Precinct official Elaine Rex, of Odebolt, Iowa, talks with U.S. Rep. Steve King, of Kiron, Iowa, at the Odebolt Fire Station, where King cast the precinct's first vote in the mid-term election in Odebolt on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018. King, the Republican incumbent in Iowa's 4th Congressional District, is being challenged for his seat by Democratic newcomer J.D. Scholten. (Tim Gallagher/Sioux City Journal via AP)

Precinct official Elaine Rex, of Odebolt, Iowa, talks with U.S. Rep. Steve King, of Kiron, Iowa, at the Odebolt Fire Station, where King cast the precinct's first vote in the mid-term election in Odebolt on Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2018. King, the Republican incumbent in Iowa's 4th Congressional District, is being challenged for his seat by Democratic newcomer J.D. Scholten. (Tim Gallagher/Sioux City Journal via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on elections to the U.S. House of Representatives (all times local):

3:00 a.m.

Democrats have won a House majority, gaining power to investigate President Donald Trump and help shape the nation’s political agenda for the next two years.

Democrats picked up at least two dozen House seats Tuesday, capturing the 218 seats needed to break Republicans’ eight-year hold on the House that began with the tea party revolt of 2010.

While Republicans retained control of the Senate, the Democratic win in the House ends the GOP monopoly on power in Washington and opens a new era of divided government.

Democratic candidates flipped seats in a host of suburban districts outside Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago and Denver, including many that were won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Democrats also made inroads in Trump country, winning several races dominated by white working-class voters.

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2:40 a.m.

House Speaker Paul Ryan says history has repeated itself as Republicans appeared likely to lose control of the House after eight years.

Ryan, who is retiring from Congress, said in a statement that the president’s party “always faces tough odds in its first midterm election,” frequently losing dozens of seats.

Ryan says he is proud of the campaign that GOP candidates ran “in a challenging political environment,” and he congratulated Democrats on winning a House majority. He also praised Senate Republicans for maintaining control of the upper chamber.

Ryan says Americans “don’t need an election to know that we are a divided nation, and now we have a divided Washington.” He urged leaders to come together and called it “an incredible honor” to lead the House the past three years.

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2:35 a.m.

South Carolina is sending a new Democrat to Congress for the first time in more than 25 years.

Attorney and ocean engineer Joe Cunningham beat state Rep. Katie Arrington, a Republican backed by President Donald Trump in a surprising win in a state that has become solidly Republican.

Arrington had defeated incumbent Rep. Mark Sanford in a GOP primary thanks to Trump’s backing.

Cunningham painted Arrington as a reactionary politician who would back Trump over the people in her district.

Cunningham opposed Trump’s call for oil drilling off the state’s coast, while Arrington initially supported it. She later said she was against offshore drilling, which many coastal leaders — including Republican mayors — strongly oppose as a grave threat to the state’s tourism-based economy.

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12:40 a.m.

Republican Steve King has won a ninth term representing northwest Iowa’s 4th Congressional District.

Voters re-elected King despite a string of controversies about comments and meetings he has held involving other candidates and groups characterized as white nationalists. King has argued that all those he met or made comments about were simply conservatives.

King defeated Democrat J.D. Scholten, a former minor league baseball player who raised more money than King and spent months crisscrossing the 39-county district.

King did little campaigning but maintained his hardline views on immigration and support of gun rights were in step with the conservative district.

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12:20 a.m.

Women will break the current record of 84 serving at once in the U.S. House.

With ballots still being counted across the country, women have won 75 seats and are assured of victory in nine districts where women are the only major-party candidates.

Outrage and organizing by women have defined Democratic Party politics this election cycle — from the Women’s March opposing President Donald Trump the day after he was inaugurated in January 2017 through a stream of sexual assault accusations later that year that sparked the #MeToo movement.

More than 230 women, many of them first-time candidates, were on the general-election ballots in House races.

Despite the gains, men will continue to hold the vast majority of House seats.

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12:15 a.m.

Democrats have picked up at least 23 House seats, putting them on track to reach the 218 needed to seize control from Republicans after eight years.

Democrats knocked off at least 17 GOP incumbents, picking up moderate, suburban districts across the county. Democrats won seats stretching from suburban Washington, New York and Philadelphia to outside Miami, Chicago and Denver. West Coast results were still coming in.

Democrat Abigail Spanberger of Virginia defeated Republican incumbent Dave Brat in suburban Richmond to give Democrats the 23rd pickup.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is hailing ”’a new day in America.”

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11:55 p.m.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi is telling Democratic lawmakers and supporters that elections are about the future and “thank you all for making the future better for all of America’s children.”

Pelosi spoke as Democrats closed in on control of the House.

Pelosi said the election Tuesday was about more than Republicans and Democrats. It was about restoring the Constitution and providing a balance to the Trump administration.

She says the election is also about stopping what she described as the GOP’s attacks on entitlement programs and the Affordable Care Act. She says Democrats will find common ground when they can and stand their ground when necessary.

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11:50 p.m.

Democrats are moving toward control of the House. They’ve picked up moderate, suburban districts across the Northeast and Midwest as they get closer to the 23 seats they need to wrest control from Republicans.

Republican incumbent Reps. Rod Blum and David Young of Iowa, Randy Hultgren of Illinois, Leonard Lance of New Jersey and Pete Sessions of Texas all lost contested races.

Democrat Abby Finkenauer beat Blum and will be among the youngest women ever elected to the House. Democrat Cindy Axne beat Young, and Lauren Underwood, a 32-year-old African-American nurse, topped Hultgren.

Democrat Tom Malinowski, a former State Department official under President Barack Obama, defeated Lance, a five-term incumbent. Former NFL linebacker and civil rights attorney Colin Allred defeated Sessions, flipping a reliably conservative Dallas enclave.

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11 p.m.

Democrat Sean Casten has defeated six-term Republican Rep. Peter Roskam to flip a suburban Chicago district the GOP has held for more than four decades.

Casten, a scientist and businessman, argued that Roskam was too conservative for a district that supported Hillary Clinton over President Donald Trump in 2016. Casten pointed to Roskam’s record of opposing abortion and his record of voting along with Trump.

Casten focused his campaign on health care and has called for stricter gun control laws.

Roskam insisted he’s a moderate who opposed Trump when necessary. He criticized Casten as wanting to raise taxes and for name-calling and “embracing the politics of ridicule.”

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10:35 p.m.

First-time Democratic candidate Jason Crow has defeated five-term Republican Rep. Mike Coffman in suburban Denver.

Crow, 39, is a former Army Ranger and captain who fought in Iraq. He then went to work at a politically-connected Denver law firm before taking on Coffman, who has survived repeated strong Democratic challenges in the diverse district.

Hillary Clinton won the district by nine points in 2016 while Coffman won it by eight.

Coffman is an Army and Marine veteran and is active on veterans’ issues. But Crow used his own military service to neutralize Coffman’s advantage. Crow also embraced the cause of gun control in a district that was home to the 2012 Aurora theater shooting that killed 12 and abuts Columbine High School, where two teen-aged gunmen killed 13 in 1999.

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10:20 p.m.

Democratic newcomer Sharice Davids has defeated incumbent Rep. Kevin Yoder in Kansas to become the nation’s first LGBT Native American in Congress.

The 38-year-old activist, lawyer and political newcomer already garnered national attention as part of a crop of diverse Democratic candidates.

Yoder was endorsed by President Donald Trump, but the suburban Kansas City district voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016. The district is a mix of fast-growing bedroom communities, established suburbs and poorer city neighborhoods.

Davids emerged from a six-person Democratic primary and energized voters and Democratic donors by emphasizing her biography. Her history includes mixed martial arts fights.

She’s a member of the Wisconsin-based Ho-Chunk Nation and was raised by a single mother who served in the Army and worked for the U.S. Postal Service.

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10:10 p.m.

Democratic businessman Dean Phillips has defeated Republican Rep. Erik Paulsen in a suburban Minnesota district that figures heavily into Democrats’ hopes for a House takeover.

Paulsen had easily won elections throughout his five terms in office even as the Minneapolis-area district trended toward Democrats.

But the district favored Hillary Clinton by nearly 10 points two years ago, and a statewide poll late in the race showed Phillips with a comfortable lead. Outside groups poured more than $10 million into the battleground race.

Phillips ran his family’s liquor company and started a chain of local coffee shops. He painted Paulsen as too in-step with President Donald Trump, though Paulsen tried to distance himself from the president.

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10:05 p.m.

Newly minted Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania has defeated three-term Republican Rep. Keith Rothfus in the nation’s only House race pitting two incumbents against each other.

Democrats enjoy a 71,000-voter registration edge in the suburban Pittsburgh district, and Lamb comfortably led polls over Rothfus, who has one of Pennsylvania’s most conservative voting records in Congress.

Lamb won a special election in March to succeed Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned, in a district that Trump won by about 20 points.

Both men live in the new 17th District, despite living in different districts that they currently represent.

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10 p.m.

Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell has defeated Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo in Florida, the second GOP incumbent House member to fall. Curbelo, a moderate and critic of President Donald Trump, was trying to defy the political winds against Trump in the South Florida district.

Mucarsel-Powell is an immigrant from Ecuador who has worked for several nonprofit organizations in Miami-Dade County. She ran on preventing gun violence and protecting the environment, but her main focus was on health care and the Affordable Care Act, which Curbelo voted to repeal.

Mucarsel-Powell painted Curbelo as a politician who talks like a moderate but tends to vote with conservatives.

Curbelo is a leader of the bipartisan Climate Caucus and bucked GOP leadership this summer by supporting a tax on emissions of carbon dioxide, a contributor to global warming.

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9:00 p.m.

Republican Rep. Andy Barr of Kentucky won a close-fought race that Democrats had targeted in a bid to shift the House to Democratic control.

Barr turned back a strong challenge from Democrat Amy McGrath in a district that supported President Donald Trump two years ago.

McGrath, a retired fighter pilot, gave Barr his toughest test yet as he sought a fourth term. Barr urged voters to re-elect him for his “access and influence with this administration,” while McGrath countered with a message of “country over party.”

Barr won by 22 points in 2016, but McGrath waged an aggressive challenge, including TV ads showing her in front of fighter jets and with her young children.

The district includes Lexington and capital Frankfort. The seat has switched parties five times since 1978.

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8:50 p.m.

In Indiana, Greg Pence, an older brother of Vice President Mike Pence, has won a heavily Republican House seat that his famous sibling once held.

The 61-year-old Pence, an owner of two antique malls, defeated Democrat Jeannine Lee Lake, who publishes a bi-monthly Muncie newspaper.

The eastern Indiana seat is open because Republican Rep. Luke Messer ran in the GOP primary for the Senate. Greg Pence is one of Mike Pence’s three brothers.

Greg Pence is a Marine veteran and once ran a now-bankrupt chain of convenience stores.

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8:30 p.m.

Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock of Virginia was the first congressional incumbent to lose as voters in her Northern Virginia district expressed their continued dislike of President Donald Trump.

Democratic state Sen. Jennifer Wexton won an easy victory in the wealthy suburban district outside Washington, which Hillary Clinton won by 10 percentage points.

Comstock tried hard to emphasize her independence from Trump, but Wexton, a former prosecutor, portrayed the two-term incumbent as a Trump ally out of touch with the diverse, well-educated district.

Comstock easily beat a Democrat in 2016 when her district went for Clinton.

The national focus on the race helped Comstock and Wexton raise more than $5 million in all, while outside groups spent more than $10 million.

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For AP’s complete coverage of the U.S. midterm elections: http://apne.ws/APPolitics