US midterm elections: Democrats retain control of Senate as House race still undecided – live

Read More

Analysts say victory by Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, which secured her party’s control of the Senate for two more years, will be of massive importance to Joe Biden’s plans for filling judicial vacancies.

Retaining the majority in the chamber gives the president the opportunity to keep getting his picks confirmed, something for which the incumbent senator was a key ally even before the midterms.

“Cortez Masto has been an excellent senator, who has represented Nevada very well. One example is her efforts to keep the federal district court vacancies in Nevada filled,” said Carl Tobias, Williams professor of law at the University of Richmond and former lecturer in law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“Last year, she and Senator [Jacky] Rosen recommended two well qualified, mainstream candidates whom Biden nominated and the Senate smoothly confirmed.

“The Democrats’ retention of the Senate majority will enable Biden and that majority to continue nominating and confirming highly qualified judges who are diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, ideology and experience, like Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Nevada district judges Cristina Silva and Anne Traum.

“These nominees and appointees will mean that Biden and the Democrats have honored their promises to counter former President Trump’s confirmation of 231 judges, especially on the Supreme Court and the appellate courts, who are extremely conservative.

“For example, Biden and the Democrats have already appointed 25 appellate judges and are on track to confirm at least five, and perhaps as many as 10 more, judges for those courts this year. Biden and the Democratic majority can build on this success for two more years. “

Kari Lake, the Republican election denier trailing Democrat Katie Hobbs in the contest to become governor of Arizona, has been on Fox News complaining again about the pace of the count.

Although Arizona law dictates the process, and speed, by which the ballots are counted, Lake is also unhappy that Hobbs, as secretary of state, has involvement in the election, even though her opponent’s role is at arm’s length by certifying the count when it’s complete.

“I consider someone’s vote their voice. I think of it as a sacred vote, and it’s being trampled the way we run our elections in Arizona,” Lake said.

“We can’t be the laughingstock of elections anymore. Here in Arizona, and when I’m governor, I will not allow it. I just won’t.”

It’s a familiar gripe from Lake, who has pledged to be the media’s “worst fricking nightmare” if she wins, and has refused to say if she would accept the result of the election if she lost.

Several dozen of her supporters, some in military-style fatigues, lent a menacing air to the count by gathering outside the Maricopa county elections in Phoenix on Saturday and hurling abuse at sheriff’s deputies.

Lake, the Arizona Republican party, and Republican national committee (RNC), have all lobbed out unfounded allegations of misconduct and incompetence by election officials, as the count enters its sixth day.

Bill Gates, chair of Maricopa’s board of supervisors, hit back, telling CNN: “The suggestion by the RNC that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa county, is absolutely false and offensive to these good elections workers.”

The county is also rejecting online grumblings:

Lake said she did not expect the race to be called until at least Monday. She conceded: “I’m willing to wait until every vote is counted. I think every candidate should wait until every vote is counted.”

Rick Scott, the Florida senator who heads the Republican senatorial committee, has been pouring fuel on the post-midterms fire that threatens Mitch McConnell’s future as Senate minority leader.

Despite helping to mastermind the election campaign strategy that fell flat when Democrats retained control of the chamber, Scott, and other Donald Trump loyalists, say it’s all McConnell’s fault.

On Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Scott repeated his call for next week’s Republican leadership elections at least until after the Georgia Senate run-off on 6 December:

Mitch McConnell said… we’re not going to have a plan. We’re just going to talk about how bad the Democrats are. Why would you do that?

What is our plan? What are we running on? What do we stand for? What are we hell bent to get done? The leadership of the Republican Senate says ‘no, you cannot have a plan’. We’re just gonna run it on how bad the Democrats are, and actually they cave in to the Democrats.

Scott, and Senate colleagues Marco Rubio (Florida) and Ted Cruz (Texas) are among those with knives out for McConnell, aided and abetted by former members of Trump’s inner circle who are keen to shift the blame for the Republican flop away from the former president.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior policy advisor, continued the theme, also on Sunday Morning Futures:

You’re going to lose these close races because the Republican brand, set by Mitch McConnell on down, is not exciting, is not persuasive, is not convincing to voters.

While Republicans, or some of them at least, are blaming Donald Trump for the party’s midterms misfire, leading Democrats have no doubt with whom the credit should lie: Joe Biden.

Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, herself a former candidate for the party’s presidential nomination, was almost giddy in her analysis of the elections in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press this morning:

Donald Trump, with his preening and his selection of truly awful candidates, didn’t do his party any favors.

But this victory belongs to Joe Biden. It belongs to Joe Biden, and the Democrats who got out there and fought for working people. The things we did were important and popular.

Remember, right after Joe Biden was sworn in, all of the economists and the pundits in his ear who were saying, “go slow, go small.”

Joe Biden didn’t listen to them. And in fact, he went big. He went big on vaccinations. He went big on testing, but he also went big on helping people who were still unemployed, on setting America’s working families up so they could manage the choppy waters in the economy following the pandemic.

We were able to address the values and the economic security of people across this country. And it sure paid off. It paid off at historic levels.

Also on Meet the Press, White House senior advisor Anita Dunn reflected on Biden’s pre-election strategy of bashing extremist “Maga Republicans” named for Trump’s Make America Great Again movement:

A lot of people thought it wouldn’t work. Former President Trump kind of adopted it himself. But it was a very effective strategy for raising for the American people the hazards of going down that path with democracy denial, threats of political violence to achieve political ends, an extremist program that involves denying women the right to an abortion, economic policies that continue to be trickled down, as opposed to bottom up and middle out.

The Republican Party has to come up with what they’re actually for. It’s very clear what President Biden and the Democratic Party are for.

The Guardian’s Sam Levine has news of a consequential victory for Democrats in Nevada:

Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was elected Nevada’s top election official, beating Jim Marchant, a Republican who is linked to the QAnon sought to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 race.

His victory is a significant win against efforts to sow doubt in US elections, a growing force in the Republican party.

The Nevada secretary of state race was one of the most competitive in the country and closely watched because of Marchant’s extreme views. It was also one of several contests in which Republican candidates who questioned the election results were running to be the top election official in their state.

Marchant, a former state lawmaker, said during the campaign that if he and other like-minded secretary of states were elected, Donald Trump would be re-elected in 2024. He has also said that Nevada elections are run by a “cabal“, and that Nevadans haven’t elected a president in over a decade.

He also has pushed Nevada counties to adopt risky and costly hand counts of ballots and leads the America First Secretary of State coalition, a group of secretary of state candidates running for key election positions who pledged to overturn the 2020 race.

Aguilar had never run for elected office, but cast himself as a defender of Nevada’s democracy. His campaign emphasized the extremist threat Marchant posed. He far outraised Marchant and was much more present on the campaign trail.

Read the full story:

Republicans have been bashing Donald Trump on the Sunday talk shows, with Maryland governor Larry Hogan calling him the “800lb gorilla in the room” as the former president prepares to announce a new White House run this week.

The party’s less than stellar midterms performance, which included a slew of defeats for extremist candidates endorsed by Trump, have prompted growing chorus from senior officials that it’s “time to move on” from him.

Leading the call Sunday was Hogan, for so long one of very few Republicans daring to speak out against the twice-impeached former president.

Hogan, who is termed out of office in January, told CNN’s State of the Union it would be “a mistake” for Trump to run again, noting that the White House, Senate and House were all lost under his watch:

He’s still the 800 pound gorilla. It’s still a battle that’s going to continue for the next few years. We’re two years out from the next election. And the dust is settling from this one. I think it’d be a mistake. Trump’s cost us the last three elections and I don’t want to see it happen a fourth time.

Over on NBC’s Meet the Press, Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy also laid Republicans’ poor showing at Trump’s door, alluding to his fixation with his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, and candidates who bought into the lie that the election was stolen from him:

Those that were most closely aligned with the past, those are the ones that underperformed.

We’re not a cult. We’re not like, ‘OK, there’s one person who leads our party’. If we have a sitting president, she or he will be the leader of our party, but we should be a party of ideas and principles. And that’s what should lead us.

What we’ve been lacking, perhaps, is that fulsome discussion,

Read more:

Nancy Pelosi says Democrats are “still alive” in the race for control of the House of Representatives, but acknowledges the pathway to victory is narrow.

The speaker’s party needs 218 seats in Congress to retain control of the chamber, and currently has 203. Republicans, despite losing several seats they were expected to win handily, have 211 and are closing in on the majority.

On CNN’s State of the Union just now, Pelosi was asked specifically about the loss of four House seats in usually reliably blue New York, and whether they would determine control of the chamber.

Pelosi said:

You cannot make sweeping overviews the day after the election, just every district at a time. Our message, people over politics, lower costs, bigger paychecks, safer communities, served us well in the rest of the country.

I want to salute President Biden for his campaign and President Obama, all of it raising the urgency of the election, and the awareness that people must vote and that they shouldn’t listen to those who say this is a foregone conclusion because of history, but it’s about the future and get out there and vote.

We’re still alive. But again, the races are close.

Pelosi, 82, would not be drawn about her own future if Republicans take the House, despite hinting last week that the attack on her husband would influence her decision about whether to retire. House leadership elections are on 30 November.

My members are asking me to consider [running], but that’s just through the eyes of the members.

We are so completely focused on our political time… and not worrying about my future, but for the future for the American people

But she said she was hurt by response to the attack, which included offensive mockery:

It wasn’t just the attack, there was a Republican reaction to it which was disgraceful. An attack is horrible. Imagine how it feels to was the one who was the target, and my husband paying the price, and the traumatic effect on our family.

But that trauma is intensified by the ridiculous, disrespectful attitude that the Republicans had. There is no nobody disassociating themselves from the horrible response that they gave to it.

One of the biggest midterms winners for the Democrats was Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was reelected by double digits. She’s just been on CNN’s State of the Union, speaking out against political violence she says extremists have been stoking.

Whitmer herself was the victim of a kidnap plot that resulted in the conviction of several rightwing extremists, and called out a hammer attack by another on the husband of House speaker Nancy Pelosi:

My opponent [election denier Tudor Dixon] was a conspiracy theorist, and she has regularly stoked politically violent rhetoric [and] undermined institutions. Whether it is aimed at me, or it is aimed at a Republican congressman like Ron Upton or Peter Meijer here in Michigan, it’s unacceptable.

My heart goes out to the Pelosi family. I think that this is a moment where good people need to call this out and say we will not tolerate this in this country.

Whitmer says the key to her victory was focusing on basics, while her challengers were concentrating on divisiveness:

We stay focused on the fundamentals, whether it’s fixing the damn roads or making sure our kids are getting back on track after an incredible disruption in their learning, or just simply solving problems and being honest with the people.

Governors can’t fix global inflation. But what we can do is take actions to keep more money in people’s pockets, protect our right to make our own decisions about our bodies.

And all of this was squarely front and center for a lot of Michigan voters, and I suspect that’s probably true for voters across the country.

Among the happiest Democrats at the party’s strong midterms performance is Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader who gets to keep his job for another two years.

Speaking after Catherine Cortez Masto‘s victory in Nevada kept the chamber in Democrat hands, Schumer told reporters the results were a “vindication” of the party’s agenda, and a rejection of extremist candidates and “divisive” rhetoric put forward by the Republican party:

The election is a great win for the American people.

Three things helped secure the Senate majority. One, our terrific candidates. Two, our agenda and accomplishments. And three, the American people rejected the anti-democratic, extremist Maga (Make America Great Again) Republicans.

The American people soundly rejected the anti-democratic, authoritarian, nasty and divisive direction the Maga Republicans wanted to take our country, from the days of the big lie, which was pushed by so many, to the threats of violence and even violence itself against poll workers, election officials and electoral processes.

And of course, the violence on January 6, all of that bothered the American people.

And another thing that bothered them just as much, too many of the Republican leaders went along with that, didn’t rebut that violence, and some of them even aided and abetted the words of negativity.

Where was the condemnation from the Republican leaders so often missing from so many of them?

Americans have woken to the remarkable news that Democrats will retain control of the Senate for the next two years, secured by Catherine Cortez Masto‘s projected victory over Republican Adam Laxalt in Nevada that was declared on Saturday night.

Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer, who will remain Senate majority leader, hailed an achievement that appeared unthinkable amid talk of a red tsunami before last Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Only the Senate race in Georgia, which heads to a 6 December runoff, remains to be settled. But the outcome cannot affect control of the chamber as Democrats now have 50 seats, plus vice president Kamala Harris‘s tie breaking vote.

Things are less clear in the House of Representatives, where a number of close races are yet to be called, and Republicans are closing in on a narrow majority.

And in Arizona, we’re awaiting a winner in the tight and heated governor’s race between Democrat Katie Hobbs and extremist Republican Kari Lake.

We’ll have plenty more news, commentary and reaction coming up in today’s live blog, including from senior officials in both parties.

While we wait for the day to unfold, here’s a catch up from The Guardian’s Dani Anguiano in Las Vegas about Cortez Masto’s majority clinching victory: