Incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has defeated Republican challenger Adam Laxalt in Nevada, thus securing the crucial 50th Senate vote and assuring Democrats of control.
The Associated Press called the race for Cortez Masto early Sunday after Cortez Masto took a 5,000 vote lead with 98% of precincts reporting.
The runoff next month in Georgia between incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker still has meaning in that a Walker victory would leave the Senate in the same place it was before the election — a 50-50 tie with Vice President Harris wielding the deciding vote. But it would also mean that West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin would continue to be in a position to block much of Biden’s massive spending plans as he has done for two years if he votes with the Republicans.
Holding the Senate despite this year’s high inflation — and a deep-seated historical pattern of intense midterm backlash against the president’s party — ranks as the one of the most surprising and consequential results of an election in which Democrats performed far better than anyone expected. It also makes Joe Biden the first Democratic president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 to not only keep control of the Senate but possibly even expand his majority there.
While Laxalt led narrowly in the vote count for much of the week, his rural firewall was ultimately not strong enough to withstand Cortez Masto’s two-to-one advantage among the tens of thousands of eleventh-hour mail voters from in and around Las Vegas and Reno whose ballots were counted last.
It seems clear that younger voters were the difference-makers for Democrats across the country. They didn’t turn out in quite the numbers they did in 2020, but giving Democrats a 30-point advantage was enough to save Democratic Senate incumbents like Cortez Masto, Mark Kelly in Arizona, and Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire.
The Gen-Xers also gave crucial support to several vulnerable House Democrats. Republicans had better figure out a way to reach these voters and start converting a few of them or 2024 could be a repeat of 2022.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer doesn’t quite have the hang of the whole “gracious winner thing.”
“I feel good for the country. Because so many people worried — I did — about this democracy,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said at a news conference late Saturday. “America showed that we believe in our democracy. That the roots of our democracy are deep and strong. And that it will prevail as long as we fight for it.”
He added that Republicans were hampered by “flawed challengers who had no faith in democracy, no fidelity to the truth or honor.”
If that’s his “peace offering,” Republicans would do well to give it the contempt it deserves.
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