Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in Tuesday's midterm elections, handing Donald Trump a divided government for the last two years of his presidency and delivering one of the sharpest midterm rebukes to a sitting president in decades.
The Associated Press projected that Democrats would take the Senate late on Tuesday, after Josh Turek defeated Ashley Hinson, a Republican congresswoman, in Iowa. NBC News projected that the party had also won the House of Representatives, where it needed a net gain of only three seats.
A Senate rout
The scale of the Senate result surprised even Democratic strategists. The party needed a net gain of four seats; it flipped at least six, according to tallies by Forbes and Newsweek. Roy Cooper won North Carolina's open seat. Sherrod Brown returned to the Senate by defeating Jon Husted in Ohio. Adam Hamilton, a pastor, unseated Roger Marshall in Kansas, a state Mr Trump visited in the campaign's final days. Annie Andrews beat Darline Graham in South Carolina, and Democrats also gained Texas, where James Talarico ran against Ken Paxton. Jon Ossoff held Georgia, and Keisha Lance Bottoms became the state's first Black woman elected governor.
Why it happened
The exit polls explain much of the result. Forty-three per cent of voters said they had voted partly to oppose the president, and 65 per cent said his policies had made the economy worse. Petrol averaged $4.17 a gallon on the eve of the vote, more than a dollar above its level a year earlier, as the war with Iran kept oil prices high. Mr Trump's closing campaign, which included attacks on Somali immigrants and on Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim Senate candidate in Michigan, did not reverse the trend.
Markets take fright, mildly
Investors reacted cautiously. American stock futures fell overnight, with contracts on the Nasdaq down about 2 per cent and those on the S&P 500 down about 1 per cent, while the dollar index slipped by about 0.5 per cent. Analysts said a Democratic Congress made further fiscal stimulus less likely and raised the prospect of tougher regulation of Big Tech and artificial intelligence. "I don't think the big risk to markets is from the blue wave," said Michael Arone of State Street Global Advisors.
Tai Hui of J.P. Morgan Asset Management noted that Mr Trump retains his veto and can still move markets through tariffs, trade and foreign policy. A divided government, he said, could also restrain fiscal deficits.
What comes next
A Democratic Congress will control spending bills and gain the power to investigate the administration, from its tariffs and the conduct of the Iran war to the Justice Department's role in the election. Legislation will now require compromise; Mr Trump's agenda will depend largely on executive orders, which the courts have repeatedly constrained.
Several ballot measures, including California's Proposition 40, a one-off tax on billionaires' wealth, had not been decided when this article was published.
