Key facts
- Roy Cooper, a former Democratic governor, won the open Republican-held North Carolina Senate seat, per the BBC analysis.
- Democrats need four Senate pick-ups to take control, and the North Carolina result was the first, the BBC analysis said.
- Republicans lost all three Florida House seats they had redrawn to make easier to win, the BBC analysis said.
- Democrats were poised for toss-up victories that would secure a House majority for the first time since 2022, the BBC analysis said.
- Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews was outperforming Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential numbers in majority black South Carolina counties, the BBC analysis said.
Democrats were on course for broad gains in the US midterm elections on November 4, 2026, with votes still being counted in the eastern United States and polls closing in key Midwestern battleground states, according to a BBC analysis by North America correspondent Anthony Zurcher.
Two Senate races that a year earlier were seen as battlegrounds turned into comfortable Democratic wins: Jon Ossoff's re-election in Georgia and the open Republican-held seat in North Carolina, where former Democratic Governor Roy Cooper defeated Republican Party insider Michael Whatley. That was the first of the four pick-ups Democrats need to take control of the Senate. Attention shifted to Republican-held Senate seats in Texas, Kansas and Ohio, where counting was under way. In South Carolina, the BBC's US partner CBS News rated the Senate race as leaning Democrat.
In the House, Republicans in the Florida legislature had redrawn the boundaries of three Democratic-held seats to make them easier to win, and lost all three, the analysis said. Other Florida House races that Republicans expected to win comfortably had become close contests. Democrats flipped an open seat in western North Carolina and appeared positioned to make gains in Virginia, Kentucky and Indiana.
The analysis attributed the Democratic performance to high turnout, particularly among black voters in the South, and to winning back Hispanic voters in Florida who had backed Republicans two years earlier. In majority black South Carolina counties, Democratic Senate candidate Annie Andrews was significantly outperforming Kamala Harris's presidential numbers from 2024, and in Miami-Dade County, which Trump carried that year, Democratic candidates were back on top.
There were Republican wins in Florida: Senator Ashley Moody narrowly won re-election and Congressman Byron Donalds won his bid for governor. The analysis said Florida as a whole still appeared to tilt right, and cautioned that a strong Democratic night in the east would not necessarily translate across the country.