US midterms: early results project Ossoff and Warner Senate wins as counting continues across the country
Early projections from the 2026 US midterms have Jon Ossoff holding his Georgia Senate seat and Mark Warner winning in Virginia, with a string of early Democratic House holds — but control of Congress remains undecided as western polls close and counting continues.
Early results from the United States midterm elections began to come in on Tuesday night, 3 November, as polls closed state by state across the country, with control of Congress — and with it the shape of the final two years of President Donald Trump's second term — hanging in the balance. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives were on the ballot, along with 35 Senate seats and 36 governorships, in an election widely framed as a referendum on the president's agenda.
The first big call of the night came from Georgia, where Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff was projected to win re-election, defeating Republican challenger and Representative Mike Collins. The projection came from Decision Desk HQ and was also carried by NBC News and CNN, and it preserved a crucial Democratic foothold in the Senate. Ossoff, who first entered the Senate in 2021 after Georgia's twin run-off victories, was the only Democratic senator seeking re-election in a state that Trump won in 2024, which had made the race one of the Republicans' top targets.
Early reporting put Ossoff well ahead, with around four-fifths of the vote counted in the first tranches against about a fifth for Collins, although those figures were always expected to narrow as more ballots were counted. The result keeps alive Democratic hopes of gaining ground in the Senate, where Republicans entered the night with a 53-47 majority and Democrats needed a net gain of four seats to take control. Georgia's open governor's race, between Republican Rick Jackson and Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms to succeed the term-limited Brian Kemp, remained too close to call in the early hours.
Virginia delivered the night's other early Senate projection, with Democratic incumbent Mark Warner projected by CBS News and Decision Desk HQ to win re-election over Republican challenger Bert Mizusawa. Together, the two Senate holds gave Democrats a steady start, but neither result on its own settled the battle for the chamber, with most of the night's competitive Senate races — including contests in states across the Midwest and the West — still to be decided.
In the House, the first projected holds also leaned Democratic in the early count. In Florida, Democrat Lois Frankel was projected to win re-election in the state's 23rd Congressional District, while Maxwell Frost retained Florida's 10th District in an uncontested race. In Georgia, Democrats Nikema Williams and Jasmine Clark were projected to hold the 5th and 13th districts respectively, defeating John Salvesen and Jonathan Chavez, and Democrat Oliver Gilbert was projected to win Florida's 24th District.
One early warning sign for Republicans came in Indiana, where incumbent Republican Representative Victoria Spartz trailed Democratic challenger J.D. Ford by about 60 per cent to 40 per cent in the first results from the state's 5th District, with nearly 40 per cent of precincts counted. Analysts cautioned that the margin was likely to narrow as election-day ballots, which tend to favour Republicans, were added to the count — a reminder that early leads in many districts can shift sharply through the night.
The scale of the vote was already clear before election day itself. Nearly 59.7 million Americans had cast ballots through early in-person voting and mail-in voting by Tuesday, surpassing the early-vote total from the 2022 midterms, according to figures cited in live coverage. More than 210 million Americans were eligible to vote in total, and in Georgia alone more than a million people had voted on election day on top of nearly 2.8 million early votes, a record for the state.
Polls closed in a staggered sequence through the evening, eastern time: first in parts of Indiana and Kentucky at 6 p.m., then at 7 p.m. in Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Vermont, most of Florida and the rest of Indiana and Kentucky, and at 7:30 p.m. in Ohio, North Carolina and West Virginia. Results from the Central and Mountain time zones were due to follow through the late evening, with the West Coast — including California, Washington and most of Oregon — not closing until 11 p.m. eastern time, and Alaska and Hawaii later still.
Early voter sentiment pointed to discontent driving turnout. According to a network exit poll reported by NBC News, more than four in ten voters viewed the midterms as a chance to reprimand President Trump, while preliminary survey results cited in live coverage found voters broadly unhappy with the state of the nation, the economy and the president's job performance. As results began to arrive, Trump himself criticised Fox News' coverage on social media, an early sign of the tension inside the Republican camp as the night unfolded.
For all the early movement, the decisive questions remained open as the night wore on. Control of neither chamber had been decided, many of the closest races had barely begun reporting, and final tallies in tight contests could take days or even weeks as mail-in and provisional ballots are counted. What the early projections did establish was a Democratic start in the night's marquee Senate race and a string of early House holds — a foundation, but not yet a verdict, on whether the party can flip the House, challenge for the Senate, or fall short in both.
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