2026 Midterm Results: What They Mean for the Lame Duck and the 120th Congress

Democrats won the 2026 midterms by a margin that reset expectations for the 120th Congress. One week later, the numbers are still settling, the lame duck is already underway, and the party that won is arguing with itself about how to use the majority it has not yet taken.

On November 12, Jason Dick, Editor in Chief of CQ News and Roll Call, sat down with Peter Cohn, Managing Editor, Policy and Legislation, for a 30-minute debrief on the post-midterm picture: the December 11 funding deadline, the NDAA, committee musical chairs, and what the results mean for the policy agenda through 2027. Here's what they had to say.

Key Takeaways

• Democrats are heading into the 120th Congress with their largest House majority in decades, and the panel noted the Senate majority could reach 56 seats as the last races are called.
• The December 11 government funding deadline collides with a push from some Senate Democrats to tie any stopgap to cutting off money for combat operations involving Iran, a standoff that could carry into the January 3 swearing-in.
• Senate Democratic leadership may not be settled until after Thanksgiving, with Chuck Schumer under pressure from his caucus and Chris Van Hollen signaling a possible challenge.
• The NDAA could miss its year-end deadline for the first time in decades, though bipartisan interest in chip export controls after the NVIDIA shakeup may give it a path.
• Democrats are divided on healthcare, with energy shifting from shoring up the Affordable Care Act toward Medicare expansion, and a debt limit fight waits in the back half of 2027.

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Video Timestamps

• 2:57 - Maine's 2nd District is called for Paul LePage, and what the slow count says about Democratic gains
• 4:02 - Pete Cohn on the size of the majorities and the risk of Democrats overplaying their hand
• 5:37 - Chuck Schumer's leadership fight and Chris Van Hollen's demand on Iran war funding
• 6:53 - Could the 120th Congress open in the middle of a shutdown?
• 8:16 - Iran as the elephant in the room, and the pressure on Hakeem Jeffries from the left
• 10:47 - The NDAA, departing defense hawks, and the Pentagon top line
• 13:48 - The NVIDIA fallout and chip export controls as a reason to finish the NDAA
• 16:30 - Appropriations in the 120th: Patty Murray, Rosa DeLauro, and Murkowski versus Moran
• 23:06 - Affordability, oversight, and the floor time an impeachment would cost
• 25:39 - The healthcare debate: Medicare expansion, the ACA, and who pays
• 28:35 - Reconciliation, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and the debt limit

Full Transcript

Jason Dick

My name is Jason Dick, and I'm the Editor-in-Chief of CQ and Roll Call. I'm pleased that you joined us today for Decoding the 2026 Midterms.

My colleague in the newsroom, Peter Cohn, is our Managing Editor for Policy and Legislation at CQ and Roll Call, and a longtime colleague. Pete and I have been doing this for a long time. We covered our first midterms together at National Journal way back in 2004, when we literally slept overnight at the Watergate headquarters for Congress Daily. We were much younger then, but not nearly as wise as we are now. So, Pete, thanks for joining the webinar as we talk about what we can expect in the 120th Congress.

Peter Cohn

Great to be with you, Jason, although I gotta confess, I can't really remember that far back.

Jason Dick

I think we may have expunged some of that from our memories, particularly going 40 hours in a row without any sleep. That was a big election, but as big as 2004 was, it seems minor compared to what we saw last week. We're still getting race calls from Tuesday's election day.

Right as we were about to come in here, the Associated Press called Maine's 2nd Congressional District for Republican Paul LePage, the former Republican governor of Maine. That is only the third Democratic district Republicans have flipped, and it's the only one so far that wasn't a flip because of redistricting. LePage did not defeat an incumbent. Jared Golden retired, or however you want to describe someone in their 40s who's moving on to another profession.

So that's the first Republican flip in an open seat not caused by redistricting, and it shows the extent of the inroads Democrats made. That's going to make this webinar pretty interesting, because we're still seeing who is going to be running for some of the top slots in committees, right?

Peter Cohn

Absolutely. You've all seen the numbers. On the popular vote alone, this is the biggest destruction of one party by the other since Watergate. It's going to be the biggest House majority for either party in decades. The Senate majority went way beyond the wildest dreams of the prediction markets. It's looking like it's going to be 56 seats in the Senate.

The risk for Democrats now is that they overplay their hand, and you're already starting to see some of that play out only about one week out from the election. The incoming crop is starting to flex its muscles. They're starting to try to influence the process, even in the lame duck session.

That is going to have major repercussions when we get to December 11, the government funding deadline. The Iran war is clearly in the crosshairs, pardon the pun, of the Democratic majorities on both sides of the Capitol, with major divisions about how aggressive they can be in trying to cut off the purse strings for Department of Defense operations overseas. Department of War, as some may prefer to say it.

So there will be chairmanship battles that play out, probably in December, and the leadership is not going to be settled. That's another major factor, particularly on the Senate side. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, who by all accounts had a gangbusters election, is being targeted for defeat by a large portion of his caucus. They're being egged on by the left, which is emboldened by the results of last Tuesday. Chuck Schumer has to walk an incredibly fine line. He's got to make that faction of his caucus happy to beat back a potential challenge.

We don't know if he will be challenged. The prediction markets have Schumer at about an 80 percent chance to hang on. But Chris Van Hollen, senator from Maryland, is making noises about challenging him. Just this morning, Van Hollen and a group of his colleagues came out with a statement saying they will not support a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown unless it includes language cutting off money for any combat operations that involve Iran.

That's going to be a major fight coming down the pike, and the fact that Democrats won't have their leadership squared away until probably early December raises the stakes considerably for that December 11 deadline.

Jason Dick

One of the things that strikes me is that we're less than one month away from this shutdown deadline. Democrats don't take their majority until January 3 at noon, as the Constitution stipulates. And yet we're faced with the not completely outside chance that we could be starting a new Congress in the middle of a shutdown if these talks don't go anywhere.

On the other hand, Susan Collins, who lost her race for re-election, is the Appropriations chair in the Senate, and she's releasing appropriations bills. She released the Agriculture bill earlier this week. It looks like later this week we'll get Energy and Water and a couple of others. So on one hand there is an effort to get some kind of agreement. But the underlying politics don't seem to have budged from a White House perspective. The president just announced a few minutes ago that J.D. Vance is being pulled out of any talks with Iran to focus on the fraud campaign.

So the Iran issue is not going away, and it directly impacts the funding deadline on the 11th. I promise we'll get to the 120th Congress and the significant committee leadership changes, but we don't even know how we're going to get out of December yet.

Peter Cohn

That's exactly right. Iran is the major elephant in the room. We just talked about the dynamic in both chambers, where you have this emboldened incoming majority, influenced by members who aren't even here yet but were in town this week for freshman orientation. And then the social media echo chamber is a whole other thing. It's all coming at them right now.

The pressure is on Hakeem Jeffries, who in all likelihood is going to be the speaker. There's not a lot of doubt about Jeffries' leadership prospects. But he is getting absolutely hammered by his left flank over all of these issues, and definitely on the Iran war.

All of our reporters up at the Capitol are asking these questions, and they're not getting straight answers out of people like Schumer and Jeffries right now, because all of the energy is coming from the anti-war faction on the left. Everyone, even on the Republican side, is pretty much saying we need to wind down these operations in Iran, given what happened with inflation and the ongoing risk to the Strait of Hormuz.

But that December 11 deadline is coming fast, and they do not have a way out of it at this moment. Susan Collins just lost, and she's trying to get some things done on her way out the door for her home state. That's very unlikely to succeed, because these are partisan bills that don't have buy-in from the Democratic side.

The Democratic leadership, the ones who want to make the government function, including the leadership on the Appropriations Committee, want a short-term stopgap continuing resolution. The thinking is: we're going to take over on January 3, we're going to have something like 260 seats in the House and 56 seats in the Senate, we can do a lot of things and put a lot of pressure on this administration. So let's take it easy and punt the remaining issues into the early part of next year.

But they're encountering major pushback from their caucus on doing that. So, as you said, we could end up on January 3 in a shutdown at the very moment that should be a triumphant, historic moment for Hakeem Jeffries getting that gavel.

Jason Dick

And appropriations is not the only deadline we've got for this lame duck. Before we get to the 120th, we also have the National Defense Authorization Act. It authorizes spending on Pentagon programs and national security, but it's also typically a Christmas tree for legislation that's ready to go but not quite ready for the floor on its own. Whether it's the highway bill or permitting reform, which the Senate is debating right now, the NDAA tends to attract a lot of riders.

And we don't know about that either. They were on a glide path in informal conference talks, and then this election took over. Some people on the Republican side were not expected to lose. We didn't expect Rob Wittman to lose in Virginia, a very senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, nor Michael Turner, another senior Republican on House Armed Services. When you lose people like that, sometimes even attendance is a problem for the rest of the lame duck.

Peter Cohn

Right. You saw a lot of defense hawks departing. Even before the election we knew Mitch McConnell is going to be departing. We had the untimely passing of Lindsey Graham in the Senate. So the defense talks are sort of trickling out.

At the same time, President Trump continues, including just today on Truth Social, calling for a massive increase in Department of Defense funding by the end of this year, probably through a budget reconciliation bill. There's not a lot of appetite for that on Capitol Hill right now. Conservatives are pushing for it, but in the Senate the path is extremely narrow.

The NDAA doesn't appropriate the funds, but it is a statement of where Congress is on Pentagon funding, and it carries a lot of unrelated issues. You have to set a top line for the Defense Department budget as part of it, so it's tied up in the same issues we're seeing with the government funding fight. Iran, Iran, Iran. They're going to be pushing for the same types of strings on the Pentagon and on the administration's prosecution of the war, and for a lower defense budget target.

So we could be witnessing a situation where the NDAA, for the first time in something like 64 years, does not get done by the end of the year.

Now, the counter to that is the NVIDIA situation. We've just witnessed the downfall of the CEO of NVIDIA, for various reasons we don't need to get into here.

Jason Dick

Violating company policy was the most recent one.

Peter Cohn

That is a big one, yes. NVIDIA was one of the major companies pushing back against export controls for the advanced semiconductors used in the artificial intelligence build-out. There was a package of bills tied up in the NDAA with a lot of support on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the Capitol. Very few opponents. The big tech companies, particularly NVIDIA, expressed opposition.

Now you're starting to see those objections fall away a little bit, and people viewing it as a real political imperative to make sure the most advanced, sensitive chips used in AI are not available to the Chinese. That's the counterweight to the argument that they can't agree on the defense budget or on Iran. Maybe they've got to pass the NDAA just to express concern about the Chinese microchip situation.

On the other hand, they could do it the old-fashioned way and pass those bills separately. But that very rarely happens at the end of the year, when the Senate's process makes it hard to pass any stand-alone bill.

Jason Dick

I do want to transition into the 120th now, but you cannot take anything for granted in the lame duck. One reason it becomes so unpredictable is that you have people who are literally depressed and not excited about coming back to Washington. They also don't have offices anymore. If they've lost or retired, they're moving out of their office space right now, into temporary space on the House side of the Capitol, which gets very crowded.

If you go there, it's an incredibly chaotic scene, with dumpsters full of stuff in the hallways. It is not a conducive atmosphere for legislating in a deliberate manner. So buckle up. We're going to see a lot of things that may not be entirely predictable, which is why we're up at the Capitol, to make sure we don't miss anything.

So, the 120th Congress. As unstable as we've painted this picture, on one of our biggest topic areas, budget and appropriations, the Democratic leadership seems set. That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of sticky issues to work through. In the Senate, Patty Murray will be the Appropriations chair. In the House, Rosa DeLauro will be the Appropriations chair. They're the ranking members of their respective spending panels right now.

There's a bigger question mark on the Republican side, particularly in the Senate, where we've got an interesting power play between Lisa Murkowski and Jerry Moran for the Senate Appropriations ranking member slot.

Peter Cohn

Right. On the Democratic side of the Appropriations Committee, frankly, is where most of the bill writing is going to happen, particularly in the House. Republicans are not going to have a lot of input into how those bills are written. It's going to be very tightly controlled by the leadership out of the Speaker's office, in close conjunction with Rosa DeLauro.

They're going to be writing bills to a substantially higher funding level on the non-defense side. They'll probably try to keep the defense budget relatively stable, if not a little lower than the last few years. With the margin they'll have in the House, where they can afford to lose 40 or so members on their side, they're going to be able to pass bills.

The Senate is going to be a lot different. With 56 votes, it's a different dynamic. We've been talking about all the energy coming from the left, but if you look at where Senate Democrats flipped seats, these are some pretty deep red parts of the country. You've got new senators coming in like Adam Hamilton in Kansas and James Talarico in Texas. In all likelihood we'll see Mary Peltola pull it out in Alaska. Scott Colom in Mississippi. These are people who do not have the same ideas about how to do business as, say, a Chris Van Hollen, who is positioning himself for something, whether it's Democratic leader or a presidential run in 2028.

So they're going to have their hands full. And if you don't have 60 votes, you are eventually going to need some sort of bipartisan buy-in. Lisa Murkowski at the top of the Senate Appropriations Committee would probably be a lot more likely to cut a deal with the Democrats, given her track record over the last few decades, than a Jerry Moran from Kansas. It'll be interesting how Hamilton and Moran work together, if in fact Moran pulls it out, which is unclear. It's an unprecedented situation with the challenge Murkowski appears to be making.

The House is going to be fine pushing bills out. They'll probably pass bills to cut off money for the war as part of their spending bills, if not something they do in the first couple of weeks of the session. On the Senate side, we've got to see how the leadership questions play out: who the ranking member is going to be, who the Democratic leader is going to be. The Appropriations Committee has become much more tightly controlled at the leadership level in recent decades. The days of the freewheeling Appropriations Committee have come to an end. So we've got to see if Schumer hangs on.

Jason Dick

I know we stated this at the beginning, but the thought that a minority leader who picks up nine seats, potentially, has to struggle to get the votes to be majority leader, especially after the close relationships he developed as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, must be mind-blowing to him. We're witnessing generational evolution in real time. After such a big victory, we won't know the leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate until potentially after Thanksgiving, unless something changes remarkably.

Peter Cohn

It's looking like after Thanksgiving, from all the reports we're getting. And that's a major factor in the December 11 fight. Let's assume Schumer hangs on. Right now he does not have an actual challenger, which is important. Somebody has to run. If Chris Van Hollen wants to run for president, being majority leader is really not a good launching pad for a presidential campaign.

Jason Dick

Just ask Bob Dole.

Peter Cohn

Great example. So the 120th is not getting off to the type of start one might have expected a week ago Tuesday, when Democrats made crushing, historic gains, because of the infighting we're seeing. We could have predicted there would be infighting, but the extent of it is something else.

There were Democrats who could not get to the Capitol to impeach Pete Hegseth earlier this week because they were attending a fundraising dinner. They are being absolutely hammered by the party faithful all over the internet. The left-leaning groups are coming after their own members for things like that. That kind of thing is going to keep playing out, not just right now but all through next year. If anybody strays from the party or doesn't toe the line, they're going to hear about it, and that's going to be a problem for leadership in both chambers.

Jason Dick

One of the biggest issues in the campaign was affordability. Democrats tried to tie this to the expiration of subsidies for Obamacare, among other issues. Energy prices were a huge part of it. There are goals to put forward legislation to address all this. Permitting reform in this Congress is conceivably something that could address energy prices by cutting some of the red tape on energy projects.

But the other thing we have to consider is the pent-up desire among Democrats to perform oversight on the Trump administration. Things like the impeachment of Hegseth. He survived this week. I'm guessing there will be another impeachment vote sometime in January or February. All of this takes time. It's an opportunity cost. If Hegseth gets impeached, there's a Senate trial. The Chief Justice of the United States comes over to preside, even if it's a quick trial.

So how likely are we to see a delay in getting the Democrats' agenda going at the beginning of the year if they're dealing with a short-term continuing resolution, an impeachment of the Secretary of Defense, and other oversight fights with the Justice Department?

Peter Cohn

President Trump remains an almost uniquely unpopular president. Last week was a total referendum on Trump, and he's going to continue to be a referendum over the next couple of years as Democrats try to see which Republicans continue to tether themselves to the MAGA universe. You're already starting to see J.D. Vance try to distance himself a little bit.

So Democrats have an incentive to keep the administration in their sights, with subpoenas and oversight and hearings left and right next year. That also serves another purpose. At the moment, they're a little divided on what their agenda is going to look like.

Peter Cohn

On affordability, there's a massive debate happening on the Democratic side right now. What do we do about healthcare? For years, the mantra was that we've got to shore up the Affordable Care Act. Now they're barely talking about the Affordable Care Act. Now it's all about how quickly they can expand Medicare to as many people as possible.

There's still going to be a role for the ACA if you're only extending Medicare to people 55 and over, for instance. But there's a huge debate, and so much energy on the Democratic side to do something like that. It's going to be a massive battle with the insurance companies and the entire healthcare industry, which went through this same fight back in 2009 and 2010, after a generational election brought in President Obama and Democratic majorities.

So on healthcare alone, there's not a lot of unity. And then there will be the usual calls to tax the rich to pay for it. But we just saw the California billionaire's tax go down in flames last week. If they can't do it in California, do you think a senator from Mississippi or a senator from Kansas is going to vote for gigantic tax increases?

So putting the spotlight on Trump, and keeping it there, serves the purpose of papering over some of the differences on their own side of the aisle.

Jason Dick

Getting back to Medicare for All, it sounds simple, but it's vague, because there isn't a lot of agreement. Do you go down to people 55 and older? Do you go further? If so, what happens to the Affordable Care Act and the exchanges? That gums up whether they try to adjust the premium subsidies for the ACA.

Jay Rockefeller, the longtime senator from West Virginia, just died recently. He was a big champion of the Children's Health Insurance Program, which was meant as a bridge for kids whose parents made too much to qualify for Medicaid but couldn't afford private insurance. It seems like they have a lot to sort out before they can get to a cohesive strategy on something that sounds simple but isn't.

Peter Cohn

They have an incredible amount to work out. You're already seeing the calls from Bernie Sanders, who, by the way, has publicly called for dumping Chuck Schumer. Sanders is going to be chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Elizabeth Warren is in all likelihood going to chair the Senate Banking Committee, and she's also on the Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Medicare.

They're already talking about reconciliation: a giant reconciliation package that deals with Medicare for All in some way, shape, or form, sending it to Trump, and making him veto it. With 56 votes in the Senate and 260 in the House, they could probably do this. But you're already starting to hear some Democrats say, isn't that a waste of time if Trump's just going to veto it and we don't have the votes to override him? Those discussions are going to be happening all through the beginning of next year. Interestingly, you're not hearing as much about reconciliation from House Democrats.

The other thing is they're going to have to deal with the debt limit next year. That may be toward the back half of the year, so they'll have a few months to get their sea legs. But when the debt limit comes around, all bets are off. I'm not going to hide my money under the mattress just yet, but that could be really ugly, unless they deal with it in this lame duck session and Republicans can somehow take it off the table through reconciliation. That might be the better thing for the stock markets. If they don't deal with it this year, that's going to be a major thing to figure out next year.

Jason Dick

I hate to end on that, but then again, it's a cliffhanger. Stay tuned. It's an Empire Strikes Back type of ending. A little gloomy. The nice thing is, and this is a shameless plug for the work of the journalists whose coverage we help direct, we'll be there covering it all.

Thanks again. Really appreciate your time tuning in to this FiscalNote webinar. I'm Jason Dick, Editor-in-Chief at CQ and Roll Call. This is Pete Cohn, my colleague, Managing Editor of Policy and Legislation. Thank you, and have a great rest of the day.

Track the 120th Congress From Day One

A December 11 deadline, a leadership fight, a reshuffled Appropriations Committee, and a majority that has not agreed on its own agenda. The next few months will move fast, and the bills that matter to your organization will be buried in the noise. PolicyNote pairs federal legislative tracking with analyst curation and summaries built for your organization, so you know what moved before your stakeholders ask. See how PolicyNote works.