They had promised a "blue wave" sweeping them back into control of Congress.

In the end it stopped short of the Senate, but Democrats will be content to have seized the House of Representatives and to have picked up the keys to a few more governors' mansions along the way.

Donald Trump's enemies are now in a position to start plotting his demise and are working to make it happen.

In their hands committees and chairmanships that can order investigations, issue subpoenas and try to hold this president to account.

That will give him pause for thought, even if he was putting his best gloss on the setback, tweeting that the evening had been a "tremendous success".


The Democrat victory in the House was won in the suburbs where voters appeared to reject Trump's divisive politics.

Most consequential may have been the votes of college educated women who polls suggest have been turned off by the issues like the separation of families on America's borders, the president's preoccupation on immigration and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.

It was a night that saw in both the old and the new, when familiar names came back from the political dead.

In Utah, failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney is now a republican senator despite his sharp differences with President Trump in the past.

Image: President Trump's enemies will be lining up to plot his downfall

But it was also a night that saw new faces making history with the first two Muslim women to be voted into Congress.

One of them began her acceptance speech with the Muslim invocation "Asalaam aleikum", quite a moment in American political history.

And in New York, socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the first woman in her 20s to be elected to Congress.

President Trump may relish the prospect of Muslims and socialists swelling the ranks of his enemies on Capitol Hill.

They may make fresh targets for his divisive rhetoric.

Image: The votes of college educated women may have helped Democrats take the House

And he can now blame a Democrat controlled House and make it a scapegoat. This is a president that thrives on conflict and he now has an opponent to rail against.

Despite this, he knows the Mueller investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian subversion of US democracy is drawing to a close.

Trump 'will have to work with Democrats'

When it presents its findings there will now be a branch of legislative government eager to pursue its conclusions to wherever they may lead. That is not what he will have wanted.

And for American voters there is now the prospect of gridlock in Washington once more and certainly no end in sight to the turbulence that has roiled American politics for the last two years.