About this election
The 2022 United States Senate elections were held on 8 November 2022, in the middle of Joe Biden's term. Defying the usual midterm pattern of losses for the president's party, Democrats made a net gain of one seat, expanding their effective majority to 51–49. The result, confirmed only after a Georgia run-off on 6 December 2022, freed Democrats from the constraints of a 50–50 chamber and was a central element of the much-discussed Democratic "over-performance" in the 2022 midterms.
Thirty-five seats were contested — the Class 3 senators plus a special election in Oklahoma. As ever, each was decided by statewide vote for a six-year term. Georgia again required a December run-off when neither candidate reached a majority in November. The map shows the winning party in each state that held a Senate race in 2022.
The decisive Democratic pickup came in Pennsylvania, where Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman defeated the Republican Mehmet Oz for an open seat. Democrats also defended a string of vulnerable incumbents in battleground states: Mark Kelly held Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto narrowly held Nevada — the last race to be called, securing the majority — and Maggie Hassan won comfortably in New Hampshire. In Georgia, Raphael Warnock defeated the Republican Herschel Walker in the run-off to claim a full six-year term. Republicans had hoped a poor national economy would deliver the chamber, but a slate of inexperienced and Trump-endorsed nominees underperformed in the most competitive states.
Analysts widely attributed the Democrats' success to the weakness of several Republican nominees and to the backlash following the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade, which energised Democratic and independent voters. The result broke the historical rule that the president's party loses ground in the Senate at the midterms, and it stood in contrast to the narrow Republican capture of the House in the same election.
The 51-seat majority gave Democrats outright control of committees and a small but meaningful cushion, reducing the leverage of individual senators and easing the confirmation of nominees. It shaped the final two years of the Biden administration and set the terms for the 2024 cycle, when Democrats would have to defend an exceptionally exposed map.
The map above colours each state by the party that won its Senate race, and in a handful of battlegrounds that colour sat oddly against the rest of the ballot. Georgia and New Hampshire re-elected Republican governors by wide margins on the same day they sent Democrats to the Senate; several Sun Belt states that Republicans carried at other levels stuck with Democratic senators. This residual ticket-splitting — rarer than it once was, as Senate results increasingly track presidential ones — was decisive in 2022 precisely because the contested seats clustered in the closest states, where a few points of personal vote for a stronger candidate outweighed the national lean.
The 51–49 result bought Democrats a cushion, but the seats they were defending in 2022 were the favourable ones. The next class, up in 2024, was the mirror image: Democrats had to hold seats in states Donald Trump had carried — Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and a string of Rust Belt and Sun Belt battlegrounds — with almost no Republican-held targets to attack in return. That structural exposure, visible the moment the 2022 count finished, is why the 2024 Senate map broke so heavily the other way; our 2024 Senate page shows how the cushion won here was spent two years later.
Federal Election Commission (FEC), official 2022 Senate general-election results — fec.gov.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.