Republicans have inched closer to a narrow House majority while control of the Senate hinged on a few tight races in a midterm election that will determine the type of Congress that U.S. President Joe Biden will have to deal with over the next two years, while setting the table for the 2024 presidential election cycle.
Either party could secure a Senate majority with wins in both Nevada and Arizona — where the races were too early to call.
But there was also a strong possibility that, as in early 2021, the Senate majority could come down to a run-off in Georgia. Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock led Herschel Walker but each failed to hit the 50 per cent threshold to win outright due to alternative candidates that will drop off the run-off ballot on Dec. 6.
In the current congressional session, the Senate is 50-50, but Vice-President Kamala Harris casts any tiebreaking votes for the Democrats.
Republicans are projected as holding a 49-48 lead for the next session. While the Alaska race is still too close to call, it is a battle of two Republican candidates, incumbent Lisa Murkowski and Donald Trump-backed Kelly Tshibaka.
So all eyes will turn to Nevada and Arizona before a Georgia run-off occurs.
Republican Blake Masters, an investment executive, trails Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona by five percentage points, while a Nevada contest between Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto and Republican Adam Laxalt has not yet been called, with Laxalt currently in the lead by over two percentage points.
It could take several days before it’s clear who won those Senate races, as well as in several House districts, owing in part to rules on counting ballots.
McCarthy-led House wave may not materialize
Control of Congress will affect the Biden agenda. House Republicans would be likely to launch a spate of investigations into Biden, his family and his administration if they take power, while a Republican takeover of the Senate could see the president’s picks for the federal judiciary run into stiff resistance.
In the House, Republicans were within a dozen seats of the 218 total needed to take control, while Democrats kept seats in districts from Virginia to Pennsylvania to Kansas.
In a particularly symbolic victory for the Republican Party, Quebec-born Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the House Democratic campaign chief, lost his bid for a sixth term. On the flip side, Democrats were hoping for a pickup over hard-right gun enthusiast Lauren Boebert in Colorado, though the race is currently so close that it would trigger an automatic recount.
With millions of votes still uncounted Wednesday across the nation’s most populous state, California, uncertainty remained for about a dozen of the state’s 52 House contests.
A small majority in the House would pose a great challenge for the Republicans and especially California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who is in line to be House Speaker and would have little room for error in navigating a chamber of members eager to leverage their votes to advance their own agenda.
“Look, we were told we were going to have an incredible, incredible wave,” said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, in an online streaming show.
“If that would have been the case … you would say, ‘Well, OK, Kevin is the presumptive Republican nominee for Speaker.’ But I think we need to have a serious discussion.”
Nevada, Ariz. set timeline expectations
In Nevada, the continuing vote count includes more than 100,000 ballots still to tabulate that were delivered at drop boxes on election day and sent by mail. Nevada election clerks will count mail ballots received until Nov. 12 as long as they were postmarked by election day. Officials have until Nov. 17 to finish the counting and submit a report to the Nevada secretary of state’s office, according to state law.
Voting officials in the two most populous counties, encompassing the population centres of Las Vegas and Reno, warned it would take days to process the outstanding ballots.
Hundreds of staff are working to process ballots as quickly as possible, and “every piece of equipment that we have available to process mail will be in use,” Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said.
The counting will continue through the weekend. For any ballots that need a “cure” — which can occur if the signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t appear to match the voter’s signature on file — voters will have until the close of business on Monday to fix the matter, Gloria said.
On Wednesday afternoon, Arizona’s most populous county said there were some 400,000 votes still left to count. In addition, those Maricopa County officials said audit boards will review some counts on Saturday.
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Andra Gillespie, an associate professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta, breaks down the U.S. midterms, as control of the U.S. Senate and the House is still unknown.
Maricopa officials said about 17,000 ballots were affected by a printing mishap that prevented vote-counters from reading some ballots, a problem that slowed voting in some locations and infuriated Republicans who were counting on strong election day turnout. County officials said all ballots will be counted but gave no timeline for doing so.
“There is no perfect election. Yesterday was not a perfect election,” Bill Gates, chairman of the board of supervisors, told reporters earlier in the day. “We will learn from it and do better.”
Meanwhile, Republicans who control the three-member board of supervisors in southeastern Arizona’s Cochise County voted Wednesday to appeal a judge’s decision that blocked them from hand-counting all the ballots, which are also being tabulated by machines.
The efforts to hand-count ballots in the county and elsewhere across the nation are driven by unfounded concerns among some Republicans that problems with vote-counting machines or voter fraud led to Trump’s 2020 defeat.
Governors’ races took on outsized significance in this year’s midterms particularly in battleground states that could help decide the results of the 2024 presidential election. Democrats held on in New York, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in generally competitive races, while Republicans won with room to spare in Florida, Texas and Georgia gubernatorial contests.
The Arizona governor’s race is being closely watched. Former television news anchor Kari Lake was about half a point behind Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs in the race for governor, a contest that centred heavily on Lake’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election.