After US midterm election
Biden’s Democrats retain majority in Senate
The Capitol in Washington. US President Biden’s Democrats are now surprisingly close to a possible majority in the Senate. photo
© J. Scott Applewhite/AP/dpa
The Democrats are doing what few thought possible: defending their majority in the Senate in the midterms. The race for the House of Representatives is still open.
In the US congressional elections, President Joe Biden’s Democrats defended their majority in the Senate. They were able to hold a hard-fought Senate seat in the state of Nevada, as reported by US television channels CNN, NBC and CBS based on vote counts. Accordingly, the Democrats come to the necessary number of senators to control the Chamber of Congress.
The congressional elections had already taken place on Tuesday. At the “midterms” in the middle of Biden’s four-year term, all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate were up for election. 36 governorships and other important offices in the states were also filled. The counting of the votes in Arizona had taken a particularly long time because of the extremely close race between the two local opponents and because of electoral peculiarities in the state.
Before the election, a wave of success was predicted for the Republicans and a debacle for the Democrats. But neither happened. The Democrats performed significantly better than expected – even if it is still unclear who will have the say in Congress in the future.
It is also still unclear who will dominate the House of Representatives in the future. There, too, voting results are counted. 218 seats are needed for a majority in the chamber. After the votes have been counted so far, the Republicans came to 211 seats and the Democrats to 203 on Saturday morning (local time). There, too, the race is significantly closer than predicted before the election.