The race for the upper house is centered on Nevada, where the margins are very tight, and Georgia while the Republicans assume with surprise that their possible victory in Congress will be by the slightest.
The Democratic Party sees control of the Senate as closer after having won the seat for Arizona. With 49 representatives, it needs only one of the two seats that are still in the running: Georgia, doomed to a second round on December 6 due to the technical tie between the two candidates, and Nevada, where Republican Adam Laxat this morning had less than 900 votes ahead of Democrat Catherine Cortez.
The race in Arizona has been resolved faster than expected thanks to the tug in recent hours in the count of former astronaut Mark Kelly over his conservative opponent, executive Blake Masters, a capital investor who was the trump card of former President Donald Trump to win the Senate seat in this territory. Kelly has won when the long half million ballots that remained to be reviewed in this State have not yet been counted. There is 12% left, but totaling the balance will take until the first days of this coming week. However, the advantage that the Democrat has garnered over the Masters at this point (six points) is already insurmountable.
Analysts predicted a heart attack weekend and it seems on the way to being fulfilled. The nerves in the directions of both parties grow as the elections in Nevada are resolved. If they win, Democrats no longer need to wait for the December round in Georgia. What’s more, they could approach this second round with the illusion that, in case of taking over this seat, and therefore adding 52 senators, Joe Biden would become the first president to improve the results in the Upper House in an election. intermediate.
Now, if the victory is Republican, both formations will be tied at 49 seats and everything will be disputed in that last State in the battle between the Democrat Raphael Warnock and the Republican Herschel Walker. This weekend, the two formations play extra time and what happens will be seen if they end up in the penalty round.
The vote count is now at 88% in Nevada. There is no clear finalist given the narrow margin of votes that separates them. Each one is around half a million supports and there are less than 900 that mark the tiny advantage of Laxat. The remaining 12% of envelopes correspond to counties where mail-in votes have continued to arrive in recent hours. The reception period ends today, Saturday, as the period of time is considered sufficient for all the ballots deposited in the postal service before last Tuesday’s election day to have reached their destination. There are about 68,000 envelopes.
Among the areas in dispute are Las Vegas and Reno, naturally, due to their greater volume of population. As a usual rule, there are two seats where the Democrats win, especially in the first. It is also important to know what the Latino community will do. So far, 57% of whites have opted for Adam Laxat while 69% of Hispanics have opted for Catherine Cortez. Traditionally, early voting is favorable to the Democrats.
For all this, the Republican Party is especially concerned. Especially when things are not going to his liking either in the congressional elections. The margin has narrowed as the counts progress and right now the conservatives have a slim advantage in the House of Representatives (211 seats against 200), which has even generated reproaches from a part of the right to the minority leader in Congress, Kevin McCarthy, and Senator Mitch McConnell, as partially responsible for the disaster. Much of the criticism comes from the most extreme sector of the party, which is taking advantage of the hopeless results of the elections to gain weight against the moderate wing.
That sector is the one that considers, as some of its spokesmen recall this week, that McCarthy should have been removed since in 2021 he asked that all internal power be withdrawn from Trump as a result of the assault on Capitol Hill. Nor do they forgive Mitch McConnell for considering Trump “not guilty” of the assault on Capitol Hill, but “morally responsible” for his “shameful neglect of duties” to calm the situation. old accounts are never settled.
Peter Meijer, a financial analyst and until now a Republican member of the House, has opined this morning in ‘The Washington Post’ that a factor in the setback caused by the voters lies precisely in that time. In his opinion, after Biden’s victory in the White House and the subsequent disorders promoted by radicalism, the Republican Party has continued “in the same direction and actively avoiding any internal reckoning.”
Meijer’s colleagues say the damage has already been done. The conservatives hoped to obtain a majority in Congress of at least thirty seats and are now fighting for five. Although they have it within reach, internal sources predict that the difference with the Democrats will be too small to achieve the overwhelming opposition they were looking for against the Biden Executive. They do not see it easy to complicate the second half of the legislature for the president, nor how they are going to mobilize his supporters if they intend to return to the White House in just two years. They also fear that a battle will open with the sector furthest to the right for control of that difference. The leaders begin to review the political strategy and ask themselves where they have gone wrong.
Donald Trump, for his part, still sees himself as the leader he no longer is. He speaks of successes where others appreciate failures. In line with him, he flees forward. The tycoon has warned that he is considering challenging the elections. If not all of them, at least the Senate in Arizona, where the Republicans were confident of a comfortable victory given the existing malaise in this State with inflation, immigration policies and insecurity (hate crimes are at their highest point since 2011), in addition to the conflict around abortion. His government recovered in September a law from 150 years ago to prohibit the interruption of pregnancy, which in October was blocked by the Court of Appeals; a circumstance that, for the Republicans, could have created the perfect breeding ground for the mobilization of their anti-abortion bases.
It should be said that Arizona is one of the places where it was necessary to reinforce police security in these past elections in the presence of volunteer militias related to Trumpism who decided to station themselves in front of the polling stations (armed and with balaclavas) in order to verify that there were no electoral fraud.
The right also trusted in the high investment made in the nomination of its candidate, Blake Masters, in this State: no less than 15 million dollars. Masters has turned, however, into a strange nightmare. Several party leaders today put him as an example of a “deficient” candidate whose only merit has been to explain to everyone who has wanted to listen to him that Trump was robbed of the elections and he should be the legitimate president of the United States.
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