Paul Singer

USA TODAY

The White House may not be the only institution in Washington that Democrats lost on Tuesday despite getting more votes than Republicans.

It turns out that Democrats also got more votes for the U.S. Senate than Republicans, and yet Republicans maintained their majority on Capitol Hill.

In results that are still preliminary, 45.2 million Americans cast a vote for a Democratic Senate candidate, while 39.3 million Americans voted for a Republican. (In the White House race, as of Thursday afternoon, Clinton had 60.1 million votes and Trump had 59.8 million.)

The problem for Democrats is that, much like the Electoral College, the number of votes matters less than where those votes are cast.

In California, for example, there were two Democrats — Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez — competing for an open Senate seat, with no Republican on the ballot. Together, they received 7.8 million votes. If you count only Harris' winning vote total of 4.9 million, Democrats still tally 42.2 million votes. Had a Republican Senate candidate in California captured as many votes as Sanchez did — about 2.9 million — the total for the two parties nationwide would have been about even.

Meet the new U.S. senators

The vote totals for Senate are also a bit arbitrary because each state gets two senators no matter how few people live there. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was re-elected with 111,000 votes; Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York was re-elected with 4.8 million votes.

Louisiana also complicates the calculations because there were 24 candidates running for a Senate seat and nobody got a majority of the votes. Republican candidates in that race collected 1.2 million votes while Democrats collected just under 700,000 votes. That race will be decided in a Dec. 10 runoff between the two top vote-getters, Democrat Foster Campbell and Republican John Kennedy.

Until that race is settled, Republicans have 51 Senate seats for the Congress that will convene in January; Democrats have 46, plus two independents who generally align with them.

Republicans captured the majority of the "popular vote" for the House on Election Day, collecting about 56.3 million votes while Democrats got about 53.2 million, according to USA TODAY calculations. With a few races still undecided, Republicans so far hold a 239-193 majority for the next Congress.

Contributing: Brad Heath