NBC projects Democrats have won Congress; the printed count still leaves the House 25 seats short

Full analysis

What happened Why it matters How each country tells it Where accounts conflict Room for disagreement Our assessment Sources and evidence

What happened

Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday’s midterm elections, a result anchored first in the Senate and then projected into the House. NBC News made the call, projecting that the party had flipped enough Republican-held seats in deeply Republican states — Michigan, Maine, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas — to take the Senate, and that it had won a swift and decisive House majority that could become its largest in nearly two decades. Africa Guinee, running an Agence France-Presse dispatch, reported the two-chamber victory as fact, calling it an "incontestable victory" and a disaster for Donald Trump; Liverpool Echo said multiple major US media outlets forecast the House would be reclaimed for the first time since 2023.

But the only live count in the set, printed by La República as it carried CNN and NBC projections, puts the House at 193 Democratic seats to 104 Republican, a partial count still 25 seats short of the 218 needed for a majority. The Senate count it carried was more settled: 52 Democrats to 40 Republicans, with a net gain of six, past the 51 required for control. Liverpool Echo noted the starting math: Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate and three in the 435-member House.

The Senate margin was built on firsts. La República named Annie Andrews’s South Carolina win, the first for the party in that state since 1998, and Roy Cooper’s takeover of the North Carolina seat. Africa Guinee’s AFP dispatch added that Andrews beat Darline Graham, whom Trump personally picked after Lindsey Graham’s death in July, and that James Talarico will be Texas’s first Democratic senator since 1992; Liverpool Echo put Talarico’s statewide first as 1994. AFP also reported Adam Hamilton’s Kansas Senate win as the first for a Democrat since 1932, and that Gina Hinojosa defeated Greg Abbott to become Texas governor. Ohio went to Sherrod Brown over Jon Husted, Georgia’s Jon Ossoff held his seat and New Hampshire’s Chris Pappas prevailed; Republican candidates in Florida kept the state’s Senate and governor races.

Trump had told voters to pretend he was on the ballot. On Tuesday night, he disclaimed the result on Truth Social: "I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!" Liverpool Echo reported his Fox News concession that he was "a little bit surprised" and thought he could transfer rally energy to candidates; La República carried the same interview with him praising Democrats — "I think the Democrats did a good job" — and blaming part of the outcome on the war with Iran. Africa Guinee’s AFP dispatch added that Trump told the New York Times he would accept the result, and that he warned before the defeat that he would "veto everything" if Republicans lost. NBC News, by contrast, wrote that Trump "quickly ran away from them Tuesday evening."

Democratic leaders immediately shifted to what the new majority would do. Chuck Schumer promised to "end all this rampant corruption and end the chaos." Hakeem Jeffries, set to become the first Black House speaker — chosen as the party’s nominee the week of Nov. 16 and requiring 218 House votes on Jan. 3 — said Democrats would "hold the crooks accountable, beginning on day one." Trump’s party, facing lame-duck control until Jan. 3, could use the remaining weeks to push a reconciliation bill and a debt ceiling increase before relinquishing the House.

Why it matters

The result ends two years of Republican control of Congress and returns subpoena power and oversight scheduling to Democrats in January. NBC News laid out the targets its own reporting has already identified: Oversight’s Robert Garcia would investigate "Trump family corruption," Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes and the immigration crackdown; Judiciary’s Jamie Raskin and his members list pardons for "wealthy criminals and MAGA loyalists" and foreign governments’ "buying influence" through the Trump family’s crypto empire. Senator Richard Blumenthal said support for any Trump Supreme Court nominee would be "slim to none," meaning a vacancy in the president’s final two years would face a Democratic Senate blockade.

The vote itself was as much a judgment on oversight as on costs. NBC’s exit poll found 43% of midterm voters said they were expressing opposition to Trump, and 71% — including 41% of Republicans — said Congress does not exercise enough oversight of him. Latino voters, who narrowed the Democratic edge to 7 points in 2024, gave Democrats a 27-point lead in an NBC poll released Sunday. The map stretched from Florida’s remaining Republican hold to Kansas’s first Democratic senator since 1932, a majority resting on states that voted for Trump in all three of his presidential bids.

For a frontline NATO ally, the midterm drama was framed as near-irrelevant. Rzeczpospolita’s Bogusław Chrabota argued that Poland’s interests — a hard alliance with the United States, full trust in the American partner inside NATO, and a larger American military presence on the Vistula — remain unchanged, whatever the internal political realities of the ally.

How each country tells it

• 🇺🇸
  NBC News · United States · original reporting

  Projects the result as institutional capture — full control of Congress won by flipping deeply Republican states, which unlocks an oversight arsenal and a constitutional showdown.
• 🇬🇧
  Liverpool Echo · United Kingdom

  Reports the result through Trump’s personal humiliation, putting Jon Ossoff’s ‘failed lame duck president’ branding in the headline and collecting the night’s quotable put-downs and concessions.
• 🇵🇱
  Rzeczpospolita · Poland · opinion

  Opinion piece arguing the midterm result should not change Polish-American relations, because Poland’s interests — a hard NATO alliance, trust in Washington and a larger US military presence — remain unchanged.
• 🇵🇪
  La República · Peru · carries CNN and NBC News

  Reports the result as a straight partisan defeat for ‘Donald Trump’s Republicans’, with clean seat math (52-40 Senate, 193-104 House) and Trump’s own Fox News concession blaming Iran.
• 🇬🇳
  Africa Guinee · Guinea · wire copy

  AFP dispatch presenting the night as a ‘stinging setback’ for Trump, with voter colour in Atlanta and the historic firsts in Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, North Carolina, Iowa and Ohio, plus Trump’s veto threat.

Where accounts conflict

The sharpest discrepancy is how finished the House result is. NBC News projects a decisive Democratic win and says the party is "set to have what could be their largest majority in nearly two decades." Africa Guinee’s AFP dispatch reports the two-chamber majority as already acquired. Liverpool Echo stops at the conditional: "multiple major US media organisations have reported that Democrats are also forecast to reclaim control of the House." And La República prints a partial count of 193 Democratic seats against 104 Republican, saying the count "still does not reach the threshold of 218," while carrying CNN and NBC projections of a win. Those accounts can coexist under a projection model, but they cannot all describe the same fact: whether the House majority is an achieved result or an expected one.

Room for disagreement

The strongest case that this will not produce the oversight reckoning Democrats are promising comes from Trump’s own posture. He has already said he would veto "everything" if Republicans lost, and NBC News describes a presidency rooted in a vision of unrivaled executive power, with neither side in a mood to compromise. A Congress that investigates can be stonewalled by a president who will not comply, and the confrontation NBC News predicts could produce clashes rather than accountability. Voter anger over affordability was the engine of the result, but the next two years could be consumed by subpoena fights instead of the cost-of-living action voters said they wanted.