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What We Know About Congressional Control and Pending Results in the US

The battle for control of the House is now the biggest unanswered question of this year’s midterm elections, after Democrats retained their narrow majority in the Senate.

Victories in Arizona and Nevada, according to projections by the CNN mean the party will enter 2023 with at least 50 seats in the Senate – and could add one more if the senator Raphael Warnock defeat the republican challenger Herschel Walke r in a runoff in Georgia next month. But there are other important runs for other offices that are still pending.

The party wants to reach the 218 seats needed for a majority in the House and that will depend on races in states with a large share of mail-in ballots — including California, where identifying winners in some races can take weeks, Oregon and Arizona.

Another high-profile race remains very close: the Arizona gubernatorial race – where the Republican Kari Lake the Donald Trump-backed electoral denier, takes on the Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs defender of the state electoral process.

Republicans Keep House Majority Hopes Alive

The eyes of the political world are now on the battle for control of the House, where Republicans appear to be slowly inching toward a narrow majority, but Democrats’ hopes have not yet entirely faded. Republicans won 211 of the 218 seats needed to gain a majority, according to projections by the CNN while Democrats won 204, with 20 undecided on Saturday night.

Democrats have dealt a major blow to Republican-leaning Washington’s 3rd District, where, on Saturday, the CNN projected that the Democrat Marie GluesenkampPerez would defeat the republican Joe Kent , who aligned himself closely with former President Donald Trump. His victory came largely as a result of Trump’s efforts to punish Republicans who voted to impeach him.

the deputy Jaime HerreraBeutler a moderate who was widely seen as a key to re-election, did not finish in one of the top two positions in the primaries and therefore did not advance to the general election.

Many of the undecided disputes are in California, where counting ballots by mail can take weeks and significant changes can occur at the end of that process. Other states with large amounts of mailed ballots, including Arizona and Oregon, also have undecided disputes.

Regardless of the final composition of Congress next year, the Republicans’ lackluster performance sparked a backlash against GOP leader Kevin McCarthy.

Senate victory also increases Biden’s power

By retaining their majority in the Senate, Democrats have challenged the historic trend of midterm elections against ruling parties and overcome anxiety about high inflation. Instead, voters punished Republicans who opposed abortion rights and repeated Trump’s lies about voter fraud.

The result is a major boost for President Joe Biden in the remaining two years of his first term in the White House.

That means Democrats will have the ability to confirm Biden’s judicial nominees — avoiding scenarios like what former President Barack Obama faced in 2016, when the then Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell refused to vote for his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland 🇧🇷 It also means that Senate Democrats can reject House-passed bills and can set their own agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer spoke about the victory Saturday night, saying voters confirmed the Democrats’ commitment.

He said the Democratic Senate candidates “defeated some very flawed opponents who had no faith in democracy, no allegiance to truth or honor. And even when the polls looked bleak, our candidates never gave up and never lost faith.”

He also praised the Democrats’ ability to block any GOP measures banning abortion rights following the June Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. “Because the American people ended up electing Democrats in the Senate, there is now a wall against a national threat of abortion bans that so many Republicans have talked about,” Schummer said.

Another Georgia Senate Runoff

The Senate control that is already being established will take some of the national spotlight — and television advertising spending — out of Georgia’s runoff. But the December 6 race between Warnock and Walker is still important.

A victory would give the Democrats a significant majority, rather than the power-sharing deal currently in place with Vice President Kamala Harris serving as a tiebreaker in the House 50-50. It would also give them a head start ahead of a 2024 Senate battle, in which the party must defend several seats in states that normally support Republican presidential candidates.

“It’s just better. The higher the number, the better,” Biden, who is in the midst of an international trip, told reporters in Cambodia shortly after the CNN and other media projected that Democrats would retain their majority in the Senate.

Warnock’s campaign had already released a television ad setting the stakes for the second round. “It’s about who has the competence and character to represent us; who is willing to tell the truth; who has the necessary knowledge for the job”, says a narrator on site.

It is the second consecutive election in which Georgia’s decision goes to a second round.

In 2021, Democrats won the Georgia Senate runoff – the race for Jon Ossoff against the then senator. the confrontation of David Perdue and Raphael Warnock with the then senator Kelly Loefler 🇧🇷 Loeffler had been nominated for the Senate in 2019 when former Senator Johnny Isakson resigned for health reasons. Warnock defeated her in the special election for the remainder of Isakson’s term.

Now, Warnock faces Walker, the Trump-backed former University of Georgia football star, in a race for a full six-year term.

Arizona government among top races still undecided

The Arizona Governor’s Race Between Kari Lake one of the most prominent deniers of this year’s elections, and Katie Hobbs remains fierce, with Hobbs clinging to a 34,000-vote lead at the end of Saturday, with an estimated 290,000 votes to be counted.

If Lake wins, she would be a rare Trump-backed election denial to win a competitive state run this year. Other Republicans who echoed Trump’s falsehoods about widespread election fraud lost gubernatorial elections in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and secretary of state elections in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and more.

In an interview with CNN Saturday afternoon, the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Overseers, bill Gates , said about 190,000 votes still need to be counted in Maricopa County. He said he was confident that about 95% to 99% of those votes would be registered by Tuesday. According to Gates, the county will continue to report about 85,000 votes a night until they run out. It is perhaps the most watched race that is very close to being called. But several other major races are also undecided.

In Alaska, the state’s overall seat in the House and one of its seats in the Senate will depend on the results of the ranking choice.

the democrat congresswoman Mary Peltola , who won a special election this summer, is in a strong position to hit the 50% mark. But the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski faces a tougher challenge from the republican Kelly Tshibaka which is supported by Trump as part of his retribution attempt against Murkowski and others for his impeachment following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

And in Los Angeles, Congresswoman Karen Bass on Saturday extended its lead over the developer Rick Caruso in the race for mayor.

Election officials react to misinformation

Authorities in Arizona and Nevada continued to reject misinformation about the vote count that was released online by right-wing activists and by Trump on his Truth Social platform.

The former president posted on Truth Social Friday night that Clark County, which is Nevada’s most populous, was “finding all kinds of ballots” and “making every effort to steal the election from Adam Laxalt”.

Clark County Electoral Secretary, Joe Gloria refuted Trump’s claim during a news conference on Saturday.

In Nevada, ballots posted on Election Day could be counted as long as they arrived on Saturday. “We are making ballots that we are required to receive according to the law, there is no way to find ballots,” Gloria said. “They are brought here by the US Postal Service. as long as it is posted [no dia da eleição]we process these ballots and put them in the count”.

Laxalt took a different tone from Trump on Saturday. Just before the Saturday night vote in Clark County, Laxalt led Cortez Masto by a mere 862 votes. Still, he acknowledged in a tweet Saturday morning that mail-in ballots that arrived in the past two days continued to break at higher Democratic margins than his team had calculated. “This shortened our win window,” he tweeted.

Laxalt said the race was down to more than 20,000 Clark County ballots on Election Day. “Whether they are GOP districts or slightly DEM leaning, we can still win. If they continue the heavy DEM trend, it will overtake us.”

Underscoring the proximity of the race, Laxalt published a series of tweets Saturday night encouraging voters to “check” their ballots to ensure that any ballots with technical errors with signature or other issues can be corrected to ensure they are counted.

The deadline for checking the ballots is until 17:00 on Monday (13).

In Arizona, where the CNN projected that Senator Mark Kelly will win re-election, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters took a different approach — tweeting on Saturday that all votes must be counted before anyone predicts the outcome (even if Kelly continued to lead him for a significant margin).

“To my people who slammed their doors in the 115 degree heat, and to the millions of Arizonans who trust me, let’s make sure all legal votes are counted,” Masters tweeted. “If, in the end, Senator Kelly has more of them than I do, I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory. But voters decide, not the media; Let’s count the votes.

Maricopa County election officials backtracked on Masters’ earlier claim — which Lake had also made — that the Arizona vote count was moving too slowly in Arizona’s most populous county.

“It is very, very unfortunate that some candidates, some activists are deciding to spread this disinformation,” Gates told Jim Acosta of CNN 🇧🇷 “We spent weeks in Maricopa County, publicizing that people should not anticipate results on election night or even the next day. May it take so long.”

Gates added that candidates and activists who claimed that counting was taking too long were “not paying attention to the story of how we counted votes here in Arizona decades ago. The average time over the last two decades to complete our count is 10 to 12 days.”

Source: CNN Brasil

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