Midterm elections 2022: Republicans edge towards slim House majority as last results trickle in – live

Read More

Donald Trump may announce another presidential run tonight, but not everybody is happy about it. The former president’s brand appears to have suffered after his handpicked candidates performed poorly in last week’s midterm elections, though a poll indicates he still remains the most popular person in the Republican party.

Here’s what else has happened today:

Liz Cheney had the last word in a spat with Arizona’s defeated GOP governor candidate Kari Lake, but warned of the continued threat to democracy posed by many Republicans in Congress.

Rupert Murdoch is reportedly sick of Trump and may switch his allegiance to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a development that could have big implications for the ex-president’s new White House campaign.

Only a handful of House races remain uncalled, and the GOP is one seat away from winning control of the chamber. It’s possible one of several races in California could deliver Republicans a majority today, while more results are expected in a crucial Colorado race tomorrow.

Back to Lauren Boebert’s race for a moment. While the firebrand conservative Republican appears on track to win another term in the House, it’s going to be a narrow one, and few saw that coming.

Her western Colorado district has tended to vote Republican, and analysts viewed a victory by Democrat Adam Frisch as unlikely. The Wall Street Journal went to her district to figure out what was behind his unexpectedly stiff challenge. Here’s what they found:

Several supporters of Mr. Frisch, including voters registered unaffiliated and Republican, said that Mr. Frisch had won them over with his measured message, and that he has been more present than Ms. Boebert within the district. Some said they were deeply affected by the Jan. 6 attack, in which a mob of Trump supporters disrupted the certification of Joe Biden‘s presidential-election victory.

Mr. Frisch said he was fed up with extremism in politics when he began considering a run against Ms. Boebert last fall.

The former Aspen city councilman and onetime financial trader sat down and began to crunch numbers on the farthest right and farthest left politicians in the country. He discovered that Ms. Boebert, who won her 2020 race by six points, was the most vulnerable, with–as a point of comparison–a far narrower margin of victory than Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).

Mr. Frisch, 55, became convinced that it was possible for someone to build a coalition to beat Ms. Boebert, and his family urged him to get in the race.

Political analysts attributed Mr. Frisch’s surprise momentum to Ms. Boebert’s close alignment with Mr. Trump, her reputation for attention-getting statements and a general fatigue within her district of headlines about her. That left an opening for Mr. Frisch and grass-roots groups to cobble together an alliance of Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans to compete.

“If Lauren Boebert had been an ordinary Republican, this race would not be competitive,” said Laura Chapin, a Democratic political consultant in Denver.

Benjamin Stout, a spokesman for Ms. Boebert, said she outperformed other statewide Republicans within the district and said the majority of Republicans have stuck with her. He pointed to Mr. Frisch’s campaign as a conservative, emphasizing support for business and energy, as proof of support for Republican principles.

“He just copped her policies and ran on them,” Mr. Stout said.

Control of the House is potentially just one race call away from being decided – assuming the winner is a Republican.

The GOP has won 217 of the 218 seats needed to create a majority in Congress’ lower chamber, while Democrats have 205 seats. All it will take is one more victory for Republicans to retake the chamber for the first time since 2019. The question is: where?

An obvious choice would be Colorado’s third district, where Lauren Boebert, one of the chamber’s most controversial lawmakers, is in an unexpectedly stiff battle for re-election against Democrat Adam Frisch. There are only a few ballots left to count in this race, but according to Colorado Public Radio, don’t expect the outcome to be decided today: the next results won’t be published until Wednesday.

Based on this chart from the New York Times, that makes several uncalled races in California the best possibilities for learning today which party controls the House.

Republican Adam Laxalt has conceded Nevada’s Senate race and acknowledged his loss to Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto:

Cortez Masto’s victory in the race guarantees Joe Biden‘s allies control of the Senate for another two years. However, election season isn’t quite over. On 6 December, voters in Georgia will cast ballots in a run-off election to determine whether Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock will return to the Senate, or be replaced by Republican Herschel Walker.

Donald Trump’s looming re-election bid has been hit a significant defection after the influential owner of Fox News reportedly told the former president he’s switched allegiances to Ron DeSantis, Mark Sweney reports:

Rupert Murdoch has reportedly warned Donald Trump his media empire will not back any attempt to return to the White House, as former supporters turn to the youthful Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

After the Republican party’s disappointing performance in the US midterm elections, in particular the poor showing by candidates backed by Trump, Murdoch’s rightwing media empire appears to be seeking a clean break from the former president’s damaged reputation and perceived waning political power.

Last week, Murdoch’s influential media empire, including right-leaning Fox News, his flagship paper the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post, each rounded on Trump, calling him a loser and a flop responsible for dragging the Republicans into “one political fiasco after another”.

Here’s another tepid endorsement of Donald Trump from a Republican senator.

This time it’s John Cornyn of Texas, as per NBC News:

Speaking at a Washington Post event today, Liz Cheney called voters’ rejection of candidates who deny the outcome of the 2020 election in last Tuesday’s election a victory for democracy:

She also accused many of her fellow Republicans in Congress, particularly the party’s leaders, as having their head in the sand when it comes to standing up to Trump:

This appearance is in some ways an exit interview for Cheney. She lost the Republican primary for her Wyoming House seat in August, and won’t return to Congress next year.

It’s not just the House where Republicans are performing poorly.

Last night, the Associated Press projected that Democrat Katie Hobbs triumphed over Trump-endorsed Republican Kari Lake in Arizona’s governor’s race.

It was a moment to savor for Liz Cheney, the conservative Republican House representative and Trump foe who ran television ads encouraging voters in Arizona to reject Lake. Last month, the Arizona Republican released a snarky letter in response to Cheney’s ads – but on Twitter, Cheney may well have had the last word:

Donald Trump endorsed an extensive number of Republicans in House elections, and while ballots are still being counted, it appears that wasn’t always a good thing.

Writing in the Washington Post, Philip Wallach, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, finds Trump’s chosen Republicans underperformed in competitive House races:

Here’s more of his argument:

We can put a number on it by seeing how Trump-supported candidates did relative to those Republicans he did not endorse. If we look at all 401 contests in which a single Democrat faced a single Republican, there is not much difference. Relative to baseline expectations derived from their districts’ recent voting patterns (as calculated by the Cook Partisan Voting Index), 144 Trump-endorsed candidates exceeded their baselines by an average of 1.52 points. In 257 races where Trump did not endorse a general-election candidate, Republicans exceeded their baseline by 1.46 points.

But that similarity is driven mainly by Trump’s endorsements of many Republicans cruising to easy reelection in uncompetitive districts. If we focus exclusively on districts where the margin of victory was less than 15 points, such that the seat was conceivably in the balance, the picture that emerges is quite different.

In these 114 districts, candidates bearing Trump endorsements underperformed their baseline by a whopping five points, while Republicans who were without Trump’s blessing overperformed their baseline by 2.2 points — a remarkable difference of more than seven points.

That said, the GOP is still on course to win a majority in the chamber – just not a particularly big one.

At least one Republican senator has already chosen their side in the rivalry between Trump and DeSantis.

Yesterday, Wyoming’s Cynthia Lummis said she regarded the Florida governor as leader of the Republican party, Politico reports:

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell has more on the tensions within the Republican party over Donald Trump’s imminent announcement of a new campaign for the White House:

Donald Trump is expected to announce his 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday night as planned, according to multiple sources close to the former US president, inserting himself into the center of national politics as he attempts to box out potential rivals seeking the Republican nomination.

Trump will deliver at 9pm ET a speech from the ballroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, where he recently hosted a subdued midterm elections watch party, and detail several policy goals that aides hope could become central themes of the presidential campaign.

Trump’s remarks were being finalized late into the night with a pair of speechwriters and his political team, the sources said, with aides keen for the former president to convey a degree of seriousness as he seeks voters to elevate him to a second term in the White House.

The political team at Mar-a-Lago are aware nonetheless that Trump has a penchant for veering off script and delivering news as he pleases, often fixating on grievances over debunked election fraud claims that have historically done him no favors.

Still, Trump appears to know that after the disappointing Republican results in the midterm elections, he is perhaps at his most politically vulnerable since the January 6 Capitol attack, and faces a critical moment to ensure he does not get discarded by the rest of the GOP.

After years with Donald Trump as the undisputed head of their party, many Republicans are grappling with the rise of Ron DeSantis and whether to switch their support to the Florida governor. The Guardian’s Chris McGreal takes a closer look at their rivalry:

Terri Burl was an early member of Women for Trump. As chair of her local Republican party branch in northern Wisconsin, she twice campaigned vigorously for his election in the key swing state. By the time Trump left office, Burl rated him the greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Maybe even better.

But now Burl has had enough.

She views the prospect of Trump announcing another run for the presidency – as he is expected to do in Florida on Tuesday evening – with trepidation. Burl predicts “a lot of blood on the floor” if it comes to a fight with rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the Republican nomination, and defeat in the 2024 election if the former US president is the candidate.

Donald Trump will at 9pm today make a “big announcement” – probably of another presidential campaign – at his Mar-a-Lago resort. If you’re a Republican, it will indeed be big.

The former president is at the center of an array of investigations by local and federal authorities and just had a number of his handpicked candidates rejected by voters in the midterms, but a poll released today shows he’s still the most popular man in the GOP.

If the primary were held today, 47% of Republicans and independents who lean towards the party would support Trump, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll. Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, who won a resounding reelection victory on Tuesday, would get 33% support. Trump’s former vice-president Mike Pence would get only 5% support. No other candidates came close.

The figures underscore the durability of Trump’s appeal to Republican voters, despite all that has happened since he took over the GOP in 2016 and won the White House later that year. It also cuts into the idea that Republicans’ struggles in Tuesday’s vote are a sign of voters souring on his brand.

That said, the survey reinforces the belief that voters see DeSantis as an increasingly palatable alternative to Trump. He’s jumped in popularity since the most recent Morning Consult poll, when he was at 26% support. In that survey, Trump was at 48% support, just a point from where he is now.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. As votes were being counted over the past week, Democrats have wondered if their surprising strength among voters could deal them an against-all-odds victory in the House of Representatives. We appear to be nearing the answer to that question: no. While it will surely be smaller than they hoped for, Republicans are closing in on winning a majority in Congress’ lower chamber for the first time since 2019. Their victory could be confirmed in the hours to come. Meanwhile, at 9pm eastern time, former president Donald Trump is scheduled to make an announcement that will likely be the start of a new presidential campaign.

Here’s what else is happening today:

Joe Biden appears to have wrapped up his day at the G20 in Indonesia, which may weigh in on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The House and Senate are in session, with the House Homeland Security Committee holding a hearing on global terrorism threats featuring FBI director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell will speak to reporters at 10 am eastern time.