US midterms 2022: Democrats’ hope of keeping House fades as counting continues – live

The GOP’s failure to capture the Senate majority in last Tuesday’s election has sparked a public feud between two of its top lawmakers and their allies.

The Republicans needed to pick up just one seat to take the chamber from the Democrats. Instead, Joe Biden’s allies took a seat in Pennsylvania from the GOP, while all sitting Democrats won reelection.

The feud is between Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and senator Rick Scott, head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) tasked with getting the party’s candidates elected. While McConnell hasn’t commented on the matter publicly, Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff to the majority leader, said Scott made strategic errors and failed to communicate with his fellow Republicans.

The NRSC “was run basically as a Rick Scott super PAC, where they didn’t want or need to input any Republican senators whatsoever,” Holmes told The Wall Street Journal. “That’s a huge break from recent history where members have been pretty intimately involved.”

In particular, he said a proposal by Scott released earlier this year to force the re-authorization of all federal laws, including those establishing the social security and Medicare programs, was a misstep because it made the party seem as if it was going after benefits popular with voters.

On a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Scott went directly after his party’s leader in the chamber, accusing him of holding Republicans back. “The leadership in the Republican Senate says, ‘No, you cannot have a plan. We’re just going to run against how bad the Democrats are’ and actually then they cave in to the Democrats,” Scott said.

Meanwhile, Chris Hartline, a spokesman for the NRSC, told the Journal McConnell’s allies undermined their work by “constantly trashing our candidates publicly and privately, and telling donors not to give to us or our campaigns.”

Perhaps the most cutting words were from Curt Anderson, an adviser to Scott. He blamed everyone for Republicans’ failure to take the Senate, including McConnell, Scott and the GOP candidates. “But insecure small people never accept responsibility for failure,” Anderson told the Journal.

Support from young voters was a big reason for Democrats’ strength in Tuesdays’s election. Alaina Demopoulos looks at how the party was able to connect with Gen Z:

Democrats avoided a predicted “red wave”, and they have Gen Z to thank. Tuesday night’s big wins can largely be attributed to young voters, who showed up en masse and overwhelmingly voted blue.

Exit voting polls found that one in eight midterm voters were under 30, and 61% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 voted for Democrats. The results pushed the Fox News pundits Jesse Watters and Laura Ingram to suggest that the legal voting age should be increased to 21.

Partly responsible for high youth turnout was a new generation of political consultants who had been stumping behind the scenes for months, challenging the generalization that Gen Z is too lazy or disillusioned to bother casting ballots.

Jim Marchant was one of the election deniers on Tuesday’s ballot, standing for the post of secretary of state in Nevada. He ended up losing his race to Democrat Cisco Aguilar, The Guardian’s Sam Levine reports:

Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, was elected Nevada’s top election official, beating Jim Marchant, a Republican who is linked to the QAnon sought to spread misinformation about the results of the 2020 race.

His victory is a significant win against efforts to sow doubt in US elections, a growing force in the Republican party.

The Nevada secretary of state race was one of the most competitive in the country and closely watched because of Marchant’s extreme views. It was also one of several contests in which Republican candidates who questioned the election results were running to be the top election official in their state.

Marchant, a former state lawmaker, said during the campaign that if he and other like-minded secretary of states were elected, Donald Trump would be re-elected in 2024. He has also said that Nevada elections are run by a “cabal”, and that Nevadans haven’t elected a president in over a decade.

He also has pushed Nevada counties to adopt risky and costly hand counts of ballots and leads the America First Secretary of State coalition, a group of secretary of state candidates running for key election positions who pledged to overturn the 2020 race.

Aguilar had never run for elected office, but cast himself as a defender of Nevada’s democracy. His campaign emphasized the extremist threat Marchant posed. He far outraised Marchant and was much more present on the campaign trail.

Many Democrats may have been surprised by how well their party did in the midterms, but Michael Moore wasn’t. In an interview with The Guardian’s Edward Helmore, the liberal documentary maker explained why he believed the party was stronger than it appeared:

In the lead up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.

But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.

That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.

With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is looking like a prognosticator par excellence.

“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.

While they appear set to lose control of the House, Democrats nonetheless took a victory lap over the weekend after the midterms went much better than they expected, The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland reports:

As the balance of power in the US House of Representatives remained unresolved on Sunday, Democrats are celebrating the projection that they won control of the Senate, marking a significant victory for Joe Biden as Republicans backed by his presidential predecessor Donald Trump underperformed in key battleground states.

While senior Democrats remained guarded Sunday about the chances of keeping control of both chambers of Congress, House speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the party’s performance in the midterms following months of projections indicating heavy losses.

“Who would have thought two months ago that this red wave would turn into a little tiny trickle, if that at all,” Pelosi told CNN.

She added: “We’re still alive [for control of the House] but again the races are close. We don’t pray for victory… but you pray that God’s will will be done.”

Prior to the midterms, Joe Biden vowed that if Democrats keep control of Congress, the first piece of legislation he will send to lawmakers will be a bill to codify abortion rights established in Roe v Wade.

Speaking in Indonesia, the president downplayed the likelihood of that legislation going anywhere in the new Congress, since it appears that the GOP is on track to capture the majority in the House.

“I don’t think there’s enough votes to codify unless something happens unusual in the House,” Biden said.

Referencing Democrats’ chances of preserving their majority in Congress’s lower chamber, Biden said, “I think it’s going to be very close, but I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

Election results prove ‘democracy is who we are’: Biden

If a president’s party can only keep one chamber of Congress, the Senate is the one to have.

The Senate is tasked with approving the White House’s nominations, including cabinet secretaries, federal judges and most crucially, supreme court justices. With Democrats holding the majority for the next two years, Joe Biden is once again guaranteed the ability to get his cabinet secretaries and judges confirmed to post across the government. That will increase the chances Biden’s legislative accomplishments – and those of future Democratic presidents – survive court challenges.

But if the House falls to Republicans, Biden’s days of big legislating may have come to an end, at least for now. The chamber’s GOP leadership has shown little interest in working with the president, and it’s unlikely any of their bills make it through the Senate and to the president’s desk. Control of the House also gives the GOP the ability to conduct investigations and issue subpoenas. Expect them to do that to officials involved in the US withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, and to Hunter Biden.

Counting continues in House races as Democrats’ hope of keeping chamber fade