US midterms: Control of Congress at stake as Arizona, Nevada count ballots
Two days after polls, 30 races are yet to be determined; some Republicans blame Trump
Highlights
- Even a slim House majority would allow Republicans to block Biden's priorities and launch investigations into his administration
- It could set the stage for bruising battles over pressing matters like raising the nation's spending limit.
- A Republican Senate would hold sway over Biden's judicial appointments, including any potential Supreme Court vacancies.
Phoenix, Arizona: Two days after Americans went to the polls, the political world remained on tenterhooks on Thursday, with both chambers of the US Congress up for grabs as election officials painstakingly tallied hundreds of thousands of votes in a process that could take days to resolve.
• That is just seven shy of the 218 needed to seize control from Democrats and put an end to President Joe Biden's legislative ambitions.
• But 30 races are yet to be determined, including 19 of the most competitive based on a Reuters compilation of the leading nonpartisan forecasters.
Senate's fate
The fate of the Senate, meanwhile, rests with a trio of fiercely contested states. Either party can win a majority by sweeping the races in Nevada and Arizona, where counting late-arriving ballots is expected to last several more days.
If those races don't deliver a majority for either party, Senate control will be decided in a runoff election in Georgia for the second time in two years.
Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will go one-on-one on Dec. 6 after both fell just short on Tuesday of the 50% threshold needed to win outright.
On Twitter, critics say Arizona election officials had no excuse for continuing to count this late, especially when massive states like Florida declared its election results only hours after the last polls closed.
Republican Arizona Attorney General-elect Abe Hamadeh blasted the Arizona counting debacle, writing, "Arizona DESERVES results on Election Day. This is an embarrassment. Maricopa County needs accountability."
House: Underwhelming Republican performance
Though Republicans remained favoured to take over the House, their performance on Tuesday was seen as underwhelming.
• Virginia’s Republican lieutenant governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, once a vocal Trump supporter, said voters had sent “a very clear message” Tuesday that ”enough is enough.”
“The voters have spoken and they have said that they want a different leader. And a true leader understands when they have become a liability,” she said in an appearance on Fox Business. “A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage. It is time to move on.”
• Earle-Sears, who served as co-chair of a group called Black Americans to Re-elect President Trump in 2020, also said she “just couldn’t” support another Trump campaign.
• Some advisers had urged Trump to delay his planned announcement until after the Dec. 6 Senate runoff election in Georgia.
• The runoff could determine which party controls the Senate to avoid turning the race into a referendum on him and unintentionally helping Democrats.
• Trump, rebuffing that advice, on Thursday invited reporters to a “Special Announcement” at his Mar-a-Lago club on Tuesday, Nov. 15, at 9 p.m.
Trump's diminished brand could further encourage Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to challenge for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, after he won re-election with a resounding majority on Tuesday.
Trump attacks Republican DeSantis
In a statement on Thursday, Trump took aim at his would-be rival, calling him "Ron DeSanctimonious" for a second time in recent days and taking credit for his political rise. The former president was expected to announce his third White House run next Tuesday, though the mercurial Trump could still change course.
Many pundits on the cable channel have spent years championing former president Donald Trump as the candidate most likely to lead Republicans back to the White House, but the tone on Fox was noticeably different as election results rolled in.
DeSantis's landslide victory over Democrat Charlie Crist was one of the few bright spots for Republicans as they watched their hopes of a midterm red wave fade, and many commentators suggested that the governor might make a better 2024 nominee than the former president.
DeSantis "made the single best case I have heard made for the GOP in quite some time," Trump's former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said midday Wednesday on Fox. "It was positive, it was sunny, it was forward-looking. It needs to be the future message for the party."
Even a slim House majority would allow Republicans to block Biden's priorities and launch investigations into his administration, while setting the stage for bruising battles over pressing matters like raising the nation's spending limit. A Republican Senate would hold sway over Biden's judicial appointments, including any potential Supreme Court vacancies.
Vote counting
As ballots were tallied, Democrats expressed cautious optimism about both the Nevada and Arizona Senate races.
In Nevada, Republican challenger Adam Laxalt, the state attorney general, clung to a lead of less than 2 percentage points, but his advantage over Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto has shrunk as ballots in populous Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, are counted.
Arizona presented a mirror image: Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly has seen his margin over Republican challenger Blake Masters narrow since Tuesday, though he still led by more than 5 percentage points.
Bill Gates, the chair of the board of supervisors in Maricopa County, by far Arizona's most populous county and home to Phoenix, said on Thursday that counting a backlog of more than 400,000 votes would likely take until next week.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, who has echoed Trump's false claims about voter fraud and whose race against Democrat Katie Hobbs remains too close to call, has accused Maricopa officials of dragging their feet deliberately, an allegation Gates called "offensive." "Everyone needs to calm down a little bit and tone the rhetoric down," said Gates, a Republican.
Democrats avoid wipeout
Despite deep voter frustration over high inflation and Biden's low approval ratings, Democrats avoided the wipeout losses that the party in power has historically suffered in a president's first midterm election.
That was due in part to anger over the Supreme Court's decision to eliminate a nationwide right to abortion, which led to Republican-backed bans in more than a dozen states.
"Women in America made their voices heard, man," Biden said at a political event in Washington. The president had also framed the election as a test of U.S. democracy at a time when hundreds of Republican candidates embraced Trump's false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.