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2026 United States elections
Halfway through Donald Trump's second term, his Republicans went into the midterm holding both the House and the Senate, and lost the lot. The upset came in Texas. The state's attorney general, Ken Paxton, had ousted the sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn, in a primary runoff, then lost the seat to Democrat James Talarico, the party's first Senate win in Texas since 1988. House projections give Democrats more than 250 seats. Several races are still being counted, so final totals may move.
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2022 United States elections
Joe Biden's Democrats lost the House by a handful of seats in a year when a Republican wave was widely predicted and never quite arrived; they even gained a Senate seat and kept that chamber. The thin majority made the Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, miserable. He needed 15 ballots to become Speaker in January 2023, the first time since 1923 the vote had gone past one, and that October eight Republicans joined Democrats to make him the first Speaker ever voted out.
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2018 United States elections
Forty-one seats: that was the Democrats' House gain at the first midterm of Donald Trump's first term, their best since the Watergate year of 1974, on the highest midterm turnout in more than a century. It ended Republican control of the House, and that House impeached Trump in December 2019. On the same night Republicans added two Senate seats, which let both sides claim they had won.
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2014 United States elections
Barack Obama had already lost the House; in his second term he lost the Senate as well, when Republicans took nine seats from his Democrats and made Mitch McConnell Majority Leader. What that was worth became clear in 2016. When Justice Antonin Scalia died, McConnell refused Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, so much as a hearing, and the Supreme Court seat stayed empty for more than a year.
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2010 United States elections
'A shellacking' was Barack Obama's own word for it the next day. Two years after his election, Republicans gained 63 House seats, the most in any midterm since 1938, and took the House while his Democrats held on to the Senate. With John Boehner as Speaker, every bill now needed a Republican House and a Democratic Senate to agree, and the first big test, the 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, ended with Standard & Poor's cutting America's credit rating for the first time.
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2006 United States elections
In George W. Bush's sixth year, with the Iraq war dominating the campaign, his Republicans lost both chambers, and the Senate went in a peculiar way. Joe Lieberman lost Connecticut's Democratic primary, ran as an independent, won anyway and then sat with the Democrats, so their new 51-seat majority counted him and Vermont's Bernie Sanders alongside 49 Democrats. In the House, Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to be Speaker, and the day after the vote Bush announced that his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was leaving.
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1994 United States elections
Even the Speaker lost his seat. Two years into Bill Clinton's presidency, his Democrats lost 54 House seats and a majority they had held for 40 years, and Tom Foley was beaten in his own district in Washington state, the first sitting Speaker to lose re-election since 1862. Newt Gingrich took over with his Contract with America. The Senate fell too, and the day after the election Alabama's Richard Shelby switched parties to join the winners.
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1986 United States elections
Ronald Reagan never had a Republican House, and six years into his presidency he lost the Senate too: Democrats took eight seats and ended the Republican majority that had arrived with his 1980 landslide. Within a year that Senate, with Joe Biden chairing the Judiciary Committee, rejected Reagan's Supreme Court nominee, Robert Bork, by 58 votes to 42.
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1954 United States elections
Dwight Eisenhower was still popular midway through his first term, and his Republicans lost both the House and the Senate anyway, which makes this the best answer here to anyone who treats a midterm as a simple verdict on the president. Sam Rayburn took the Speaker's chair and Lyndon Johnson the Senate leadership. Democrats would hold the House for the next 40 years, and in 1956 Ike won a landslide re-election without his party carrying either chamber, something that had happened only once before, in 1848.
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1946 United States elections
'Had enough? Vote Republican,' ran the slogan, and after a year of strikes and meat shortages voters had. Harry Truman, president since Franklin Roosevelt's death the year before, saw his Democrats lose 55 House seats and both chambers, giving Republicans Congress for the first time since the early 1930s. A fellow Democrat, Senator J. William Fulbright, even suggested Truman appoint a Republican Secretary of State and resign so that Republican could take over. Truman stayed. The new Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act, which curbed union power, over his veto, and in 1948 he ran against the 'Do-Nothing Congress' and won.
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