House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks during a midterm election night party hosted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in Washington, DC. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Elections An election of bragging rights — and disappointment — for both parties Republicans suffered widespread losses in the suburbs — but Democrats lost a spate of key Senate and governors races.

Democrats seized control of the House on Tuesday, a major setback for President Donald Trump and the conservative, anti-immigration agenda he brought to Washington two years ago.

But Republican victories in the Senate and across the South stanched Democrats’ broader gains, exposing limitations of the Democratic Party’s reach on the cusp of the 2020 presidential campaign. While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) heralded the result as ushering in a “new day in America,” persistent schisms in the American electorate remained largely unchanged.


In an election marked by startlingly high early turnout and long lines on Election Day, Democrats made new inroads into America’s suburbs — gaining governorships in Kansas, Illinois, Michigan and New Mexico in addition to the House majority.

But in a bitter disappointment, Democrats fell short in swing-state gubernatorial contests in Ohio and Florida. They lost battleground Senate races in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota, with other losses possible if not likely.

The outcome deflated progressive activists who had desperately hoped for more.

“This is heartbreaking,” the liberal activist Van Jones said on CNN.

Though the president’s party has historically suffered midterm election losses — as Obama-era Democrats did in 2010 — the results on Tuesday were especially bruising for Republicans who saw their grip on the suburbs slip further away. Despite their losses in high-profile contests, Democrats were expected to cut into Republicans’ advantage in the nation’s governorships.

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And Democrats flipped suburban House districts across the country, from Florida and Virginia to Colorado — a new marker of the GOP’s fragility outside of the most rural, conservative swaths of the country.

Following his defeat in the Denver suburbs, Republican Rep. Mike Coffman told supporters, “[I knew] if this race was nationalized as a referendum on the president, I simply could not win this race. In this race, it was a referendum on the president. In the end, the wave was too big for this ship of ours to stay afloat."

Trump himself was defiant, heralding a “tremendous success tonight” on Twitter.

But with Democrats taking control of the House, he will lose the governing majority he's enjoyed the first two years of his presidency. The result, in all likelihood, will be more gridlock and partisan acrimony. Democrats are expected to spearhead investigations into the president’s ties with Russia, and they'll have to decide whether to heed calls from liberal activists to try to impeach him.

But Democrats wary of alienating moderate voters might find common ground with Trump on issues ranging from drug pricing to criminal justice reform.

“Can we get along?” Trump said on “Fox & Friends” recently. "Maybe."

The 2020 campaign is sure to color Trump's relationship with Congress as soon as the night's results are digested. Top-tier Democrats who were waiting to be sure that Democrats retake the House — a positive sign for their prospects in the next presidential election — are expected to rush into outright campaigning if Democrats gain a majority.

A large field of potential contenders, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), were heavily involved in the midterms, marshaling resources and staff for Democratic politicians in an effort to curry favor.

Trump held out hope that Republicans would maintain control of the House in recent days, even as his unpopularity in key suburban districts appeared to drag Republican candidates down.

Mercilessly yoking Republicans to the president’s strident anti-immigration rhetoric and to his effort to undo Obama-era health care guarantees, Democrats had already prompted a wave of GOP lawmakers to retire rather than face reelection.

For as much as the election served as a referendum on Trump, the identity of the Democratic Party hung in the balance, too. Had Gillum prevailed in Florida — or had Stacey Abrams prevailed in Georgia, where she was still in the running, but lagging behind — the election might have hastened the rise of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

While the Democrats’ growing coalition of younger, non-white voters ran into headwinds in statewide contests Tuesday, a cast of more establishment Democrats was struggling, too. In Indiana, Donnelly aired television ads criticizing the “radical left” for its positions on health care and immigration. And in Wisconsin, which Trump carried two years ago, Democrats are relying not on a liberal firebrand to unseat Republican Gov. Scott Walker, but on Tony Evers, a sober, 67-year-old state education superintendent who was drawing even with Walker late Tuesday.

By Election Day, the early vote in three states — Texas, Nevada and Arizona — had surpassed the total turnout in the last midterm election, as the historic nature of the election settled in. Nationwide, 36 million voters had cast early ballots, a staggering increase over 2014.

During an election-eve rally in Cleveland on Monday, Trump took credit for the surging interest in the elections, saying they “used to be like boring” but are now “the hottest thing.”

Trump had campaigned furiously for Senate Republicans in the final days of the election. But while Republican lawmakers sought to turn the president’s — and midterm voters’ — attention to less divisive, positive economic indicators, Trump only amplified his anti-immigration rhetoric, believing it would turn out base voters.

Ignoring pleas from fellow Republicans to change course, Trump said in the run-up to the midterms that “sometimes it’s not as exciting to talk about the economy … because we have a lot of other things to talk about.”

By Election Day, his closing argument for the midterms had been muted. NBC, Fox and Facebook decided on the eve of the election to pull an immigration-related ad widely panned as racist.

The fallout came hours later, with voters reporting they were casting their ballots about Trump, according to television networks’ early exit polls. Majorities of voters reported positive feelings about the economy but did not list it as an issue of primary significance. And the country, they said, was headed in the wrong direction.

Michael Stratford, Sarah Zimmerman and Ian Kullgren contributed to this report.

