Democrats defy dire predictions
NEW YORK: JOE Biden’s Democrats were defying expectations in Wednesday’s tense US midterm elections but the President was still staring down the barrel of losing control of Congress.
By 3pm AEDT, as counting continued, the Republicans were favoured to pick up the five seats they needed to win a majority in the House of Representatives from the Democrats.
But experts said there was little sign of a “big red wave” to give the Republicans a convincing advantage.
In the Senate, where both parties held 50 seats before election day and 34 were up for grabs, key races remained too close to call and the final result could take days to determine.
President Barack Obama’s top adviser David Axelrod said the early results were shaping up differently to the blowout loss suffered by Mr Obama halfway through his first term in 2010.
“I know what it feels like, and it doesn’t feel like this,” Mr Axelrod said.
But Karl Rove, who was a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, said he still expected the Democrats would lose 20 to 25 seats in the House. “There ain’t much good news in that for them,” he said.
The parties of first-term presidents have historically struggled at the midterms, held at the halfway point of the four-year presidential term.
A series of election day exit polls exposed widespread frustration among voters about the state of the country, with a CNN survey finding 39 per cent were dissatisfied and 34 per cent were angry, and that skyrocketing inflation was the top issue for voters.
A CBS poll found 66 per cent of Americans did not want Mr Biden to seek a second term.
In the swing state of Arizona, about one in five votecounting machines suffered technical problems in Maricopa County.
But Mr Trump accused his opponents of “trying to steal the election” as the Republicans unsuccessfully lodged emergency legal action to extend voting hours in the area.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was convincingly re-elected as his state’s leader, boosting his position as Mr Trump’s top rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He said his victory had “rewritten the political map” in what had been a battleground state.
On election day, Mr Trump issued a veiled threat to Mr DeSantis, saying he “could hurt himself very badly” if he ran for the White House.
The midterms also produced a diverse range of new politicians.
Generation Z will be represented in Congress for the first time by 25-year-old Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, while Maura Healey in Massachusetts became the first openly lesbian woman elected as a state governor.