() — With Arizona Senator Mark Kelly’s victory on Friday night, Democrats are just one seat away from maintaining control of the US Senate, as all eyes turn to neighboring Nevada, where the Senate race rages. increasingly turns in favor of the Democrats.
The victory of Kelly, who was elected in 2020 to complete the term of the late Republican Sen. John McCain, capped a string of victories for Democrats on Friday night as the ballots continued to be painstakingly counted. The defeat of venture capitalist Blake Masters, who had echoed former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, marked yet another voter rejection of a Trump-backed candidate who Democrats portrayed as an extremist.
So far, Democrats have 49 Senate seats and Republicans another 49, meaning Democrats need just one more seat to win a majority in the Senate (with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote). They could reach that critical 50-seat threshold if they succeed in Nevada, where Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto is closing in on Republican Adam Laxalt, the state’s former attorney general, who called the 2020 presidential election “rigged” and filed lawsuits in Trump’s name trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory in the silver state.
The Nevada Senate race has been deadlocked for months, but could ultimately determine the balance of power in the upper house. Democrats are also defending a seat in Georgia, where Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican Sen. Herschel Walker are headed for a Dec. 6 runoff, projects.
Control of the US House of Representatives still hangs in the balance. But it is clear that even if the Republicans win a majority, it will be by a much smaller margin than the leaders expected. That unexpected result has already produced recriminations and doubts from Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had hoped to emerge from these races with a clear mandate to become the next House Majority Leader.
Democrat Mark Kelly
The string of Democratic victories on Friday night marked a surprising reversal of fortunes for a party that appeared to be in deep trouble ahead of Tuesday’s election. Candidates like Kelly and Cortez Masto were working with President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings, an unfavorable economic climate (with inflation and high gas prices hitting household budgets across the country), and facing historical trends that tend to to lead to heavy losses in the first intermediate cycle of a new president.
But this has been a complex cycle with many different crosscurrents affecting voter behavior, including the June Supreme Court decision to strike down abortion rights, angering many across the country. Republicans were also hurt by Trump’s decision to support far-right candidates who were loyal to him but were often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who define elections. In the end, many independent and moderate voters appear to have rejected candidates they considered too extreme or too aligned with Trump, and Democrats flocked to protect their incumbents.
Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after leading Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, stormed the state in the final days of the election, warning that the very fate of the nation’s democracy lay on the ballot. Voters in the Grand Canyon State also rejected the offer of Republican state Rep. Mark Finchem, a strident Trump-backed election denier, to become Arizona’s top election official. Instead, they will choose Democrat Adrian Fontes as Arizona’s next secretary of state, projected Friday night.
The only bright spot for Republicans was Nevada, where voters chose Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor, ousting Democrat Steve Sisolak, reported. Lombardo, the popular Clark County sheriff, reminded voters of his struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, when unemployment in Nevada peaked at nearly 30%. Although the economy has recovered, Lombardo argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and had hampered the state’s economic recovery.
In an echo of 2020, some Republicans, including Masters, are already trying to stoke the ballot count controversy in Maricopa County, Arizona, by suggesting that it was unreliable there because of the handling of certain ballots. Both Masters and GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake have suggested the count has been moving too slowly.
Blake Masters Arizona Republican Senate Nominee
On Friday, Masters made a similar argument to Lake, calling the counting process in Maricopa County, Arizona’s largest and home to Phoenix, “incompetent” and pointing to a problem with printers that has caused some ballots to fail. were not tabulated correctly on Tuesday, despite election officials saying the problem was fixed within hours on Election Day.
Masters also accused the county of mixing uncounted ballots with ballots that had already been counted. The Republican National Committee and the Arizona Republican Party issued a statement saying the election “has exposed deep flaws in Maricopa County’s election 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 Elections Department told ‘s Kyung Lah that the county office has “replays that help us ensure that each legal ballot is only counted once.”
“Since the ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and reconcile the total ballots to the records to ensure they match. This is done with the presence of observers from political parties and it is a practice that has been in force for decades,” the spokesperson said.
Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, rejected Masters’s suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting again, stating that “it’s just not allowed under Arizona law.” Gates said the county’s pace for counting ballots matches previous years.
When asked by about specific allegations by the Republican National Committee, Gates said he would prefer those concerns be communicated directly to him. “I am a republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. Bring these issues to our attention and discuss them with us, instead of making these unsubstantiated claims,” he said.
“Let the count continue and in the end, if you have issues that you choose to take to court, you have every right to do so, and we will let the process play out,” Gates added.
Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to weather the headwinds facing Democrats, even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won, due to his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, Navy veteran, and husband of the former representative Gabby Giffords.
A first-time candidate, Masters was able to weather the challenge of the Republican primary with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He appealed to Republicans vowing to prioritize immigration issues and, in a campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
Masters later appeared to moderate his tone on the 2020 election results, as well as the conservative stances he had pursued during the primary on abortion, in what initially seemed like an effort to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate in Arizona. (Although Republicans comprise a plurality of voters in Arizona, independents make up about a third of the electorate and often sway close elections.)
After his primary victory in August, Masters removed language from his website that included the false claim that the election was stolen. When questioned by the moderator during a debate with kelly, Masters admitted that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote count or in the election results in a way that the result would have been otherwise. In that debate and along the way, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “roll off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.
But Masters seemed to change course after receiving a trump phone call in which he urged him to “be tougher” on denying the election results, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. In the final week of the campaign, Masters told ‘s Lah that he did not believe that moderates would resent his comments on the 2020 election, and he insisted that voters were much more focused on their concerns about inflation, crime and the border.
Throughout the campaign, Kelly portrayed Masters as an out-of-the-mainstream candidate who would jeopardize abortion rights, as well as Social Security and Medicare. In a state where lawmakers passed a new 15-week abortion ban earlier this year, and where legal efforts are underway to ban abortion in nearly all cases, the Kelly campaign maintained a relentless approach to abortion. Masters’ anti-abortion stances.
Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal introduced by South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. That bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
