The Republican Party has gained control of the United States Senate and is closing in on overall control of Congress with seats in the House of Representatives are yet to be announced.
President-elect Donald Trump’s party now have 52 of the 100 seats in the Senate, which was a loose Democratic majority before the election, including four independent senators such as Bernie Sanders.
Of the 33 seats being contested, three have switched to Republican including Ohio, a key seat, as well as West Virginia and Montana.
Six seats are yet to announce their results including in battleground states Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which were held by Democrats.
The Republican Party is also closing on a majority in the House of Representatives, although that race is tighter.
They were carrying a slender majority into this set of elections and have gained one additional seat up until this point, leaving them 20 short of a majority with 57 seats left to declare, including several close races.
There’s no immediate resolution in sight, as it took more than a week to determine the final control of the House in the last set of elections in 2022.
What is the Senate, House of Representatives and Congress?
The two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, are the government legislature that approves bills to become law and holds the executive to account.
The Senate is known as the upper chamber and is made up of two senators representing each state.
Senators serve six-year terms with about a third of the chamber being contested in staggered two-year intervals.
In the race this year there are two current seats also being contested in both California after the death of the Democrat Dianne Feinstein and Nebraska after the Republican Ben Sasse resigned last year.
The House of Representatives is the lower chamber and is made up of 435 members who each represent the constituents of a congressional district.
Representatives serve two-year terms with elections with elections every two years.
The American lawmaking process sees bills enter either one chamber and then the second, with both the House and Senate requiring a simple majority vote before the bill is finalised and presented to the president.
If the executive vetoes a bill, both chambers of Congress require a two-thirds super-majority vote for the bill to become statute.
Looking to the midterms
If the Republican Party occupies the House of Representatives as well as the Senate and the White House, it will have a unified government that can pass bills with little resistance from the opposition.
The midterm elections in 2026 will be the next opportunity for the Democrats to change the parliamentary arithmetic when all seats in the House and 33 seats in the Senate (as well as 39 gubernatorial elections for the chief executive governor of individual states and territories) are contested.
In the past 70 years Republicans have only controlled both Congress and the White House twice, from 2003 to 2007 and 2017 to 2019.
The Democrats have held a unified government five times over the same period, most recently from 2021 to 2023.
