Democrats hold on to Senate control with Nevada win

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democrats have held on to control of the Senate with a victory in Nevada, continuing the party’s comeback in the midterm elections and making it easier to continue pursuing the White House’s policy agenda.

Incumbent Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto narrowly edged Republican challenger Adam Laxalt in vote counting late Saturday, four days after the election, giving the Democrats 50 seats in the 100-seat upper chamber, with Vice-President Kamala Harris holding the tie-breaking vote.

Control of the House of Representatives, meanwhile, remained uncertain. While the Republicans appeared likely to wrest the majority from the Democrats, several tight races in California are still too close to call. The Democrats will have the chance to add to their margin in the Senate in a run-off election next month in Georgia.

The Republican losses in the midterms have mostly come at the expense of candidates backed by Donald Trump, dealing the former president a blow even as he prepares to launch a 2024 comeback bid Tuesday.

“The American people rejected – soundly rejected – the anti-democratic, authoritarian, nasty and divisive direction the MAGA Republicans wanted to take our country,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, said Saturday night.

Mr. Biden claimed the victory as an endorsement of his agenda, which has included building infrastructure, combating climate change and trying to expand the country’s social safety net.

“I’m incredibly pleased by the turnout, and I think it’s a reflection of the quality of our candidates. They’re all running on the same program,” he told reporters in Phnom Penh, where he is attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. “I’m looking forward to the next two years.”

Holding the Senate will allow Mr. Biden to continue making appointments, including of federal court judges, which the upper chamber must approve. It will also make it easier for him to try to advance legislation.

Republicans had hoped to handily take control of Congress and the governorships of key swing states in the midterms, predicting a “red wave.” Instead, the Democrats have so far held all of their Senate seats and picked up one, in Pennsylvania, from the Republicans. In that contest, Democratic Lieutenant-Governor John Fetterman defeated Mr. Trump’s chosen candidate, television doctor Mehmet Oz.

In Georgia, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock narrowly edged former professional football star Herschel Walker, but did not take 50 per cent of the vote. Under that state’s rules, the pair will face a runoff election on Dec. 6.

Taking the additional seat would allow the Democrats to hold majorities on Senate committees and dilute the power of senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, moderates who have previously held up Mr. Biden’s legislation with protracted negotiations to secure their votes.

The midterms were particularly bad for candidates who embraced Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election had been rigged against him. Election-denying Republicans lost Senate contests in the swing states of Arizona and Rhode Island, and gubernatorial races in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Mr. Trump tried to shift the blame to Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. In a post on his Truth Social platform Sunday, the ex-president accused Mr. McConnell of selling out to Mr. Biden and hurled a racist insult at Mr. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao. A Taiwanese-American, Ms. Chao served as Mr. Trump’s transportation secretary.

“It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault,” Mr. Trump wrote, accusing him of “Giving 4 Trillion Dollars to the Radical Left for the Green New Deal” and asserting that he “blew the Midterms, and everyone despises him.”

Some Republicans responded to the poor midterms result with renewed baseless claims that voting had been rigged.

In Phoenix, some polling places had lengthy lines on election day Tuesday after printers printed ballots too faintly to be read by vote-counting machines. The problem affected tens of thousands of people at roughly a third of polling places, though it never shut down voting and was fixed later in the day. Republicans claimed it was part of a nefarious plot.

“This is voter suppression targeting a political party,” tweeted Abe Hamadeh, the party’s candidate for attorney-general. In a Truth Social post containing a typo, Mr. Trump wrote that Democrats “stole the Electron” in Arizona, and demanded they “Do Election over again!”

In that state’s senate vote, far-right Republican venture capitalist Blake Masters failed to unseat Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly, a former astronaut.

Mr. Masters favours cutting legal immigration; subscribes to the white national “great replacement” theory, which baselessly holds that Democrats are trying to “replace” native-born Americans; favours stopping U.S. aid to Ukraine and once floated the unsubstantiated notion that the FBI was somehow responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters.

The result of the state’s gubernatorial race remained too close to call Sunday, with Republican Kari Lake, an election-denying former television news anchor, nearly even in the vote count with Democrat Katie Hobbs, with hundreds of thousands of ballots still to be counted.

Neither Mr. Masters nor Mr. Laxalt conceded their races, with the Arizona candidate saying “we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted.”

Protesters gathered outside the Maricopa County election headquarters in Phoenix on Saturday, the first such demonstration since the election. But those who gathered had dispersed by evening, after Charlie Kirk, an influential far-right figure, urged people not to gather around county buildings. “Don’t give them an excuse to stop counting votes,” he said.

Ms. Lake also urged caution. “Every candidate should wait until every vote is counted,” she said on Fox News Sunday morning. She continues to believe uncounted ballots hold sufficient votes for her to win the governor’s office.

Arizona expects most of its ballots to be counted by Tuesday.

Controlling the governments of swing states is a crucial goal of election deniers. Mr. Trump’s efforts in 2020 to reverse the presidential result foundered in part because state officials refused to help him. In Tuesday’s midterms, election deniers were defeated in gubernatorial races in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, other states that will be key in the 2024 election.

Election deniers also went down to defeat in Arizona and Nevada contests for secretary of state, the top official who oversees elections.