Is Joe Biden a Candidate? Demographic Analysis of the Arizona General Relatives During the 2020 Election. Are Candidates Really Defeasible?
One of the biggest questions going into the 2020 election was if Republican candidates were going to reflect the views of the GOP base. Poll after poll has shown that a clear majority of Republicans falsely believe that President Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that a lot of Republicans running for office believe this as well. Can any of those candidates run states where elections are close? It’s usually yes for most of the time. Most election deniers running for governor have only a small chance of winning or are from states former President Donald Trump easily won.
Another high-profile contest remains too close to call: The Arizona governor’s race. Lake is a denier of the election process, and she’s running against a supporter of the election process.
The governor’s race in Arizona has remained close despite Lake being one of the most prominent election deniers on the ballot this year.
Lake is running stronger than Masters, the GOP nominee. Masters trails his Democratic opponent, Sen. Mark Kelly, by more than 5 points in in the average of all polling.
Losing campaigns in swing or blue states have been known to be hampered by 2020 election denial. Blue-state Republicans in Maryland and Massachusetts are getting destroyed in the polls by their opposition, even though both of them are Republicans.
But Lake’s standing may have more to do with the fact that 2020 election denialism isn’t as much of an important factor to voters as we might think when it comes to voting in elections for state office. While just 18% of voters said in the CBS News poll that they wanted elected officials in Arizona to say Biden didn’t win in 2020, another 41% said it didn’t matter. This means the majority of Arizona voters (59%) don’t seem to mind or actually like it when someone running for office denies the reality of the 2020 election.
Additionally, the Marist poll showed that a mere 6% of voters are not at all confident that the 2022 election in Arizona will not be run fairly and accurately. 23% are not very confident, and the overwhelming majority are confident in it.
The Secret of Lake’s Secret: How Democratic Democrats Are Facing the Trump-President Biden and Laxalt-Mirror Campaigns
So what is Lake’s secret? Part of it may be that her past as a television anchor is paying off. She seems to be doing a good enough job reaching voters in the middle of the electorate.
In the November elections, voters in 27 states will vote for the secretaries of state. Fourteen of those seats currently are held by Republicans and 13 by Democrats.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson is favored to retain his seat and win a second term, even though he voted against certifying 2020 election. Likewise, Nevada’s Adam Laxalt has raised questions about the 2020 election and played a leading role in post-election legal efforts to reverse Biden’s victory in the state. He is running against Democratic Senator Catherine Cortez Masto.
Two years’ time, if another close presidential election between Biden and Trump is on the line, Arizona will once again be in the mix.
The voters who poured into a Phoenix high school to hear from former President Barack Obama were looking to send a message of defiance Wednesday night.
They said they are determined to defeat former President Donald Trump’s hand-picked slate of election deniers – including gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake, Senate nominee Blake Masters and Secretary of State nominee Mark Finchem – and will not allow their state’s voters to be intimidated by activists who turned up to monitor ballot drop boxes late last month – some of them armed, masked and wearing camouflage.
As President Joe Biden warned Americans from Washington, DC, on Wednesday night that democracy is at stake, it’s here in Arizona that democratic institutions look most fragile ahead of next week’s midterm elections and the 2024 presidential election, in which Arizona is likely to be a pivotal battleground.
The election misinformation spread online by the right-wing activists and by Trump on his Truth Social platform continued to be push back by officials in Arizona and Nevada. Trump baselessly posted on Truth Social Friday night that Clark County, which is the most populous in Nevada, was “finding all sorts of ballots in Clark County” and “pulling out all stops to steal the Election from Adam Laxalt.”
A registered Democrat from Maricopa County, Rodriguez said it was frightening that radical Republicans were able to rise up and support candidates like Lake and Masters who echoed Trump’s lie about the election.
“What are they running on, aside from Trump’s talking points that the election was stolen?” Rodriguez said something. She noted that “a lot of Trumpers” are still driving their trucks with Trump flags around her Glendale, Arizona, neighborhood. “And they’re walking around with guns on their hips, showing up at the ballot boxes or showing up at the election sites – for what reason? I mean, do they think that their intimidation tactics are going to work?”
Arizona Election Deniers Kari Lake Obama-Obama Midterms: A Tale of Two Sides of the Same Coincidence
She spoke about her record as secretary of state. She said that she stood for democracy when she refused to give into the insurrectionists who surround her home after she certified the 2020 election.
The New York Times/Siena College poll shows she is in a dead heat with Lake. Nathan L. Gonzales rates the race a toss-up.
The state was on edge as Obama arrived in Arizona less than a week before the midterm election to campaign for fellow Democrats, including Sen. Mark Kelly, who is in a close race with Masters. It was the fact that those top statewide contests could be decided on a razor’s edge that drew Obama to the Grand Canyon State.
Both Biden and Obama have been arguing that the fate of democracy is at stake, but Biden, who has not been invited to campaign in top swing states, had to make his argument from the opposite side of the country.
The political climate and concerns about the sanctity of the election results are what brought Keith Greenberg, a registered Republican from Maricopa County, to Obama’s rally. In an interview he stated he was voting against the Trump ticket because he did not like Democrats.
“The Republican Party today is not the Republican Party I’m a part of,” said Greenberg, who described the 2020 election as fair and honest. I can not put up with that being a lie, it is more like the American Nazi Party.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/03/politics/arizona-election-deniers-kari-lake-obama-midterms/index.html
Angelesco vs. Arizona: a lawsuit against the right-wing group’s actions at the ballot drop-boxes
Two lawsuits have been filed in Federal court on behalf of voters who felt intimidated by the aggressive patrols at the ballot drop boxes late last month.
The group’s members are now banned from yelling at voters who drop off their ballots or taking pictures of voters at the drop boxes, as a result of the ruling. The Justice Department had weighed in on the case that was brought by the League of Women Voters. In a legal brief, the DOJ said the right-wing group’s ballot security efforts were likely illegal and that they raised serious concerns of voter intimidation.
In Arizona, where the Republicans control the party and have censured people for loyalty to the former president, it’s even more pronounced.
According to a registered Democrat, people came to see Obama Wednesday night because they were hopeful about the democratic process.
She said it was important to hear from someone we trusted that we could be hopeful about the election. “You can see all these people out here. Thousands of people are waiting. I just want to believe that people will believe in something better, that they will not be swayed by dishonest people, and that we all have morals and values as humans.
The 2020 Secretary of State Contest and the Voting Rights Defenders of Joe Biden and the Investigative Investigation of a Florida State Sen. Brad Raffensperger
The low-profile secretary of state contests have drawn a lot of attention, and millions of dollars in political spending, as several Republican nominees who doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election are vying for the job.
Voting rights advocates have been concerned because election deniers are on general election ballots in key battlegrounds, which could impact the outcome of future elections, like the possibility of former President Joe Biden and Donald Trump running against each other.
The Georgia contest features one of the most prominent election chiefs in the country, Republican Brad Raffensperger, who refused to allow Trump to get the votes he needs to win the state. (That campaign by Trump and his allies is the subject of a special grand jury investigation in Fulton County, Georgia.)
Michigan’s election pits the incumbent Democrat, and national voice against election denial, against the republican who was behind the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, who has made false claims about the 2020 election.
Karamo, a community college professor who secured an endorsement from Trump last year, has said he won the election, and she signed on to an unsuccessful Supreme Court lawsuit that challenged Biden’s victory in four states.
The Democrats need to pick up 23 seats in the House to control it, and we will see how this plays out.
Most of Indiana and Kentucky have polls close at 6 p.m. There are parts of both states that are in the central time zone so it will take time to see if Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly survives a challenge from republican Mike Braun.
Waves: How a Democratic Sen’s Race Could Probabilize the State of the House and the Senate, and How to Detect a Wave?
It might not be a good bellwether. In a novel twist, the race has become much more of a question of whether or not she is progressive for the district than about Trump or the incumbent congressman. But it will be an early indicator of the environment, and a Barr loss would give Republicans reason to panic.
A building wave? Virginia might be the most important early sign of where the House is going. The Democrats’ must-win there is in the 10th District, where strategists in both parties say Republican Rep. Barbara Comstock is unlikely to hold onto her seat in the DC suburbs. Republican Rep. Scott Taylor’s race in the Norfolk-area 2nd District, though, is a much better bellwether for the national environment. If the GOP congressman loses in the 7th District, it could be an early sign of a Democratic wave.
The 5th District, which is home to a former journalist and a distillery owner, is currently held by the Republican and was competitive late in the cycle. A Democratic win here would be a sign of a wave that is threatening to wipe out Republicans who weren’t even on the national radar.
Democrats would be in for a big night if they win both the wave-maker districts of the Atlanta suburbs. Karen Handel, the Republican who beat Jon Ossoff in Georgia’s 6th District in a special election last year, is facing Lucy McBath, a woman whose son was murdered over a dispute about loud music. Republicans in the 7th district are angry that Rob Woodall did not take his race seriously. “If you don’t think it behooves you to put paid media on air, we’re not going to come help you. We’re not a welfare organization,” a Republican official said.
Miami is a house battleground. Two House battlegrounds are located in South Florida. The 26th district has a Republican congressman and he has run well on issues like immigration and climate change. What should be an easy Democratic pick up in the 27th District has become more difficult as Donna Shalala, a non-Spanish speaking candidate, faces Maria Elvira Salazar, a Spanish language broadcast journalist.
They were history-makers. In Georgia, the headliner is the governor’s race between Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp and Stacey Abrams, an emerging Democratic star who has combined a progressive platform with an appeal to black voters – all with a chance to become the nation’s first black female governor. The race will go to a second round if neither candidate gets more than 50%.
We will need to wait an extra hour for results to come in for Andrew Gillum, the Democrat and progressive favorite who is in a close race with Republican Ron Paul, who is so aligned with Donald Trump that he has endorsed him.
Democrats’ Senate must-wins. One of the most watched Senate races in the nation is in Florida, where Rick Scott is trying to oust Bill Nelson and potentially diminish Democrats’ chances of getting a majority.
What about a Midwestern state-level resurgence? In Ohio, a state President Trump won 9 percentage points in the 2016 elections, Richard Cordray will attempt to win the governor’s office. He faces Republican state Attorney General Mike DeWine. It’s the first of several such tests for Democrats, who also hope to reverse GOP gains in Michigan, Iowa and Wisconsin.
Tennessee is one of the best pick-up opportunities for Democrats. In an effort to find moderate Republicans to vote for him in the 2020 election, Phil Bredesen has repeatedly pledged to work with Donald Trump.
And Missouri, where Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill faces Republican state Attorney General Josh Hawley, is one of the GOP’s three or so (along with North Dakota and Indiana) best pick-up opportunities.
The most important time for House control. This could also be the hour in which the next House begins to take shape. Pennsylvania and New Jersey are battlegrounds.
In New Jersey, Democrats need to win two races, including the open 2nd District where Jeff Van Drew is the favorite, and the 11th District with Mikie Sherrill.
But it’s the next two that would clearly show Democrats on their way to a huge House majority: Republican incumbents Leonard Lance and Tom MacArthur, one of the architects of the House’s health care repeal bill who also backed Trump’s tax bill, are also in the fights of their political lives. It would show how important health care is to the Democrats.
Democrats could also pick off House seats in Illinois. Sean Casten is their best bet – he faces GOP Rep. Peter Roskam in the Chicago suburbs. Lauren Underwood, who was campaigning with former President Barack Obama over the weekend, faces a stiff challenge from Rep. Randy Hultgren in the area near Chicago. The 12th and 13th Districts are two more wave-maker types with GOP incumbents Mike Bost and Rodney Davis.
A one-on-one vote to decide the winner of the Republican primary between Cindy Hyde-Smith and Chris McDaniel in Mississippi’s Senate will decide the general election.
There’s a House race tonight in Arkansas, where Democrats are trying to take on Republican French Hill. It’s another member of the wave-maker category of districts that would signal a huge Democratic night.
All eyes will be on Minnesota, where Democrats are now poised to turn the state blue two years after it came close to going for Trump in 2016. Four closely watched House contests, including two where Democrats are on defense, will indicate how successful Democrats are in breaking down the wall, but Democrats seem likely to retain the governor’s mansion and both Senate seats.
The polls closing at 9 pm could be seen as a sign of things to come. The 3rd and 6th Congressional districts in Colorado and Kansas are all but written off by Republicans, but if Democrats win in suburbs with Colin Allred, Houston and Detroit, they will cement their control of the House.
The night could become an exceptional one for Democrats, with wins in deep red districts without big population centers that Trump won two years ago. Some good examples of that are upstate New York and Kansas City where Republicans are being challenged by Democrats.
Did history in the state of Texas exist? Texas hasn’t elected a state-wide Democrat since 1988. But Rep. Beto O’Rourke, fueled by Democratic enthusiasm and a Brinks Truck worth of cash, has given Sen. Ted Cruz a real race. Polls have the upstart Democrat down and Republicans believe the state’s Republican tendencies will be evident on Election Day, but staggeringly high early voting numbers and national attention on the race have given O’Rourke a chance. A win here would be earth-shattering for Democrats.
And the 9 p.m. poll closing could also bring a big loss for Democrats. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp has become the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate due to a few campaign missteps and, if the polls are any indication, is more likely to lose on Tuesday night. She had a mistake in the campaign ad, in which she wrongly identified victims of sexual assault.
Democrats hope that a win in Arizona, where two congresswomen are fighting for their political lives, will help erase a loss in North Dakota.
Is Scott Walker done? Tony Evers, the state schools chief, is challenging Scott Walker in Wisconsin, which is the most competitive governor’s race in the country.
The race has been used to judge Walker, who is asking for another term in the state, an ask even Republicans admit would make his re-election difficult.
The dark horse gubernatorial race of the 9 p.m. ET hour is in South Dakota, where Republican Rep. Kristi Noem is in a surprisingly tough fight against Democrat Billie Sutton, an anti-abortion, pro-gun Democrat who is running to oversee a state that backed Trump by 30 percentage points in 2016.
An important note: If Democratic control of the House comes down to California, the country is in for a long ordeal. California is notoriously slow at counting votes, meaning races could be decided in days and weeks, not hours.
Katie Hill, Gil Cisneros, Katie Porter, Harley Rouda and Mike Levin are the five Democrats looking to flip seats in the traditionally Republican area. Depending on how races earlier in the night go, these five seats in Southern California could either be the cherry on top of a good night for Democrats or the focus of considerable attention over the next weeks.
Democrats expect to hold Montana, where Tester is running on his connections to the state and authenticity, but Nevada is expected to be a fight, despite that fact that Heller for months has been seen as the most vulnerable Republican incumbent running for Senate this year.
In Alaska, the current governor, independent Bill Walker, ended his re-election campaign in order to support Democrat MarkBegich in the race against Republican Mike Dunleavy. Republicans believe the race will be an easy pick up for them, but there is a chance of a late night surprise because of the lack of reliable polling and the sudden withdrawal of the current governor.
There were new votes reported late in the evening in Arizona and Nevada, which are states with key races that will determine control of the Senate.
The control of the Senate was expected to be a close one going into Election Day, with control likely to come down to Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. Even if the Republicans do end up winning the majority, it will be harder for McCarthy to become the speaker since the contest for control of the chamber has made it more difficult.
How Many Uncounted Votes Are Needed on Election Day? The Case of Maricopa, Arizona: Blake Masters, Blake Gates, Bill Gates and Katie Hobbs
The biggest reason the vote counting is taking so long is the way that each state handles the ballots outside of those cast at polling places on Election Day, including both early votes and mail-in ballots.
Even though the media calls the races on election night, Patrick says there is still so much work to be done in the states that they do not declare winners on Election Day.
In Arizona, where CNN has projected that Sen. Mark Kelly will win reelection, GOP Senate nominee Blake Masters took a different approach than anyone else in the race, by announcing Saturday that all the votes should be counted before anyone predicts the outcome.
The biggest chunk of uncounted ballots, about 290,000, are votes that were dropped off at vote centers on Election Day. In an interview on Friday, Bill Gates told CNN that officials were expecting to release the results from up to 70% of the votes.
We should be able to get through the majority of the votes by Monday morning, according to Hargrove.
After the 2020 election, there were wild and baseless allegations that were made in the state of Arizona about felt-tipped Sharpies, as a result of the delay in calling the races.
“Not every woman with glasses is Katie Hobbs,” the official Twitter account of Maricopa County tweeted in response Thursday evening. This was an Observer for the party. Please refrain from making assumptions about workers who happen to wear glasses.”
Deriving the 2020 Election and Reopening the “Wheels” Off the Vote: An Open-Domain Viewpoint on Master’s Disclaimer
After his primary victory in August, Masters scrubbed his website of language that included the false claim that the election was stolen. Under questioning from the moderator during a debate with Kelly, Masters conceded that he had not seen evidence of fraud in the 2020 vote counting or election results in a way that would have changed the outcome. In that debate and on the trail, Kelly had argued that the “wheels” could “come off our democracy” if election deniers like Masters were elected.
At a news conference Thursday, Gates said, “Quite frankly, it is offensive for Kari Lake to say that these people behind me are slow-rolling this when they are working 14-18 hours.”
Voters have the option of curing their mail ballot in order to make sure it gets counted. This can mean validating that a ballot is truly from them by adding a missing signature, or by addressing signature-match issues. The deadline for voters to “cure” their ballots in Nevada is Monday, November 14, according to state law.
The law in Nevada allows for mail-in ballots to be received through Saturday if they are postmarked by Election Day.
A number of mail-in ballots were disqualified because they were late, according to Jamie Rodriguez, an interim register of voters in Washoe County.
Washoe County, which includes Reno, still has about 22,000 ballots left to count, Rodriguez said, and the county expects to get through most of them on Friday.
State Elections in Arizona: Tammy Patrick, RNC, Griswold, AZ, and the Independence of Maricopa, Arizona
The ultimate makeup of the House is important for McCarthy because of the way the chamber elects a speaker: It requires a majority of the full House, or 218 votes, not just a majority of the party in control. If Republicans take power with a double-digit majority, McCarthy could afford to lose a few defectors. The Freedom Caucus has more power than the single members thanks to a slim majority.
The chair of the House Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy. The meeting went well but he didn’t say if McCarthy has his support for speaker.
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Friday that it was still “too early to tell” whether the race would go to a recount, as the state has to certify the results first. If the race is within half a percent, a recount is triggered. If the candidate decides to pay for one, it may be conducted.
On Friday night, the RNC and the Republican Party of Arizona issued a statement questioning the process in the county, and demanding that it require around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing until all of the votes are counted. The groups also threatened that they would “not hesitate to take legal action if necessary.”
Tammy Patrick is a senior adviser at the Democracy Fund and spent 10 years working as a county election official. Maricopa is home to Phoenix and more than half the state’s voters.
Patrick says the nuts and bolts of how elections are run in Arizona haven’t changed a lot since her time there. But she says voter behavior and political realities have.
Patrick says voters may have heard messages that it was better to use the mail ballot rather than wait in line on Election Day.
Whatever the reason for the influx, though, now election officials have to process and tabulate all those ballots. Ballots and signatures will be checked by bipartisan teams.
Patrick believes there’s an “extraction machine” that could speed this process up. Many counties in Florida, in particular, use an inhouse device that cuts the top of an envelope with a laser and then opens the envelope with air, which makes it much easier to remove the ballot.
Some of the regulations and procedures differ between Florida and Arizona, though they have the same deadlines and rules for mail ballots. Regardless, Florida has become a popular point of comparison for those on the political right criticizing Arizona’s elections management.
Leon County’s officials said in a statement that even though they have the majority of votes counted, there is still work that needs to be done. Processing of ballots from abroad is also included.
Comments on “Concerning Failed Mail-in Votes in the Pima County Senate Race” by Y. E. Hargove
With Mark Kelly winning in Arizona, Democrats are one seat away from keeping control of the US Senate and they are focused on Nevada, where the competitive Senate race is getting more and more competitive.
Political organizations, especially Democratic-leaning unions, that spent months urging people to vote in Nevada’s key Senate race are now turning their focus toward “curing” flawed mail-in ballots in the still-uncalled contest.
Hargove said that she hopes by Monday that Pima County will have the majority of the remaining votes counted. She had previously told CNN that all the votes would be counted by Monday morning. She said on Friday night that it was no longer the case as a result of large amount of votes received the day before from the recorder’s office.
Gates was asked by CNN about the Republican National Committee’s accusations, and said he would prefer they communicate them to him directly. I agree with the statement: I am a Republican. Three of my colleagues on the board are Republicans. He said to raise these issues with us and talk about them with us.
“The suggestion by the Republican National Committee that there is something untoward going on here in Maricopa County is absolutely false and again, is offensive to these good elections workers,” he said.
Maricopa County Clerk David Stevens says he isn’t worried about the quality of the midterm results: What we have learned from the Cochise County hand count
“Over the past couple of decades, on average it takes 10 to 12 days to complete the count. That’s not because of anything Maricopa County has decided to do. That’s because of how Arizona law is set up, and that’s what we do here at Maricopa County, we follow the law to make sure that the count is accurate.”
A scaled- down version of the hand count audit plan that had been rejected by the court could still have a negative effect on the process of certifying the state’s results.
Concerns have arisen about possible delays in determining the winners in a state where key races remain too close to call after the confrontation in Cochise County. The deadline for the Arizona counties to certify results is usually 20 days after the last day of voting.
On Thursday, a state appeals court made clear in a 2-1 vote that it would not be reversing a court order barring the full hand count in time for the plan to be revived for the midterms. But a lawyer for Cochise County David Stevens, the recorder, said that there is no giving up on the efforts to conduct a hand audit that goes beyond the usual procedures.
CNN reports that Trump is trying to blame McConnell for the failure of several endorsed candidates in the general election and will try to gain opposition to the Kentucky Republican in Senate GOP leadership elections next week.
In retaining their Senate majority, Democrats defied the historical trend of midterm elections breaking against parties in power and overcame anxiety about high inflation. Instead, voters punished Republicans who had opposed abortion rights and parroted Trump’s lies about election fraud.
This has been a busy time with many different occurrences that affect voter behavior including the Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights. Republicans were also hamstrung by Trump’s decision to boost far-right candidates who were loyal to him, but often too extreme to appeal to the swing voters who decide elections. Many independent and moderate voters turned away candidates they thought were too extreme or too closely aligned with Trump, and Democrats decided to protect their incumbent candidates.
The one bright spot for Republicans was in Nevada, where voters elected Republican Joe Lombardo as the state’s next governor – tossing out Democrat Steve Sisolak, CNN projected. When the unemployment in Nevada was nearly 30%, the popular Clark County sheriff reminded voters of their struggles. Though the economy has rebounded, Lombardo had argued that Sisolak’s policies had been too restrictive and had hampered the state’s economic recovery.
A spokeswoman for the Maricopa county elections department, whose role as a tech billionaire and a former Republican presidential candidate had an impact on election denialism
A spokeswoman with the Maricopa County Elections Department told CNN’s Kyung Lah the county office has “redundancies in place that help us ensure each legal ballot is only counted once.”
“Because ballots are tabulated by batch, we are able to isolate the results from those specific locations and reconcile the total ballots against check-ins to ensure it matches. This is done with political party observers present and is a practice that has been in place for decades,” the spokesperson said.
Bill Gates was the chair of the board of supervisors and he said that Masters should not have proposed wiping the slate clean. Gates said the county’s pace for counting ballots is in line with previous years.
“Let the count continue on and at the end, if they have issues they choose to take to court, they have every right to do that, and we’ll let that process play through,” Gates added.
Kelly entered the 2022 cycle well positioned to withstand the headwinds facing Democrats – even in a purple state like Arizona that Joe Biden narrowly won – because of his formidable fundraising and unique personal brand as a retired astronaut, a Navy veteran and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Masters, a first-time candidate, was able to navigate the GOP primary gauntlet with significant financial backing from conservative tech billionaire Peter Thiel, his former boss. He appealed to Republicans by promising to prioritize immigration issues, and in a campaign video released last year, he said he believed Trump won the 2020 presidential election.
But Masters seemed to reverse course after receiving a phone call from Trump urging him to “go stronger” on election denialism, a conversation that was captured in a Fox documentary. Masters told CNN in the final week of the campaign that voters were more focused on inflation, crime and the border than on his comments about the 2020 election.
Masters had said he would support a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks, a proposal that was advanced by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham. That bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and to protect the life of the mother.
What Counting the Votes Turns into Election Weekend: Defending Joe Biden in the 2020 Midterm Election in Arizona with the CNN Investigative Team
On Saturday, election workers still count the votes in key races across the country. Here’s what to know as Election Day turns into Election Weekend:
The tabulation process in the state of Arizona came under fire on Friday from the Arizona Senate candidate, the RNC and the GOP.
The groups demanded “around-the-clock shifts of ballot processing” until all of the votes are counted, along with “regular, accurate public updates,” and threatened potential legal action.
But many of the candidates who were most aggressively dishonest about the 2020 election will lose, CNN projects — notably several candidates who ran for posts with critical powers over elections in states expected to be competitive in the 2024 presidential campaign. According to CNN, the defeated candidates include the gubernatorial nominees of Pennsylvania and Michigan, the secretary of state nominees of Arizona and Nevada, and the US Senate nominee from Nevada.
The party defied the historical trend of midterm elections breaking against parties in power and overcame anxiety over high inflation, cementing its majority as voters rejected Republican candidates who had aligned themselves with former President Donald Trump and in many cases parroted his lies about widespread election fraud.
Retaining Senate control is a huge boost to President Joe Biden over the remaining two years of his first term in the White House, with one more Senate race outstanding that will determine the final balance of power in the chamber – and how much leverage the president’s party will ultimately have.
CNN and other news outlets projected that Democrats would retain their majority in the Senate, prompting Vice President Biden to state that it was a reflection of the quality of the candidates. “They’re all running on the same program. Wasn’t anybody who wasn’t running on what we did,” Biden went on.
The Real Problem of the 2020 Senate Runoff: Democrat R. Warnock vs. Republican Herschel Walker in the Post-Democracy Era
Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker are facing off on December 6 after neither candidate cleared the 50% threshold on Tuesday.
Biden said he was “looking forward to the next couple of years” with Democrats, and said he was now focused on the Senate runoff in Georgia, acknowledging it would be better to have 51 seats in the Senate.
The Democrats have no votes to spare, since the Senate is evenly split with Vice President Harris holding the tie-breaking vote.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on Saturday night called the Democrats’ hold on the Senate a “vindication” of the party’s agenda and said it amounted to a rejection of “anti-Democratic, extremist, MAGA Republicans.”
“Oh and one other thing we did, which I cannot forget, we staunchly defended a woman’s right to choose,” Schumer said, referring to the battle over abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
He also touted Democrats’ ability to block any GOP measures that would ban abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June decision to reverse Roe v. Wade.
Only one Senate seat has changed hands so far in the 2022 midterm elections: Pennsylvania, where Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, who campaigned as he recovered from a May stroke, defeated Republican Mehmet Oz, the celebrity doctor who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump.
Republicans successfully defended seats in hard-fought races in Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, while Democrats retained their seats in competitive contests in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire.
In Nevada, CNN projects that Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a former prosecutor and state attorney general, will defeat Republican Adam Laxalt, her successor in the attorney general’s office and the son and grandson of former senators.
Laxalt co-chaired Trump’s 2020 campaign in Nevada and played a leading role in legal efforts to reverse the results of that election, which he said was rigged. On January 6, the year of the US Capitol attack, the lies and election conspiracy theories embraced by Trump and his allies were argued to have led to it.
Clark County, Nevada: Democrat Electoral Candidates Who Didn’t Affect the Constitution in the heyday of the Georgia Senate
Clark County, Nevada: Clark County, which is Nevada’s most populous and encompasses Las Vegas, will release results from its remaining 22,000 mail ballots tonight, according to county registrar Joe Gloria.
He said this would be released sometime this afternoon or evening, and estimated that it would happen by 7 p.m.
Democrats kept their majority in the Senate, but that hasn’t solved the question of control of the House.
According to CNN projections, Democrats have 206 seats they need to win the majority of 218 seats, with 20 undecided.
Democrats scored a major victory in Washington’s Republican-leaning 3rd District, where on Saturday CNN projected that Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez would defeat Republican Joe Kent, who had aligned himself closely with former President Donald Trump.
Her victory came largely as a result of Trump’s efforts to punish Republicans who voted to impeach him. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a moderate who was widely viewed as a lock for reelection, did not finish in one of the top two slots in the primary and therefore didn’t advance to the general election.
He said the Democratic Senate candidates “beat some very flawed challengers who had no faith in democracy, no fidelity to truth or honor. Even though the polls looked bleak, our candidates never gave up.
The Senate control battle in the US will distract from the Georgia Senate race which is still going on.
The Voting Season in Maricopa, Arizona: Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, and Kelly Loeffler
The narrator says in the spot that it was about who was competent, willing to tell the truth, and who had the knowledge needed for the job.
In Georgia, the general election is triggered if no candidate tops 50% of vote in the primary and overtime is required if that does not happen.
Jon Ossoff defeated David Perdue in one of the Georgia Senate runoffs, while Raphael Warnock faced off with Kelly loeffler. Loeffler had been appointed to the Senate in 2019 when former Sen. Johnny Isakson resigned for health reasons. She was defeated in the special election for Isakson’s term.
He said that he was confident that most of the votes would be recorded by Tuesday. He said that the county would keep reporting about 85,000 votes per night until they’re done.
Democratic Rep. Mary Peltola, who won a special election this summer, is in a strong position to eclipse the 50% mark. The Republican Kelly Tshibaka is attempting to avenge the attack on the US Capitol by impeaching Murkowski, who is supported by Trump.
Still, Laxalt acknowledged in a tweet Saturday morning that the mail-in ballots that had arrived over the past couple of days continued to break in higher Democratic margins than his team had calculated. “This has narrowed our victory window,” he tweeted. He said the race was coming down to the more than 20,000 Election Day Clark County drop-off ballots. If they are Republican or DEM leaning, then we can still win. If they continue to trend the same way. then she will overtake us.”
“For my people who knocked doors in 115 degree heat, and for the million+ Arizonans who put their faith in me, we are going to make sure that every legal vote is counted,” Masters tweeted. “If, at the end, Senator Kelly has more of them than I do, then I will congratulate him on a hard-fought victory. Let the voters decide, not the media.
Maricopa County Election officials pushed back on Masters’ earlier contention – one that Lake had also made – that the vote counting in Arizona was moving too slowly in Arizona’s most populous county.
Gates told CNN’s Jim that some candidates are deciding to spread misinformation. “We have spent weeks at Maricopa County, getting that word out that people should not anticipate results on election night or even the next day. That it does take this long.”