About this election
The 2016 United States Senate elections were held on 8 November 2016, concurrently with the presidential election. Thirty-four of the 100 Senate seats were contested — the Class 3 senators elected in 2010 — and the Republican Party retained its majority, emerging with 52 seats to the Democrats' 46 and two independents (Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine) who caucus with the Democrats, for an effective 52–48 split. Democrats made a net gain of two seats but fell well short of the majority, leaving Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader.
The Senate is the upper chamber of Congress, with two members from each state regardless of population, serving staggered six-year terms so that roughly a third of the chamber is renewed every two years. Senators are elected by statewide popular vote, in most states by simple plurality, though Louisiana uses a two-round "jungle primary" and a handful of states require a majority. The vice-president presides over the Senate and casts the deciding vote in the event of a tie. The map on this page colours each state that held a Senate election in 2016 by the party that won the seat; states with no contest that year are left uncoloured.
Republicans were defending 24 of the 34 seats up, many of them won in the 2010 Tea Party wave in states that had since trended Democratic, making the map theoretically favourable to Democrats. In the event, the Senate results tracked the presidential vote almost perfectly: for the first time in a century, every state that held a Senate election voted for the same party for president and Senate. That tight alignment limited Democratic gains to two seats.
Democrats flipped Illinois, where Representative Tammy Duckworth unseated the Republican Mark Kirk, and New Hampshire, where Governor Maggie Hassan narrowly defeated the incumbent Kelly Ayotte by about a thousand votes. Republicans held a series of seats that Democrats had hoped to win, including Pennsylvania (Pat Toomey), Wisconsin (Ron Johnson, who trailed in most polls but won), Florida (Marco Rubio, who reversed his pledge not to seek re-election), North Carolina (Richard Burr) and Ohio (Rob Portman). The survival of these incumbents, on Trump's coattails, preserved the Republican majority.
Holding the Senate proved enormously consequential. Combined with the House and Trump's victory, it gave Republicans unified control of government and, critically, control of judicial confirmations. The chamber's Republican majority had already refused to consider President Obama's 2016 Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland; it instead confirmed Neil Gorsuch in 2017, the first of three Trump-era Supreme Court justices that reshaped the Court for a generation.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2016 Senate general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.