Midterm Elections 2022: Midterms News: Democrats Keep Control of Senate With Victory in Nevada (Published 2022) (2024)

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Catherine Cortez Masto, one of Democrats’ most vulnerable senators, eked out a win in Nevada.

But with Ms. Cortez Masto’s victory in Nevada, Democrats have nailed down the 50 seats they need to retain control of the upper chamber, a major feat considering that voters typically punish the president’s party during the midterms.

The Democratic victory will bolster Mr. Biden’s political capital as he moves toward a possible bid for a second term. Even if Republicans do take the House, he will be able to stock the judiciary with his nominees and will be insulated from politically freighted G.O.P. legislation. And Democrats will be free to mount their own investigations to counter the threatened onslaught from a Republican-controlled lower chamber.

“I feel good, and I’m looking forward to the next couple of years,” Mr. Biden told reporters in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Ms. Cortez Masto’s modest lead — half a percentage point — was secure enough for The Associated Press to project a winner on Saturday night. Most of the remaining votes left to be counted were from mail ballots, which have tended to break for Ms. Cortez Masto by a wide margin.

Speaking in New York, a triumphant Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, called his party’s victory “a vindication for Democrats, our agenda and for the American people.” He added, “The American people rejected the anti-democratic extremist MAGA Republicans.”

A Dec. 6 runoff in Georgia between Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, will offer only a slight padding of Democrats’ majority or a consolation prize to Republicans.

The Democratic victory in Nevada, along with Senator Mark Kelly’s re-election in Arizona, which was called late Friday, affirmed the thin firewall that the party is trying to fortify in the West. Mr. Biden won Arizona by a mere 10,457 votes in 2020; Nevada has been more consistently Democratic in presidential years but erratic in midterms.

Ms. Cortez Masto, who became the first Latina senator six years ago, had to come from behind to beat Mr. Laxalt, who was backed by Mr. Trump.

Her victory was sealed Saturday night when 22,323 mail-in ballots were recorded from Clark County. The Democrat’s 14,084 votes were enough to vault her into a large enough lead to ensure her victory.

Mr. Laxalt indicated on Twitter on Saturday that he might not drag out the race with claims of fraud, despite efforts earlier this year to map out a litigation strategy. Hours before the race was called, he acknowledged that Ms. Cortez Masto might “overtake us” and thanked his supporters.

But a close adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, seemed to question the results on Twitter. The adviser, Josh Holmes, called her comeback “statistically unforeseeable” — though he offered no evidence of fraud or error.

Ms. Cortez Masto’s success was all the more noteworthy coming a day after the Republican candidate for governor, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo of Clark County, ousted the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Steve Sisolak. Ms. Cortez Masto outperformed Mr. Sisolak in Nevada’s rural counties and was able to keep voters in her fold who said they mildly disapproved of the job Mr. Biden was doing, according to Republican polling.

Nevada held some of the biggest surprises of a surprising midterm. Even Democrats had been worried about a blowout: the loss of a governorship, a senator and three House Democrats. In the end, only the governor lost.

Republicans were dealt another blow on Saturday night when Jim Marchant, who helped organize a national slate of Trump-aligned candidates aiming to take over state election systems, lost Nevada’s race for secretary of state to Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat. The result meant that every election denier hoping to run future elections in a major battleground state had been defeated.

And Democrats were racking up victories elsewhere: In Washington, one of the biggest upsets of the midterms was declared when a Democratic political neophyte, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, beat Joe Kent, a hard-right veteran backed by Mr. Trump who in a primary had ousted the current Republican representative, Jaime Herrera Beutler, as retribution for her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. Mr. Kent’s loss was the second time Republicans had ousted a member of their party who backed impeachment, only to lose the seat to Democrats.

A Democratic Senate will be invaluable to Mr. Biden, even if Republicans narrowly secure control of the House. In addition to having two more years to confirm judges, the president will have more control over personnel in his government with the confirmation of nominees under the guidance of Mr. Schumer.

By never bringing House bills to a vote, Senate Democrats will be able to insulate Mr. Biden from having to veto politically difficult legislation. Senate Democrats will be able to answer political messaging bills passed by the House with political messages of their own, using bipartisan measures like the infrastructure bill and the gun control bill that came out of the current 50-50 Senate in an effort to pressure House Republicans to act.

“Because the American people turned out to elect Democrats in the Senate, there is now a firewall against the threat a nationwide abortion ban, cuts to Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security, and the extreme MAGA Republican policies,” Mr. Schumer said Saturday night. “Republicans in the House should be on notice.”

In past showdowns, bipartisan solutions secured in the Senate have ultimately been swallowed by the House. That becomes more likely in the case of a divided Congress, with the Senate in Democratic hands.

Senate Democrats will also be a voice for the administration when Congress must pass bills to fund the government and raise the statutory borrowing limit. But Republicans, if they win control of the House, will almost certainly try to extract concessions, under the threat of government shutdowns or even a potentially disastrous debt default.

Republican leaders in the House have already indicated they will demand to undo a large funding increase for personnel at the Internal Revenue Service, which was included in the Inflation Reduction Act passed this year. They are also planning to press for more money for controls at the U.S. border with Mexico and to complete the border wall started by Mr. Trump.

For much of the midterm campaigns, Republicans and independent analysts saw G.O.P. control of the House as a foregone conclusion, given Mr. Biden’s unpopularity and the headwinds that economic uncertainty and inflation represented for Democratic candidates.

But control of the Senate appeared to be a seesaw battle. Those same political headwinds burdened Democratic candidates for the Senate, but weak Republican challengers, many of them endorsed or handpicked by Mr. Trump, gave Democrats a fighting chance in swing states like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada.

In the heated aftermath of the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, which ended constitutional protections for abortion, Democrats thought they could bolster their 50-vote control by two or three seats. Then the pendulum seemed to swing late in the campaigns, and Republicans convinced themselves that the anger over abortion was waning. Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the leader of Senate Republicans’ political arm, said in late October that he saw a path to a 55-seat Republican majority, predicting that even Democratic states like Washington and Colorado were in play.

In the end, the field proved to be much smaller. Democrats were able to capture just one Republican seat, that of the retiring Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, which was won by the state’s lieutenant governor, John Fetterman. But, so far, Republicans have defeated no Democratic incumbents in Senate races. And only one Democratic incumbent, Mr. Warnock in Georgia, is left to possibly defeat.

“With Senator Cortez Masto’s victory, Democrats have accomplished a historic feat in defending our Senate majority against all odds and when the conventional wisdom said we have no business even being in the fight,” declared J.B. Poersch, the president of the Senate Majority PAC, the super PAC aligned with Democratic leadership. He said it had been 60 years since the party defended all of its seats in a midterm when it held control of Washington.

Deciding Senate control before Georgia’s runoff could affect the Warnock-Walker race. Voters on both sides may have less motivation to turn out with the stakes considerably lower. Democrats hope that will be particularly helpful to Mr. Warnock.

Mr. Walker’s campaign for Senate has been dogged by allegations of domestic violence and exaggerations of his résumé, and by accusations from two former girlfriends that he paid for them to have abortions. The last was especially problematic for a candidate who has been an unwavering opponent of abortion, even in cases of rape or incest.

Some Georgia voters appeared to have split their tickets between Mr. Warnock and the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who easily won re-election on Tuesday. Some may have voted for Mr. Kemp and left the Senate slots blank.

Now, with Mr. Kemp not on the ballot and a Senate majority no longer in play, Democrats hope a significant number of Georgia Republicans will stay home on Dec. 6.

But the lower stakes could affect Democratic turnout as well, which would deprive Mr. Warnock of the claim that his victory carries weight beyond simple Senate control. In truth, however, 51 seats would have practical implications. Instead of evenly divided Senate committees, Democrats would have a numerical majority, which would help them issue subpoenas, research nominations and send legislation to a final vote without the interceding of the Senate Democratic leader.

Reporting was contributed by Nate Cohn, Catie Edmondson, Reid J. Epstein and Alexandra Berzon.

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Voters reject election deniers running to take over elections as Aguilar wins in Nevada.

With Mr. Marchant’s loss to Mr. Aguilar, all but one of those “America First” candidates were defeated. Only Diego Morales, a Republican in deep-red Indiana, was successful, while candidates in Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico were defeated.

Their losses halted a plan by some allies of former President Donald J. Trump and other influential donors to take over the election apparatus in critical states before the 2024 presidential election. The “America First” candidates, and their explicitly partisan statements, had alarmed Democrats, independent election experts and even some Republicans, who feared that if they gained office, they could threaten the integrity of future elections.

Mr. Marchant not only repeatedly claimed that Mr. Trump had won the 2020 election, but he pledged that if he were elected, Mr. Trump would again be president in 2024.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Mr. Marchant said at a rally held by the former president in October.

During the 2020 election, it was secretaries of state — both Democrats and Republicans — who stood up to efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn the results. State election officials certified vote tallies over Republican objections, protected election workers from aggressive partisan poll watchers and, in at least one case, refused a personal entreaty from the president.

The next spring, several candidates pushing the false narrative that the 2020 election had been stolen announced their intention to run to be the top election officials in critical states.

Mr. Marchant said in an interview with The New York Times in January that he had been approached by Mr. Trump’s allies to run for secretary of state and had been encouraged to organize a national slate of like-minded candidates.

He quickly cobbled together the “America First” slate, including candidates from states like Michigan, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. They began touring nationally, holding forums promoting election conspiracy theories, occasionally with leading members of the QAnon movement.

Suddenly, secretary of state races became premier attractions, elevating once sleepy, bureaucratic down-ballot races to the national spotlight. Donations, especially from alarmed Democrats, quickly flooded the races. Nearly $50 million was spent on television advertising in four states — Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Minnesota — and Democrats had a 10 to 1 spending advantage.

The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State — which in 2019 had just one part-time staff member — had to be built on the fly. Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado and the chair of the association, hired seven full-time staff members and raised $25 million for the cycle.

“We really believe, and continue to believe, that these races have a tremendous effect on whether this country will continue to have a vibrant democracy,” Ms. Griswold said. “Or be able to have one at all.”

Polling races for secretary of state proved difficult, but concern began to grow among some Democrats as polls suggested that voters did not have democracy at the top of their list of concerns heading into the election.

But candidates like Mr. Aguilar said they heard about democracy issues daily from voters.

“People are tired of chaos,” Mr. Aguilar said in an interview. “They want stability; they want normalcy; they want somebody who’s going to be an adult and make decisions that are fair, transparent, and in the best interest of all Nevadans.”

Mr. Aguilar, a local businessman with deep ties to the Las Vegas business and gaming communities, announced his candidacy well before the primaries. He said that threats to fair elections weighed on him every day on the campaign trail.

“Look, it was scary,” Mr. Aguilar said. “And the burden that I carried throughout the campaign knowing that was pretty extensive.”

Some of the biggest Republican committees and candidates, however, avoided the slate of “America First” candidates. In Nevada, the Republican candidates for governor and Senate never held a rally with Mr. Marchant, and they never mentioned his name in the final few months.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, which is the arm of the Republican National Committee that oversees races for secretary of state, chose only to back Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia who famously rebuffed Mr. Trump’s request to “find” him enough votes to overturn the state’s results in 2020.

“Secretary Raffensperger is a principled conservative dedicated to making it easier to vote and harder to cheat, and we congratulate him on his re-election,” Dee Duncan, the president of the R.S.L.C., said in a statement.

Mr. Duncan has not mentioned any of the “America First” candidates in his statements or news releases since the polls closed on Tuesday.

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Cortez Masto defended her Nevada seat, winning election to a second term.

But the red wave that Republicans had hoped would be driven by soaring inflation and President Biden’s sagging approval ratings never materialized, and instead, after days of vote counting, Ms. Cortez Masto prevailed, dashing G.O.P. aspirations of a Senate takeover.

Her victory, paired with a key Democratic hold in Arizona and a flip in Pennsylvania, ensured that the Senate would remain a bulwark for the Biden administration in Congress should Republicans wrest control of the House, which remains up for grabs.

It guaranteed that Democrats would have at least 50 Senate seats in the new Congress, giving them a bare majority by dint of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaking vote, and will preserve their ability to confirm Mr. Biden’s nominees

The outcome of the sole remaining unresolved Senate race in the nation, the runoff contest on Dec. 6 between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, will determine whether they can expand their majority by an additional seat or if the G.O.P. will hold them to the same 50-50 split that exists now.

Ms. Cortez Masto faced one of the toughest races in the nation. While Republicans pummeled Democrats across the country for soaring inflation, the issue carried an especially biting sting in Nevada, where rent and gas costs have risen faster than almost anywhere else in the country.

Republicans had hoped that the confluence of voters’ persistent economic concerns and Ms. Cortez Masto’s own difficulties establishing a brand for herself would accrue to Mr. Laxalt’s advantage. And they had waxed optimistic that they could erode Democratic support from the state’s sizable Latino electorate.

Mr. Laxalt, after taking a hard right turn during his primary to promote baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election and lay detailed groundwork to fight election fraud in his own race months before any votes were cast, pivoted as Election Day approached to try to appeal to a broader group of voters. He blamed Ms. Cortez Masto and Democratic policies for the high price of gas in Nevada and told The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s editorial board that there was “no question” Mr. Biden was legitimately elected.

But the Nevada race became yet another this election cycle where voters rejected candidates with close ties to Mr. Trump, who had repeated his lies of a stolen presidential election. The state’s traditional Democratic strongholds — the urban counties anchored by Las Vegas and Reno — rallied to Ms. Cortez Masto’s side so decisively that Mr. Laxalt was unable to prevail even after winning big among rural voters.

Mr. Laxalt indicated on Twitter on Saturday that he might not drag out his own race with claims of fraud, despite his efforts earlier this year to map out a litigation strategy. Hours before the race was called, he acknowledged that Ms. Cortez Masto might “overtake us” and thanked his supporters.

Three incumbent House Democrats in Nevada who also faced difficult races won their re-election contests, dashing Republicans’ prospects of sweeping the state.

Ms. Cortez Masto had sought to portray Mr. Laxalt, whose father and grandfather served in the Senate, as a fortunate son and an extremist. Some of her most aired television advertisem*nts attacking Mr. Laxalt focused on his ties to Mr. Trump and his opposition to abortion rights.

And she played up her own record in the Senate, emphasizing the relief she helped deliver to workers hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic after the state’s hospitality industry was devastated.

Ms. Cortez Masto, a former Nevada attorney general who was elected to the Senate in 2016 by a margin of just two and a half percentage points, was the handpicked successor of Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader who died last year. He had leaned on his powerful home-state political machine to help turn out the voters who propelled her to victory, and some Democrats anxiously wondered this year whether Ms. Cortez Masto could replicate that performance without Mr. Reid’s organization behind her.

In the closing weeks of her campaign, Ms. Cortez Masto emphasized her personal history, leaning heavily on her identity as a third-generation Mexican American. In a Twitter post circulating an advertisem*nt, she recalled growing up around her grandparents’ kitchen table hearing family stories from her “cousins and tias.”

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Perez, a Democrat, wins in Washington, picking up a competitive House seat.

The seat is held by Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump for incitement of insurrection after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Mr. Kent, a budding MAGA star endorsed by Mr. Trump and backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire Republican political patron, defeated her in a primary.

The victory by Ms. Perez suggested that Mr. Kent was too extreme for the district. Last year, he spoke at a “Justice for J6” rally in Washington, D.C., supporting those charged with nonviolent crimes in the Jan. 6. attack. His campaign paid a member of the Proud Boys, one of the groups that led the Jan. 6 attack, $11,375 for “consulting” services, according to a report by The Associated Press.

Ms. Perez, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant, leaned heavily into her personal biography in her run, particularly following the Supreme Court decision overturning abortion rights. She spoke publicly about a miscarriage in 2020 that left her having to navigate a phalanx of protesters to gain access to care at a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Mr. Kent had said he favored banning abortions nationwide.

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Masters, who has advanced former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, has also questioned what he called “troubling” issues in this election and hinted at legal action. Republican officials in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, emphasized on Tuesday that there was no fraud or foul play and have since urged Republican candidates to tone down their rhetoric.

Georgia voters brace for a nationally important runoff. Again.

“I probably will vote, but there are many times in my mind where I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is just too much,’” said Andrea Rivera, the owner of an advertising firm who describes herself as conservative and lives in Chamblee, a northern suburb of Atlanta.

Even if the Nevada Senate race is called for Democrats, securing them a majority, a Georgia runoff between Senator Raphael Warnock and his Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, will remain crucial. It could offer Democratic leaders more leverage, or slightly widen Republicans’ ability to block legislation. And, of course, if Nevada goes to Republicans, it will be up to Georgia to decide which party controls the Senate.

Mr. Warnock and Mr. Walker must find a way to surf a choppy mix of enthusiasm and weariness among Georgia voters, charging into the Dec. 6 runoff amid a swirl of attack ads, new campaign spending and out-of-state visits from boldface names — not to mention the looming specter of former President Donald J. Trump.

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Mail ballots in the Las Vegas area are likely to put Democrats ahead.

The bulk of the remaining mail ballots in Clark County are expected to be reported on Saturday (though the deadline to have all ballots counted is not until Tuesday). That could be enough to allow news organizations to project a winner, depending on the number of ballots counted and the size of Ms. Cortez Masto’s lead.

Most news organizations, including The Associated Press, are reluctant to call races when the leading candidate is ahead by less than half a percentage point, or about 5,000 votes in this case.

Even so, Ms. Cortez Masto would build a lead of more than 5,000 votes if she fares as well in the final Clark mail ballots as she has in those counted so far. She is also expected to have an advantage in the remaining mail ballots from Washoe County, as well as the more than 10,000 mail ballots that voters can “cure” after being initially rejected for a bad signature match.

Only a few thousand mail votes remain from the state’s rural, Republican counties.

Adrian Fontes defeats Mark Finchem, a vocal election denier, for Arizona secretary of state.

As his fortunes began to fade, Mr. Finchem began asserting, without any evidence, that the 2022 election was marred by fraud, claiming on Twitter on Friday afternoon that there were “shenanigans that are obviously happening and have happened.”

On Thursday, Mr. Finchem tweeted: “Quick, check Katie Hobbs’ and Adrian Fontes’ location. Make sure they aren’t in the back room with ballots in Pima or Maricopa. I hope our GOP lawyers are following them everywhere.”

Mr. Fontes had called for calm and for everyone to “respect the process” as votes were being counted.

Mr. Finchem ran on a platform of drastically overhauling elections in Arizona, pledging to enact policies that had explicitly partisan goals and were likely to be at odds with state and federal laws. He called for a ban on early voting, sharp restrictions on mail-in ballots and ending the use of electronic vote-counting machines in Arizona. He had sued the state to eliminate vote-counting machines for this election.

A conservative member of Arizona’s House of Representatives who has in the past identified as a member of the Oath Keepers militia, Mr. Finchem gained prominence after the 2020 election, helping organize an unofficial hearing at a downtown Phoenix hotel featuring former President Donald J. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, and playing a critical role in trying to advance a slate of fake Trump electors.

He became a leader of the movement to decertify the 2020 election and drafted a resolution in the Arizona House to do just that.

Distrust of American elections was core to his campaign. Mr. Finchem even cast doubt on the electoral process during his own successful primary election.

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Mark Kelly wins his Arizona Senate race, putting Democrats a seat from control.

If Mr. Laxalt were to prevail, control of the Senate would hang in the balance until the runoff election on Dec. 6 in Georgia between Senator Raphael Warnock, a Democrat seeking a full term, and his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, the former football star.

Mr. Kelly, long seen as one of his party’s most vulnerable incumbents, rose to victory with the support of national Democrats and some top state Republicans who played up his willingness to reach across the aisle and who cast his candidacy as necessary to preserve American democracy. With 83 percent of the vote counted, he led Mr. Masters by 5.7 percentage points.

Mr. Masters, a venture capitalist and political newcomer who embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, burst into Arizona politics with millions of dollars in support from the technology billionaire Peter Thiel, his former employer.

With an ideological fervor that excited the state Republican Party’s ascendant right wing, he portrayed himself as an internet-savvy insurgent while playing to xenophobic and racist fears, claiming that Democrats were trying to bring more immigrants to the country to change its demographics and gain a political edge. He struggled, however, to win over the state’s independent voters, who have helped push Arizona from reliably red to tossup and who now make up about a third of its voting population.

Tensions have run high since Tuesday as election officials count votes in Arizona, which has long been at the center of conspiracy theories and skepticism about the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Masters and the other top three Republican candidates on the statewide ballot — all of whom have advanced false claims of election fraud in 2020 — have made baseless suggestions that election officials are incompetent and hinted at malfeasance.

One of those Republicans, Mark Finchem, the nominee for secretary of state and one of the nation’s leading proponents of election falsehoods, also lost his race on Friday night. He was defeated by Adrian Fontes, the Democratic former Maricopa County recorder.

In an email to supporters on Thursday, the Masters campaign said it had seen “troubling” issues during the election and asked for contributions: “We’re expecting a contested road forward and legal battles to come.”

The fall campaign carried high stakes for debates in Congress on abortion rights and the border, as well as for the direction of Arizona, once a conservative stronghold but now one of the country’s most politically competitive states.

Mr. Kelly, who won office in 2020 in a special election to fill the seat of Senator John McCain after his death, will be serving his first full term. In the final weeks of the campaign, his allies promoted Mr. Kelly’s bipartisan work in the Senate on energy, infrastructure and the economy. Outside the Arizona State Capitol a day before Election Day, Mr. McCain’s sons stood with state Republican leaders and former elected officials, who accused Mr. Masters of campaigning on fear and rebuked him over his 2020 election claims.

Sharon Harper, who is close friends with the McCain family and serves as the chief executive of a Peoria commercial real estate company, said at the event that she knew Mr. McCain would have been “very supportive” of Mr. Kelly because, like Mr. McCain, Mr. Kelly always put “America and Arizona first.”

Mr. Kelly, a former astronaut and the founder of a nonprofit group and super PAC that support gun control — his wife, former Representative Gabby Giffords, was shot in the head in a 2011 assassination attempt — pitched himself as a leader concerned first and foremost with the needs of his state. He received help from former President Barack Obama and Jill Biden, the first lady, who made last-minute stops in Arizona.

But given President Biden’s sagging approval ratings and what appeared to be a difficult national environment for Democrats, Mr. Kelly was vulnerable.

In an October debate, Mr. Masters hit him hard on inflation and the southern border, two of Republicans’ strongest issues in the state. On the stump, Mr. Masters painted a dystopian picture of the border — overrun by cartels, fentanyl and “illegals” sweeping through.

After lagging well behind in polls early in the campaign, Mr. Masters improved his standing as former President Donald J. Trump and his allies came to his aid and national Republicans ticked up their ad spending.

Some Republican political strategists also saw Mr. Masters as riding the coattails of Kari Lake, the Republican running for Arizona governor, whose race against Katie Hobbs, the Democratic secretary of state, remained too close to call on Friday.

In the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Masters, Ms. Lake and the other top Republican candidates toured the state on a bus, pitching themselves as a tight band of outsiders taking on the news media, the left and their own party’s establishment.

Mr. Kelly, for his part, courted a diverse coalition of moderates, conservatives and independents. He also used Spanish-language radio and television to pitch himself to the state’s Latino voters. They helped propel his victory in the 2020 special election, which gave Democrats both of his state’s Senate seats for the first time in 70 years.

At his election night party in Tucson, not far from his home, Mr. Kelly said his campaign had not been “about name-calling or dividing people” but about finding common ground and solving problems.

“This has been a tough election,” he said. “No matter how the rest of the results shake out, our government will remain closely divided with a lot more work to do,” he said.

He tended to campaign alone, often in a bomber jacket, and, as a retired Navy captain — Mr. Obama called the combat pilot turned senator the actual “Top Gun” — he had an advantage that allowed him to cover more ground than other candidates.

“I rent a little airplane,” he said. “I fly myself around the state, meeting with folks.”

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Joseph Lombardo, a Republican backed by Trump, ousted Gov. Steve Sisolak in the Nevada governor’s race.

Mr. Lombardo focused much of his campaign tying Mr. Sisolak to President Biden, who won the state in 2020, but whose approval ratings have been dismal. Mr. Lombardo was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump during the Republican primary this year, but did not make his policies or personality central to his campaign in the fall.

Instead, Mr. Lombardo presented himself as a law-and-order Republican who would focus on reducing regulations in the state, where the economy remains largely dependent on the gambling industry. Public opinion polls repeatedly showed that voters in Nevada, with a large working-class population, viewed the economy as the most important issue.

Economic conditions are mixed in the state. Mr. Sisolak often focused on the recovery since the start of the pandemic more than two years ago, as unemployment dropped to 4.4 percent from 28.5 percent in April of 2020. But inflation remains stubbornly high, and Mr. Lombardo consistently attacked what he called “Bidenflation” and high gasoline prices, which he similarly attributed to Democrats.

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Will a recount decide Lauren Boebert’s race? It could take weeks to sort out.

Mr. Frisch, a businessman and former Aspen, Colo., city councilman, had jumped out to an early lead in the seesaw contest, one that has garnered widespread attention.

As votes continue to come in, depending on the margin, it is possible there could be a recount in the race, in western Colorado. In an email on Friday, Annie Orloff, a spokeswoman for the secretary of state in Colorado, said the regular process has to play itself out, however, before a recount could be considered.

First, Colorado gives voters until Nov. 16, in what is known as the cure period, to fix errors or signature discrepancies that could result in their ballot being rejected. That deadline is the same for overseas voters and members of the military to return ballots.

After that, the secretary of state’s office selects at least one statewide contest and at least one contest in each county to audit, based on input from its own staff and from Democratic and Republican county clerks. The secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat who has tussled with election deniers, was re-elected on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Specific ballots are then chosen randomly to be audited by bipartisan election judges in each county, and those audits must be completed by Nov. 29. Additionally, bipartisan canvass boards made up of two representatives from each major party and the county clerk must then conduct a canvass, comparing the number of ballots cast to the number of people who voted.

Once that process is completed, if the candidates are separated by less than one-half of one percentage point, the secretary of state has until Dec. 5 to order a mandatory recount. The recount must be completed by Dec. 13. Colorado also allows candidates, political parties and other “interested parties” to request a recount, which they would have to fund. Those would need to be completed by Dec. 15.

Liz Cheney calls the absence of a red wave a ‘clear victory for team normal.’

“I think that you saw in really important races around the country people coming together to say, ‘We believe in democracy. We believe in standing up for the Constitution and for the republic,’ and a real rejection of the toxicity and the hate and the vitriol and of Donald Trump,” Ms Cheney said.

Republicans entered the midterms with heightened expectations that the party’s candidates were poised to create a red wave, seizing on high inflation, the issue of crime and President Biden’s weak approval ratings.

But that level of success failed to materialize for the party, which has a chance at narrowly winning control of the House but could also fall short of flipping the Senate after several Trump-backed candidates lost key races. Control of both chambers is unclear as ballots are tallied in several too-close-to-call races.

Ms. Cheney overwhelmingly lost in the Republican primary in August to her Trump-backed opponent, Harriet Hageman, who was elected on Tuesday to Wyoming’s lone House seat with nearly 70 percent of the vote.

Mr. Trump’s supporters have vilified Ms. Cheney and nine other House Republicans who voted for Mr. Trump’s impeachment last year. One of them was re-elected on Tuesday and results are still being tallied for another. Ms. Cheney and three others lost in the primary, while four declined to seek another term.

Ms. Cheney, who serves as vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, crossed party lines to support three Democrats in Tuesday’s elections. Two of the Democrats she backed, Representatives Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, won, while the third, Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio, lost his Senate race to J.D. Vance.

When the program’s moderator, the journalist Abigail Pogrebin, told Ms. Cheney that she could have never imagined in her lifetime the Republican congresswoman campaigning for Democrats, Ms. Cheney replied, “Yeah, mine either.”

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