Results of the midterm elections and balance of power in Congress


US Senator Mark Kelly, left, and Blake Masters (Reuters, Getty Images)

Control of the U.S. Senate could rest with Nevada and Arizona, two states where GOP victories could elevate some of the nation’s most prominent Holocaust deniers, even after other candidates who amplified the former president’s lies Donald Trump on the 2020 election were rejected by voters in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

Those two western states — perpetual battlegrounds during presidential years — were still too early to call early Thursday morning, while a Democratic-held third seat, Georgia, will move to a runoff in December, CNN projects.

Republicans must win two Democratic seats to win a majority. As ballots continue to be counted across the country, Republicans appear to be slowly closing in on the 218 seats that would give them a majority in the House, albeit much narrower than they had hoped.

The fight for the Senate, however, is still full of unknowns — including whether it will all come down to Georgia after Peach State gave Democrats a majority in 2021 with victories in two ballots. It’s Nevada and Arizona that will determine how much of a pivot Georgia becomes.

Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly maintained an edge over Republican Blake Masters early Thursday morning, while Nevada Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto trailed Republican Adam Laxalt. CNN had estimated late Wednesday that there were about 600,000 votes left to be counted in the Grand Canyon state and about 160,000 votes left to be counted in Nevada.

Laxalt, a former Nevada attorney general, was co-chair of Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign in the state and filed lawsuits trying to overturn Nevada’s results in that election, which he says were ‘rigged’ . Cortez Masto had argued that lies and election conspiracy theories embraced by Trump and his allies like Laxalt led to the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Masters, a venture capitalist and first-time candidate, released a campaign video while running for the GOP nomination in which he said he believed Trump had won the 2020 election. , like Laxalt, have won Trump’s endorsement.

After winning the Arizona Senate primary, Masters briefly seemed to back away from some of that extreme rhetoric — scrubbing his website, for example, of language that included the false claim that the election had been stolen. During a debate with Kelly, he also acknowledged that he had not seen evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election. But the Republican candidate appeared to backtrack after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go louder” on election denial, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary.

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