It took a trip through the record books before CNN’s chief data analyst would believe what the midterm returns were telling him about the Republican Party.
Harry Enten, CNN’s 38-year-old chief data analyst, walked viewers of “CNN News Central” through the 2026 results on Sunday, Nov. 8, 2026, with ballots in some areas still being counted, and kept landing on the same year: 1948.
“It was a historic not just wave for Democrats, but a historic blue tsunami,” Enten said, joking that the country had just lived through a “blue-nami.” He started, he explained, with Congress.
Democrats flipped the U.S. House of Representatives and are likely to finish with a net gain of roughly 44 or 45 seats once the counting ends, Enten said. That, he added, citing USAFacts, is the party’s biggest net House gain since 1948, a defeat for President Donald Trump’s party.
Back to Truman and the Tribune
Seventy-eight years is a long way to reach for a comparison, and Enten made sure viewers felt the distance. “My goodness gracious, mind blown, 78 years ago,” he said, invoking the days of Harry S. Truman, who served as president from 1945 to 1953.
The Senate took him to the same spot on the calendar. By Enten’s count, Democrats are leading in nine seats — the seven they flipped, plus Alaska and Mississippi, both still outstanding. The last time the party flipped nine seats and flipped control of the chamber, he said, was 1948.
To drive it home, Enten reached for the most famous photograph in American electoral history: Truman grinning in St. Louis, Mo., in November 1948, holding up a Chicago Daily Tribune front page that declared he had lost to Thomas Dewey. Truman had come from behind and stunned the country, Enten noted, and the scale of what Democrats just did belongs in that company.
The Stat Enten Didn’t Believe
Then came the number he saved for last, the one he said he doubted until he went through the record books himself. This could be the first cycle ever, Enten said, in which a party won five Senate seats in states it had not carried in a presidential race in at least 10 election cycles.
The five: Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Alaska and Mississippi. Alaska and Mississippi remain uncalled, Enten said, but both were leaning more Democratic as he spoke. South Carolina, Kansas and Texas were already in the column. By his reading of the historical record, no party has ever pulled that off, a result he called mind-boggling.
What Democrats Haven’t Had Since the 1990s
The governors’ races did not require a trip to the Truman administration, but Enten rated them impressive all the same. Democrats are leading in or hold 30 governorships, he said. If they hang on in Alaska and Kansas, it would be the first time the party has controlled 30 governor’s mansions since the early-to-mid 1990s.
From Schumer’s Odds to Impeachment Odds
The Sunday segment capped a week in which Enten returned again and again to the same math. In an installment of “The Odds” on Friday, Nov. 6, he and “CNN News Central” anchor John Berman examined what the results meant for the Senate and where prediction markets put Sen. Chuck Schumer’s chances of becoming the chamber’s next majority leader.
Later that night, Enten turned up on "Laura Coates Live" to explain what he called “extinction level results” for Republicans — a collapse the network framed as upending the 2028 race for the White House.
By Monday, Nov. 9, the whiteboard had moved on to a new question. Berman and Enten were back with an installment of their odds segment weighing the chances of another Trump impeachment, with the House about to change hands.