For the last decade, Donald Trump tormented Democrats and defied expectations of what it meant to lead and endure in American politics.

On Tuesday, the old rules finally caught up with him.

Trump wasn’t on the ballot, but he made the midterms emphatically about himself, urging his supporters to turn out as if he were. After a decade in which he dominated the national narrative, the voters who had sided with him so often before appear not to have followed him en masse.

Democrats were projected to retake both the House and the Senate from the Trump-led GOP. They won governor’s races in red states and were closing in on upsets in deeply conservative congressional districts that, just days earlier, had looked all but unwinnable.

Plenty of races remained uncalled at 1 a.m. But the early returns pointed to one of the best nights for Democrats — if not the best — since Trump ran for the White House in 2016.

If those projections hold, the rest of Trump’s term will look very different. A Democratic House and Senate would be able to stall his agenda and investigate his administration, and the Senate would decide the fate of his nominees, including to the federal courts. That could be a significant check on a president who has already reshaped the Supreme Court.

The night also suggested that Trump’s appeal doesn’t transfer. Candidates he embraced or campaigned for lost in deep-red Kansas and South Carolina. Vivek Ramaswamy, an ardent ally of the president, lost the Ohio governor’s race. Trump’s conservative magic, it turns out, doesn’t extend to the candidates further down the ballot. That’s an uncomfortable reality for a party that has remade itself around one man.

His choices also proved costly. In Texas, Trump embraced the state’s impeached and acquitted attorney general, Ken Paxton, over a Republican incumbent who had won many times before. The party spent a fortune trying to save Paxton’s campaign, making it the most expensive race in the country this cycle. He lost anyway.

And Democrats found they could make a case in far more of the map than recent elections suggested. The party won statewide in Texas, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas and South Carolina, places that had long looked out of reach, in some cases breaking Republican winning streaks that stretched back decades.

Democrats also made history. In Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Democratic mayor of Atlanta, was elected the first Black woman governor in the nation’s history. She defeated a wealthy Republican who had campaigned on becoming Trump’s “favorite governor.”

In Ohio, which Trump carried by double digits two years ago, the state’s pandemic-era health director won as a Democrat, defeating Ramaswamy. Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown, the Democratic senator who lost his seat in 2024, won his way back to Washington in a special election for the seat JD Vance gave up when Trump elevated him to the vice presidency.

In South Carolina, Democrats defeated Darline Graham, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose unexpected death this summer led to her appointment to serve out what little remained of his term. Trump and his allies spent precious time, money and attention trying to win her more than a brief stay in the Senate. South Carolina hadn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate since 1998. Now pediatrician Annie Andrews has changed that.

And in ruby-red Kansas, where Trump campaigned shortly before Election Day, Republicans lost a U.S. Senate race for the first time since 1932, the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected president.

Election Day 2026 marked a sharp break from most of the Trump era. He stunned Democrats and the Republican establishment alike when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. That night left a glass ceiling intact and a Democratic Party that has been afraid of its own shadow ever since.

Democrats won the House in the 2018 midterms but lost ground in the Senate. They captured unified control of Washington in 2020, as Trump tried to overturn his clear loss and a mob of his supporters violently attempted to subvert the peaceful transfer of power.

But Democrats’ uneven handling of the economy and immigration gave Trump ample opportunity for a comeback. He seized it, his deep influence among Republicans almost untouched, and returned to the White House in indisputable fashion in 2024, leaving the Democratic Party fractured, reeling and pointing fingers.

Republicans had unified control of Washington, and Trump, having swept every presidential battleground state, was ascendant. But he and his party were soon bedeviled by the same economic messaging woes that had undone the last Democratic administration.

They turned immigration, which had been a winning issue for them, into a national reckoning over aggressive and violent enforcement tactics that left Americans dead. The president tumbled into the Iran War. And the cost-of-living woes he once could have pinned on his predecessor quickly became indistinguishable from the consequences of his own decisions.

Midterms are often brutal on the incumbent president’s party. But the wins — and surprisingly narrow losses — that voters delivered Democrats on Tuesday suggested something bigger than the usual midterm backlash.

Singular as he has become in American politics, Trump also benefited from the zeitgeist he stepped into a decade ago. The 2010 tea party wave had energized Republicans around political outsiders, and the rise of social media allowed misinformation and conspiracy theories to spread far and wide.

But everything new eventually grows old. Now even Trump and his Republican allies must contend with the recriminations that come with holding all that power, rather than promising they could do better if given the chance.

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