This live blog is now closed. You can find all our coverage here.
Counting is set to continue in all the races that are yet to declare. We’re going to pause our live blog now, but will return if there is anything important to update you on.
If you want to know why the vote count is taking so long in some states, you can read our explainer here.
And if you want to continue to track the results live, you can do so here.
Today so far
Ballot counting continues, and it may still be a while until we find out which party will control the House and Senate. As Republicans wrestle with questions about why the elections failed to bring about the “red wave” they expected, Joe Biden has continued in his party’s performance.
Here’s a rundown of what has happened so far today:
A top White House official insisted the Democrats still had a chance at winning the House.
A newly elected Republican congressman said the party should “move forward” from Donald Trump. The former president is facing pressure to delay announcing his presidential bid after many of his endorsed candidates faltered in the midterms.
The chair of the Texas GOP said the party needs to give voters a positive message if it wants to improve on what is looking to be a lackluster performance in the midterms.
Montana became the latest state where voters said no to further abortion .
Nevada’s razor-thin Senate and governor races may not be known until Saturday, by when most ballots from the Democratic-leaning Clark county will be counted.
An official in Arizona’s Maricopa county asked Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake to tone down her rhetoric about the elections.
Inflation declined in October, new government data showed. potentially signaling the beginning of the end of the political perilous wave of price increases
Democrat Tina Kotek is the winner of the Oregon governor’s race, defeating a Republican candidate in a race that was unusually close in the typically blue western state.
– Chris Stein and Maanvi Singh
Democrat Tina Kotek elected governor of Oregon
Democrat Tina Kotek is the winner of the Oregon governor’s race, defeating a Republican candidate in an unusually close election in the typically blue western state.
Democrat Tina Kotek was elected governor of Oregon, topping a three-woman field in what was seen as the GOP’s best chance in years to capture the office in the liberal state. https://t.co/Bf11DqvGKB pic.twitter.com/MyksvnI10o
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) November 11, 2022
Kotek was the longest serving speaker of the Oregon House, and the GOP candidate, Christine Drazan, was the former leader of the Republicans in the state House. Kotek had 47.1% of the vote and Drazan had 43.5%.
Kotek is making history with her win, joining Maura Healey of Massachusetts as the first lesbians elected as governors in the US. Kotek said today:
It is an absolute honor. I can tell you that being who I am is important to Oregonians across the state. Lots of young people have come up to me and said thank you for running and thank you for being who you are.
Updated
Hi all – Sam Levin in Los Angeles here, taking over our live coverage for the rest of the evening.
Here in LA, voters are closely following the very tight race for mayor of the second largest city in the US, with many votes still to be counted. As of the latest count this evening, Rick Caruso, a billionaire real estate developer had 50.25% of the vote and Karen Bass, the Democratic congresswoman, was trailing slightly behind at 49.75%.
More than 545,000 votes have been counted so far, and on Wednesday, LA county officials estimated that there were still more than 1m votes to be counted. It could take a week for a winner to be called, according to the LA Times, which noted that in the primary, Bass was initially behind in votes, but as more were counted, she ended up surpassing Caruso.
Both nominally Democrats, Bass and Caruso come from starkly different backgrounds, and their down-to-the-wire contest comes at a particularly fraught time for Los Angeles.
The region’s homelessness crisis has become a humanitarian catastrophe, with LA county recording 69,000 unhoused people in this year’s annual estimate, considered an undercount, including more than 48,000 living outside. City government is also in crisis. Recordings leaked last month captured three councilmembers, including the council president, making bigoted and racist remarks.
More here on the race:
Updated
A federal judge in Texas has blocked Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.
The Trump-appointed judge declared the policy unlawful in a ruling issued Thursday evening. The ruling comes after a stay on the program was granted in a separate lawsuit. There have been a number of legal challenges against the program from conservative groups and officials.
The Washington Post has more details:
In the Texas case, the plaintiffs argued, in part, that the Biden administration made arbitrary decisions about who would qualify for debt forgiveness and how much of their balance would be canceled. Biden’s loan relief plan would cancel up to $10,000 in federal student debt for borrowers who earn up to $125,000 annually or up to $250,000 annually for married couples. Borrowers who received Pell Grants are eligible for an additional $10,000 in forgiveness.
Biden has continued to promote the program, which could benefit tens of millions of Americans.
Zoe Grueskin reports:
New York state voters passed a ballot measure that would fund up to $4.2bn for environmental improvement projects – including increasing flood resiliency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, electrifying school buses and creating more green and open spaces.
The proposal also aims to reach communities most affected by the climate crisis. If approved, it will allow the state to sell bonds in order to raise funds to finance several projects.
Nearly 60% of voters at the state level cast their ballot in support of the measure – in New York City, that number went up to 81%. The support is not entirely surprising: since the early 20th century, 11 environmental bond acts have made it to the ballot in New York. All but one, in 1990, passed with a substantial margin of the vote.
Read more:
Updated
Donald Trump has sent supporters an email trashing Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who is broadly viewed as a potential presidential candidate after his midterm victory.
The former president, who has teased that he will soon announce his candidacy for 2024, referred to the governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious” and accused him of lacking “loyalty and class” for entertaining media questions about whether he’d run against Trump for president.
Trump is facing pressure to delay announcing his presidential bid after many of his endorsed candidates faltered in the midterms.
Read more:
Updated
A top official in Arizona’s Maricopa county, the state’s largest, has asked Kari Lake to tone down her rhetoric about the elections.
Lake, who is the Trump-endorsed Republican candidate for governor, has denied the 2020 election results and often spread false claims and misinformation about elections. Lake and her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, are locked in a tight race.
“Now, I feel 100% confident we are going to win this, I hate that they’re slow-rolling and dragging their feet and delaying the inevitable. They don’t want to put out the truth, which is that we won,” Lake said on the conservative Charlie Kirk show. “We’re going to win this, and there’s not a darn thing they can do about it. But they’re trying to pour cold water on this movement.”
In Maricopa county, officials were not pleased.
“Everyone needs to calm down, tone the rhetoric down,” said Bill Gates, chair of the Maricopa Board of Supervisors. “Let’s stop the name calling.”
"Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say these people behind me are slow rolling this."
— KTAR News 92.3 (@KTAR923) November 10, 2022
Bill Gates, chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, is not very happy about some of the things being said about the elections department. pic.twitter.com/OoUpd4oyLf
In Arizona, where many voters vote early, officials have to verify and approve ballots in a process that can take days or weeks. It is normal in close races to have to wait a while for results.
Updated
Even though it remains unclear which party will take control of the House with several key races still undecided, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has established transition teams for the 118th congress.
“The House Republican majority is getting right to work,” McCarthy said, despite the fact that it may be a while until we know whether Republicans have a majority. “These transition teams will ensure we hit the ground running on issues that Democrats have ignored or made worse for the American people under one-party rule, all while shutting out our fellow citizens from the People’s House.”
McCarthy, a California Republican, has long sought the role of House speaker, but Republicans’ underperformance in the midterms means that if he does ascend to the role, he might be helming a very small Republican majority. Several pro-Trump, Freedom Caucus Republicans have also expressed disappointment with McCarthy, and there’s a chance they could mount a challenge against him.
McCarthy has named Republican whip Steve Scalise, and congressmen James Comer, Jim Jordan and Bryan Steil as leaders in his transition team – which could be a strategic move to keep potential rivals close.
Updated
Here's why votes take so long to count in Arizona
Ed Pilkington and Sam Levine report:
Several of the most consequential races are happening in the border state of Arizona. A US Senate contest between the Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly and Republican challenger Blake Masters could determine which party controls the Senate.
There are also consequential state races, including for governor and secretary of state, in which prominent election deniers endorsed by Donald Trump have a shot at winning. So far only 70% of the Arizona vote has been counted.
To understand why that is, you have to zoom in to Maricopa county, which covers the state capital, Phoenix. It contains 60% of all votes in Arizona and is the second largest voting jurisdiction in the nation.
The number of people who vote early has increased dramatically since the pandemic. This year Maricopa county also saw a surge in the number of early ballots that were dropped off on election day – they are known as “late earlies” – rising to 290,000, the largest number in the state’s history and 100,000 more than in 2020.
Each early ballot has to be verified to check that the voter’s signature matches the signature in the voter rolls, and after that is done it is sent to a bipartisan panel for approval and processing. That all takes time, as we are witnessing.
Many people have drawn a comparison of Arizona’s vote count with that of Florida, which called its results within hours of polls closing on Tuesday. That state’s system allows election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots as soon as they are received; mail-in ballots have to be requested and must be received by an election supervisor no later than 7pm on election day.
But the main reason why Ron DeSantis won his re-election race so quickly on Tuesday was because it was a blowout, with the incumbent Republican governor garnering 59% of the vote while his challenger, Charlie Crist, received only 40%.
Had the candidates we are watching in Arizona or elsewhere had such a convincing lead, we would probably not still be waiting for their races to be called. Nonetheless, there are questions that Arizona is going to have to face in future elections.
Stephen Richer, who is the recorder of Maricopa county, said that after the dust settles “we will likely want to have a policy conversation about which we value more: convenience of dropping off early ballots on election day or higher percentage of returns with 24 hours of election night”.
Oliver Milman and Nina Lakhani in Sharm el-Sheikh report:
Nancy Pelosi has accused Republicans of treating the climate crisis like “it’s all a hoax” while at the Cop27 climate talks in Egypt, where the US delegation is attempting to remain upbeat about continued progress on dealing with global heating despite uncertainty over the midterm election results.
Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, made a surprise appearance at the climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh on Thursday. The trip may be one of Pelosi’s last as speaker, with most forecasts predicting Republicans will eke out a narrow majority in the House.
There has been “shall we say, a disagreement on the subject” of the climate crisis between the parties, Pelosi said at Cop27, adding that Republicans have said “‘Why are we having this discussion? There is no climate crisis. It’s all a hoax.’ We have to get over that. This is urgent, long overdue.
“So we cannot just have any political disagreement or the power of the fossil fuel industry cramping our style as we go forward with this, but to show a path that gets us to where we need to be,” Pelosi said.
Pelosi’s appearance at Cop27 comes at a critical point for the future of democracy in the US and the future of the planet. Joe Biden was able to pass the country’s most significant piece of climate legislation this year because Democrats have the majority in both the House and the Senate. With that set to change, the mounting anger at the US for obstructing meaningful global climate action, despite being the world’s largest polluter and richest country, may only get worse.
Read more:
Key House races are still undecided
Republicans are inching towards a House majority, but several key races, especially in the west, remain undecided.
Many of these close races are in California, where elections often take days or weeks to tabulate. In Orange county, the Democratic star Katie Porter is very narrowly leading Republican Scott Baugh in her newly formed swing district. Meanwhile, the Republican incumbent Michelle Steel, who ran an intensely negative campaign falsely painting her Taiwanese American opponent as having ties to Chinese communism, is leading in her race. And the Democrat Adam Gray is barely trailing the Republican John Duarte in the Central Valley.
in Colorado, the far-right firebrand Lauren Boebert remains in an unexpectedly tight virtual tie with her opponent, the Democrat Adam Frisch.
In Nevada, the Democratic representative Susie Lee is leading in a tight race against the Republican lawyer April Becker, who challenged the 2020 presidential election results. And the incumbent Democrat Dina Titus is pulling ahead of her Republican challenger in a redrawn district.
Updated
Voter turnout this year was the second highest of any midterm since 1940, according to the Washington Post, which analyzed AP and US Elections Project data.
About 112.5m people – or about 47% of eligible voters – cast ballots in the midterms. In 2018, about 50% of eligible voters cast ballots, according to the Post.
And according to researchers at Tufts University, about 27% of eligible voters 18-29 turned out:
This 2022 youth turnout is likely the second-highest youth turnout rate for a midterm election in the past 30 years, behind only the historic 31% turnout in 2018. Votes cast by young people made up 12% of all votes in this election, nearly matching the 13% youth share of the vote from the 2014 and 2018 midterms, according to National Election Pool surveys.
Joe Biden just spoke in Washington to thank Democratic volunteers for their work in securing the party a better-than-expected night in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
He noted that several Republicans who embraced baseless fraud claims about his own election win in 2020 ended up conceding their races without much drama:
President Biden says none of the 2020 election deniers contested the results of the 2022 midterm elections when they lost:
— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
“Tuesday was a good day … for democracy, and it was a strong night for Democrats.” pic.twitter.com/NZlZwNsyIL
He also linked the surprising support many Democrats received to the party’s pledge to preserve abortion access:
President Biden touts the overwhelming support for abortion rights during the 2022 midterms:
— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
“Women in America made their voices heard, man … Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them.” pic.twitter.com/Kc2qZUAwu1
He closed by touting his own legislative accomplishments, including moves intended to lower the country’s fiscal deficit:
President Biden: “I don’t wanna hear from Republicans calling Democrats big spenders. We’re the ones bringing down the deficit. They’re the ones that blew it up over four years.” pic.twitter.com/5N7j0ExfT0
— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
The Guardian’s Maanvi Singh is now taking over the blog, and will cover the rest of today’s elections and politics news.
Updated
The Senate’s Democratic leader Chuck Schumer isn’t banking on his party continuing to hold the chamber for another two years.
Bloomberg Government reports that Schumer intends to prioritize confirming Joe Biden’s judges and other nominees before the year ends and the new Congress begins:
🚨Scoop: Senate leader is preparing to pull the defense authorization bill off the floor and instead focus on federal nominees and judges and majority next year is still in limbo. Instead annual defense bill will materialize as an informal conference bill @business @BGOV #NDAA
— Roxana Tiron (@rtiron) November 10, 2022
Democrats still have a path to keeping the Senate majority, particularly if Mark Kelly in Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada win their races. Counting is ongoing in both.
Even as some Republicans blame him for their party’s struggles in Tuesday’s election, Morning Consult has new data out that confirms he remains the most-liked man in the GOP, though perhaps not as popular as he once was:
2024 National Republican Primary:
— Political Polls (@Politics_Polls) November 10, 2022
Trump 48% (+22)
DeSantis 26%
.@MorningConsult, 1,691 RV, 11/2-7https://t.co/AdYWBaSMK0 pic.twitter.com/PZ1AJdcudQ
Trump’s most recent popularity peak came in August, after his actions had received scrutiny from the January 6 committee and his resort searched by the FBI as part of its investigation into potentially unlawful retention of government secrets.
Nevada ballot counting could continue till Saturday
It may not be until Saturday that the outcomes of Nevada’s razor-thin Senate and governor races are known, The Nevada Independent reports.
That’s based on comments made at a press conference by Joe Gloria, registrar of Nevada’s most-populous county Clark, where Las Vegas is located. The outcome of the two races is expected to hinge on votes from its residents, who tend to lean Democratic:
Gloria on today's numbers:
— Sean Golonka (@s_golonka) November 10, 2022
He notes that Clark reported results from about 14k mail ballots last night.
He says there are still more than 50k ballots that must be counted in Clark.
"Majority of mail should be counted in Clark County by Saturday."
Yesterday, Gloria said Clark received 12.7k in mail on Wednesday, and in the afternoon, the county announced it received 56.9 from Election Day drop boxes.
— Sean Golonka (@s_golonka) November 10, 2022
The 14k reported yesterday was apparently Monday drop off and Tues mail. But Gloria now says there are 50k uncounted.
Meanwhile, NBC News reports a Trump adviser says the former president still plans to announce another run for the White House on Tuesday:
A senior Trump adviser just confirmed Tues announcement & said “The media, the corporate elites, and political establishment has all moved in unison against Donald Trump at their own peril. It’s like they want to recreate 2015-2016. Let them. We are doing it again. Buckle up”
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 10, 2022
Invites for Trump’s announcement should go out today.
— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) November 10, 2022
'I could not support him', top Virginia Republican says of Trump
Virginia’s Republican lieutenant-governor Winsome Sears said she could not support Donald Trump if he again ran for the White House, telling Fox Business Network in an interview that the former president has become a “liability” for the GOP:
“A true leader understands when they have become a liability. A true leader understands that it’s time to step off the stage, and the voters have given us that very clear message... I could not support him.”
— The Recount (@therecount) November 10, 2022
—VA Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears (R) comes out against Trump’s 2024 candidacy pic.twitter.com/0g1plfHJmu
The comments are significant considering Sears did something last year that Trump hasn’t done in more than six: win an election. Voters in the Democratic-leaning state elected Sears as the running mate of Glenn Youngkin in his gubernatorial campaign, and she made history as the first woman and first person of color to serve as Virginia’s lieutenant governor.
Her comments also underscore the tension among Republicans over Trump’s influence on the party, particularly since many candidates he backed did not fare well in Tuesday’s midterm elections.
Updated
Montana voters reject 'born alive' law
Montana has become the latest state where voters said no to further abortion restrictions by rejecting a law that was meant to stop the killing outside the womb of babies who survive a failed abortion – which is already illegal.
The so-called “born alive” law would have allowed medical providers to face criminal charges if they don’t take “all medically appropriate and reasonable actions to preserve the life” of infants, according to the AP.
The defeat puts Montana among the ranks of Republican-leaning states where voters have rejected attempts to further tighten down on abortion access following the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June.
Here’s more on the failed law from the AP:
Health care professionals and other opponents argued the proposal could rob parents of precious time with infants born with incurable medical issues if doctors are forced to attempt treatment.
“Today’s win sends a clear message to state leadership: Montanans demand our right to make private health care decisions for ourselves and our families with the help of our trusted medical teams — and without interference from politicians,” said a statement from Hillary-Anne Crosby, a spokesperson for an organization called Compassion for Montana Families that opposed the measure.
The outcome comes after a series of wins for abortion rights supporters in states around the country where abortion was directly on the ballot during the midterm elections. Voters enshrined abortion protections into state constitutions in Michigan, California and Vermont. They also voted down an anti-abortion constitutional amendment in conservative Kentucky, just as voters did in Kansas in August.
Supporters said the proposed Montana law was meant to prevent the killing of infants outside the womb in rare occurrence of a failed abortion, something that is already is illegal. Penalties for violating the proposed law would have included up to $50,000 in fines and up to 20 years in prison.
At least half of U.S. states have similar post-abortion born-alive laws in place, according to Americans United for Life, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that opposes abortion, aid in dying and infant stem cell research.
“This initiative would have criminalized doctors, nurses and other health care workers for providing compassionate care for infants, and, in doing so, overridden the decision-making of Montana parents,” said a statement from Lauren Wilson of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Adam Gabbatt has taken a look at the latest round in the long-running American political parlor game, ‘Has Rupert Murdoch Finally Dumped Trump?’:
On election day, Donald Trump was clear about how his efforts to support Republican candidates should be seen.
“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit,” Trump told NewsNation. “If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
Unfortunately for Trump, he did not get what he hoped for. Instead the former president has seen conservative news outlets, the Rupert Murdoch-owned ones in particular, turn on him, in some cases with gleeful abandon.
“Trumpty Dumpty” blared the front page of Thursday’s New York Post, the tabloid Murdoch has owned since 1976. Editors went so far as to mock up Trump as Humpty Dumpty, his enlarged orange head stuffed into a white shirt and a signature red tie.
Next to the picture of Trump as an egg perching precariously on a brick wall, the text goaded: “Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall – can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?”
The Post cover offered the most visceral insight into Murdoch’s thinking, and its contempt was far from an outlier in the mogul’s news empire.
“Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser” was the verdict of the Wall Street Journal editorial board. A subheading added: “He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022.”
The piece was just as scathing as the headline, running through nine races this November the paper said Trump had effectively tanked through his continued election denial, his various wars with more moderate Republican candidates and his general unpopularity nationwide.
“Since his unlikely victory in 2016 against the widely disliked Hillary Clinton, Mr Trump has a perfect record of electoral defeat,” the editorial said.
“The GOP was pounded in the 2018 midterms owing to his low approval rating. Mr Trump himself lost in 2020. He then sabotaged Georgia’s 2021 runoffs by blaming party leaders for not somehow overturning his defeat.”
It added: “Now Mr Trump has botched the 2022 elections, and it could hand Democrats the Senate for two more years.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not happy about how Democrats performed in her state, New York, in the midterms – a series of House losses helping (probably) hand the chamber to Republicans, though Kathy Hochul, the governor, did fend off an unexpectedly strong challenge from her Trumpist opponent, Lee Zeldin.
The New York City congresswoman popularly known as AOC told the Intercept: “New York, I think, is the glaring aberration in what we see in this map … what happened in New York really bucks a lot of the trends in what we saw nationwide.
“… I think, in New York, the way that those campaigns were run were different than the way a lot of winning campaigns across the country were run. And I think the role of the state party had very strong national implications. If Democrats do not hang on to the House, I think that responsibility falls squarely in New York state.”
Identifying key election themes in New York, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think policing was a big one, I think the choice among certain Democrats to … amplify Republican narratives on crime and policing, running ads on it … validating these narratives actually ended up hurting them much more than a different approach. I think that what we saw in other races was that they were able to really effectively center either their narratives and the narratives that they wanted to run with, whether it was abortion rights, whether it was democracy, whether it was … other key and top priorities.
“I think Democrats in New York, they did a couple of things. They ran ads around that were explicitly very anti-defund [the police], which only served to reinvoke the frame and only served to really reinforce what Republicans were saying. If we’re going to talk about public safety, you don’t talk about it in the frame of invoking defund or anti-defund, you really talk about it in the frame of what we’ve done on gun violence, what we’ve done to pass the first gun reform bill in 30 years. Our alternatives are actually effective, electorally, without having to lean into Republican narratives.
“… And I think another prime mistake is that in New York state, [ex-governor Andrew] Cuomo may be gone, but … much of his infrastructure and much of the political machinery that he put in place is still there. And this is a machinery that is disorganised, it is sycophantic. It relies on lobbyists and big money. And it really undercuts the ability for there to be affirming grassroots and state-level organising across the state.
“And so … you’re leaving a void for Republicans to walk into … it’s a testament to the corruption that has been allowed to continue in the New York state Democratic party.”
Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri who may or may not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 but definitely did run from Capitol rioters on 6 January 2021, even after raising a fist to the mob, thinks Republicans did not do as well as they might’ve done on Tuesday night because they didn’t run on his populist, not to say Trumpist, principles.
He tweets, in a message at least partially counter to the emerging consensus that Republicans suffered (if probably winning the House and maybe winning the Senate can be called suffering) because voters wanted to rebuke their Trumpist drift:
Washington Republicanism lost big Tuesday night. When your “agenda” is cave to Big Pharma on insulin, cave to Schumer on gun control & Green New Deal (“infrastructure”), and tease changes to Social Security and Medicare, you lose
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) November 10, 2022
A refresher on how Hawley ran, as shown by the House January 6 committee, is here.
Video of Josh Hawley running, meanwhile, is here:
My colleague David Smith has been speaking to anti-Trump conservatives about where the former president stands now, after a disappointing midterm election for his endorsed candidates and the Republican party, and with conservative media including Murdoch-owned papers showing signs of throwing in their lots with Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who had a contrastingly strong night on Tuesday.
Donald Trump is still expected to announce his third run for the Republican presidential nomination next week, though a chorus of party voices seems to wish he wouldn’t.
Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, tells David Trump “is wounded and that’s evidenced by the rightwing media ecosystem putting out collective rebukes in the wake of a disappointing midterm result because Donald Trump was at the centre once again.
He cost them a much larger victory in the midterms. He is the albatross around the Republican party’s electoral neck and will continue to be as long as he is alive and breathing.”
But Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, is not convinced Trump is a spent force yet: “I’m not holding my breath that this posture will remain. We saw this before after the election in 2020 and it lasted as long as the ratings started to crash.
When they started losing ratings to Newsmax and other media outlets, they went right back to the fawning coverage of Donald Trump. Are they willing to remain steadfast this time around because they think now that Ron DeSantis is the heir apparent? We’ll see how long that lasts.”
Joe Walsh, a former Tea Party congressman from Illinois who ran in the 2020 Republican primary as an anti-Trump candidate, also thinks the former president isn’t done with his party, or America, yet.
We’ve seen this movie before. He led a fucking insurrection and the party still bowed to him. So will the dam finally break with this one? No, I don’t think it will. I still think it’s his party.
“This whole DeSantis thing is overrated. Trump knows that. He knows who DeSantis is. I still expect him to come out this month and announce he’s running and I don’t expect many Republicans to have the balls to say, ‘Donald, you suck’. I just don’t think it’ll happen.”
Story:
Updated
The day so far
Ballot counting continues across the United States, with the outcomes of two key Senate races and several House races up in the air. Meanwhile, new government data showed inflation declined in October, potentially marking the beginning of the end of the political perilous wave of price increases that has gripped the country for more than a year.
Here’s a rundown of what has happened so far today:
A top White House official insisted the Democrats still had a chance at winning the House.
A newly elected Republican congressman said the party should “move forward” from Donald Trump.
The chair of the Texas GOP said the party needs to give voters a positive message if it wants to improve on what is looking to be a lackluster performance in the midterms.
How did John Fetterman, the Democratic victor in Pennsylvania’s Senate race, pull it off? The Guardian traveled to the state to find out.
Candidates who deny Joe Biden’s 2020 election win were rife on ballots nationwide, and the Washington Post has been tracking how they fared in the midterms.
Have a look:
How the 291 election deniers have fared so far (30 races uncalled as of Thursday at 11 a.m. ET)https://t.co/vda4lBIoFL pic.twitter.com/YoKePByT11
— Adrián Blanco (@AdrianBlancoR) November 10, 2022
Updated
Georgia’s Democratic senator Raphael Warnock plans to address the press after his race for re-election against Republic Herschel Walker went to a runoff.
The two men will face off again on 6 December in a race that, depending on the outcome of Senate contests in Nevada and Arizona, could decide control of the chamber.
Warnock announced he will speak at 1pm in Atlanta. Meanwhile, NBC News reports that Warnock’s campaign manager is signaling optimism to supporters about the senator’s prospects of winning a six-year term.
“Reverend Warnock will win the runoff by continuing the strategic investments in paid communication and field organizing, continuing to hold the diverse coalition that has driven Reverend Warnock’s success, and emphasizing that this race is about who is able to represent our state,” Quentin Fulks wrote in a memo today.
He characterized former NFL star Walker as “completely unqualified for a job that requires knowledge of the issues and an interest in listening and learning.”
Updated
Whatever the results of the midterms, Democrats are assured about eight more weeks of controlling both the House and Senate, and have a packed schedule of lawmaking ahead of them.
In an interview with National Public Radio, Democratic senator Cory Booker offered a preview of what the party’s priorities will be in the closing weeks of the year:
Could Democrats avert a debt ceiling crisis in 2023 by extending the debt limit this year, in the lame duck session? @CoryBooker says on @MorningEdition he would "hope" to do this, but there is a crowded agenda and party leaders haven't said if they will try it. @NPR
— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) November 10, 2022
In the lame duck, which might be the Democrats' last chance to legislate before R's take a chamber, @CoryBooker says "a lot of things" are "urgent for Democrats": writing "marriage equality" into law, making a child tax credit "permanent," and "confirming a lot of judges."
— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) November 10, 2022
Republicans found unexpected enthusiasm in New York, where they won several tight House races including in New York City’s exurbs, where Mike Lawler triumphed over sitting Democrat Sean Patrick Maloney.
But in an interview with CNN this morning, Lawler signaled he was willing to break from the party’s embrace of Donald Trump:
Mike Lawler, the New York Republican who unseated the Democratic campaign chair, tells us he wants to see the GOP move on from Trump. “I would like to see the party move forward. I think any time you are focused on the future, you can't so much go to the past,” Lawler says. pic.twitter.com/8b3nxlB6Ll
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) November 10, 2022
A number of Republicans are doing some soul searching after the “red wave” they hoped for did not arrive.
The party still could win the House and Senate, but it’s clear Americans weren’t as enthusiastic about Republicans as they expected.
Matt Rinaldi is chair of the Republican party in Texas, where the GOP suffered no major setbacks on Tuesday and is generally the dominant political force in the state. On Twitter, he shared his view of what went wrong for GOP candidates elsewhere:
Election takeaways:
— Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) November 9, 2022
1. Florida had a wave election. Texas had a very good night. Results elsewhere were mixed. Ron DeSantis and his optimistic brand of bold and unapologetic conservatism is a winning brand and the GOP should take note. (1/8)
4. Obviously, the results from outside Florida & Texas were largely disappointing. We have an outside shot of a one vote senate majority & will likely have a narrow margin in the House. Kari Lake will likely pull it out. (5/8)
— Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) November 9, 2022
5. But the lesson is, the GOP can’t rest on Dem incompetence & 70% of voters believing America is on the wrong track to win elections. It needs a positive message and governing agenda. It needs to stand for something. (6/8)
— Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) November 9, 2022
Ron DeSantis created a FL wave because his optimistic, bold & unapologetic conservatism won hearts & minds. He led, rather than followed polls. He stood for something. He took risks. He rejected moderation. He inspired people. This is the path forward for the GOP. (7/8)
— Matt Rinaldi (@MattRinaldiTX) November 9, 2022
While voters may have displayed surprising enthusiasm for the Democrats on Tuesday, Joe Biden’s party isn’t out of the woods yet, The Guardian’s David Smith reports:
It was a result that, Joe Biden said on Wednesday, gave everyone a “whew! sigh of relief” that Make America Great Again (Maga) Republicans are not taking over the government again.
Biden won and Donald Trump lost in midterm elections to decide control of Congress. But just as in 2020, a collective exhalation is not enough to spell the end of political dysfunction in America. Things are about to get messy.
For all their deflation, Republicans appear on course to capture a majority in the House of Representatives, albeit by a far smaller margin than history has suggested or crystal ball gazers had forecast.
That means the end of Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s reign as House speaker, at least for now. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has announced his intention to take the speaker’s gavel. It might be better described as a poisoned chalice.
Should McCarthy prevail, his achingly slim majority will afford little room for maneuver when it comes to legislating. McCarthy will have to do deals either with Democrats or far-right Trump loyalists. In a House where every member fancies him or herself as president, the speaker could find himself perpetually bending to the will of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Democrats have picked up another House seat.
The Associated Press confirms Gabriel Vasquez has ousted incumbent Republican Yvette Herrell in New Mexico’s second district. Herrell took the seat from Democrat Xochitl Torres Small in the 2020 election.
Politicians across the country broke barriers in the midterms, with the first member of generation Z elected to Congress and the first openly gay woman winning a governorship.
Here’s more about the historic firsts that resulted from Tuesday’s vote:
Some of Democrats’ best prospects for keeping the House are indeed in the west. Consider Colorado, where rightwing firebrand Lauren Boebert is locked in an unexpectedly close race for reelection, the Associated Press reports:
The controversial far-right Republican Lauren Boebert was locked in a tight race with fewer than 100 votes separating her and her opponent on Wednesday night, in her bid for reelection to a US House seat in Colorado against the Democrat Adam Frisch, a businessman and former city councilman from the posh, mostly liberal ski town of Aspen.
Boebert’s contest was being watched nationally as Republicans try to flip control of the US House. The Trump loyalist established herself as a partisan flashpoint in Washington in her first term and had been favored to win reelection after redistricting made the conservative and mostly rural district more Republican.
The margin in the race puts it in the recount zone of about 800 votes or less, or 0.5% of the leader’s vote total. Both Boebert and Frisch had 50% of the vote as of Wednesday night with about 97% of votes counted.
Frisch contends Boebert sacrificed her constituents’ interests for frequent “angertainment” in accusing Joe Biden and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, of seeking to destroy the soul of the nation. He vowed to join the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus”, a sharp turn from Boebert’s repudiation of across-the-aisle consensus-building.
White House deputy chief of staff Jen O’Malley Dillon said this morning that the Biden administration believes it’s possible Democrats could keep their majority in the House:
WH's @JOD46 says on @Morning_Joe the House is still in play for Democrats: "When we look at the votes coming in in the West, there's definitely still a path for Democrats to hold the House."
— Jordan Fabian (@Jordanfabian) November 10, 2022
Doing so would be hugely unexpected. No president has managed to hold on to their majorty in the House in their first midterms since George W Bush in 2002.
Joe Biden just put out a statement cheering the latest inflation data, saying it “shows that we are making progress on bringing inflation down, without giving up all of the progress we have made on economic growth and job creation.”
“My economic plan is showing results, and the American people can see that we are facing global economic challenges from a position of strength,” the president said in a nod to his administration’s argument that global events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have played a major role in the price spike.
He closed his statement by referring to the possibility that his Democrats will soon lose their majorities in one or both houses of Congress, and GOP leaders may take aim at some of the legislation Biden secured passage of during his first two years in office.
“I will work with anyone – Democrat or Republican – on ideas to provide more breathing room to middle-class and working families. And I will oppose any effort to undo my agenda or to make inflation worse,” Biden said.
Democrats scored a win in the race for Senate control when John Fetterman beat a Republican to take control of Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat in Tuesday’s election.
The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland traveled to the Keystone State to find out how Fetterman pulled it off:
You’re going to be hearing a lot on this blog today about Arizona and Nevada. Why?
It’s not out of love for gambling, cactuses and canyons. Rather, the southwestern states are home to the two Senate races that have not yet been called, and will determine who controls the chamber.
Both seats up for grabs are occupied by Democrats, and if Mark Kelly in Arizona and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada both win reelection, Biden’s allies will control the chamber for another two years. If neither wins, the GOP will have the majority. And if only one triumphs, then the 6 December runoff election for Georgia’s Senate seat will determine which party wins a majority in the chamber.
Updated
Democrats may have dodged the inflation bullet in the midterms, but it doesn’t mean the trend is over, or that voters won’t punish Joe Biden’s party at a later date. Here’s The Guardian’s Lauren Aratani on what the latest data means for the world’s largest economy:
Prices of goods and services in the US were up 7.7% in October compared with the same time last year, a sign that inflation is slowly starting to cool after reaching decades-high records over the last few months.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Thursday that in October, the consumer price index showed a 7.7% rise in prices over the last 12 months, a 0.5 percentage-point decrease from September, which saw a rate of 8.2%. The October inflation rate is the lowest since January, when rates rose to 7.5%.
Along with the slight cooling in the overall inflation rate, the core inflation rate, which excludes the volatile energy and food sectors, also showed a small tempering off, reaching 6.3% – a 0.3% increase compared to the core inflation rate last month.
While October’s inflation rate is slightly lower than analysts expected, it is still much higher than the 2% target rate that the Federal Reserve has been trying to reach.
US inflation showed signs of cooling in October
America’s white-hot inflation was expected to be one of the most potent trends influencing voters in Tuesday’s elections, but government data released just minutes ago indicates it may have started cooling.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports consumer prices rose 7.7% in October compared to the same month last year, down from the 8.2% rate seen in September. On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.4%, the same rate as in September.
Inflation has climbed to levels not seen for four decades over the course of the past year, souring voters on Joe Biden’s presidency and making Democrats nationwide fear they’d be booted from office in the 8 November midterms. While all the votes haven’t been counted yet, Biden allies appear to have done better than expected on Tuesday, a sign that their arguments about abortion and Republicans’ threat to democracy may have overcome voters’ economic anxieties. However consumers are still paying much more for household staples than they were a year ago. Food prices are up 10.9% compared to October 2021, and gasoline 17.5%, for example.
The bigger question is if this latest report is a sign that the bout of inflation that accompanied the economy’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 is finally easing for good. There are an array of opinions out there about this, but here are the views of University of Michigan economics professor Justin Wolfers:
Core CPI rose by 0.3% in October, which is 0.2 points below expectations, and down from 0.6% last month. It's now running at 6.3% over the year down from 6.6%.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) November 10, 2022
This is a very encouraging inflation report. There's a good chance that inflation has peaked, and is now turning down.
Headline inflation also yields good news: Up only 0.4% in October, a rise that's 0.2% below consensus.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) November 10, 2022
Inflation over the past year has been 7.7%, down from a rate of 8.2%. last month and a peak of 8.9% in June.
Again, it looks like inflation has peaked and is now falling.
Within core inflation, we're seeing roughly similar rates of inflation in the goods sector (5.1% over the year) as the service sector (6.7%).
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) November 10, 2022
But over more recent months goods inflation has pretty much stopped: -0.4% in October, 0% in September, and 0.5% and 0.2% in prior months
So focus will shift to the service sector, where inflation is running at 6.7%.
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) November 10, 2022
Some good news: The biggest cost in the service sector is labor, and labor costs aren't providing much inflationary pressure. Service sector inflation should moderate over time.
Good morning from Washington. This is Chris Stein, taking over from Martin Belam in London, and directing your attention away from the nation’s capital momentarily to a place much further to the west: Nevada.
There, it’s starting to look like Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto may be regaining her lead in the race for the state’s crucial Senate seat as more mail-in ballots are counted, according to Cook Political Report, which also sees Democrat Mark Kelly retaining his Senate seat in Arizona:
After last night's NV mail ballot trend, excellent chance now that Dems will have 50 Senate seats/control in hand heading into the GA runoff.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 10, 2022
Last night, The Nevada Independent reached much the same conclusion:
Here's what we know on the Nevada Senate race, if we assume the rurals are all but spent, will only add a couple thousand at most to Laxalt's lead:
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 10, 2022
If CCM continues to win urban mail at current clip, taking 65%, she will easily overtake Laxalt with 110,000 mail (at least) left.
If her margin decreases from 65-30 to 60-30, for instance, she would still in decisively.
— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) November 10, 2022
If it is 60-35, same.
If it's 55-30, same.
If it's 55-35, same.
She wins in all those models.
Buckle up.
Good night to all. See you for more math tomorrow!
Over at Politico Alex Isenstadt has written about the big decision that Republican hopefuls have to take on if they want to run for the White House in 2024 – are they prepared for a tussle with former US president Donald Trump first? Isenstadt writes:
For all the interest many Republicans have in running for president, would-be candidates — and their donors, staffers and family members — are going to have to decide whether they have the stomach to take on a former president known for having a vindictive streak.
Potential 2024 hopefuls have spent the last two years raising money, giving big speeches and traveling to early states under the thinly veiled cover of helping the party prepare for the midterms or fueling their reelection campaigns. That excuse doesn’t work anymore, and further steps toward a presidential race risk direct conflict with Trump.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump mercilessly savaged those who tried to stop him. While some eventually made their way back into Trump’s good graces, others never did.
Should Trump indeed decide to run again in 2024, the Republican political class will face a similar decision. While the prospect of defeating Trump may be what some in the party want, they will also have to gauge their comfort level with possible retaliation should he make it back into the White House.
Emma Brockes writes her Guardian column today on the topic of the midterms, saying what a relief it is she has been been denied her favourite election day hobby – hating fellow Americans:
There were the races that were so starkly depressing that no amount of fancy footwork could neutralise them. Chief among these was the Pennsylvania Senate race between Dr Oz, the rightwing TV host who said in a recent debate that abortion was a matter between “women, doctors and local political leaders”, and the Democratic candidate, John Fetterman.
The importance of this race was underscored when both Biden and Barack Obama turned up to stump for Fetterman on Saturday, undoing all the detachment I’d managed to achieve about the midterms. Watching Obama do his thing in front of a stadium of people in Pittsburgh was intensely moving. It was also a hard reminder of how far we had fallen since 2008. Accustomed as most Americans are these days to seeing the apparent lunatic in any race win, Obama’s appearance seemed to guarantee Oz would ascend to the Senate.
Fetterman won with 50.4% of the vote. By midday, while it was still unclear whether Congress would remain in the hands of the Democrats, it was apparent there would be no red wave. There was no big revival in support for Trump-backed candidates. And there were some hugely cheering results from the centre of the country, where for example in Kentucky voters defeated the anti-abortion constitutional amendment. For the first time in ages, it was possible to think warmly of people one was used to dismissing.
Read more here: Emma Brockes – What a relief I’ve been denied my favourite election day hobby, hating fellow Americans
Sheera Frenkel and Steven Lee Myers report for the New York Times that researchers who study election disinformation said most efforts to stoke doubt about the results of the midterms had failed to spread widely. They write:
The major social media platforms all struggled to combat misinformation and disinformation online as the results were tabulated, but researchers who study the problem said efforts to stoke doubt about the outcome of the American democratic process had — at least so far — failed to take root. Some saw it as a hopeful sign of the political system’s resilience, though few declared victory in the fight against misinformation.
According to a New York Times analysis, more than half of 370 candidates who in some way had cast doubt on President Biden’s victory had won their races as of midday on Wednesday. They included 170 members of the House, where Republicans appeared to be closing in on reclaiming a majority. Although the party fell short of the “red wave” that many had anticipated, its successes may have tempered some of the conspiracy theories that emerged early Tuesday.
With prominent Republican candidates still on the cusp of winning, calling attention to fraud could undercut those victories, including majority control of the House and Senate.
However, the article still identifies some corners of the web where anger over results and the electoral process continues to seethe.
“There is a lot of anger and noise on the mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but the most aggressive statements on the day of the midterms, including calls to violence, are found on the alt platforms including Gab, Parler and Telegram,” said Alex Stamos, the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which tracked election disinformation online as part of the Elections Integrity Partnership. Users in some cases called for storming polling stations or using violence, though no significant attacks unfolded on election day.
Adam Gabbatt has been in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the Guardian, and today has profiled John Fetterman’s rise from small-town mayor to Pennsylvania senator:
Arguably it was Donald Trump who launched the political career of John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who clinched the state’s US Senate seat in Tuesday’s election.
In the days after the 2020 presidential vote, the former US president infamously claimed there had been widespread election fraud, including in Pennsylvania, where Fetterman was lieutenant governor. Fetterman disagreed.
When Trump later said he would sue Pennsylvania over alleged, but nonexistent, voter fraud, Fetterman’s response was succinct. “The president can sue a ham sandwich,” he said.
Fetterman’s image as an earthy, working-class hero enabled him to position himself as the opposite to Mehmet Oz Oz’s elitist, rich man vibe, and to appeal to a broad range of Pennsylvanians, although the truth isn’t quite that simple.
The Democrat has an MBA from the University of Connecticut and a master’s from Harvard, and has acknowledged growing up in a “cushy” environment made possible by his father’s successful insurance business. Fetterman has said he received financial assistance from his parents for almost all of his 13 years as Braddock’s mayor – the job only paid $150 a month – until he became Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor in 2019.
There seems little disingenuous about Fetterman, however, who chose not to move into the lieutenant governor’s mansion when elected, instead remaining in Braddock, where he lives, as he has often told crowds at rallies, opposite a steel mill. His passion for the town is visible on his right forearm, where nine tattoos mark the dates that people were killed “through violence” in Braddock while he was mayor.
Having spent the bulk of his political career in charge of a town of 2,000 people, Fetterman will now represent Pennsylvania’s population of nearly 13 million. As he spoke to the crowd in the early hours of Wednesday, it seemed like a challenge he was ready for.
Read more from Adam Gabbatt here: John Fetterman’s rise from small-town mayor to Pennsylvania senator
CNN’s Fredreka Schouten reports that allegations of intimidation or harassment of Arizona voters continued, with a total of 21 complaints – including one threatening government officials — being forward to federal and state law enforcement, according to information released yesterday. She writes:
One of the 21 complaints involved a threat against government officials. The 22 October email, which said it was a warning to “Corrupt and Treasonous Government Officials”, mentioned the violence of the French Revolution and promised to use property tax records to find workers’ homes. The secretary of state’s office has referred it to the FBI. All of the complaints forwarded to federal and state law enforcement so far involve reports of alleged intimidation before election day.
Alexi McCammond and Emma Hurt write for Axios this morning that Democrats and Republicans are readying to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into Georgia over the next few weeks if, as seems very possible, control of the Senate comes down, once more, to a Georgia runoff. They write:
Depending on the outcome of other races that still haven’t been called, Georgia may end up being Republicans’ last chance to deny Democrats a Senate majority. Republican Herschel Walker performed significantly worse than Governor Brian Kemp, who easily won re-election Tuesday while Walker failed to crack 50% of the vote.
Republicans turning out to vote for Kemp may have helped pull Walker’s scandal-plagued campaign close to 50% — meaning he could have a harder time rallying support on his own in the runoff.
Back to Arizona for a second, and Meg Kinnard at the AP has this explainer of just why the counting is going so slowly, even by their standards. She writes that part of it is because of all of the ballots that got dropped off on election day in Arizona’s biggest county.
Officials in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous and home to Phoenix, estimated Wednesday there were about 400,000 votes left to count, with about 275,000 of those being ballots that came in on Election Day itself votes known in some places as “late earlies,” the counting of which has been known to hold up tabulation.
There are also about 17,000 outstanding ballots, about 7% of those cast in person on election day that were set aside due to a Tuesday printing problem at about a quarter of the county’s vote tabulation centers. A judge denied a request from Republicans to keep the polls open, saying he didn’t see evidence that people were not allowed to vote, and officials said those votes would be tallied throughout the week.
Election officials said they also received about 8,000 provisional ballots on election day, which included those cast by people who did not have ID, or those whose records showed they had already voted by mail.
Outside of Maricopa County, about 200,000 ballots remained to be counted, the bulk of them in Pima County, which includes Tucson.
Adam Taylor has written the Washington Post’s Today’s WorldView newsletter today, with a focus on Florida’s governor, asking is the world ready for President DeSantis? Taylor writes:
A disappointing night for most Republicans turned into a very good night for one Floridian. Governor Ron DeSantis not only won a second term in Tuesday’s midterm elections but also did so by a sizeable margin.
The results cemented many expectations that DeSantis would run for president in 2024. And to some Democrats, the double-digit wins seen by not only DeSantis but Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio on Tuesday have firmly ended the chapter where the state could be seen as a swing state.
Taylor picks out a couple of implications for a future DeSantis run for the White House, noting:
DeSantis is not Trump. He may not always act like it, but DeSantis’s résumé is more of a run-of-the-mill Republican civil servant than the bombastic-businessman-turned-political-arsonist Trump. In some ways, DeSantis’s background makes him look closer to former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, whose more interventionist leanings were sometimes at odds with Trump.
Taylor also picks up that DeSantis’ Florida roots would potentially signal a change in priorities for US foreign policy:
Unlike Trump, born wealthy in New York City and only belatedly becoming a resident, DeSantis is a real Florida man. And to some extent, he lives up to the reputation, notably paying extra attention to foreign issues close to many Floridians: Including Cuba, Venezuela, Colombia and Haiti.
DeSantis is happy to use brash rhetoric and even cruel stunts to make his point. He has flown Venezeulean migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in a bid to own liberals and battled with Disney over gay rights — breaking with Republican orthodoxy to complain about corporate power. He has said France would fold if Russia invaded and sided with Elon Musk over Ukrainian leaders after the U.S. billionaire suggested Kyiv needed to negotiate a peace deal with Russia.
And while DeSantis appears to have accepted the reality of climate change’s likely impact on Florida, he has favored throwing money at climate adaptation rather than working to actually mitigate the problem.
Here is how my colleague Nicola Slawson is summing things up for today’s First Thing newsletter, which should be hitting in-boxes shortly:
Joe Biden hailed “a good day” for democracy after Democrats defied history and outperformed expectations in the US midterm elections, leaving control of Congress on a knife-edge.
With ballots still being counted, Democrats were hopeful about holding the Senate, though the outcome of the tight races in Arizona and Nevada were still uncertain yesterday evening and another key race in Georgia was heading to a runoff. Democrats need to win two of those seats to maintain Senate control.
Republicans, meanwhile, felt they were on course to win the House – but by a much narrower margin than widely predicted.
“We had an election yesterday – it was a good day, I think, for democracy,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “And I think it was a good day for America.”
The president added: “While the press and the pundits are predicting a giant red wave, it didn’t happen … Democrats had a strong night.”
Who will have control of the Senate? Control of the US Senate was still up in the air this morning as several hotly contested seats remained uncalled and the fierce race between Georgia’s Democratic incumbent senator, Raphael Warnock, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, moved to a runoff.
Who was the midterms biggest loser? He wasn’t on any ballot but Donald Trump is widely seen as the night’s biggest loser as so many of his endorsed candidates failed and he was being blamed by members of his own party for the failure of the Republicans’ anticipated “red wave”.
Where can I see the full live results of the congressional midterms? You can view them here seat by seat.
Arizona Democrats are maintaining small but dwindling leads over their Republican rivals in the races for US Senate and governor, the AP reports. The races remained too early to call two days after the election, with some 600,000 ballots left to count, about a quarter of the total cast.
Protracted vote counts have for years been a staple of elections in Arizona, where the overwhelming majority of votes are cast by mail and many people wait until the last minute to return them. But as Arizona has morphed from a Republican stronghold to a competitive battleground, the delays have increasingly become a source of national anxiety.
After opening big leads early on election night, when only mail ballots returned early were reported, Democrats have seen their leads dwindled as more Republican ballots have been counted. On Thursday morning, Democrats led in the races of Senate, governor and secretary of state, while the race for attorney general was essentially tied. It could take several days before it’s clear who won some of the closer contests.
Republican Kari Lake was about half a point behind Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs in the race for governor, a contest that has centered heavily on Lake’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. The Republican candidate for attorney general also trailed narrowly.
Democrats had more comfortable 5-point margins in the races for US Senate and secretary of state, but with so many ballots outstanding, the races remain too early to call.
David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, offers this analysis of the results today, arguing that Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief – but their troubles are far from over:
For all their deflation, Republicans appear on course to capture a majority in the House of Representatives, albeit by a far smaller margin than history has suggested or crystal ball gazers had forecast.
That means the end of Democrat Nancy Pelosi’s reign as House speaker, at least for now. Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has announced his intention to take the speaker’s gavel. It might be better described as a poisoned chalice.
Should McCarthy prevail, his achingly slim majority will afford little room for maneuver when it comes to legislating. McCarthy will have to do deals either with Democrats or far-right Trump loyalists. In a House where every member fancies him or herself as president, the speaker could find himself perpetually bending to the will of Marjorie Taylor Greene.
It is hardly a prescription for national unity. Whatever happens in the Senate, which may be decided again in a Georgia runoff, America is returning to an era of divided government and two years of grinding trench warfare.
That spells trouble for Biden’s legislative agenda, echoing the plight of Barack Obama, who did big things in his first two years as president but found slim pickings over the following six.
Biden, who campaigned as an apostle of bipartisanship and did enjoy some wins – on infrastructure, gun safety, military veterans’ benefits – will now find Republicans more combative as everything comes to be seen through the prism of the 2024 election.
Read more of David Smith’s analysis here: Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief. But their troubles are far from over
US midterms 2022: what we know so far
Welcome to our continued coverage of the 2022 US midterm elections, where Senate control is still considered a toss-up as key races remain uncalled, and in the battle to control the House the Republicans have secured 217 seats compared to 184 that have gone for the Democrats. With 391 of 435 races called, the Republicans have gained six seats, which may well just be enough to put them on course for the slimmest of majorities. Here’s what we know so far:
The fierce race between Georgia’s Democratic incumbent senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger Herschel Walker moved to a runoff. Warnock is narrowly leading Walker, but neither candidate will be able to clear the 50% threshold needed to win outright after the polls closed on Tuesday and avoid a 6 December runoff.
In Nevada as of midday on Wednesday, with about 77% of the votes counted, Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto was trailing her Republican rival Adam Laxalt, 47.2% to 49.9%. Both candidates have urged patience as residents wait to hear the outcome of the race and several other close elections, which could take days.
Arizona’s Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly was ahead of his Republican challenger, Blake Masters, 51.4% to 46.4%, with 45% of the vote counted.
The Democrats need to win two of those Senate seats to effectively maintain control of the Senate with a 50-50 split on Senators and the vice president having the casting vote.
You can find all of the latest results on our interactive: US midterm election results 2022 – live
