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4:50pm Peltola will win the Alaska Senate contest, taking Democrats to a 56-44 Senate majority. With over 95% counted, she now has 49.8%, with Republican Sullivan on 46.1%. That’s close enough to the 50% + 1 that she needs to win, and she’ll cross that line on exhaust and leakage. Remaining votes are likely to be pro-Peltola. This will be Democrats’ ninth Senate gain, seven in states Trump won by double-digit margins in 2024.
Guest post by Adrian Beaumont, who joins us from time to time to provide commentary on elections internationally. Adrian is a paid election analyst for The Conversation. His work for The Conversation can be found here.
Ten days since the November 3 US mid-term elections, Democrats have won the federal Senate by 55-44 over Republicans with one contest still unresolved. Alaska uses preferential voting. With 88% counted, Democrat Mary Peltola has 49.1%, Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan 46.8%, a minor Republican 2.2% and another Dan Sullivan 1.6%.
Unlike Australian elections, there’s no indicative two-candidate count. If no candidate wins a majority of the primary vote, the tabulation of preferential votes occurs next Thursday AEDT. The large majority of the outstanding votes are in legislative districts that Peltola won, so her vote share should increase in later counting. But preferences from the minor Republican and the second Sullivan are likely to favour Sullivan.
Senators have six-year terms with one-third up for election every two years. Democrats who gained seats won’t be up for re-election until 2032, except in Ohio which was a special election. Winning the Senate by 56-44 would make it harder for Republicans to regain the Senate majority before 2032. If a Democrat wins the 2028 presidential election, Democrats would be able to get a filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate majority with a four-seat net gain.
On Thursday AEDT, the Mississippi Senate contest was called for Democrat Scott Colom, who defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by 49.3-48.6, a 0.8 point margin. In 2024, Donald Trump had defeated Kamala Harris in Mississippi by nearly 23 points. In Nate Silver’s final pre-election polls aggregate, Hyde-Smith had led by 6.5 points, so Colom greatly exceeded his polls.
This was the first Democratic win in a Mississippi Senate contest since 1982, when southern Democrats were still regarded as racist. It’s the first time a Black person has won the Mississippi Senate in 140 years, during the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War.
Republican gerrymanders that backfired
Democrats lead in called seats in the House of Representatives by 256-169 with ten undecided. Of the undecided seats, Democrats lead in four, Republicans in four and two in Louisiana will go to runoffs on December 12. Republicans are likely to win both runoffs as they had a large majority of votes in both seats in November 3 “jungle primaries”. So Democrats are likely to win by a final 260-175. This would be Democrats’ largest House majority since the 1991-93 Congress.
Given Democrats’ national popular vote lead of 13.8 points in the Cook Political Report’s tracker, their 59.8% of seats is below expectations in a single-member system. At the Australian 2025 federal election, Labor won 62.7% of seats on a 10.5-point national two-party margin over the Coalition. At the UK 2024 general election, Labour won 63.2% of seats on a 10.0-point national popular vote margin over the Conservatives. There are relatively few competitive US House seats owing to gerrymanders, explaining Democrats’ underperformance relative to popular votes.
The Republican gerrymander that backfired most spectacularly was in North Carolina. In 2024, Republicans won the 14 NC House seats by 10-4. They tried to gain an extra seat by gerrymandering for an 11-3 Republican split. But the huge Democratic landslide wiped out Republican margins. Four NC seats haven’t been called yet, but Democrats are likely to win by 11-3.
In Texas, while Democrats gained a seat instead of Republicans gaining five (as per the gerrymander), Republicans had enough safe seats that they won Texas’ 38 House seats by 24-14 despite losing the popular vote in Texas by 5.7 points. In Florida, there was no net gain with Republicans holding the 28 Florida House seats by 20-8 (a four-seat Republican gain was expected from the gerrymander). Republicans won the Florida popular vote by 2.2 points.
In Tennessee, the Republican gerrymander had split Memphis into three House seats. While Republicans won all these seats, they appear to have lost another Tennessee seat by 0.14 points. In Alabama, Democrats held a seat they were expected to lose after gerrymandering. Republican gerrymanders will only work as expected in Louisiana, provided they win both runoffs on December 12.
Republican Lauren Boebert has been defeated in Colorado’s fourth House district. Democrats have gained the governorships of Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Iowa and Nevada, with Alaska to come.
The question is how to build on those. Especially in Texas and Mississippi. How to stop them flopping back to the Repubs.
Dems need to do all the things we all know they need to do. Abolish the Electoral College. Force states to set up independent election commissions with no gerrymandering. Appoint 5 new Supreme Court judges that outnumber the loonies and force change on the court. Get rid of the Senate Filibustering and make simple majorities for all votes. Get rid of the money out of the electoral system. Move voting to Saturdays like we do, and only use manual systems.
And stick Trump and several thousand cronies in jail, which they failed to do in 2020.
Stop ‘reaching across the aisle’
I found a website when the count was at about 70% which claimed that because the ballots are scanned, it was already known that the preference distribution was at that stage, of the approx 4% other primaries, just over 1.3% were going to Sullivan, just over 0.9% to Peltola, and the other 1.8% exhausting. I just looked for that site again but I can’t find it. If the difference in allocated preferences is only say 0.45% in about 290000 total Sullivan can only catch up about 1400 votes. I hope I’m right. Just checked count. Peltola might actually get to 50%. Pretty close.
So is Alaska like NSW with ‘optional’ preferential voting? I assume Republicans would want you at least voting for both Sullivan incumbent and the other Republican (but not for Sullivan non-incumbent)
Reposting from the main thread,
Pondering what the Democrats should do once they hold the House and Senate, they should probably make the tactic of passing legislation and even if Trump vetoes most of it, pin the blame on him.
It’s one of the reasons why the Democrats went so well in the 2008 election after they won the 2006 midterms, they were pushing popular bills forward and Bush vetoed most of them.
Don’t give up just because they won’t pass the veto, make that bloated oompa-loompa own what he does.
I found the link to the preliminary ranked choice allocation.
https://fairvote.org/results-and-analysis-from-alaskas-2026-elections/
corleone at 4:48
Appears to be
Alaska 2026 Senate
Updated Nov 13, 2026
Est. 96% votes in
CANDIDATE VOTES
Mary
Peltola
Democratic 49.8% 138,240
Dan S.
Sullivan*
Republican 46.1% 127,828
Gerald
Heikes
Republican 2.1% 5,885
Daniel J.
Sullivan
Independent 1.6% 4,560
It is
Looks like Kansas Governor has been called for the Democratic candidate Cindy Holscher.
It appears that she will replace the incumbent Democrat Laura Kelly.
This one went down to the wire.
Cindy Holscher (D): 552,328 50.3%
Ty Masterson (R): 545,128 49.7%
So now Democrats only need the 855 “write ins” to get over 50% in Alaska.
I suppose Trumpy would assume they are all Republicans as well ??
I think Peltona will end up over 50% anyway though.
With 9 flips in the senate, 2026 Ds beats:
2010 for Rs (6 flips)
2008 for Ds (8)
1994 for Rs (8)
1986 for Ds (8)
One has to go back to 1980 to seat more seats flip to one side – Republicans gained 12 seats that year. For a better Democratic gain one has to go to 1958.
Thanks for that link, WMGA. In Alaska’s only House seat, it suggests that Rep Nick Begich will hold against an independent challenger.
In Louisiana, the Dems might be able to put in a better show in District 5 than District 6. There are big chunks of the District where the 2nd placed Republican -Gabe Firment – did extremely poorly compared to other Republican candidates. In some parishes, he wasn’t even in the top 5 candidates.
Although Pat Moore is probably not a good enough candidate to pull off a win.
Not taking anything away from Scott Colom – he had a stellar campaign and his victory in Mississippi is one for the ages. But his opponent (Cindy Hyde-Smith) did not do herself any favours. She was a pot plant in the Senate, and a cack-handed campaigner in her home state (she made one particularly tactless remark about the price of beef). Silly Cindy probably figured that being a Republican senator in one of the reddest states in the U.S. was a job for life.
On Alaska, if anyone was wondering why late votes favour Democrats, this is because these votes come from parts of the state with large native American populations. Although called ‘rural’ they are very different to the rural populations of the lower 48 states.
Gerrymandering is of course a perversion of the democratic process. Voters should choose their elected representatives, not the other way round.
Both sides do it. It is just that it is often easier for Republicans to gerrymander when Democratic voters are concentrated in urban areas. In Tennessee, for example, the Republican legislature in 2026 split Memphis between three districts, abolishing the state’s single Black-majority, Democratic-held district.
Gerrymandering can lead to some truly bizarre shaped districts. Illinois’ 16th district looks like a silhouette of Sideshow Bob.