ABSTRACT
In the 2006 midterm elections, Democrats won control of Congress for the first time in 12 years. They picked up 30 seats in the House to win a 233–202 majority, one seat larger than that held by the Republicans in the previous Congress. They also gained six Senate seats, all taken from Republican incumbents, to win a one-seat majority in the upper house. Remarkably, Democrats lost not a single seat in either chamber, the first election in U.S. history in which a party retained all of its congressional seats.
