DailyExpertNews
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With Arizona Senate Mark Kelly’s victory on Friday night, Democrats are just one seat away from retaining control of the U.S. Senate, while all eyes are on neighboring Nevada, where the competitive Senate race is increasingly toward the United States. Democrats tend.
Kelly’s victory, who was elected in 2020 to fill the term of the late GOP Senator John McCain, capped a string of victories for Democrats on Friday night as ballots in the West were meticulously counted. Kelly’s defeat of venture capitalist Blake Masters, who had repeated former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, marked another voter rejection of a Trump-backed candidate portrayed by Democrats as an extremist.
So far, Democrats will have 49 seats in the Senate and Republicans 49 — meaning the Democrats need just one more seat to win the Senate majority (with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the casting vote). They could reach that critical 50-seat threshold if they succeed in Nevada, where Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is approaching Republican Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general — who called the 2020 presidential election “rigged” and filed lawsuits against Trump’s behalf seeks to undo Biden’s 2020 win in the Silver State.
The Nevada Senate race has been deadlocked for months, but it could ultimately shape the balance of power in the upper chamber. Democrats are also defending a seat in Georgia, where Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker are heading for a runoff on Dec. 6, DailyExpertNews projects.
Control of the US House is still at stake. But it’s clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be by a much smaller margin than GOP leaders had hoped. That unexpected outcome has already sparked recrimination and doubt among Republican leaders, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who had hoped to emerge from this battle with a clear mandate to become the next House majority leader. become.
Friday night’s run of Democratic victories marked a stunning turn of fortune for a party that appeared to be in serious trouble en route to Tuesday’s election. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto had to contend with President Joe Biden’s low ratings, an unfavorable economic environment – with inflation and high gas prices weighing on household budgets across the country – and faced with historical trends that often lead to losses in the first mid-cycle of a new president.
But this has been a complex cycle with many different counter-currents influencing voter behavior, including the Supreme Court decision in June to overturn abortion rights, which infuriated many voters across the country. Republicans were also paralyzed by Trump’s decision to boost far-right candidates loyal to him, but often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide the election. Ultimately, many independent voters and moderates seem to have turned down candidates they viewed as too extreme or too close to Trump — and Democrats showed up en masse to protect their incumbent candidates.
Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, invaded the state in the closing days of the election, warning that the fate of the country’s democracy was at stake. Voters in the state of Grand Canyon also rejected the bid by GOP state representative Mark Finchem, a strident election denier who was backed by Trump, to become Arizona’s top election official. Instead, they will choose Democrat Adrian Fontes as Arizona’s next secretary of state, DailyExpertNews predicted Friday night.
The only bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor — throwing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, DailyExpertNews predicted. Lombardo, the popular Clark County sheriff, had reminded voters of their struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Nevada unemployment peaked at nearly 30%. Although the economy recovered, Lombardo had argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and hampered the state’s economic recovery.
In an echo of 2020, some Republicans, including Masters, are already trying to stir controversy over the ballot counting in Maricopa County, Arizona — suggesting that the count there was unreliable due to the handling of certain ballots. Both Masters and GOP Governor Kari Lake have suggested the count is going too slowly.
On Friday, Masters made a similar argument against Lake, calling the counting process in Maricopa County — the largest county in Arizona and home to Phoenix — “incompetent,” pointing to a problem with printers that led to some ballots not being properly printed on Tuesday. were tabulated, although election officials said the issue was resolved within hours on Election Day.
Masters also accused the county of confusing uncounted ballots with ballots that had already been counted. The Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona said in a statement that the election revealed “deep flaws in Maricopa County’s electoral administration. Arizona deserves better — transparency, certainty, efficiency — and most importantly, accurate and prompt announcement of election results that can be accepted by all voters.”
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa County Election Department told DailyExpertNews’s Kyung Lah that the district office has “fired “helping us ensure that every legal vote is counted only once.”
“Because ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and compare the total number of ballots to check-ins to ensure it matches. This is done in the presence of political party observers and is a practice that has been around for decades,” the spokesperson said.
Bill Gates, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, rejected Masters’ suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting again, stating that “simply not allowed by law of Arizona.” Gates said the province’s pace of counting ballots is in line with previous years.
When asked on DailyExpertNews about specific allegations from the Republican National Committee, Gates said he would prefer they communicate those concerns directly to him. “I’m a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. Please discuss these issues with us and discuss them with us, instead of making these baseless claims,” he said.
“Let the count go through and at the end, if they have issues that they want to take to court, they have every right to do so, and we’ll let that process go through,” Gates added.
Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds Democrats face — even in a purple state like Arizona that narrowly won Joe Biden — because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a veteran of the Navy and the husband of former Rep Gabby Giffords.
A first-time candidate, Masters was able to navigate the GOP’s primary gauntlet with significant funding from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, and in a campaign video released last year, said he believed Trump would win the 2020 presidential election.
Masters then appeared to modulate his tone over the 2020 election results, as well as the conservative stances he’d sought during the abortion primaries — in what initially appeared to be an effort to appeal to a wider swath of the Arizona electorate. . (Although Republicans make up a multitude in Arizona, independents make up about a third of the electorate and often lead to close elections.)
After his primary win in August, Masters scrubbed his website of language that contained the false claim that the election had been stolen. When questioned by the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters admitted he had seen no evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote count or election results in any way that would have altered the outcome. In that debate and along the way, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” “could come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.
But Masters appeared to change course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” against election denial, a conversation captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told DailyExpertNews’s Lah that he did not believe moderates were bothered by his comments about the 2020 election, insisting voters were much more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border. .
Throughout the campaign, Kelly portrayed Masters as a candidate outside the mainstream, who would endanger abortion rights, as well as Social Security and Medicare. In a state where lawmakers passed a new abortion ban 15 weeks earlier this year — and where legal efforts are underway to ban abortion in almost all cases — Kelly’s campaign has kept a relentless focus on Masters’ anti-abortion stances.
Masters had said he would support a national abortion ban after 15 weeks, a proposal tabled by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. That bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the mother’s life.