How Democrats reshaped the Senate, in charts and maps
By Matt Stiles, Brett Taylor, Curt Merrill, Koko Nakajima, Annette Choi, Renée Rigdon, CNN
(CNN) — Two years after President Donald Trump carried much of the country’s political map, voters in some of his strongest states delivered a dramatic reversal Tuesday.
Democrats flipped seven Republican-held Senate seats, including in states Trump won by double digits in 2024. The shifts were enormous: The Democratic margin improved by more than 25 percentage points in Texas and more than 20 points in Kansas and South Carolina.
County-by-county election results show where those gains happened, from Democratic strongholds to places that remained solidly Republican.
CNN closely examined county-level votes in seven states where Democrats flipped a Senate seat that had been held by a Republican — Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Maine and New Hampshire — and also Mississippi and Alaska, where the results were too still close to call on Thursday.
Voters shifted toward Democrats in more than 780 of those states’ 800 counties — another illustration of the nearly uniform partisan movement by the electorate across the nation in House and Senate races.
In some places, such as Texas, scores of counties remained heavily Republican but still saw movement away from the GOP. In Texas’ urban areas, which were already Democratic or trending in that direction, the shift was also visible and decisive.
This chart shows how each state’s counties voted in the 2024 presidential election compared with the 2026 Senate contests.
A key shift in Texas came in the Rio Grande Valley, a heavily Latino region that had been reliably Democratic for decades before swinging toward President Donald Trump in 2024 — and back toward Democrats this year.
Cameron County, home to the city of Harlingen, saw a massive shift towards the Democratic challenger, James Talarico. He won the county by a 38.5 percentage-point margin en route to his Senate victory, the first for a Democrat since 1988.
Similar shifts happened in Hidalgo and Webb counties, which are home to McAllen and Laredo, respectively.
The shift that led to Talarico’s victory can be credited in part on a transforming “blue spine” of counties along Interstate 35. The swath of land through the middle of the state is home to Laredo, San Antonio, Austin, Waco and Dallas/Fort Worth.
These 21 counties have been growing more Democratic, even as the party has been shutout of statewide offices for three decades. It first emerged to prominence in 2018, when Democratic former congressman Beto O’Rourke came close to defeating Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
Talarico carried the region by about 26 points, more than doubling O’Rourke’s 2018 high-water mark for a modern-era Senate campaign.
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