Status: 11/12/2022 7:24 p.m
After the victory in Arizona, the Democrats are hoping to defend their majority in the US Senate. The decision could now be made in Nevada. There the candidates are only a few hundred votes apart.
In the midterms, the US Democrats are slowly approaching their goal of defending a majority of the seats in the Senate. After days of nail-biting, Democrat Mark Kelly managed to defend his hard-fought Senate seat in Arizona. That puts the Democrats just one seat away from a possible Senate majority.
There, Democrats and Republicans now have 49 votes each after the decision from Arizona. Two seats in the Congress Chamber are still open: Georgia – where a runoff will not be held until December because neither opponent got more than 50 percent of the vote the first time around – and Nevada.
Only 800 votes apart
The eyes are therefore now directed to the desert state in the western United States. There is a head-to-head race between Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto and her Republican opponent Adam Laxalt. The vote is extremely close: On Saturday morning (local time), Republican Laxalt had a lead of just over 800 votes.
Should the Democrats defend the seat, their Senate majority would be secured. The background is that the Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who is also President of the Senate, is allowed to vote in a stalemate. On the other hand, should the Republicans prevail in Nevada, the Democrats would have another chance to win in Georgia. Mathematically, because of Harris’ vote, you only need one of the two open Senate seats to control the chamber.
Close race also in the House of Representatives
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. The Republicans still have a better chance of winning the majority in the chamber.
But the fact that the Democrats are so close and that a majority for them in the House of Representatives is also within the realm of possibility was something that many had not thought possible before the election. For Biden, future majorities in Congress will determine how much or little he can achieve politically in the second half of his term.
Long count
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. At the midterm elections in the middle of a president’s term, the ruling party usually takes a beating and loses seats in both houses of Congress.
The fact that the result is still open is partly due to the fact that the counting of the votes in Arizona took a particularly long time due to the extremely close outcome and due to electoral peculiarities in the state.
displeasure with Trump
The defeat in Arizona joins the failure of various Republican candidates who supported Trump. Their poor performance reflects on the ex-president and has cast doubt on his leadership role in the Republican Party. 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.