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The Republican party was hopeful of winning a majority in the US Senate on Tuesday, after flipping a seat in West Virginia and seeing off challenges to Rick Scott’s seat in Florida and Ted Cruz’s seat in Texas.
West Virginia governor Jim Justice’s victory over Democratic candidate Glenn Elliott early on election night left the Republicans needing to flip one more seat to take control of Congress’s upper chamber.
Ahead of the election, Democrats, including two independents and the vote of vice-president Kamala Harris, held a 51 to 48 lead over Republicans in the Senate.
The party was fighting on Tuesday to retain control of 23 of the 34 states up for election, putting Democrats at a disadvantage ahead of the vote. Several of the contests were in swing states including Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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Before voting opened on Tuesday, polls suggested Sherrod Brown, the Democratic Senator in Ohio, would lose his race to businessman Bernie Moreno. In Montana, voter surveys also put Republican Tim Sheehy was ahead of the Democrat incumbent Jon Tester.
Justice’s victory brings to Congress one of US politics’ most colourful figures. A coal baron in a state where mining of the fossil fuel remains a powerful industry, Justice travels with his English bulldog Babydog.
In July, he addressed the Republican National Convention from a podium in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, next to his pet.
Justice will succeed Joe Manchin, who is retiring after leaving the Democratic party to become an independent earlier this year. Manchin had endorsed Elliott, a lawyer and former mayor of the city of Wheeling.
In his victory speech on Tuesday, 73-year-old Justice said that the political climate in Washington, DC was “completely dysfunctional” and “if you were to come to Jim Justice and say, ‘What do you want to do?’ And I would say, ‘I want to shake up the world.’ That’s exactly what I want to do.”
Control of the Senate would give Donald Trump more legislative power if he wins the presidency, although Democrats remained hopeful on Tuesday evening of securing a majority in Congress’s lower chamber, the House of Representatives.
A divided government, with the two chambers held by different parties, would divide government, making life difficult for Trump or Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate.