US midterms: Democrats pin Senate hopes on tightly fought races

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The Biden administration was braced for a bad night on Tuesday as the US midterm election results threatened to rob the Democrats of control of Congress, just as former president Donald Trump appears ready to announce another run for the White House.

But the Democrats were holding out hope that they might just retain control of the US Senate if a handful of closely fought races fell their way.

The final results, which will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Biden’s first term as president and further constrain his legislative agenda, could take days or even weeks in some closely fought Senate races. Delayed results are likely to fuel legal challenges and conspiracy theories about vote-rigging, particularly if the remaining seats determine control of the Senate.

Some battleground states saw hiccups at polling places on Tuesday, escalating fears that election deniers would use the isolated incidents to raise baseless doubts about the legitimacy of the results:

In Arizona’s Maricopa county, officials said they had resolved a tabulator issue that had caused delays at some polling places.

One community center in Georgia’s Cobb county announced it would stay open an additional 45 minutes after a delayed start on Tuesday morning.

Some polling sites in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne county ran out of paper, resulting in some voters being turned away. A court ruled that the Republican-leaning county should stay open until 10pm ET to ensure voters had enough time to cast their ballots.

That ruling could impact Pennsylvania’s hotly contested Senate race between Mehmet Oz, a Trump-backed Republican, and Democrat John Fetterman, who has been battling to assure voters he is fit for office after suffering a stroke. Earlier on election day, the agency overseeing the voting in Philadelphia said it will delay counting thousands of paper ballots because of a Republican lawsuit that said the process was open to duplicate voting.

Dozens of Republican candidates for the Senate, the House of Representatives and other major offices have refused to confirm that they will accept the result if they lose amid a swirl of false claims of fraud, stemming from Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and kept alive by the Republican party leadership.

The party that controls the White House typically loses seats in midterm elections and independent forecasts suggested this year will be no exception.

Despite widespread expectations that Republicans will regain control of the House of Representatives, Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi voiced high hopes as polls began to close on Tuesday night.

“We have far superior candidates. We own the ground out there today. And just because a pundit in Washington says ‘history says you can’t win’ is no deterrent for the enthusiasm we have out there,” Pelosi told PBS. “So I think you’ll be surprised this evening.”

The Senate is currently split 50-50 with Democrats holding the tie-breaking vote, and there are several toss-up races including in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Arizona. If Georgia’s Senate race is as close as expected, and no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote, a run-off election would be scheduled for 6 December, possibly meaning it will be unclear who will control the chamber in the next legislative session until then.

Thirty-five Senate seats and all 435 House of Representatives seats are on the ballot, with Republicans widely favored to pick up the five seats they need to control the House.

Opinion polls suggest that support for Democrats has fallen in recent weeks amid growing voter concern about high inflation and crime, two issues on which Republicans are seen as stronger.

According to AP VoteCast, half of voters say inflation factored significantly in their midterm decisions, a potentially ominous sign for Democratic prospects. But in more encouraging news for Democrats, a similarly large share of voters – 44% – said their primary concern was the future of democracy, which is a theme that Biden and his fellow party members have emphasized in their final days of campaigning.

Many Democratic candidates have also focused strongly on protecting abortion rights in the wake of the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade earlier this year.

The outcome of state elections for governors and judges was also expected to have important implications for abortion access in several states, including Arizona and Ohio.

Anger at the supreme court decision appeared to drive many people to the polls who might not normally vote in the midterms, particularly women. But in the final days of campaigning, some Democrats expressed alarm that their candidates had not done enough to address anxiety over the state of the economy in the face of near record-high inflation, leaving the party vulnerable to what Republicans predict will be a “red wave”.

Other Democrats were concerned that their party mishandled the issue of crime and public safety.

Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, wrote in the American Prospect that the 2022 midterms would be remembered “as a toxic campaign, but an effective one in labeling Democrats as ‘pro-crime'”.

Biden has attempted to push back by highlighting the US’s low unemployment rate and the 10m jobs created since he took office.

The president has also said that American democracy is on the line in the midterms in the face of numerous challenges, from gerrymandering and voter suppression to Trump’s false claims about vote-rigging. Several Republican-controlled states have introduced restrictions on postal voting and new ID requirements since the last election.

Election officials, including elected Republicans, have faced a wave of intimidation, including threats of violence.

“Our lifetimes are going to be shaped by what happens the next year to three years,” Biden said at a final campaign rally in Maryland on Monday. “It’s going to shape what the next couple decades look like.”

If the Republicans take control of the House they have threatened to launch a series of investigations into Biden and his administration in an attempt to embarrass him in the run-up to the next presidential election. These include probes into Biden’s son, Hunter, as a national security threat and the activities of the House’s January 6 committee looking into the storming of the US Capitol last year.

The Republican leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, has also threatened to go to work on behalf of Trump with a congressional probe of the various federal and state legal investigations into the former president’s political and business activities.

On Monday, Trump gave his strongest signal yet that he will run in 2024. He told a rally in Dayton, Ohio, to stand by for an announcement next week.

“I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida,” he said.