Democrats perform better than expected and Georgia Senate race heads to runoff
At the beginning of his remarks, Biden took a cautious victory lap following Tuesday’s midterm election results, celebrating gains Democrats made after a predicted Republican victory.
“While the press and the pundits were predicting a giant red wave – it didn’t happen,” said Biden, adding that many results in key races are still being tallied.
As counting continues across the country, we’re going to pause our live blog, but will be back if there’s any major updates to alert you of.
As things stand, control of the Senate remains very much in play. Georgia will now face a runoff election in December after neither candidate reached a majority.
Arizona’s Democratic candidate Mark Kelly is ahead on the current count, but there remain thousands of votes still to tally. In Nevada, Republican Adam Laxalt is just a few thousand votes of his Democratic rival.
Control of the House is still up in air. Republicans need just over 10 more seats to secure a narrow win. Victory in the lower house could come down to a handful of competitive races where counting remains ongoing.
You can read a full report on the day’s events here.
Follow the latest from the US midterms with our new blog here.
Officials in Arizona’s Maricopa County have updated the public on a printer issue that affected some ballots on Tuesday. They’ve reassured voters that all ballots affected will be counted securely and accurately.
The issue impacted an estimated 17,000 ballots (or less than 7% of votes) according to officials. Some ballots could not be read by the tabulators because the printers did not produce dark enough marks on them.
Voters had ways to cast their ballot, including dropping their completed ballot into secure boxes.
Those ballots will be verified as legit and then tabulated at MCTEC. That process is already underway.
You can read the full explanation here:
Here's an update 🧵 on the printer issue with some Vote Center ballots yesterday:
— Maricopa County (@maricopacounty) November 10, 2022
WHAT’S IMPORTANT: All ballots affected will be counted securely and accurately.
Counting continues in Arizona’s closely fought Senate race. The result there could prove be pivotal in deciding which party controls the upper house.
Democrat Mark Kelly currently leads Republican Blake Masters by around 90 thousand votes, but there remain thousands still to be counted.
Many of those that remain to be tallied are in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous county, which includes Phoenix and its sprawling suburbs. President Joe Biden narrowly carried Maricopa County in 2020.
Pima County, the state’s second largest by population and home to the city of Tucson, also has a number of outstanding votes still to be counted.
Two of the three Democratic candidates endorsed by Republican Liz Cheney won their races on Tuesday.
Cheney, the daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, is a stringent conservative but has emerged as perhaps the leading anti-Trump Republican.
She rose to national prominence as vice-chair of the House January 6 committee, seeking to establish Trump’s guilt regarding the US Capitol attack, but in August lost her primary in Wyoming to a Trump-backed challenger.
Cheney backed incumbent Democrat Elissa Slotkin in Michigan’s 7th District, as well as Abigail Spanberger in Virginia’s 7th District. Both candidates were victorious.
However her endorsement of Democrat Tim Ryan in his Ohio US Senate race against JD Vance failed to come off. The Republican, Vance, won the race in Ohio by a wider margin than predicted by many opinion polls.
Voters in four states have approved ballot measures that will change their state constitutions to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime.
The measures could curtail the use of prison labor in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont.
The four approved initiatives won’t force immediate changes in the states’ prisons, but they may invite legal challenges over the practice of coercing prisoners to work under threat of sanctions or loss of privileges if they refuse the work.
In Louisiana, a badly worded question on the ballot pushed lawmakers trying to get rid of forced prisoner labour to actually go against their own measure. They told voters to reject it because the measure on the ballot included ambiguous language that did not prohibit involuntary servitude in the criminal justice system.
Louisiana is one of a handful of states that sentences convicted felons to hard labor.
It’s still unclear which party will control the House and Senate, but Joe Biden expressed optimism today, relishing Democrats’ unexpected show of strength in the midterm races that have been decided so far. It may take days or weeks before we know the balance of power.
Here’s what we’ve learned today so far:
Joe Biden said it was “a good day” for democracy after Democrats defied history and outperformed expectations in the midterms.
Control of the Senate will be decided in Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. The former two races remain too close to call; the latter race will go to a runoff election.
Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney’s job was to win seats for the Democrats in the House of Representatives, but he lost his own bid for re-election instead.
Republican senator Ron Johnson won another term in Wisconsin, dashing Democrats’ hopes of picking up the seat and padding their majority in the chamber.
Voters in Kentucky said no to a ballot measure that would have set the stage for abortion to be criminalized.
Across the US, voters have rejected some of the most vehement election deniers, though key races featuring Trump-backed election conspiracy theorists remain undecided.
Republican Tom Kean Jr has unseated Democratic incumbent Tom Malinowski in New Jersey’s most contested race.
This was a vindication for Kean after he narrowly lost to Malinowski two years ago, in a slightly different district.
“While we did as well or better than in 2020 in the communities I have represented these last four years, and I expect the results to tighten further as all votes are counted, the new district proved too much of a hurdle to overcome,” Malinowski said. “I’m gratified that across the country, Americans chose moderation over Maga, while passing referenda protecting a woman’s right to choose.”
Kean has a long, long political lineage in New Jersey. His father was governor, and co-chair of the 9/11 commission. His grandfather was a congressman, and his great-grandfather a senator. His great-great-great-great-grandfather was a delegate in the Continental Congress.
Democrat Jahana Hayes has won re-election, fending off challenger George Logan in a race that Republicans had heavily targeted.
Hayes became the first Black woman to represent Connecticut in Congress when she was elected in 2018. This year, she focused on reproductive rights issues and her record of bringing money into her district.
Republicans poured in millions, hoping to flip the seat as part of what they anticipated would be a red wave.
In a newly formed Colorado district, Democrat Yadira Caraveo has picked up a closely contested seat, besting Republican Barbara Kirkmeyer.
Caraveo will be the first Latina to represent Colorado in congress, with Kirkmeyer conceding Wednesday night.
The district, which includes the northern suburbs of Denver, was ranked a toss-up. Nearly 40% of residents in the district are Latino.
Caraveo is a state legislator and pediatrician. She emphasized economic and cost of living issues in her campaign, as well as reproductive rights.
Read more:
Progressives had a lot to smile about as they woke up on Wednesday morning, after many of their preferred candidates won crucial races in the US midterm elections.
House progressives held on in closely fought races and appeared poised to expand their ranks, even as control of the lower chamber remained up for grabs on Wednesday. Dozens of progressive members of Congress secured re-election, including embattled incumbents like Angie Craig, whose Minnesota district was considered a toss-up.
As sitting lawmakers fended off Republican challenges, progressive House candidates like Summer Lee of Pennsylvania and Greg Casar of Texas won their first congressional races. Lee’s victory was a particular point of pride for progressives, given that she previously won a hard-fought primary after the pro-Israel group Aipac spent millions trying to defeat her.
“The loser of the night is Aipac who revealed they were totally willing to sabotage Democratic chances of keeping the majority, set $4m on fire in an attempt to beat Summer Lee, and still lost,” Leah Greenberg, co-founder of the progressive group Indivisible Project, said on Twitter.
Some new members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus are set to make history as they prepare to join the House. The Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost, who organized with the American Civil Liberties Union and has called for universal healthcare on the campaign trail, will become the first Gen Z member of Congress. Becca Balint, who was endorsed by the progressive senator Bernie Sanders, will be the first woman and the first out LGBTQ+ politician to represent Vermont in Congress.
Read more:
The Guardian’s Sam Levin and Lois Beckett in Los Angeles report:
A billionaire real estate developer and a Democratic congresswoman are still locked in a tight race to become the next mayor of Los Angeles, in a record-breaking campaign where political spending topped $120m.
On Wednesday morning, the margin of votes between Rick Caruso and Karen Bass was still too close to call, with the candidates virtually tied, the Associated Press reported.
Caruso was ahead by 12,000 votes on Wednesday morning local time, with nearly 80% of expected votes remaining to be counted.
Bass told supporters at her election party that the vote counting could take days, but added: “We will win, because we are going to build a new Los Angeles.” Caruso told his crowd: “We don’t know the outcome yet, but I’m happy to say that we’re starting out strong.”
In another closely watched LA race, the incumbent county sheriff, Alex Villanueva, was trailing his opponent, the former police chief of the city of Long Beach Robert Luna. Villanueva, a Democrat who took a hard turn to the right since his election in 2018, has been derided by some as the “Donald Trump of LA” due to a steady stream of controversies surrounding obstruction, abuse and misconduct cases.
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.
During the campaign, Caruso made it clear he would like to roll back some criminal justice reforms in order to impose tougher penalties for theft, and suggested he would be willing to arrest unhoused people who were unwilling to move into shelters.
Joe Biden has spoken with House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, the White House said.
Republicans are inching toward a majority in the House, but the balance of power in the chamber remains unclear. Still, McCarthy, a Republican from California, has already announced his bid for House speaker.
In a letter to Republican colleagues, McCarthy expressed confidence that Republicans would take the House. “I am running to serve as Speaker of the People’s House and humbly ask for your support,” he wrote.
Democrats still have a chance of keeping control of the House, though Biden confirmed earlier today that he would be speaking with McCarthy.
In Colorado, far-right firebrand Lauren Boebert is virtually tied with her centrist Democratic challenger Adam Frisch, with only a few dozen votes separating them.
Once the remaining votes, including military and overseas votes are counted, an automatic recount will be triggered as the margin of victory is less than 0.5% of the winner’s total votes.
Boebert has made a name for herself targeting fellow representative Ilhan Omar with Islamophobic comments, carrying a gun at the Capitol, heckling Joe Biden and promoting baseless QAnon conspiracy theories.