Election night brought new sadness and frustration to Parkland, Florida, where a school shooting in February left 17 people dead.

Gun control made some advances nationwide. Democrats, who have embraced gun control as a winning campaign issue, took control of the House of Representatives, where only two years ago, lawmakers held a sit-in on the House floor because Republican leaders refused even to allow a vote on stricter gun laws.

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Some Republicans backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) lost their races, including in Virginia, Texas and Colorado, where a gun control advocate defeated the NRA-endorsed incumbent who had represented Columbine and Aurora, the sites of two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.

But in Florida, less than nine months after one of the country’s deadliest school shootings, and just days after a mass shooting at a yoga studio in the state’s capital, voters selected pro-gun candidates in the state’s two major races, for governor and for US Senate.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sofie Whitney, an activist and student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, during a Vote for Our Lives event. Photograph: John Raoux/AP

After months of nonstop campaigning to vote out the politicians blocking gun laws, the students who survived the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting this February, and the parents of their classmates who were killed, will be living in a state with an NRA-endorsed governor and two senators with a long history of NRA support.

“I’m shaking with anger right now,” Jacyln Corin, a high school senior who helped found the March for Our Lives student movement, told a room of fellow activists at an election watch party in Parkland on Tuesday night. “It’s like the same feeling I was getting the night of 14 February, so angry that I don’t know what to do with that anger.”

“We’re not going to stop fighting,” she promised, looking at the father of Joaquin Oliver, the 17-year-old murdered at their school. “I can tell you, I’m doing this for the rest of my life.”

Even before the election results came in, the March for Our Lives student activists, a small group of Parkland students who organized a rally for gun control this spring that drew hundreds of thousands of people to Washington DC, as well as to an estimated 800 sister rallies around the world, were already planning their next steps: lobbying for stricter gun laws in state legislatures, training young people to run for office themselves, and preparing for the 2020 campaign.

“It just proves we have a lot further to go,” David Hogg, another student leader of March for Our Lives who graduated from Marjory Stoneman Douglas last year and delayed starting college in order to campaign full-time, said earlier, before the full results were in. “This is going to be a long uphill battle.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Hogg walks with volunteers to a polling place. Photograph: John Raoux/AP

Republicans’ success in drawing the boundaries of political districts to split Democratic voters and benefit their candidates had made the battle even more difficult. “Fuck gerrymandering,” Hogg said.

Not all Parkland students, or families of the students killed, had been pushing for Democratic candidates in Tuesday’s election. Andrew Pollack, who lost his 18-year-old daughter Meadow, has been a prominent conservative voice, and had endorsed the former Florida governor Rick Scott for Senate, and Ron DeSantis for governor, arguing that gun control laws were not the best solution for keeping kids safe.

On Tuesday, the Parkland student activists said they were concerned that DeSantis, the NRA-backed Republican who was elected governor, would oppose stricter state gun laws, or even work to undo the modest package of gun control compromises Florida legislators had passed after the shooting at their high school. DeSantis had said publicly that he would have vetoed the compromise if he had been governor.

“People love their guns here, it’s kind of crazy,” said Mitchell Dworet, the father of Nicholas Dworet, one of the students killed, told the student activists on Tuesday night. “I don’t know what it is with them. They just don’t get it. They just don’t feel it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Parkland students watch midterms results roll in. Photograph: Lois Beckett/The Guardian

He was wearing a T-shirt with a photograph of his murdered son on it.

It was not immediately clear on Tuesday night whether the youth voter participation rate had jumped at all in the 2018 election, which had been a major goal of the Parkland student activists, who had crisscrossed the country holding rallies and events designed to register students to vote and turn them out on election day.

A Tufts University center that studies youth civic engagement said that, according to initial exit poll estimates, youth voters made up about the same share of total voters as they had in previous years. That might mean that the youth voter participation rate had not increased, or that more young voters had come to the polls, but their activism had been balanced out by increased participation from older voters. Experts from Circe, the Tufts University center, said initial estimates for youth voter turnout rates would be available on Wednesday.

“It’s hard. It’s hard emotionally,” Brittany Sinitch, an English teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, said earlier in the evening, watching the updates on the tightly contested Florida races. “Tomorrow your have to stand up in front of a group of students. They’re expecting change.”

She would tell them, she said after the results came in, “to keep using their voices”.