Cost of living shaped the 2026 vote as Democrats won battleground governorships
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress and a majority of governorships in the 2026 midterms, according to The Wall Street Journal, after candidates across the party focused on affordability rather than culture-war issues. The party will enter 2027 with 54 Senate seats won and leads in two uncalled races. A House majority is expected to rival the size former President Obama had in his first term.
The report described the outcome as historic and a massive midterm rebuke of President Trump. It also characterized the result as more a rejection of Trump than a mandate for the Democratic Party’s agenda, which remains divided over the direction it should take in 2027.
The Associated Press Voter Poll, conducted for the Associated Press and the major television and cable news networks, found that 89% of voters considered the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote for Congress. High fuel and food prices were among the leading voter concerns. Candidates across the party’s ideological spectrum drilled down on the economy, argued that Trump’s policies were hurting voters’ pocketbooks and largely avoided culture-war issues that had cost Democrats in recent elections.
Democrats also selected candidates able to appeal to independent voters in closely watched races, including Texas, Kansas and South Carolina, states Republicans had dominated for decades. The coalition Trump assembled in 2024 showed signs of rapidly unraveling. Many young and Latino voters who had helped propel his return to the White House moved back toward Democrats.
The gains came after two years out of power in Washington and despite unfavorable views of the Democratic Party. The poll found that 52% of midterm voters viewed Democrats unfavorably, compared with 60% for the Republican Party.
The victory nevertheless left the party divided. Progressives pointed to their wins, including in presidential battleground states, and called for a leftward shift. “The risk for Democrats is that we start arguing about which ideological car we’re going to drive before we have agreement on where we’re going,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist who advised Vice President Kamala Harris.
“After 2024, the Democratic brand was in the toilet. It was really at a low point and it still needs a lot of work,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist. “But 2026 is where the Democratic comeback begins. It’s going to be a bigger-tent party.”
Affordability had also connected campaigns led by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the successful gubernatorial campaigns of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. All three made affordability a central pillar of their 2025 campaigns, though their proposed solutions differed sharply.
“The celebration over the victory should last all of one minute,” said former Rep. Cheri Bustos, a centrist Democrat who repeatedly won a western Illinois congressional district filled with Trump supporters. She said Democrats should not “squander this new majority with divisive nonsense that fuels the base, but ignores the real needs of everyday people.”
The report warned Democrats against repeating their interpretation of the 2022 midterms, when former President Joe Biden’s party lost the House but gained a Senate seat in a better-than-expected showing. That result encouraged Biden to seek re-election after he turned 80, and the report said the assumptions helped Trump win in 2024.
The geographic result could reshape the 2028 presidential contest. The report said Democrats would hold all the governorships in the seven battleground states that decided the 2024 election and could expand the presidential map by competing for electoral votes in traditional Republican states such as Texas.
Democrats also fielded candidates with a range of professional and political backgrounds, some endorsed by both the progressive and centrist wings. Among them were Texas Tejano singer Bobby Pulido, former Montana smokejumper Sam Forstag, Ohio union ironworker Brian Poindexter and two clergy members in Iowa. All had won or were leading their races.
The party presented the candidates as messengers with local credibility and connections to their districts. As House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries watched early returns, he noted that the party had recruited “doctors and nurses and pastors and farmers and union leaders and educators and police officers and firefighters and combat veterans—people who have already lived a life of service to their community.”
In the Northeast, Democrats had dominated recent electoral cycles, although Trump made inroads during the 2024 campaign in the New York and New Jersey suburbs and maintained his strength in northern Maine. Those gains appeared to be reversed in the 2026 results. Democrats ousted Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the longest-serving Republican woman in the Senate, and a Republican in Maine’s rural second congressional district.
In New Hampshire, Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas defeated former Sen. John E. Sununu, a member of the state’s most durable Republican family, by nearly 15 percentage points to win a Senate seat.
In the Midwest, Democrats won races in states Trump had carried by double digits. The report said the party benefited from rural hardship following price increases for fuel and fertilizer linked to Trump’s trade policy and the war in Iran.
State Auditor Rob Sand became the first Democrat to win Iowa’s governorship in two decades. Running almost as a nonpartisan candidate, Sand criticized both parties and called for greater government accountability. He won by 11 percentage points, a 24-point swing compared with Trump’s 13-point margin in Iowa in 2024.
State Sen. Josh Turek also became the first Iowa Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat. The two-time basketball Paralympic gold medalist presented himself as willing to buck his own party and benefited from headwinds facing his Republican opponent from Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war.
In nearby Kansas, Democrat Adam Hamilton snapped a nearly 100-year Republican winning streak in Senate races. The Methodist pastor cast himself as a “radical centrist” and won in a state Trump carried by 16 percentage points in 2024. Democrats also won open-seat governorships in Wisconsin and Michigan, while Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, described as a likely 2028 presidential candidate, was reelected in a landslide.
Democrats flipped both a U.S. Senate seat and the governor’s mansion in Texas, marking their first statewide victory there since 1994. James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa ran on populist messages emphasizing affordability, fighting corruption and taking on the billionaire class.
Hinojosa’s victory unseated three-term Gov. Greg Abbott, whom the report described as a Trump ally and architect of conservative policies. The report said her win sent shock waves through political circles.
Latino voters moved back toward Democrats across Texas and beyond, reversing their shift toward Trump in 2024. The change was especially pronounced in South Texas. Republicans had targeted two Democratic-held seats that Texas Republicans redrawn to favor them during mid-decade redistricting, but Democrats held both and flipped a neighboring district Trump had won by 18 percentage points in 2024.
In that neighboring district, Bobby Pulido ran as a moderate focused on affordability and distinguished himself from partisan politics. His campaign slogan was “Not team red, not team blue. Team you.”
Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist group Third Way, said there was a risk progressives would misinterpret the result. “There is one fact that just can’t be argued away: moderates made both the Senate and House majority,” he said. Cowan said every Senate seat flipped by Democrats featured a more moderate candidate, with Troy Jackson’s Maine victory as the exception.
Progressives pointed instead to Jackson’s win and the Senate victories of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota as evidence their candidates could win competitive statewide races.
“Winning a single U.S. Senate seat was never the goal. The goal is to use that seat to transform our politics,” El-Sayed said in his victory speech early Wednesday. He then repeated his campaign slogan: “Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all.”
Cowan argued that the election did not support other priorities. “It is not a mandate for impeaching the president, nor it is a mandate for extreme issues like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal said the dispute over what the result means will shape the 2028 presidential primary, which was expected to begin almost immediately. Centrists and progressives were both claiming the election as support for their competing directions.