WASHINGTON — Democrats flipped the Senate and neared control of the House on Tuesday, achieving victories in parts of the country that had been safely Republican for decades, according to Associated Press projections, signaling a sea change in Washington’s balance of power.

The wave of Democratic victories gives the party commanding control of Congress, providing a powerful check on President Trump during his final two years in office. Unified control will provide Democrats with broad investigative and subpoena powers, authority over presidential appointments, control of legislation and federal spending, and the ability to pursue impeachment proceedings.

In a series of upsets deep in conservative territory, Democrat Annie Andrews prevailed in a Senate race in South Carolina, defeating Republican Darline Graham. Democrat James Talarico won a Senate seat in Texas, and a pastor in Kansas, Adam Hamilton, became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat there in nearly a century.

Democrat Sherrod Brown, a former senator, won his seat back in Ohio, a political return that flipped the seat for his party. And Roy Cooper and Josh Turek both won their races in North Carolina and Iowa, respectively, becoming the first Democrats to win Senate seats in their states since 2008.

Dozens of House races that will determine the Democrats’ margin in that chamber remained in play. But as the night progressed, election returns were showing Democrats ahead in roughly 60 House races, putting them on track to post one of the greatest political routs in modern history, alongside the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 and the “shellacking” of 2010, during the Obama administration.

It capped months of anticipation that Republicans would face a reckoning amid voter discontent over President Trump’s economic policies, corruption allegations and his war with Iran.

Despite fears that Trump would attempt to deny or obstruct the vote, the president said he would accept the results on Tuesday evening as the outcome became clear, in a brief call with the New York Times. But in a social media post, he blamed the Republicans’ poor showing on the fact that he wasn’t on the ballot.

“If I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote.

Democrats had been expected to win the North Carolina Senate race, but the victory in South Carolina is an extraordinary flip of a state that went for Trump by nearly 18 percentage points in 2024.

Republicans also faced stunning setbacks in governor’s mansions, losing seats they held to Democrats in Ohio, Texas and Georgia.

Democrats framed their early wins as repudiations of Trump-style politics.

“I accept your job offer,” Cooper quipped as he delivered a victory speech from Raleigh on Tuesday night. “Tonight, guys, we told Washington loud and clear that North Carolinians will always matter more than the billionaires and the insiders.”

“In sweeping and decisive victories, the American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed lame-duck President Donald J. Trump,” Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, who won reelection Tuesday, told supporters Tuesday night.

In Florida, a bastion of conservatism in the Trump era, contests for House seats were far tighter than expected, and Democrats held their ground in seats that Republicans had attempted to redistrict to their favor. The Republican candidate for governor there, Byron Donalds, won his race by an unexpectedly tight margin.

Across the board, Republican candidates were underperforming compared with the party’s 2024 showing, seeming to validate months of polls that suggested voters’ frustration with cost-of-living issues might drive them to the ballot box.

More than 59 million Americans had cast ballots in early voting before election day, according to the University of Florida Election Lab.

Cooper’s victory in North Carolina was the first time a Democrat won a Senate seat in the state since 2008. And Chris Pappas’ win in New Hampshire is also a milestone, making him the first out gay man ever elected to the Senate.

And in Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms, a Democrat, became the first black woman elected to a U.S. governorship in history.

Polling shows Democrats poised to make significant gains in the U.S. House and well-positioned for swing Senate races, but analysts say the Senate majority could go either way. Several gubernatorial seats are also open, and some contests have become unexpectedly close, including in Georgia, Kansas, Texas and Florida.

For weeks, the midterms have appeared poised to deliver a referendum on Trump’s second term and the state of the economy. Americans’ approval of the president has sunk to historic lows as they have cited concerns about affordability, corruption and immigration as driving factors for their votes.

On Monday and over the weekend, candidates made their final pushes to persuade voters.

Democrats, hoping to clench voter support for a “blue wave,” hammered home their arguments about affordability, corruption and the perceived toll of Trump’s governance, aiming to sway non-Democratic voters.

“This election is a battle between the powers that be and the powers that ought to be,” Talarico said at a Sunday night rally. “We are standing with the powers that ought to be — the teachers and the nurses, the farmers and the ranchers, the grandmother who is facing eviction.”

Republicans, anticipating losses in the House, focused on delivering dire warnings to voters about Democratic candidates, whom they have portrayed throughout the campaign as extreme, dangerous and in some cases a threat to the American way of life.

“This race is about defending our state and our country, but it’s also about safeguarding our way of life,” Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican nominee for Senate, said Sunday. “Texas has never been this close to slipping away. We’ve never been this close to losing everything that we hold dear — our jobs, our livelihoods, our way of life.”

As voters cast ballots Tuesday, the Justice Department’s election monitors fanned out at polling sites across the country. Thousands of volunteers nationwide were also mobilized to be poll monitors, a backlash to the idea of potential federal election interference.

Trump sent out a flurry of last-minute social media endorsements for Republican congressional candidates and called in to the “Fox and Friends” show to make a final case. Democratic candidates dropped last-minute ads urging voters to head to the polls.

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