It is certain: the Democrats will continue to rule the US Senate in the coming years. Late Saturday night, new Nevada voting results came in that put Catherine Cortez Mastro, the incumbent Democratic senator, at an unbridgeable distance from her Republican challenger Adam Laxalt.
Her win is critical to Democrats. With Nevada, they have fifty seats in the Senate, which in practice amounts to a majority because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote. And not only that: there is even a chance that they will join the run offGeorgia elections clinch a 51st seat.
With a Democratic majority in the Senate, Republicans can’t stop Biden’s judicial nominations, as they can for the Supreme Court, should a seat become vacant there. It is still unclear who will get the majority in the House of Representatives, although the Republicans seem to have a strong advantage. The counting continues.
“This election is a win,” Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, said on Saturday. He says the result is confirmation that his party is on the right track and that voters are not interested in extremist, Trump-backed candidates. President Joe Biden also spoke out. “I’m looking forward to the coming years.”
Biden’s unpopularity
The Democratic party has emerged from the midterm elections with its head held high, with a few scratches here and there. They were in bad shape in the forecasts. Due to high inflation and unpopularity President Joe Biden was expected to lose control of both houses of Congress. Things went differently. On Saturday evening, the Democrats for the House of Representatives have 203 seats, the Republicans on 211. The party with at least 218 seats holds the majority there.
Not everywhere did the counting take so long. After American voters cast their votes on Tuesday, most of the results came within 24 hours. But the votes in Arizona, Nevada and Georgia were delayed. Because none of the candidates received more than 50 percent of the vote in the latter state, a newer round will be held in December.
Cortez Mastro was not the only Democratic winner in Nevada. Her party colleague, Cisco Aguilar, will soon be able to call himself Secretary of State, and thus supervise the elections in his state. “The future of American democracy depended on the outcome,” Aguilar said on Saturday. His opponent, Jim Marchant, is spreading the lie that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 presidential election.
Georgia
The new round in Georgia next month will be less decisive due to the Democratic win in Nevada, but again both parties will do everything they can to win that seat. There, Republican Herschel Walker, raised on the shield by Donald Trump, is battling incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock. For the “future of my agenda,” President Biden said, it is “always better to have 51 senators.” Such an extra seat also reduces the influence of senators such as Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who do not always move with the party line.
During midterm elections, the incumbent president’s party is often punished by disgruntled voters. In the 22 midterms held between 1934 and 2018, an incumbent president lost an average of 28 seats in the House of Representatives and 4 seats in the Senate. Joe Biden is a lot better off than Donald Trump, or Barack Obama.