Voters watched results in near disbelief as James Talarico claimed victory in Senate race and Gina Hinojosa was elected state’s first Latina governor

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“This is amazing,” exclaimed Tiffany Dunsmore, 44, the owner of Austin Scavenger Hunt, as the city skyline gleamed in the distance on a balmy night. “I cannot believe Texas went blue!”

For 32 long years, turning Texas blue had been an elusive prize for Democrats in the US’s second biggest state. There were false dawns, nearly men and broken dreams. But on Tuesday the party’s agony finally came to an end.

With Democrats in power, Trump may be under siege and lose his dominance over the Republican party – but his id will relish the prospect of fighting

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Donald Trump posted a document on social media this summer by a supposed historian that compared him with, among others, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. That now seems fitting: the US president has himself fought one battle too many, and appears to have brought about his own destruction.

Tuesday’s US midterm elections were a thumping, shellacking and extinction-level event rolled into one. Ruby-red Republican strongholds once deemed safe toppled like dominoes. Democrats won Senate seats for the first time in Kansas since 1932, in Texas since 1988 and in South Carolina since 1998.

Jubilant Talarico says ‘Tonight we defeated Goliath’ as Ken Paxton defeat a crushing blow to Trump and Republicans

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Democrat James Talarico has won the US Senate race in Texas, breaking a 38-year drought for his party in the Republican stronghold and delivering a stunning blow to Donald Trump.

Talarico defeated Republican Ken Paxton, the state attorney general and a staunch ally of the US president, in one of the most closely watched contests of the midterm elections to decide control of Congress.

President says he is willing to accept results but that if he were on ballot Republicans would have won ‘landslide’

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Donald Trump, who spent months urging supporters to pretend he was on the ballot, declared on Tuesday night he “wasn’t on the ballot” as Democrats scored a string of victories over his Republican party in the US midterm elections.

As a blue wave appeared to take hold across the country, the US president said he was prepared to accept the results.

The Texan could pull off a historic victory in the Lone Star state, which hasn’t elected a Democratic senator since 1988

When a young, untested former school teacher stood up to address a modest gathering of local donors in Austin, the state capital of Texas, Wendy Davis felt sorry for him. “Poor kid,” she remembers thinking.

Then James Talarico began speaking. “He was like five or six sentences in and I knew that something was different about him,” recalls Davis, a former Democratic state senator. “He was as articulate and unique then as he is now. From that day, I started calling him ‘Baby Obama’.”