Democrats tighten grip on House, but Senate hopes wane
Democrats were on track Tuesday to maintain a firm grip on the House but grappled to seize the Senate majority from Republicans as the two parties fought for control of the levers of power in Congress.
The Senate outcome rested on a handful of states where Democrats hoped to topple incumbent Republicans, but the contest was shaping up to be a nailbiter, with neither party fully confident of its chances on an unusually large battleground that stretched from Maine to Alaska and could tilt with the presidential results.
At stake was the ability of the next president to fill his Cabinet, appoint judges and pursue his agenda, and the two parties were waging a pitched battle to the end, pummeling voters with advertising backed by record sums of money, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
Democrats needed a net gain of three or four
to take Senate control, depending on whether former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, won the presidency, which would allow his vice president, Kamala Harris, to cast tiebreaking votes.
They flipped one seat in Colorado, where John Hickenlooper, the former Democratic governor, easily defeated Sen. Cory Gardner. And they had a relatively clear path to another seat in Arizona, where Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, was taking on Sen. Martha McSally. But Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn football coach, easily won back deepred Alabama from Sen. Doug Jones. And Republican Joni Ernst won reelection to her Iowa seat after a close race against Democrat Theresa Greenfield.
That left both sides closely watching a handful of races in Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, Montana and Michigan, where polling in recent weeks has shown incumbents within razorthin margins of their challengers. Republicans breathed a sigh of relief early in the night when Sen. John Cornyn was declared the winner in Texas, despite a record turnout, and again a short time later when Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump, won reelection in South Carolina after a tougher than expected race.
Democrats and Republicans were prepared for the possibility that one or both of the Senate races taking place in Georgia, an unexpectedly competitive battleground this year, could end up in winner takes all January runoffs that would decide the balance of the Senate only weeks before the inauguration in January.
At least one Senate race was already resolved, though. In Kentucky, Sen. Mitch McConjority, nell, the majority leader, had secured a seventh term, according to the Associated Press. McConnell, 78, handily beat back a challenge from Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot. Democrats poured $ 100 million into the contest, but McGrath never commanded the kind of support in the solidly Republican state to make the incumbent nervous.
McConnell is now all but assured to remain the Republican leader in the Senate, a position that could make him the most senior member of his party come January should Trump lose.
“Tonight Kentuckians said, ‘ We’re not finished yet,’ ” McConnell told supporters in Louisville. “Kentucky wants more of the policies that built the best economy in our nation’s modern history — not socialism.”
In the fight for the House, Democrats were more clearly on the offensive, bolstered by a stunning fundraising advantage, Republican recruitment failures and Trump’s eroding support in America’s cities and suburbs. Two years after gaining 41 seats to reclaim the maseats Democrats were trying to push into suburban districts that Republicans have not lost in decades around St. Louis, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Phoenix, Omaha, Neb., and even once rubyred parts of Texas. Strategists in both parties said a second blue wave could wash out 10 to 20 Republicans, and a less successful night might yield Democrats only a handful of new seats.
“Tonight, House Democrats are poised to further strengthen our majority, the biggest, most diverse, most dynamic, womenled House majority in history,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco said before the polls closed.
“There is nothing normal about what’s in the White House,” she added, “but normally, this would be the start of healing.”
Republicans began the election cycle hoping to grab onto Trump’s coattails and a booming economy to wrest back the 30 or so districts he won in 2016 that Democrats claimed two years later. Those hopes were dashed by the pandemic, which has left the economy in tatters and the nation counting more than 232,000 deaths to date. Democratic candidates in many of the districts the GOP once hoped to reclaim were poised to walk to a second term.
Still, Republicans found some unexpected bright spots. With Trump making significant inroads among Cuban Americans in Miami, Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a firstterm Democrat, was edged out by Carlos Gimenez, the Miami mayor, and Florida Rep. Donna Shalala lost to Maria Elvira Salazar, a former television anchor.
The battle for the Senate was being waged on turf much friendlier to Republicans. Though they were defending 23 states, compared with just 12 for Democrats, almost all of them were places that Trump carried in 2016.
For the second election season in a row, Democrats ran with an almost singular focus on health care, blistering Republicans for their campaign to overturn the Affordable Care Act. The law, and its protections of preexisting conditions, took on further resonance in the face of a public health crisis unlike any the nation has seen in generations and the confirmation just a week before election day of a Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, who Democrats argued would strike down the law.
In race after race, Republicans’ chances appeared to hinge on the strength of Trump, a polarizing leader who has enraptured their core supporters even as his inflammatory style and unorthodox policy positions have frustrated them and alienated crucial voting blocs. A few Republicans, like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who was battling for political survival in the race of her career, were willing to wag their fingers at the president, but most knew they could not risk his ire, or the support of his loyal base, if they were to have any shot at reelection.
Worried about Trump’s chances, though, many Republicans closed their campaigns with warnings to voters of the risks posed by putting the White House and Congress under full Democratic control.