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The last big races were called overnight, and ballots are still being counted in Anchorage and Jackson. What we already know is enough to say plainly: Democrats will control both chambers of Congress in January, with margins almost nobody predicted a year ago.
NBC News now projects that Democrats will hold about 258 House seats, a majority of roughly 80. In the Senate, Democrats flipped seven seats, in North Carolina, Maine, Iowa, Ohio, Kansas, Texas, and South Carolina, and the Associated Press now counts 54 seats for the Democratic caucus. Two races are still out. In Mississippi, Scott Colom leads Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by 43 votes; in Alaska, Mary Peltola is tied Sen. Dan Sullivan with roughly a quarter of the vote left to count.
Democrats went into Tuesday holding 214 House seats. A gain of more than 40 would be the party’s largest since 1974, the autumn after Richard Nixon resigned.
Even Fox News could not dress it up. Its own website described conservatives reeling from a “catastrophic” midterm “blue tsunami.” On Steve Bannon’s show, John Solomon conceded that the old “Christian coalition” had “frayed in this election.”
The pope they attacked
For this community, the story underneath the numbers is Pope Leo XIV.
This year, Donald Trump called the first American pope “weak on crime” and “terrible.” JD Vance, a Catholic convert, warned him to “be careful” when he talks about theology. Leo answered with the Beatitudes, and then with a warning of his own: “woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God.” A week before the election, he told the world that there is no such thing as a holy war.
Then he did what he asks every Catholic to do, and cast his own ballot from Rome.
On Tuesday, the American people took the pope’s side.
The Christian left comes home
In Kansas, the Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the largest United Methodist church in the country, beat Sen. Roger Marshall. Vance attacked Hamilton’s faith this fall; Kansas answered by electing its first Democratic senator since 1932. In Texas, James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminarian whom Ken Paxton branded a “far-left radical,” won the seat that has eluded Democrats since 1988.
Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor whom Trump repeatedly called a “jihadist.” He becomes the first Muslim ever elected to the Senate. Peggy Flanagan, a Catholic Ojibwe woman of the White Earth Nation, won in Minnesota and will be the first Native American woman to serve in that chamber.
Watch how these winners spoke when the calls came. Talarico took the stage around midnight behind a lectern that read “Love Thy Neighbor,” called it “a victory the size of Texas,” and likened his campaign against more than $300 million in opposition money to David facing Goliath.
El-Sayed opened his speech in Detroit with his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, and told the crowd that the “Inshallah” he had repeated all campaign could now become “Alhamdulillah,” praise be to God.
I found both moments remarkable. This is a movement of religious men and women, and last night it said so out loud. Praise God.
That was Talarico closing his campaign in San Antonio. On election night in Austin, he told supporters the campaign had won without shaming anyone’s neighbors, by practicing what he called “a new kind of politics.”
So the Senate class of 2026 includes a Methodist pastor, a Presbyterian seminarian, a Muslim doctor, and a Catholic Native American. Jon Ossoff, a Jewish Southerner, won a second term in Georgia with more than 58 percent of the vote. North Carolina chose Roy Cooper, a longtime Presbyterian elder and Sunday school teacher, and in South Carolina (a state Trump carried by 18 points two years ago) the pediatrician Annie Andrews became the first woman the state has ever elected to the Senate.
Then there is Tennessee’s 4th District, the seat I ran for and lost in 2020.
Victoria Broderick, a tech support professional from Fayetteville, lost to Rep. Scott DesJarlais by more than 40 points two years ago. Last night she beat him by 280 votes, and Rutherford County carried her over the line. She will be the only Democrat in Tennessee’s congressional delegation. I have walked the farm roads of that district (I wrote about them yesterday), and I can tell you that what happened there last night belongs in the history books.
By my count, this is the best night for the Christian left in nearly a century, since the Roosevelt landslide of 1932, the last year Kansas sent a Democrat to the Senate. Vox put it in five words overnight: “The Christian left is here.”
The data backs that up. On Monday, the political scientist Ryan Burge flagged 12 battleground House races in districts that are heavily mainline Protestant or heavily Catholic. All eight mainline seats were held by Republicans going in, and Burge reported Wednesday morning that every one of them flipped. In the Catholic districts, he wrote, every seat “will be held by a Democrat in January.”
Why voters moved
Americans have had enough of the corruption, and enough of watching power concentrate in one man’s hands. They feel the war in Iran every time they fill a gas tank. Prices are still too high, and families who were promised relief got tariffs instead.
What voters asked for on Tuesday is older than either party: peace, justice, progress, and equal dignity under the law.
John Paul II grew up behind the Iron Curtain and lived to see the wall come down. I have said it before, and this morning I believe it more than ever. Just as God raised up a pope from behind the Iron Curtain to help defeat communism, God has raised up a pope from the Americas to defeat MAGA authoritarianism.
These are the last days of the MAGA movement. Our mission over the next two years is to finish the work, so that this movement is swept into the dustpan of history and stays there.
Govern with humility
That mission starts with humility. A House majority of roughly 80 seats is a trust, and the Gospel has hard words for the servant who buries what he was given. It belongs to the people who lent it to them, many of whom voted Republican two years ago.
On Wednesday morning, the day after the vote, he told pilgrims in St. Peter’s Square that “politics that tends to the wounds of peoples and of those who suffer injustice” gives humanity reason to hope. He was walking through Gaudium et Spes, as he has every Wednesday this year, and the passage he reached happened to be the Council’s teaching on political life. Providence has a sense of timing.
As Catholics on the left, you and I owe these new leaders our support and our scrutiny at once. We will hold them to the issues that moved voters: ending the war in Iran, protecting immigrant families, defending the unborn and the poor, and making sure artificial intelligence serves working people rather than replacing them. We will remind them that cost of living is a moral question, because Pope Leo keeps reminding us.
Today, though, belongs to gratitude. In the words of the psalmist, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
We stand with our pope this morning. Our faith requires it, and the country we love deserves nothing less.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the pastors, seminarians, doctors, and ordinary believers who carried his vision of the common good into the voting booth on Tuesday. They did it in Kansas wheat country and in the hollows of Middle Tennessee, in places where people said faith belonged to one party alone.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for a faith that feeds the hungry, welcomes the stranger, and refuses to bless cruelty. The next two years will test whether that faith can govern as well as it can campaign, and we intend to be here for every day of it.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
I'm doing the happy dance right now!
Thank you Pope Leo 🙏🩵