Late Vote Counting in Western States Favors Democrats, So Don’t Count Control of the House Out Yet –
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By Glynn Wilson –
Political Analyst –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Defying the historical odds and the predictions of every famous, mainstream pollster and media pundit in the United States who said the Republicans were surging in the final weeks and all those who said the 2022 elections would be a Red Wave rout and a referendum on President Joe Biden, the Democrats just won the final key race they needed to maintain majority control in the Senate.
And guess what? They all said the Republicans were favored to win the House big too, and that’s still undecided and too close to call five days after Election Day. It’s looks more to me like a Red Mirage, and I never thought it was accurate anyway and said so on numerous occasions.
The latest victory comes from Nevada, where Catherine Cortez Masto came from behind with the late mail votes breaking for her, as I said they would, and defeated Adam Laxalt, a Republican former state attorney general who sided with Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election.
With 95 percent of the votes counted and reported in Nevada, Senator Cortez Masto took the lead with 48.77 percent of the vote, 487,829 votes, to Laxalt’s 48.11 percent, 481,273 votes. Her victory was sealed Saturday night when 22,323 mail-in ballots were recorded from Clark County. The Democrat’s 14,084 votes were enough to vault her into a large enough lead to ensure her victory.
The news broke late Saturday night, and The New York Times called it “a decisive moment in an extraordinary midterm election in which Democrats defied historical patterns and predictions of major losses.”
“Control of the House has still not been decided, several days after an Election Day that fell short of predictions that Republicans would sweep to power in Washington in a repudiation of President Biden’s leadership.”
With Masto’s victory in Nevada, Democrats nailed down the 50 seats they need to retain majority control of the Senate, “a major feat,” the Times reports, “considering that voters typically punish the president’s party during the midterms.”
But the Trump factor changed all that.
Yes, the Democratic victory will bolster Biden’s political capital as he moves toward a possible bid for a second term. But it’s not clear it will do much to dissuade Trump from announcing his candidacy on Nov. 15. He won’t back down or sing crow, ever. He’s already back on the broken record of “voter fraud,” clearly a losing electoral strategy as this election proves beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Even if Republicans still eke out a razor thin majority in the House — no done deal with more than 20 races out west still counting votes where mail ballots should favor Democrats — this president will be able to pack the courts with his judicial nominees and be insulated from bad Republican legislation from the House that will will never pass or even get a hearing in the Senate. In addition to having two more years to confirm judges, the president will have more control over personnel in his government with the confirmation of nominees under the guidance of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
“I feel good, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of years,” Biden told reporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Speaking in New York, a triumphant Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, called his party’s victory “a vindication for Democrats, our agenda and for the American people.” He added, “The American people rejected the anti-democratic extremist MAGA Republicans.”
While the Senate race in Georgia is now not as critical, the results of a Dec. 6 runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, could offer padding for Democrats against filibusters by moderate members of their own party, namely Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of California, who have made it hard at times for Biden to push key legislation through Congress, like the Inflation Reduction Act, the historic bill to address climate change that finally passed in watered down fashion in late summer.
The Democratic victory in Nevada, along with Senator Mark Kelly’s re-election in Arizona, which was called late Friday, affirmed the thin firewall that the party is trying to fortify in the West. Biden won Arizona by a mere 10,457 votes in 2020; Nevada has been more consistently Democratic in presidential years but erratic in midterms.
Republicans were dealt another blow on Saturday night when Jim Marchant, who helped organize a national slate of Trump-aligned candidates aiming to take over state election systems, lost Nevada’s race for secretary of state to Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat.
The result meant that every election denier hoping to run future elections in a major battleground state had been defeated.
Democrats were also racking up victories elsewhere. In Washington, one of the biggest upsets of the midterms was declared when a Democratic political neophyte, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, beat Joe Kent, a hard-right veteran backed by Trump who in a primary had ousted the current Republican representative, Jaime Herrera Beutler, as retribution for her vote to impeach Trump. Kent’s loss was the second time Republicans had ousted a member of their party who backed impeachment, only to lose the seat to Democrats.
“For much of the midterm campaigns, Republicans and independent analysts saw G.O.P. control of the House as a foregone conclusion, given Mr. Biden’s unpopularity and the headwinds that economic uncertainty and inflation represented for Democratic candidates,” the Times admitted in its coverage, even though it’s own polls, political analysts and columnists all went along with the Red Wave mentality.
All the pollsters and pundits said in the final three weeks that inflation and crime held more sway with voters than reproductive rights or the future of democracy. They were clearly wrong about that, and I disagreed with them publicly on numerous occasions. They were so desperate to find Trump Republican voters to answer their phones calls that their judgement became so clouded they weighted the polls five points toward the Republicans because they couldn’t seem to find those voters to interview. In retrospect, trying to gauge the “stealth” campaigns of Republicans created a disturbing “polling bias” all its own.
In the heated aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the long-standing precedent of Roe v. Wade, ending constitutional protections for abortion, pollsters and pundits thought perhaps Democrats could bolster their 50-vote control in the Senate by two or three seats with the support of women and higher voter turnout.
When the pendulum seemed to swing late in the campaigns, Republicans, the pollsters and media pundits convinced themselves that the anger over abortion was waning, and that the economy, inflation and crime were more important to voters than abortion, the Supreme Court or the future of American democracy, as Biden framed the debate.
Related: President Biden Goes on the Offensive Against Violent Extremism
But women on Facebook never lost interest, hope or enthusiasm, sharing daily memes about “RoeVember” coming in November.
At one point in late October — based on what the pollsters were saying — Senator Rick Scott of Florida claimed the Republicans would win the Senate and could take a 55-seat majority in the house, thinking that even Democratic states like Washington and Colorado were in play.
Talk about a mirage.
At the end of the day, Democrat John Fetterman in Pennsylvania captured a Republican seat held by the retiring Senator Pat Toomey, with the last minute help of a nod from Oprah Winfrey, who responded to our Tweet on Fetterman’s Facebook page and Twitter account and convinced women in and around Philadelphia to vote for the Democrat over the doctor made famous by Oprah herself on TV.
So far, Republicans have not defeated one single Democratic incumbent in a Senate race. They will have one more chance in Georgia.
“With Senator Cortez Masto’s victory, Democrats have accomplished a historic feat in defending our Senate majority against all odds and when the conventional wisdom said we have no business even being in the fight,” declared J.B. Poersch, the president of the Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Democratic leadership. He said it had been 60 years since the party defended all of its seats in a midterm when it held control of Washington.
The House is holding at 211 for Republicans, 204 for Democrats. With 435 total seats in the House, and all up for reelection every two years, 211+204=415 called races, leaving 20 left to decide. Democrats appear to be leading in 8 of those, which would be 214, and Republicans are leading in 9, for 220. But, but, but … the late votes to be counted favor Democrats. So it is not over.
With Senate control decided before we know the outcome of the race in Georgia, that could impact the Warnock-Walker runoff itself. Voters may have less motivation to turn out since the stakes are lower, and runoff elections tend to see fewer voters participating anyway, which typically favors Republican candidates. But that may not be the case here, and Democrats have reason to hope that their voters will be more motivated to vote for the upright Reverend than the lying, deceiving, hypocrite and former star fullback.
“Walker’s campaign has been dogged by allegations of domestic violence and exaggerations of his résumé, and by accusations from two former girlfriends that he paid for them to have abortions,” as the Times reports it. “The last was especially problematic for a candidate who has been an unwavering opponent of abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.”
Talk about hypocrisy.
Some Georgia voters appeared to have split their tickets between Warnock and the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who easily won re-election on Tuesday. In some cases, Republicans voted in the governor’s race and “skipped” voting in the Senate race for Walker, just like they did in 2020, when college educated Republicans and independents refused to support Trump, allowing Biden to win the one state in the South that became critical to Biden’s election.
Without Kemp and other down ballot races to motivate voters, and a Senate majority no longer in play, Democrats hope a significant number of Georgia Republicans will stay home on Dec. 6. Chances are the get out the vote machine that has developed in Atlanta will continue to motivate those Democrats to turn out to vote one more time.
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