Understanding Key Midterm Results by Community Type

The 2026 midterms were a massive rebuke of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, with Democrats picking up U.S. House and U.S. Senate seats and governor’s mansions around the country. The party will end up with more than 250 seats in the House, at least 54 seats in the Senate, and possibly 30 governorships.

Looking at the results through the lens of the American Communities Project reveals just how huge the vote swings were across every type of community we study. Places that tend to vote Democratic, like the Big Cities, did so by larger margins. Republican-leaning locales, such as Working Class Country, saw their GOP vote shrink or flip Democratic. And turnout played a big role everywhere.

We analyzed three big Senate wins for the Democrats to better understand what voters did on Tuesday night:

• Michigan, the state the Democrats needed to hold;
• Texas, the state they desperately wanted to win; and
• South Carolina, one of the night’s surprise flips.

We compared these states’ 2026 midterm results to their 2024 presidential results.

The three outcomes have similar themes but are defined by diverse actions at the local level. They show us an electorate achieved change in different ways — in some places by turning out and in others by staying home.

These analyses come from largely complete, but not final, vote tallies. The numbers are not likely to change dramatically as the maps fill in.

Michigan, the State Democrats Held

In 2024, President Trump won Michigan by about 1.5 percentage points. On Tuesday, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won by about 7 percentage points. The vote moved everywhere, but a few types stood out in the data.

Michigan has one Big City county, Wayne, the home of Detroit — and it showed up big for El-Sayed. The Democrat won it by 43 percentage points, whereas in 2024, Democrat Kamala Harris won the county by 29 points. And El-Sayed netted more votes out of the county than Harris as well — 311,000 versus about 249,000. Doing that in a midterm compared to a presidential year is not easy; it is usually the result of a fired-up base and a more apathetic opposition.

The other story in Michigan was its seven College Town counties. Together, they swung Democratic by 8 points and, more impressive, produced 88% of their presidential year vote, the highest number in the state. There is always a question about whether young voters are going to turn out in midterm elections. They did in Michigan to El-Sayed’s benefit.

Texas, the Coveted Flip

We wrote about Texas this fall, pointing out the Democrats’ habit of trying to win here and just missing. Trump won here by 14 percentage points in 2024, but on Tuesday, James Talarico carried the state by an almost unthinkable 12 points over Republican Ken Paxton. That’s a 26-point shift in margin. Again, the vote moved toward the Democrat everywhere, but some places were remarkable.

The biggest flip in the vote came in the Hispanic Center counties, where the shift was a striking 36 percentage points. Those 92 counties voted for Trump by about 20 percentage points in 2024. They went with Talarico by 16 points in the midterm. Much has been written about the shift in the Hispanic vote in this election, and it was a juggernaut in Texas, powering Talarico and Democratic Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa to victory. In fact, the Republican leadership was wiped out across the board, leaving U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz as the only statewide Republican officeholder.

Other communities of note include the five Big City counties in Texas. They shifted 25 percentage points. Harris won them by 12 points in 2024, but Talarico won them by 37 points. Perhaps more important, the Big Cities produced 90% of their presidential vote, the highest such number in the state. One factor may be that the Big Cities in Texas not only contain a lot of young people, but they also contain a lot of Hispanic people, compounding the turnout impact. The Texas Big City counties produced more votes for Talarico (2.76 million) than they did in 2024 for Harris (2.51 million).

South Carolina, the Surprise Pickup

Going into Election Day, there were rumblings that South Carolina, which Trump won by 18 percentage points in 2024, might be in play, but might was the key word. It turned out the race was over fairly early in the evening as pediatrician Annie Andrews defeated interim U.S. Sen. Darline Graham by a comfortable 4 percentage points. The story in the state was in part about who didn’t turn out this year.

The biggest swing in the state took place in its most Republican-leaning counties, the 11 Working Class Country counties, which swung to the Democrat by 25 percentage points. Graham still carried those counties, easily by 13 points, but Trump won them by a massive 38 points. How does a shift like that happen? In part, Republicans didn’t show up. Only about three-quarters of the 2024 electorate came out in this midterm in Working Class Country, the lowest percentage in the state.

The opposite was true in the state’s College Town counties, which produced 83% of their 2024 vote totals, while also swinging hard to the Democrat. Andrews won the College Towns in South Carolina by 31 percentage points. In 2024, Kamala Harris won them by 9 points. That’s a big swing in a set of populous counties that includes Clemson University.

What It All Means

While we’ve looked at three states here, there are similar stories in all the big wins for Democrats. Going through the swinging states, Republican-leaning counties didn’t turn out at the same rates as their Democratic-leaning counterparts. And everywhere Democrats improved on their margins, they won by more or lost by less.

In the end, that fits with a lot of what we heard in Texas and Ohio this past summer, and Iowa in the spring. When we talked to Republican-leaning voters, they were unsure about the direction of the country and/or somewhat apathetic, while Democrats were enthusiastic.

In the coming days, the ACP will explore the 2026 exit poll data broken into our 15 types, allowing us to dig deeper into what motivated voters’ decisions. Was the vote in Working Class Country driven especially hard by inflation and gas prices? How big was immigration in the Hispanic Centers’ shift?

We will share those insights soon.