Meet the unexpected winners of this year’s midterms

By Kaanita Iyer, Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, CNN

(CNN) — While Democratic victories in marquee national contests took the spotlight this week, with the party securing at least 250 seats in the House and winning back the Senate, several candidates in down-ballot races across the country clinched what appear to be surprising wins.

Here are some of those winners:

Gen-Z college students win in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts

Nineteen-year-old Sebastian Matta will likely be the next Superior Court clerk of Maricopa County, Arizona, as he is leading his Republican opponent Jeff Dial, a former state lawmaker, by more than 85,000 votes as of Thursday evening, according to the county’s unofficial results.

Matta, an Arizona State University student, would oversee an office that maintains records for the court that handles criminal and civil cases in Arizona’s most populous county.

“I saw that nobody on the Democratic side had submitted themselves to this office in nearly a decade,” Matta told The Arizona Republic. “And I figured, ‘You know, why not?’”

He told the outlet he never expected to win, but said he was “very overwhelmed with happiness” when he realized he had been a substantial lead over Dial. He’s has vowed to make the court more accessible, particularly for those that speak languages other than English.

Dial told the newspaper he had called Matta to concede.

In Georgia, 22-year-old Benjamin Culberson defeated his Republican opponent in a race for a seat on the Gwinnett County Commission by more than 10 percentage points, according to the state’s unofficial results. According to CNN affiliate WSB-TV, the Georgia Gwinnett College student flipped the seat, and the commission will now be made up of all Democrats.

19-year-old Daniel Darris-O’Connor, a student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, unseated longtime incumbent Republican Marc Lombardo to win a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. He’ll be one of the youngest lawmakers in state history.

He acknowledged his age in an interview with CNN-affiliate WCBV, insisting that his campaign was focused more on the issues than the fact that he was a young person running for office. He recalled how the Covid-19 pandemic, which began when he was in middle school, was an “eye opener that the world isn’t perfect and we need new leaders in our government that are actually going to fix things.”

A candidate who had suspended his campaign wins in Iowa

Eric Armstrong, who suspended his campaign in September for an Iowa state House seat currently held by Sen.-elect Josh Turek citing health issues, is expected to win the race anyway as he is ahead of Republican Keith Jones by around 10 percentage points, according to the state’s unofficial results Thursday evening.

In a social media post on Thursday, Armstrong announced that he would take office at the beginning of next year. “The voters of District 20 sent a clear message about the direction they want for Iowa, and I will make sure that message is carried to the Capitol in January,” he wrote.

“Thank you to every voter who placed their confidence in this campaign. I will continue to do my best and be open and upfront about what comes next,” he added.

A Democratic couple wins in Texas

Texas couple Marcus and Sheree Henderson will be the only two Democrats leadership positions in Kaufman County, which is in the northeastern part of the Lone Star State, according to county election results.

Marcus Henderson will serve as Justice of the Peace, while Shree Henderson will sit on the Kaufman County Commissioners Court, a panel that votes on tax rates and oversees the county’s budget. A local news outlet reports that they are the first Democrats to be elected to the county in this century.

A GOP stronghold in New Jersey elected its first Democrat in more than 50 years

Unofficial results show that pharmaceutical representative Christopher Russo won his race for county commissioner in Morris County, a Republican stronghold in New Jersey, by over 20,000 votes, becoming the first Democrat elected to a countywide office there since 1973, according to the New Jersey Globe.

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CNN’s Steve Contorno and Jeff Simon contributed to this report.