Items10The creator’s order
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2026 United States electionsHalfway 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…0 - 2
2022 United States electionsJoe 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…0 - 3
2018 United States electionsForty-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…0 - 4
2014 United States electionsBarack 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,…0 - 52010 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…0
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2006 United States electionsIn 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…0 - 7
1994 United States electionsEven 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…0 - 8
1986 United States electionsRonald 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…0 - 9
1954 United States electionsDwight 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…0 - 10
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…0
