What Women Won in the 2026 Midterms: 17 Governors, 100 House Democrats, Three Abortion Votes and Five Trans Lawmakers

Record numbers of women will run states and sit in Congress next year. Voters in Missouri, Nevada and Virginia protected abortion rights, and Idaho kept its ban. These are the women behind the numbers, and the races still being counted.

By Teona Abuladze · 7 min read

A few minutes after midnight, the Associated Press called Minnesota’s Senate race. In a hotel ballroom in St. Paul, White Earth Nation’s chairman and other Native men sat down at a large drum and began a victory song for Peggy Flanagan.

She is Ojibwe, an enrolled member of White Earth. The U.S. Senate has been around since 1789. Until Tuesday night, no Native American woman had ever been elected to it.

“I’m not running to make history,” she had told Sahan Journal back in August. “But it is about damn time.”

The governors

Keisha Lance Bottoms spent the last days of her campaign in Georgia borrowing a line from an old love song. If I were your woman. She said it at rally after rally.

On Tuesday night she got to finish it. “Well, now I am your woman,” she told her supporters.

The former Atlanta mayor is the first woman to govern Georgia, and the first Black woman elected governor anywhere in the United States. In two and a half centuries, this country had elected three Black governors. On Tuesday it added at least three more: Bottoms, David Crowley in Wisconsin and Byron Donalds in Florida.

This country elected three Black governors in 250 years. Then it added at least three more in a single night.

In New Mexico, Deb Haaland won. She is a citizen of Laguna Pueblo and a single mom who once got by on SNAP and WIC, and she has been collecting firsts for years: one of the first two Native American women in Congress, the first Native American Cabinet secretary. Now she will be the first Native American woman to lead a state. Back in June, she told reporters she got emotional just walking into a polling place and seeing a Native woman’s name on the ballot. This time the name was hers.

And in Texas, Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott, a three-term governor who outspent her five to one on television ads, according to AdImpact. Very few people saw that coming. She will be the state’s first Latina governor.

Add Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota and Republican Marsha Blackburn in Tennessee, each the first woman to govern her state, and the count reaches at least 17 women governors next year. The old record was 14.

A hundred women in the House

When EMILY’s List started raising money for Democratic women in 1985, they made up less than 5% of the party’s caucus in the House.

Next year there will be at least 100 of them, the first time that has ever happened. Women also did much of the work of taking the House back. Democratic women flipped at least 10 Republican seats, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.

“Women made history because we showed up to vote,” said Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, who chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus.

Flanagan may have company in the Senate, too. In Alaska, Mary Peltola, who is Yup’ik, was ahead of Republican Senator Dan Sullivan by about 600 votes on Wednesday, with a quarter of the ballots still uncounted. Alaska counts slowly. Nobody should call that one yet.

Missouri, again

Two years ago, Missouri voters did something no state had done before. They overturned a near-total abortion ban at the ballot box. It passed with 51.6%, barely.

The Republican legislature answered by writing its own amendment to undo it, and gave it the same name as the one voters had just passed: Amendment 3. Anyone who voted “yes on 3” in 2024 and did it again this year would be voting for the opposite. Lawmakers also packed in a second issue, a constitutional ban on gender transition care for minors, and that is what most of the campaign’s ads were about. The governor toured the state for it. His wife was the campaign treasurer.

Missouri said no again, and this time it wasn’t close: about 55% against.

Mallory Schwarz of Abortion Action Missouri didn’t pretend the fight was over. “They didn’t listen to voters last time,” she said. “I don’t expect them to listen to voters this time.”

Missouri’s legislature gave the repeal the same name as the right it was repealing. Voters noticed.

Nevada and Virginia were quieter wins. Nevada voters passed the same measure for the second time, as state law requires, so the right to abortion up to about 24 weeks is now in the state constitution. Clinics there won’t notice any change. Lawmakers will, because undoing it now takes two more statewide votes.

Virginia passed its amendment with 62%. It covers much more than abortion: contraception, miscarriage care, fertility treatment, childbirth. It takes effect January 1, unless a court gets in the way first. A conservative legal group is asking a judge to block certification, saying the ballot wording misled voters. The hearing is November 13.

And Idaho

In October we wrote about Desiree Ballis. At her 20-week scan she learned that her son would not survive outside the womb. Idaho law gave her no exception, so she and her husband drove to Salt Lake City. In July she stood in the Capitol rotunda in Boise and helped hand over boxes of signatures to put Proposition 1 on the ballot.

On Tuesday it lost, with about 56% of voters against it. Idaho’s ban stays. Abortion is allowed there only after rape or incest, or to save the woman’s life. A fatal diagnosis like the one Ballis got still does not count.

The celebration graphics going around on Wednesday mostly left Idaho off. It belongs in the story.

Five firsts in five statehouses

This year Republican campaigns spent heavily on ads about transgender people. On Tuesday, voters in five states elected their first openly trans legislators.

Joanna Whaley is a hospital chaplain from Lincoln Park, Michigan, and a former evangelical pastor. She says she survived 15 years of conversion therapy. In the spring, a man running against her in the Democratic primary filed a complaint to get her thrown off the ballot because she hadn’t listed her deadname. The clerk threw it out. She beat him in the primary, and on Tuesday she won the seat. Michigan already has a nonbinary legislator, Emily Dievendorf, so Whaley is the state’s first trans woman lawmaker.

In Alabama, Allison Montgomery, a software engineer, unseated a Republican incumbent with 53% of the vote. Afterward she wrote that she would “work especially hard for those who hate me.”

Jaelynn Scott, who runs the Lavender Rights Project in Seattle, won her Washington seat with 88% and becomes the first openly Black trans woman in any state legislature. In Wisconsin, Dina Nina Martinez-Rutherford, a comedian who in 2023 became the first trans woman on Madison’s city council, won with more than 90%. In Georgia, Bentley Hudgins, a former state director for the Human Rights Campaign who is nonbinary and uses they/them, will also be the first Japanese American in the legislature.

There was a smaller win in Florida. Quinnie Pérez, the daughter of Mexican farmworkers, won a seat on the Orange County soil and water conservation board. It’s a volunteer position. She is also the first openly trans person ever elected to anything in Florida.

Still counting

Almost all of these gains went to Democrats. Five Republican women lost their House seats on Tuesday, and Republican women will hold at least 16 seats in the next House. The chair of the Republican Women’s Caucus, Kat Cammack, told the Washington Post she wasn’t surprised, and that plenty of barriers still hold her party’s women back.

Races in Alaska, Kansas and Oregon were still open on Wednesday evening. Virginia’s amendment goes before a judge in nine days. Missouri’s legislature comes back in January.

Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.

Sources: Center for American Women and Politics, “New Records and Milestones for Women Amid Democratic Wave Election” (Nov. 2026); NBC News via Newsmax and Rolling Out (Nov. 4, 2026); CNBC live updates (Nov. 4, 2026); PBS NewsHour/AP (Nov. 4, 2026); CBS News (Nov. 4, 2026); The 19th (Nov. 2026); House Democratic Women’s Caucus (Nov. 4, 2026); Detroit News/Washington Post (Nov. 4, 2026); Philadelphia Inquirer (Oct. 2026); Minnesota Star Tribune, MPR News, Sahan Journal, ICT (Nov. 3–4, 2026); ABC News and The Hill on Alaska (Nov. 4, 2026); Missouri Independent, KCUR, NPR/St. Louis Public Radio (Nov. 3–4, 2026); The Nevada Independent and KLAS (Nov. 4, 2026); ALXnow, Axios Richmond, PBS, Virginia Mercury (Oct. 28 and Nov. 3–4, 2026); KTVB, Spokesman-Review, Idaho Press, Idaho Capital Sun (Nov. 4, 2026); Source NM (June 2026); The Advocate, Out, GLAAD, Erin in the Morning, Michigan Advance, LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, Attitude, WFTV (2026). Desiree Ballis’s story: Shansi Magazine, “Abortion Is on the Ballot in Four States on November 3” (Oct. 2026), drawing on Idaho Capital Sun reporting.