Democrats' high hopes are dashed

Republicans look to keep Senate majority, make unexpected House gains.

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats awoke Wednesday to a political debacle despite big optimism heading into the elections, as Republicans continued to cling to their Senate majority and are on track to make unexpected gains in the House.

As the presidential race headed toward a photo finish that could take days to sort out, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., faced another political letdown that, so far, resembled their failure in 2016 when President Donald Trump was elected.

In the highly anticipated Senate matches, Republicans scored easier-than-expected victories in Iowa, Montana and South Carolina while establishing very large leads in Kansas and Texas. GOP incumbents held narrow but steady leads in Georgia, Maine and North Carolina.

“Overall we had a better election than most people thought across the country,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters Wednesday in his home state.

The only clear Democratic victory came in Colorado, and a Democratic challenger held a significant lead in Arizona. The Democratic Party remained hopeful in Michigan that its incumbent, Sen. Gary Peters, would pull ahead as votes come in from large urban centers.

Taken together, with the loss of a Democratic seat in Alabama, Schumer faces long odds of winning back the majority, which would mark a fourth straight electoral defeat for Senate Democrats.

If those races stand, McConnell will be poised to either play a significant role in curbing the new Biden administration’s agenda and hold sway over its presidential appointments — or continue to be a force in shepherding Trump’s appointees to confirmation in a second term, depending on the outcome in the presidential race.

Just as the nation cleaved into a rural-exurban bloc versus suburban-urban enclave in the presidential race, the congressional campaigns broke sharply along those lines and House Republicans won back several seats in traditionally conservative areas that they had lost in the 2018 midterms.

“All I can say is: This has been overwhelming,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said after defeating Democrat Jaime Harrison, whose campaign broke fundraising records and brought a hard-fought Senate race to the deeply conservative state. “I’ve never been challenged like this, and I’ve never seen more support before than tonight.”

Graham, who used his Fox News appearances to plead for donations, ended up winning by double digits in the traditional Republican stronghold, despite public and private polling that showed the race to be a toss-up just a few days ago.

In even more unexpected fashion, Pelosi is on track to lose seats in her caucus and come out of this election season with the smallest majority in about 20 years.

That reality stands in contrast to an early victory lap Tuesday, when she and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairwoman Cheri Bustos of Illinois were expressing confidence that their most vulnerable members had won reelection and the party would make inroads in suburban strongholds held by Republicans.

Instead, it was House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was trumpeting the results on Wednesday.

“Republicans defied the odds and grew our party last night,” he tweeted. “In districts all across the country, Americans rejected socialism and voted for freedom. Nancy Pelosi: you’ve been put on notice.”

In the Senate, Schumer’s caucus clung to narrow hopes of actually winning a couple more seats and possibly the majority, with the most likely path coming from the quirks of state law in Maine and Georgia.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, claimed victory Wednesday in her bid to secure a fifth term, beating back an avalanche of Democratic money and liberal anger in the most difficult race of her career to defeat Sara Gideon, a Democrat, and strengthen the party’s hold on the Senate.

Her triumph, reported by The Associated Press, preserved Collins’ status as the only remaining New England Republican in Congress.