America votes, hopes and watches
Young and old told to make sure their voices are heard
An elderly African-American woman ambles out of a polling station, pushing a walking frame. “I hope things change,” she tells waiting reporters.
She is Murlin Hampton, originally from Jamaica, an 84-year-old retired nurse.
And she wants what every other American wants out of the 2018 Midterm elections — “change for the better”.
But everyone’s idea of change is a little different to the next, and whether it will be the key outcome of the election could take a lot longer than last night’s election to be known.
Americans awoke to “Happy election day” greetings and social media accounts filling up with photographs of placards and badges with “I voted today”.
At a student activist rally at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas [UNLV], students were offered free rides to polling stations to ensure they voted.
Criminal justice and Afro-American studies student Jameelah Lewis, an organiser with
Black Lives Matters UNLV and
UNLV NAACP
[National
Association of the Advancement of Colored People], urged youth to vote.
“Vote for people who can’t vote. Make sure your voice is heard,” Lewis yelled to a passersby. “Women fought for their right to vote. Black folks fought for their right to vote. So please make sure that you’re coming out to vote. And while you’re voting, make sure it’s an educated vote,” Lewis said.
Signs propped against stalls noted candidate names for Nevada and 20-year-old Austin Krehbiel held a placard and wore a pink T-shirt identifying as a “feminist”.
He was most concerned about healthcare because his mother had expensive medical needs that without the Affordable Care Act would have her paying for prescriptions.
Krehbiel and a young man wearing a pink jumpsuit and high heels also urged their peers to vote.
In Nevada, a swing or “purple” state with a high Latino and migrant population, voters took to the polls in droves.
Clark County election volunteer Keith Hill has worked every election night for 12 years.
A former United States Air Force aircraft mechanic, Hill is now a data assessor for the county, but he was there for the overtime.
He was also excited to know who would win and whether change would come.
Hill said he wanted the “blue wave” but rather than a tsunami it had been more like “the tide coming in”.
That the Democrats wouldn’t take the Senate disappointed Hill greatly.
He voted early, on the first day possible, and he knew who he was “voting against”. “I don’t like the meanness.
“I just don’t feel that those are our values being represented.
“Those were not the values I signed up to defend.
“It’s kinda disheartening to see my country so mean to people in need. It kills me, I hate it. It ain’t me and that ain’t what I stand for.”
Voters at the Cambridge Recreation Center polling station were waiting up to an hour to vote.
Babies and young children waited in line with their patient parents as slowly but methodically voters made their way through the process.
Two American Civil Liberties Union workers stationed at the far end of the hall observed the process.
And everywhere there was an American flag.
● Natalie Akoorie is in California and Nevada courtesy of the State Department Foreign Press Centre to report on the 2018 Midterm elections.
Resigned to losing his party’s grip on the House of Representatives, US President Donald Trump last night congratulated the House Democratic leader and chose to celebrate “tremendous success” for Republicans in maintaining the Senate.
Trump called Representative Nancy Pelosi and noted her pitch for bipartisanship in her remarks, her office tweeted. The President, in an earlier tweet, weighed in on the Midterm results, overlooking the Democratic pickups in the House and writing: “Tremendous success tonight. Thank you to all!”
Democrats gained control of the House, while Republicans kept their Senate majority.
Widely viewed as a referendum on Trump’s presidency, the results offered a split decision that revealed deep divides in the American electorate.
Control of the House gives Democrats the ability to launch investigations into the President and stymie his agenda.
But White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders minimised the magnitude of likely Democratic gains.
“Maybe you get a ripple, but I certainly don’t think that there’s a blue wave,” she told reporters, pointing to several early Republican wins.
As for Republicans retaining control of the Senate, she called it “a huge moment and victory for the President”.
White House aides called on Democrats to work with Republicans in the next Congress.
Said White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway: “I don’t know that there will be much of an appetite for Democrat lawmakers to spend all of their time, or most of their time or even a fraction of their time investigating, instigating, trying to impeach and subpoena people.”
In addition to the call to Pelosi, Trump called Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, as well as a number of candidates he backed during the race, the White House said. Sanders said he was to continue making calls today.
Trump had aggressively campaigned in the closing days of the race, his focus on boosting Republicans in states that he carried in 2016. Of the three races he targeted in the final day, the Republicans won all of them: Mike Braun defeated Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Josh Hawley defeated Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri and Attorney General Mike DeWine defeated Democrat Richard Cordray in the race for Ohio Governor.
The election was a historic day for women in American politics. Nearly two years after women spilled out into the streets of Washington and in cities across the country in defiance of the inauguration of Trump, the nation sent more women than ever before to the House.
The record number of women who will be members of the incoming class of lawmakers could have a stark impact on politics in the nation’s capital. According to data compiled by the Associated Press, 237 women ran for the House as major-party candidates.
At 29, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman elected to Congress. Ocasio-Cortez has said she is still paying off her student loans and until recently had no health insurance.
The Democrat shocked many in New York politics, including herself, when she came out of nowhere to defeat 10-term Representative Joe Crowley in New York’s Democratic congressional primary last spring.
The victory made her the national face of young, discontented Democrats — often women and minorities — trying to shove their party to the left.
She takes the record for the youngest woman elected to Congress from Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican representing upstate New York who was elected at age 30.
American voters have elected many men in their 20s to Congress.
Abby Finkenauer, another Democrat, became the second-youngest woman elected to Congress. Also 29, she is a little more than 10 months older than Ocasio-Cortez. She is also still paying off her student loans.
Finkenauer styled herself as a folksy champion of working-class families such as her own. A favourite of labour unions, she has frequently discussed how her father is a welder and her mother is a school district employee.
The House is also getting its first two Native American and Muslim Congresswomen, while Massachusetts is getting its first black Congresswoman, and Arizona and Tennessee
are getting their first female senators.
Healthcare, immigration and Trump were high on voters' minds as they cast ballots, according to a wide-ranging survey of the electorate conducted by the Associated Press
But the White House acknowledged the historical headwinds it faced going into the elections: In the last three decades, 2002 was the only Midterm election when the party holding the White House gained Senate seats. And only twice in the past eight decades has the President’s party picked up House seats in the Midterms.
Trump spent election night watching returns with family and friends at the White House, his shadow looming large over the results.
Nearly 40 per cent of voters cast their ballots to express opposition to the President, according to AP VoteCast, a national survey of the electorate, while about 25 per cent said they voted to express support for Trump.
Opposition to Trump proved to be more a motivating factor for Democrats than support for the President a factor for Republicans. Still, Republican voters tended to be overwhelmingly supportive of the President.
Faced with the possibility of keeping the Senate but losing the House, aides in recent days had laid out the political reality to Trump, who could face an onslaught of Democratic-run investigations.