Democrats harnessed voter fury toward President Trump to win control of the House and capture pivotal governorships Tuesday night as liberals and moderates banded together to deliver a forceful rebuke of Mr. Trump, even as Republicans held on to their Senate majority by claiming a handful of conservative-leaning seats.
The two parties each had some big successes in the states. Republican governors were elected in Ohio and Florida, two important battlegrounds in Mr. Trumps 2020 campaign calculations. Democrats beat Gov. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin Republican and a top target, and captured the governors office in Michigan two states that Mr. Trump carried in 2016 and where the left was looking to rebound.
Propelled by an unusually high turnout that illustrated the intensity of the backlash against Mr. Trump, Democrats claimed at least 26 House seats on the strength of their support in suburban and metropolitan districts that were once bulwarks of Republican power but where voters have recoiled from the presidents demagoguery on race.
Early Wednesday morning Democrats clinched the 218 House seats needed to take control. There were at least 15 additional tossup seats that had yet to be called.
From the suburbs of Richmond to the subdivisions of Chicago and even Oklahoma City, an array of diverse candidates many of them women, first-time contenders or both stormed to victory and ended the Republicans eight-year grip on the House majority.
But in an indication that the political and cultural divisions that lifted Mr. Trump two years ago may only be deepening, the Democratic gains did not extend to the Senate, where many of the most competitive races were in heavily rural states. Republicans were set to build on their one-seat majority in the chamber by winning Democratic seats in Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri while turning back Representative Beto ORourkes spirited challenge of Senator Ted Cruz in Texas.
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In two marquee races in the South, progressive African-American candidates for governor captured the imagination of liberals across the country. One fell to defeat at the hands of Trump acolytes, and the others future was in doubt a sign that steady demographic change across the region was proceeding too gradually to lift Democrats definitively to victory.
Secretary of State Brian Kemp of Georgia was ahead of Stacey Abrams, who was seeking to become the first black woman to lead a state; early Wednesday morning, Ms. Abrams suggested the race might go to a runoff. And former Representative Ron DeSantis narrowly defeated Andrew Gillum, the mayor of Tallahassee, in the largest presidential battleground, Florida.
At an election-night celebration in Washington, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader in the House who may soon return to the office of House speaker, signaled how central the theme of checking Mr. Trump and cleaning up government was to the partys success.
When Democrats win and we will win tonight we will have a Congress that is open, transparent and accountable to the American people, she proclaimed. Are you ready for a great Democratic victory?
But at a meeting of Democratic donors and strategists earlier on Tuesday, she signaled there were lines she would not cross next year. Attempting to impeach Mr. Trump, she said, was not on the agenda.
Even so, the Democrats House takeover represented a clarion call that a majority of the country wants to see limits on Mr. Trump for the next two years of his term. With the opposition now wielding subpoena power and the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, still looming, the president is facing a drastically more hostile political environment in the lead up to his re-election.
Their loss of the House also served unmistakable notice on Republicans that the rules of political gravity still exist in the Trump era. What was effectively a referendum on Mr. Trumps incendiary conduct and hard-right nationalism may make some of the partys lawmakers uneasy about linking themselves to a president who ended the campaign showering audiences with a blizzard of mistruths, conspiracy theories and invective about immigrants.
And it revealed that many of the right-of-center voters who backed Mr. Trump in 2016, as a barely palatable alternative to Hillary Clinton, were unwilling to give him enduring political loyalty.
The president was initially muted Tuesday night, offering only a terse statement on Twitter, but then turned more boastful, citing others to claim that he deserved credit for Republicans who won.
For Democrats, their House triumph was particularly redemptive not only because of how crestfallen they were in the wake of Mrs. Clintons defeat but due to how they found success this year.
The president unwittingly galvanized a new generation of activism, inspiring hundreds of thousands angered, and a little disoriented, by his unexpected triumph to make their first foray into politics as volunteers and candidates. He also helped ensure that Democratic officeholders would more closely reflect the coalition of their party, and that a woman may take over the House, should Ms. Pelosi secure the voters to reclaim the speakership.
It was the partys grass roots, however, that seeded Democratic candidates with unprecedented amounts of small-dollar contributions and dwarfed traditional party fund-raising efforts. The so-called liberal resistance was undergirded by women and people of color and many of them won on Tuesday, including Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Lauren Underwood in Illinois and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.
In next years session of Congress, there will be 100 women in the House for the first time in history.
The Democrats broad gains in the House, and their capture of several powerful governorships, in many cases represented a vindication of the partys more moderate wing. The candidates who delivered the House majority largely hailed from the political center, running on clean-government themes and promises of incremental improvement to the health care system rather than transformational social change.
To this end, the Democratic gains Tuesday came in many of the countrys most affluent suburbs, communities Mrs. Clinton carried, but they also surprised Republicans in some more conservative metropolitan areas. Kendra Horn, for example, pulled off perhaps the upset of the night by defeating Representative Steve Russell in central Oklahoma.
Oklahoma City has grown increasingly diverse and todays Republican Party has little to say to people of color, said the citys mayor, David F. Holt, noting that Mr. Russell sought to broaden his appeal but was running against the national message of his party.
And in a traditionally Republican South Carolina district where Representative Mark Sanford had lost his primary race in June, a Democrat, Joe Cunningham, upset a Trump enthusiast, Katie Arrington.
Indeed, the coalition of voters that mobilized against Mr. Trump was broad, diverse and somewhat ungainly, taking in young people and minorities who reject his culture-war politics; women appalled by what they see as his misogyny; seniors alarmed by Republican health care policies; and upscale suburban whites who support gun control and environmental regulation as surely as they favor tax cuts. It will now fall to Democrats to forge these disparate communities alienated by the president into a durable electoral base for the 2020 presidential race at a time when their core voters are increasingly tilting left.
Yet the theory embraced by hopeful liberals in states like Texas and Florida that charismatic and unapologetically progressive leaders might transmute Republican bastions into purple political battlegrounds, proved largely fruitless. Though there were signs that demographic change was loosening Republicans grip on the Sun Belt, those changes did not arrive quickly enough for candidates like Mr. Gillum and Mr. ORourke. And the Democratic collapse in rural areas that began to plague their candidates under President Obama worsened Tuesday across much of the political map.
Polling indicated that far more voters than is typical used their midterm vote to render a verdict on the president, and Mr. Trump embraced the campaign as a judgment on him: the signs above the stage at his finally rally in Missouri Monday night read, Promises Made, Promises Kept, and made no mention of the candidate he was ostensibly there to support.
But by maintaining the intense support of his red-state conservative base, Mr. Trump strengthened his partys hold on the Senate and extended Republican dominance of several swing states crucial to his re-election campaign, including Florida, Iowa and Ohio, where the G.O.P. retained the governorships.
Despite how inescapable the president was, Democrats carefully framed the election on policy issues such as health care to win over voters who were more uneasy with than hostile to the provocateur in the White House. There were far more campaign advertisements on the left about congressional Republicans endangering access to health insurance for those with pre-existing conditions than there were about a president who many liberals fear is a menace to American democracy.
While drawing less notice than the fight for control of Congress, Democrats enjoyed mixed success in something of a revival in the region that elevated Mr. Trump to the presidency by winning governors races in Michigan and Illinois. Beyond the symbolic importance of regaining a foothold in the Midwest, their state house gains will also offer them a measure of control over the next round of redistricting.
Drawing as much notice among progressives hungry for a new generation of leaders was the Senate race in Texas, where Mr. ORourke, a 46-year-old El Paso congressman, eschewed polling and political strategists to run as an unapologetic progressive in a conservative state undergoing a demographic shift.
Mr. ORourke ran closer than expected against Mr. Cruz thanks to a historic midterm turnout, and the Democrats unconventional success prompted calls for him to seek the presidency long before the polls closed Tuesday night.
In the states Mr. Trump made a priority Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri he came away with several marquee victories for Senate and governor. But in parts of the country with many college-educated white voters, some of whom supported Mr. Trump in 2016, his style of leadership and his singular focus on immigration in the last weeks of the campaign contributed to Republican House losses.
Among the major races of the night, Senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, three moderate Democrats in increasingly conservative states, were decisively defeated thanks to Republican strength in small towns and rural areas. In Tennessee, Representative Marsha Blackburn, a conservative Republican, was dominating former Gov. Phil Bredesen in the middle and western parts of the state that were once Democratic strongholds.
The Democrats flipped the Senate seat in Nevada, with Representative Jacky Rosen beating Senator Dean Heller, the chambers most endangered Republican this year.
In addition to beating Wisconsins Mr. Walker, Democrats also elected Gretchen Whitmer as governor of Michigan, a former State Senate leader who is seen as a rising star in the party. Illinois voters elected J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat and Hyatt hotel heir, over the embattled governor, Bruce Rauner.
The night began with a result in Kentucky that suggested a night of mixed results. Republicans staved off an early setback in a conservative-leaning House district in central Kentucky, as Representative Andy Barr repelled a fierce challenge from Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot running as a Democrat. Mr. Barrs survival offered some hope to Republicans that they could hang on to a small majority in the House.
Many voters were waiting to see if the country would place a check on Mr. Trump and Republican power in Washington, and if antagonism toward the president would fuel a wave of Republican losses. But just as Mr. Trump shocked many Americans with his victory in the Electoral College in 2016, the possibility that he might receive a political boost Tuesday with Republican wins in the Senate if not a mandate for the next two years was a bracing thought for Democrats, and an energizing one for Republicans.
In Chapmanville, W.Va., a hardware store worker, Chance Bradley, said he was voting Republican because Mr. Trump had made him feel like an American again. But Carl Blevins, a retired coal miner, voted Democratic and said he didnt understand how anybody could support Mr. Trump or, for that matter, the Republican candidate for Senate there, Patrick Morrisey, who went on to lose to Senator Joe Manchin.
I think they put something in the water, Mr. Blevins said.
Mr. Trump had appeared sensitive in recent days to the possibility that losing the House might be seen as a repudiation of his presidency, even telling reporters that he has been more focused on the Senate than on the scores of contested congressional districts where he is unpopular. And Mr. Trump insisted that he would not take the election results as a reflection on his performance.
I dont view this as for myself, Mr. Trump said on Sunday, adding that he believed he had made a big difference in a handful of Senate elections.
Early exit polls of voters, released by CNN on Tuesday night, showed a mixed assessment of President Trump as well as of Democratic leaders, and a generally gloomy mood in the country after months of tumultuous campaigning marked by racial tensions and spurts of violence.
Overall, 39 percent of voters said they went to the polls to express their opposition to the president, while 26 percent said they wanted to show support for him. Thirty-three percent said Mr. Trump was not a factor in their vote.
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Democrats Capture Control of House; G.O.P. Holds Senate ...