Midterm Elections 2022: Democrats Keep Senate Control as Republicans Weigh Party’s Future (Published 2022) (2024)

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Here’s the latest on the election results.

“Nevadans rejected the far-right politicians working to divide us,” Ms. Cortez Masto said. “We rejected their conspiracies, their attacks on our workers and their attempts to restrict our freedoms.”

Republicans did have a victory in the state, with voters ousting their Democratic governor in favor of Joseph Lombardo, the Clark County sheriff who ran as a law-and-order Republican.

But on Sunday, it was clear that many Republicans saw their performance as evidence that former President Donald J. Trump was a political liability. Among other examples, Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana denied in interviews on the morning talk shows that Mr. Trump, by far the most prominent and powerful figure in the Republican Party, was the party’s leader.

Here’s what else to know today:

• The tight Arizona governor’s race between Kari Lake, a Republican, and her Democratic opponent, Katie Hobbs, remains uncalled, with Ms. Hobbs maintaining a slight lead. A batch of results released from Maricopa County on Sunday evening appeared to narrow Ms. Lake’s chances of mounting a comeback.

• Doug Mastriano, the Republican who was central to trying to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results, conceded to Josh Shapiro in the state’s governor’s race — four days after the race was called.

• Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican, won a U.S. House seat in central Oregon on Sunday, according to The Associated Press, defeating her Democratic opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner, and handing her party a crucial victory in its push to win a majority in the House.

• With Jim Marchant’s loss in Nevada’s race for secretary of state to Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, every election denier hoping to run future elections in a major battleground state has been defeated.

• Republicans have the upper hand in the race for control of the House, with a lead in 222 districts — more than the 218 needed to clinch the majority.

An emboldened Biden now faces a tough choice about his own future.

But even as the history-defying midterms went a long way toward solving some of the president’s immediate political problems, they did not miraculously make him any younger. A week from Sunday, Mr. Biden, the oldest president in American history, will turn 80, a milestone the White House has no plans to celebrate with fireworks or splashy parties. And so Mr. Biden confronts a choice that still leaves many in his party quietly uncomfortable: Should he run for a second term?

Top advisers such as Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Mike Donilon, Steven J. Ricchetti and Jennifer O’Malley Dillon are already meeting to map out what a 2024 campaign would look like. The president said last week that he “intends” to run but would talk with his family over the holidays and announce a decision early next year. He will only be more motivated assuming former President Donald J. Trump jumps into the race on Tuesday night as expected.

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Until now, the Hobbs camp has only urged voters to stay patient and wait for results. Her Republican rival, Kari Lake, by contrast, has been projecting a big win for days and has suggested election officials were slow-walking the results on purpose. Ms. Lake's baseless accusations have prompted Republican elected officials to ask her to tone down the rhetoric.

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Trump angst grips Republicans (again) as a 2024 announcement looms.

Now, after a string of midterm losses by candidates Mr. Trump supported, there are signs of another Republican effort to inch the party away from the former president ahead of his expected announcement on Tuesday of another run for the White House — even as his allies on Capitol Hill demand new acts of fealty to him.

It has not escaped Republicans that this week represented the third consecutive political cycle in which Democrats ran with considerable success against the polarizing former president. While they rarely spoke his name, Mr. Trump formed the background music to their attacks asserting that the Republican Party had grown too extreme.

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With control uncertain, Congress opens a post-election session.

But the prospect of a Republican takeover of the House could fuel greater urgency among Democrats to act quickly in a so-called lame-duck session to raise the statutory debt limit, thus avoiding a partisan showdown next year that could roil financial markets and put the full faith and credit of the United States at risk.

A looming runoff in Georgia to decide the last remaining Senate seat could also shape the agenda, leading Democrats to tailor it in whatever way might help Senator Raphael Warnock, who will face off against Herschel Walker, his Republican opponent, on Dec. 6.

The legislative crush will coincide with a season of jockeying for power on Capitol Hill, as lawmakers in both parties sort through the fallout from last week’s elections and make consequential decisions about who should lead them in the next Congress. Both Republican leaders are facing potential challenges given their party’s historically poor performance. Newly elected members of Congress began their orientation on Sunday, flying into Washington and meeting their colleagues. Republicans are slated to hold leadership elections this week; Democrats will do so after Thanksgiving.

Democrats see a blueprint in Fetterman’s victory in Pennsylvania.

These voters for years have been thought to be all but lost to Democrats, ever since Donald J. Trump turned out explosively high numbers of white voters in rural and exurban counties, especially in Pennsylvania and the northern Midwest. Mr. Biden recaptured Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin two years ago largely by drumming up support in the suburbs, while working-class white voters stuck with Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Fetterman, with his tattoos and Carhartt wardrobe, and priorities like marijuana legalization, appears to have regained ground with the white working class — though whether he persuaded many Trump voters to back him, or whether he improved on Mr. Biden with the demographic in other ways, awaits more detailed data.

Mr. Fetterman’s 4.4-percentage-point victory over Mehmet Oz, his Republican opponent, outpaced Mr. Biden’s 1.2-point win in Pennsylvania in 2020. Mr. Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, who posed for his official portrait in an open-collar gray work shirt, won a larger share of votes than Mr. Biden did in almost every county.

In suburban counties, where the Oz campaign tried to undermine Mr. Fetterman with college-educated voters by painting him as an extremist and soft on crime, Mr. Fetterman largely held onto Democratic gains of recent years, winning about 1 percentage point more of the votes than Mr. Biden did in 2020.

Mr. Fetterman’s biggest gains were in deep-red counties dominated by white working-class voters. He didn’t win these places outright, but he drove up the margins for a Democrat by 3, 4 or 5 points compared with Mr. Biden.

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Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Republican, flips an Oregon House seat.

In her primary contest against Mr. Schrader, Ms. McLeod-Skinner ran as a more liberal candidate, leveraging frustrations over his opposition to the scope of the Build Back Better agenda championed by President Biden and other Democrats, as well as over Mr. Schrader’s successful push to water down a proposal that would lower the cost of prescription drugs.

But Ms. Chavez-DeRemer, who opposes codifying abortion rights at the federal level and evaded questions about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, criticized Ms. McLeod-Skinner for her liberal stances. Ms. Chavez-DeRemer was also buoyed by statewide frustration over crime and homelessness in Portland, two issues that energized Republicans and independents to vote for Republican candidates for governor and the House.

Democrats’ Senate victory hands Biden a critical guardrail against the G.O.P.

If Democrats manage to retain the House — a possibility, albeit a remote one given where uncalled races are currently leaning — it would be a true game changer for Mr. Biden, potentially allowing him to push through even more of his agenda in the second half of his term. But even without that, the Senate gives him a critical foothold.

Democrats will retain the power to unilaterally confirm scores of additional Biden-appointed judges. They will also keep control of the Senate floor, allowing them to ensure that, should Republicans win the House majority, any legislation that could frustrate Mr. Biden’s agenda or make life politically difficult for him and other Democrats never sees the light of day in the other chamber.

“It’s always better with 51,” President Biden said. “The bigger the numbers, the better.”

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Here’s a look at the races that remain uncalled.

Here’s a closer look at some of the most competitive districts — the ones that are likeliest to decide control of the House.

House

• Arizona: The races in Arizona’s First District (where Democrats are hoping to unseat Representative David Schweikert) and Sixth District (an open seat featuring Juan Ciscomani, a Republican, and Kirsten Engel, a Democrat) are both within a single percentage point.

• California: Democrats have a chance of defeating Republican incumbents in a handful of California seats, including Representative David Valadao in the 22nd District and Ken Calvert in the 41st District. There is also a very close race for an open seat in the 13th District.

• Colorado: Democrats have a small chance to flip a seat in the Third District, where their candidate, Adam Frisch, trails Representative Lauren Boebert by a little over 1,000 votes but could potentially come out ahead if he does well in ballots from military members, American citizens overseas and voters who “cure” rejected ballots.

• Oregon: One close race remains in the Sixth District, between Andrea Salinas, a Democrat, and Mike Erickson, a Republican.

Governors

• The big uncalled governor’s race is in Arizona, where Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, has a narrow lead over Kari Lake, a Trump-aligned former TV news anchor, with thousands of votes still to be counted. Those ballots will also determine who wins the state’s uncalled race for attorney general.

Senate

• The race between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and Herschel Walker, a Republican and former football star, is heading to a Dec. 6 runoff after neither candidate cleared the 50 percent threshold to win outright. Democratic wins in Arizona and Nevada mean that control of the Senate no longer hinges on Georgia, but the difference between 50 seats and 51 could be highly significant when it comes to legislating.

Republicans seek distance from Trump, and other news from the Sunday shows.

“We’re not a cult. We’re not like, OK, there’s one person who leads our party,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “If we have a sitting president, she or he will be the leader of our party.”

Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” made almost identical remarks. “When any party is out of power, as Republicans are now, we don’t have a single leader,” Mr. Cotton said, suggesting Mr. DeSantis, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and himself as other leaders.

The sentiment was not universal. On “Fox News Sunday,” Representative Jim Banks of Indiana argued that Mr. Trump should stay at the helm of the party, saying, “Remember, when he was on the ballot in 2016 and 2020, we won a lot more seats than when he wasn’t on the ballot in 2018 and 2022.” (That is not quite true — Republicans are on track to win more total House seats this year than in 2020 — but their 2020 candidates did flip more Democratic-held seats and did better in relation to pre-election expectations.)

But the shifting ground was clear.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez describes fears of violence.

“I started to feel, even in 2019, that it was possible that I may not see the end of the year,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, adding that fear has influenced her political decision-making, driving her to accomplish more in a shorter period of time “because I don’t want to take the time I have for granted.”

During the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, who often draws intense, sometimes vitriolic, criticism from those on the right, has said she feared for her life. In a livestream on Instagram last year, she recalled hiding in a bathroom and thinking she was going to die as unknown people entered her office and shouted, “Where is she?” (They were Capitol Police officers who had not clearly identified themselves.)

Lawmakers in Congress have experienced a surge of threats and confrontations in recent years, coinciding with a rise in violent political speech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was viciously assaulted last month by a man who police said intended to kidnap Ms. Pelosi, interrogate her, and break her “kneecaps.”

The attack on Mr. Pelosi made public a yearslong debate on Capitol Hill about how lawmakers and their families are protected. After the attack, the chief of the Capitol Police called for increased funding to provide additional layers of security, citing “today’s political climate.”

“Nevadans rejected the far-right politicians working to divide us,” said Ms. Cortez Masto, who defeated a Trump-backed Republican, Adam Laxalt. “We rejected their conspiracies, their attacks on our workers and their attempts to restrict our freedoms.”

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Jon Ralston weighs in on Nevada politics and Cortez Masto’s victory (which he predicted).

It was a gutsy call. For days afterward, Mr. Laxalt, the Republican former attorney general, remained thousands of votes ahead. It was by no means certain that the remaining mail-in ballots, as they dribbled in from various counties in pint-size batches, would break in her favor.

But few know Nevada politics more intimately than Mr. Ralston, the founder and editor of The Nevada Independent, a nonpartisan news organization based in Las Vegas. We discussed the race in Nevada after Ms. Cortez Masto was declared the victor, and these are edited excerpts from our phone conversation. Here’s how he got it right:

So what happened? How did Cortez Masto pull it out?

Well, I think there was a confluence of factors. It’s never just one thing. But candidates matter, campaigns matter, especially in a year in which the Republicans were, as you know, very confident about taking this seat.

Ms. Cortez Masto is not that well known. She’s much more of a behind-the-scenes kind of workhorse, not a show horse, but she ran an almost flawless campaign. And I’ve seen a lot of them. She was disciplined. She was constantly on-message. She won everywhere she had to. And her media going after Laxalt was some of the best that I’ve seen in terms of just really defining him in a way that he did not want to be defined.

And what my friends in the national media missed about this race is that Laxalt was as bad a candidate as Blake Masters or Herschel Walker. It’s just that they didn’t let him speak too much, so you couldn’t really tell. And when he did, he got in trouble, saying Roe v. Wade was a “joke.”

That really energized, I think, female voters. And so I think it’s a combination of all those things. And she took a page out of her mentor Harry Reid’s book, and she raised a fortune. And that didn’t hurt, either.

I know you’re writing a book on Harry Reid, who died last year, and you often talk about the political machine he built in Nevada with casino workers, unions and Democratic operatives. Tell us a little bit about what that machine is, and whether it answered the doubts that it is still a formidable force after his death.

Great question, because there were all these stories written saying that the Reid machine was faltering. But here’s the thing: The Reid machine, that organization, the structure that was erected about a decade and a half ago, it was still there even after he passed away.

And the woman who is the architect of the Reid machine — Rebecca Lambe, one of the best political operatives in the country — is obsessive. She works 24/7 and she hires these great young people to operate the levers of the machine. They are very data-driven and they model everything, and they find voters and they register them and they turn them out.

This has worked every cycle since 2008, with the exception of 2014, when I think a strategic error was made in not putting a candidate up for governor and it caused them some problems. But the machine is still there. Harry Reid is not still around, obviously, but I bet wherever he is, he’s smiling tonight.

How would you explain why the machine couldn’t save Governor Sisolak but saved Cortez Masto?

Another great question. Here’s what I think. I think there were a fair number of Lombardo-Catherine Cortez Masto voters. And I’ll tell you why. Steve Sisolak was a Covid-era governor who had to do things when the pandemic hit that caused him enduring problems.

When you shut down the Las Vegas Strip for two months, you crush the Nevada economy. Everything emanates from there. But Sisolak almost survived. That race is going to be within one or two points, and that’s only because of the machine.

You laid out your race calls five days ago, and you were right. Did you have to take a big, stiff drink before you climbed out on that limb all alone?

Yeah, I was all alone. You know, here’s the thing about those predictions. A lot of people said, well, “We are so data-driven,” and you have the models that looked like the Republicans were doing well during early voting.

But I don’t just look at what the data shows. I also have to think about all the stuff we just talked about. And I thought there would be ticket-splitters, and I thought that Cortez Masto would survive because she had a better campaign, because the machine would put her over the top.

I did not feel, you know, overconfident in those predictions. It’s always a difficult thing to predict in politics. And I got a lot of heat for those predictions this year.

Speaking of Harry Reid, when I predicted he would survive in 2010, no one believed that — and he did win.