Democrats regain control of US House and Senate

The US midterm elections have closed with a clear victory for the Democratic Party, which will regain control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate starting in January. This is indicated by projections released by NBC News and CBS News in the hours following the vote.

In the Senate, where turnover is historically slower because only a portion of seats are contested in each cycle, Democrats wrested from Republicans at least seven districts that until yesterday were firmly in the hands of the Republican Party: Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. It is a reversal that spans politically diverse areas, from the Midwest to Southern states long considered solidly conservative.

In the House of Representatives the margin is even wider. Projections indicate between 255 and 268 seats for the Democrats, a number well beyond the 218 needed to secure a majority. This means that in January the party will have the numbers to control the chamber’s legislative agenda and the composition of committees, including those with investigative powers over the sitting administration.

The result leaves Donald Trump with two years of governing alongside a largely hostile Congress, a condition that complicates the passage of new legislation in the second half of the presidential term and strengthens the weight of congressional committees, now both under Democratic leadership.

Trump himself offered his own reading of the vote, attributing the Republican defeat to the effects of the war with Iran on oil prices. This is the explanation the president chose to place at the center of his immediate comment, according to the election projections and statements from the White House.

For the Democratic Party, which had lost control of both chambers in the previous electoral cycle, this represents a complete recovery that restores to its parliamentary groups control over legislative timing and the chairmanship of permanent committees. For the Republican Party, the defeat immediately raises the question of who will lead the internal party opposition in the final two years of the administration, in a context in which the president himself chose to point to a foreign policy factor, the war with Iran, as the main cause of the electoral result rather than his own administration’s domestic policy choices.

The vote ranks among the most lopsided results in the recent history of midterm elections, given the scale of the reversal recorded simultaneously in both chambers of Congress in a single election cycle. The new balance of power will become operative with the seating of the new Congress in January, when the seven seats won in the Senate and the House majority formally take effect.