congress; DNC chairman says mandate is about affordability

El-Sayed becomes the first Muslim elected to the Senate

Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and the Senate by considerable margins in the midterms, flipping Senate seats in Texas, Kansas and Iowa for the first time in decades, NPR reported. The Senate flips came in states traditionally characterized as Republican strongholds. House candidates won a convincing majority even while running in several states where districts had been redrawn to favor Republicans, and Democratic gubernatorial candidates won races in GOP strongholds such as Georgia, Ohio and Texas, leaving the party with at least 28 governorships heading into 2027.

The Georgia results carried their own history. Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governor’s race, becoming the first Black woman elected governor in United States history. Stacey Abrams, who founded Fair Fight Action and campaigned for the same office in 2018 and again in 2020 without winning it, said she was proud of Bottoms.

Democrats in Georgia won seats up and down the ballot — for governor, attorney general, secretary of state and in the state house — and Abrams said the sweep “gives us an opportunity to start correcting and restoring rights that we’ve seen lost across the South for more than 20 years.” She said the party had been building toward the outcome since 2010.

Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said the midterms marked the biggest win for his party in more than a century. Voters, Martin said, gave Democrats a mandate to address “affordability, health care and the systems that exclusively benefit wealthy Americans,” and he said newly elected Democrats could deliver.

Martin also described a campaign run around a positive case rather than an oppositional one. “Our candidates across the board ran for something, not against something,” he said. “They gave people a sense of a positive vision of what Democrats would do while we’re in power.”

Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee and attorney general under former President Obama, connected the results to mid-decade redistricting. Speaking with NPR’s Michel Martin, Holder said Republican gerrymandering efforts backfired, causing candidates to lose in districts drawn specifically for their success. “The redistricting efforts that [Republicans] had didn’t just fail — they were dismantled,” Holder says.

Margie Omero, a pollster and Democratic strategist, read the returns as a verdict on Washington. She said contested races consistently broke toward Democrats despite heavy Republican spending during the campaign season, and she said the pattern reflected voters’ distrust of leaders in Washington. “Voters really wanted to send a real clear message, and they couldn’t have been any clearer than what we heard last night,” Omero said.

Abdul El-Sayed made history in Michigan, becoming the first Muslim elected to the Senate as Democrats retook Congress. El-Sayed said his opponent, Republican Mike Rogers, campaigned by weaponizing El-Sayed’s name and faith rather than addressing issues he said Americans care about, including Medicare for All and the price of everyday items.

El-Sayed also discussed legislation surrounding the war in Iran and said he agreed with Trump’s scheduled end to roughly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel. Martin asked him about his lack of support from some Jewish and Black voters, a gap El-Sayed said he hopes to remedy. “There’s always more work to do. There’s always more to build. There’s always more conversations to have,” he said.

Newly elected Democratic officials, party leaders and pollsters joined NPR’s Morning Edition on Wednesday morning to discuss a wave of Democratic victories in state and local races with Steve Inskeep and Michel Martin. Their conversations covered the midterms’ results, the effects of mid-decade redistricting, the mandate voters delivered and the party’s next steps.

Democrats will officially retake control of Congress in 2027, and their leaders left the broadcasts with different priorities for that majority. Martin centered the mandate on affordability, health care and economic systems that exclusively benefit wealthy Americans. Abrams pointed to a chance to reverse rights lost across the South for more than 20 years. Holder said the maps drawn before the election would not deliver the outcomes they were designed to produce, and El-Sayed said the coalition behind his Michigan win still has work to do.

Omero attributed the breaks in contested races to a message aimed at Washington, and Martin said he believes the party’s candidates can deliver on the mandate they were given. Whether the seat counts, the gubernatorial wins and the mandate Martin described translate into governing results remains untested, and the interviews left that question open.