Doug Mastriano’s 2020 campaign has turned out differently than expected: Opening the door for a new american senator and supporting a multiracial coalition

For Democrats, Nevada holds promise and peril. Democrats are hoping to hold together a multiracial coalition and keep the Republicans from flipping the state purple, because it is a purple state.

One of the biggest challenges she faced is that much of Nevada’s population is transient – meaning many voters had not gotten to know Cortez Masto or her record. The Republican groups tried to make a connection between the senator and the unpopular president, who narrowly lost his home state of Delaware in 2020.

If you were going to choose the most important race in the country in the coming elections, it should be the one for Pennsylvania governor.

New polling from CNN shows state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, leading state Sen. Doug Mastriano, a Republican, by a whopping 56% to 41% margin among likely voters.

People closely following the governor’s race likely aren’t terribly surprised. Mastriano, who is among the most prominent 2020 election deniers seeking office this year, has run an unusual campaign.

“As he tours the Commonwealth, Mastriano has essentially walled himself off from the general public, traveling within a bubble of security guards and jittery aides who aim to not only keep him safe, but ensure he only comes into contact with true believers. It’s possible.

Mastriano’s campaign had been anticipated to evolve over the summer and begin reaching out to undecided voters. The opposite has happened. Labor Day came and went.”

Meaning that beating him was no easy task. Even as it was clear that there was major doubts about his willingness and ability to reach out beyond the hardcore GOP base in a general election, national Republicans did not try to sway the primary voters away from him, even as they were scared by getting sideways with Trump.

Progressive activist LaLo Montoya estimates he’s knocked on 10,000 doors around Las Vegas in the months leading up to Election Day. “I know that what I’m doing is with the right intentions and with my heart on my sleeve, and I’m hoping to motivate and inspire people when I do this,” he told NPR.

Montoya is an organizer for PLAN Action, a progressive state-based group that focuses on helping low and moderate income families. He is like many Democrats in Nevada. “I’m nervous about everything, I think we do our best but there’s so much misinformation that we’re going up against.”

Republican campaigns are heavily focused on the economy in a state hit hard by inflation. Even Democratic voters like retiree Mike Sanchez concede life is pretty punishing right now in this predominantly working class state, with skyrocketing housing costs and the second highest gas prices in the country. “It’s high all over. You go anywhere. “It’s a problem,” he said.

“Because Democrats just kind of seem like they’re not helping them out,” she said. “I don’t think they will make people join the police force by demoting their pay.”

Ruy Teixeira is a liberal scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has studied shifting demographics and how they can change politics. He says Democrats face a two-fold problem with Latinos right now: the party is not meeting their economic needs in real-time, and many feel socially alienated from the party’s values. The Democratic Party has become a much more culturally liberal party that is very much down the line: race, gender, crime, immigration and what’s taught in the schools.

Democrats likewise see Latinos at the heart of their party’s future. Democrats in Nevada want the presidential nominating calendar changed to make them the first-in-the-nation state in four years’ time.

The razor-thin elections for Nevada’s Senate seat and Arizona’s governorship have yet to be called on Saturday as counties in both states work to whittle down the tens of thousands of ballots that still need to be counted.

On Saturday morning, after the reports of 80,000 ballots in Arizona’s most populous county, Democratkatie HObbs had a 31,000 vote lead over her Republican opponent. And as if Friday evening, Republican Adam Laxalt is holding onto a slim lead of just more than 800 votes over Democratic incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.

According to CNN, Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Giffords and a Democrat, will defeat Republican Blake Masters in the Arizona Senate race.

When Cortez Masto secured the Senate for the Democrats, Republicans were still working hard to get the seats they need to regain control of the House.

Control of the US House still hangs in the balance. It is clear that even if Republicans win a majority, it will be much closer than they had thought. That unexpected outcome has already produced recriminations and second-guessing of Republican leaders, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had hoped to be emerging from these contests with a clear mandate to become the next House majority leader.

Is it offensive to the Republican Party, Masters, or the National Committee of Arizona to do anything wrong with the ballot counting in Cochise County?

In Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous, there were about 10,000 ballots counted on Friday, and CNN estimates there are roughly 12,000 remaining.

Political groups that spent months urging people to vote in the Nevada Senate race are now focused on trying to fix flawed mail-in ballots.

In Cochise County, home to around 130,000 Arizona residents, there was a desire to audit 100% of the ballots by hand, because of President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.

Gates said he expects that if they continue counting at the same pace – around 60,000 to 80,000 ballots a day – the county should be done counting by “very early next week.”

Hargove believes Pima County will have the majority of votes counted by Monday. She had previously told CNN that all the votes would be counted by Monday morning. On Friday night she stated that the case wouldn’t be the same because there was a lot of votes received earlier in the day.

Gates denied that Masters, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Party of Arizona had done anything wrong.

It is offensive to these good elections workers if the Republican National Committee suggests there is something wrong with the polls in the county.

The groups warned of legal action if there were not shifts of ballot processing throughout the night.

Arizona Senator Mitch McConnell isn’t talking about becoming the next speaker in the House Freedom Caucus unless he gets more money than the majority of Republicans

“Over the past couple of decades, on average it takes 10 to 12 days to complete the count. That is not a result of anything the 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.”

After suffering setbacks in court, Arizona officials who have sought to conduct a hand count audit of a rural county’s election results are considering a scaled-down version of their plan that could still inject chaos and delay into the process of certifying the state’s results.

The appeals court voted in favor of not reversing a court order that bars the complete hand count in time for the elections. But a lawyer for Cochise County Recorder David Stevens – a proponent of the hand audit – said that the county isn’t giving up on its efforts to conduct a hand conduct that goes beyond the usual procedures.

Trump, who saw several key endorsed candidates fizzle out in the general election, is trying to cast blame on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and gin up opposition to the Kentucky Republican ahead of Senate GOP leadership elections next week, CNN reported Friday.

McCarthy needs more than the majority of Republicans to become speaker, and that complicates his job even more.

House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry met with McCarthy in his office Friday. Afterwards, he wouldn’t say whether McCarthy had his support for speaker or not.

The Final Days of Sarah Palin and Mark Sisolak: Elections in Maricopa County, Arizona, Aren’t Those Things You Ever Wanted

Senate Republicans also were confident going into Election Day about their chances to break the 50-50 deadlock that has given Democrats control of the Senate on the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. Harris may not even need to cast a vote if Democrats and Herschel Walker beat each other for the 51st seat on December 6.

It was the third turn in an election week that has seen Democrats defy history and score unexpected victories across the country.

The Republican candidates who lost in the primaries were chosen for their fealty to Trump, and the election denial canard, rather than their broader appeal. Democrat John Fetterman captured an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania the Republicans now hold partly because of the weakness of his carpetbagging, Trump-anointed opponent, Mehmet Oz. And that was just one of many other examples.

Masters’ defeat in Arizona came after prominent Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, swooped into the state in the final days of the election, warning that the very fate of the nation’s democracy was on the ballot. Voters in the Grand Canyon State also spurned the bid of GOP state Rep. Mark Finchem, a strident election denier backed by Trump, to become Arizona’s top elections official. Instead, they will elect Democrat Adrian Fontes as Arizona’s next secretary of state, CNN projected Friday night.

Sisolak’s reelection bid suffered from other challenges: He alienated progressives with vetoes of several key Democratic policy bills, including a death penalty abolition bill that certainly won’t resurface under Lombardo’s administration. Progressives voted for him, but didn’t give him much enthusiasm because of his lack of vision and lack of action on many priority issues. Some undoubtedly chose the unique Nevada option of “none of the above” on their ballots, in a protest against both candidates.

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 watchers and is a tradition that has been going on for decades.

The chair of the board of supervisors rejected the suggestion that the county should wipe the slate clean and start counting again since it is not allowed under Arizona law. 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.

What to Know as Election Day Turns into Election Weekend: A Personal Story of a First-Time Running Presidential Candidate, Ricky Kelly

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 survive the GOP primary with significant financial backing from Peter Thiel, who was 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.

Masters scrubbed his website after his primary victory in August, when he made a 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.

Kelly painted Masters as a candidate who would endanger abortion rights and Social Security if he became president, and as a candidate who was outside the mainstream. Kelly focused on Masters’ anti-abortion stances after the state legislature passed a new ban on abortion at 15 weeks.

Election workers are still counting the votes in key races on Saturday. Here’s what to know as Election Day turns into Election Weekend:

The Flaws of Maricopa County, Nevada: The 2020 Nevada Campaign Co-chair Candidate Revisited by Cortez Masto

The Arizona Senate candidate Masters, the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Arizona criticized the tabulation process in Maricopa County Friday.

Simply put, Cortez Masto was able to siphon away just enough votes from Laxalt, former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Nevada campaign co-chair, by making forays into the MAGA-leaning, rural parts of her state, padding her wins in urban strongholds like Reno and Las Vegas.

Laxalt tried to get voters to believe he would combat inflation, which he blamed on poor decision-making by Masto and Biden. He also promised to help secure America’s southern border, including resuming Trump’s border wall project.

The GOP argued that Democrats contributed to the sticker shock that many Nevadans are feeling at the gas by pushing for spending and relief bills. Cortez Masto focused on Democrats’ legislative efforts to reduce Americans’ costs, including on health care and prescription drugs, while trying to tie her Republican opponent to “big oil.”

Cortez Masto also tried to remind voters of Laxalt’s history as one of Trump’s campaign co-chairs and accused him of pushing an “extreme agenda” and conspiracy theories that she said fueled the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

She and other Democrats tried to argue that abortion rights would be jeopardized in Nevada, even though they are protected by the 1990 voter referendum. Laxalt wrote in an Op-Ed for the Reno Gazette Journal that he would not support a federal ban on abortion and that abortion access was settled law in 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.

What Do We Really Want to Do? Senator Biden, Walker, and Warnock: Sixteen Years of Defending a Woman’s Right to Choose

What’s more, the Senate has sole authority to confirm judicial nominations and key executive appointments, which is critical, even if a Republican House blocks other major Biden initiatives.

“I think it’s a reflection of the quality of our candidates,” Biden told reporters in Cambodia shortly after CNN and other news outlets projected Democrats would keep their Senate majority. All of them are on the same program. Biden went on to say that was wasn’t anyone who wasn’t focused on what we did.

On December 6, the Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker will square off in an election that was called after neither of them got 50% of the vote.

Biden is a Democrat, and said he is looking forward to the next couple of years with Democrats, but admitted it would be better to have 51 seats in the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Saturday night that the Democrats hold on the Senate was avindication of the party’s agenda and meant a rejection of the anti-Democratic, misogynist, and racist Republicans in Congress.

“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.

“Because the American people turned out to elect Democrats in the Senate, there’s now a firewall against a nationwide abortion ban threat that so many Republicans have talked about.”

The only Senate seat that hasn’t changed hands so far in the elections is Pennsylvania, where Democrat John Fetterman ousted Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor 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.

A Letter to Cortez Masto, the Secretary of State of Nevada, About the Referendum to the 2020 Nevada Election Results “Overhaul the Fake Election System”

After serving as Nevada’s attorney general, she became the first Latina ever elected to the U.S. Senate. She campaign on women’s reproductive rights and bashes Laxalt for calling the decision a joke, categorizing a vote for her opponent as an automatic vote for a federal abortion ban.

NPR previously reported that the Republican candidate referred to Trump as the current president during a call earlier this summer, while also supporting the former president’s claims that the 2020 election results were a sham.

Less than one month before the election, 14 members of Laxalt’s family wrote a three-page letter endorsing his opponent, the Nevada Independent reported. The letter praises Cortez Masto’s record as attorney general, as well as her positions on women’s issues and public land preservation.

“We believe that Catherine possesses a set of qualities that clearly speak of what we like to call ‘Nevada grit,’ ” the letter said. “No further comments will be made, as we believe this letter speaks for itself.”

Laxalt responded to the letter over Twitter, saying he wasn’t surprised that some Democratic members of his family are supporting another Democrat, despite living out of state.

The AP reported that a democrat has been elected the Secretary of state in Nevada, which will be a blow to a person who supported the president.

Many people attended the event to show their support for pro-democracy candidates, which resulted in a close race where Jim Marchant was the winner and he was supported by some of the most popular politicians in the area. He had vowed to “overhaul the fraudulent election system” in Nevada.

Aguilar painted the race for Nevada’s top voting official as crucial to democracy in the swing state.

“Truth and honesty and trust are what we should be living up to.” And it’s my responsibility if I’m elected secretary of state to build that trust from scratch,” Aguilar told NPR on Tuesday, before voting ended. “My opponent has built everything he has on a false foundation of lies and disinformation.”

The Nevada race call, which came Saturday evening, means that every election denier running in a secretary of state race in a competitive state was defeated, following losses by Republican candidates in Arizona, Michigan and Minnesota, among others.

Marchant lost a race for a U.S. House seat in 2020, and he claimed afterward that the election was fraudulent, though he never provided evidence to support that claim. He gained Trump’s endorsement, and the former president rallied with him in October.

Marchant was among the most radical candidates running for a secretary of state position this midterms cycle. Marchant was the most dangerous candidate in America, and on Tuesday he told NPR that eliminating early voting was one of his key goals.

In addition to saying that he wanted to severely restrict voting access in Nevada, Marchant has also led a push in the state for counties to hand-count ballots instead of using machines, even though research has shown that method to be less accurate.

The Truth About Joe Biden and the High Court Decision: From America’s First Prime Minister to the Supreme Court: What Happened After Obama’s Reelection?

Editor’s Note: David Axelrod, a senior CNN political commentator and host of “The Axe Files,” was a senior adviser to President Barack Obama and chief strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns. The opinions in this commentary are his own. There are more opinions on CNN.

That politician was Joe Biden, who whispered that salty line (in fuller form) to then-President Barack Obama a dozen years ago at the signing of the Affordable Care Act, only to have it captured on a hot mic.

Biden could have shouted it from the rooftops of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he is at an Asian summit, and it would have been forgiven. Democrats will retain control of the US Senate after Sen. Catherine Masto won reelection in the Silver State.

If Republicans take the House, Democrats will still have control of the agenda on the Senate floor and committees.

Anyone that doubts this should consider how GOP Senate leaderMitch McConnell and the GOP majority blocked Garland from being heard for eight months, denying him a vote. In just a few weeks before the 2020 election, McConnell and the same majority fast-tracked Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.

The high court was vastly reshaped by the two other conservative justices named by Trump, and they opened the way to a series of radical decisions, including the decision that overturned abortion rights half a century ago. It is possible that the backlash that followed the court decision will have something to do with the Democratic victories in Nevada and elsewhere this year.

The Prime Minister lost his majority in the British parliamentary elections of 1945 and his wife got assurances that it was a blessing in disguise.

The referendum on the ruling party and President became just as much a judgment on the opposition and its leader, Trump, this year. It was a rebuke of election denialism and coarseness.

That verdict was not lost on some Republican politicians who, out of fear and opportunism, have stuck with Trump despite knowing better. It has been amazing to watch the quick exodus from his camp by Murdoch and his right-wing media empire. It is permissible to disobey democracy and decency but it cannot be condoned.

The verdict from Nevada came while Biden was overseas, meeting with his peers from around the world and poised for a sidebar meeting with China’s Xi Jinping.

The President might have been hobbled going into these discussions by a thumping in the midterms. It would have intensified growing doubts among our allies and adversaries about the durability of American democracy and about Biden’s political viability.

The people had their say, and dealt a blow to Trump and the Republicans who were campaigning against them.

This election proved that every vote counts according to the person campaigning on women’s reproductive rights. She recalls her grandmother, the oldest of 13 children, who would walk to her local polling place even when she could no longer drive because she knew how important it was to exercise that right and make her voice heard.

The Purple State: Voting for a Democratic Senator, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, During Biden’s Presidency

Nevada is a purple state because of its 15 rural counties that vote Republican. She says people assume it’s blue because Democrats have done a good job in the area.

This is not about blue or red for most Nevadans, she says. “This is about standing up and fighting for Nevada families and making sure you understand them so you can help make their lives a bit easier, so you can make sure that you’re willing to take on those challenges that they are dealing with.”

Do we still have work to do? Absolutely. You know, a gallon of gas is still high in Nevada. I am aware of it. I’m frustrated by it, because I fill up my gas tank and so many of my family and Nevadans do. Our costs of living are too high. We have more to do to help families and reduce their costs. And do I have ideas about that? Absolutely. I have legislation that deals with it. Nevadans are looking for that. They’re looking for something.

For 14 years she worked for the Nevada state legislature as a Democrat. She is a columnist for the Reno Gazette-Journal and a retired human services professional. The views expressed in this commentary are of her own. CNN has an opinion on it.

Of all the Senate Democrats said to be at risk of being engulfed by a Republican “red wave,” Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto was widely viewed as the most vulnerable. And yet as we all now know, the incumbent senator from Nevada now will serve another six years, after being declared the projected winner this weekend over her Republican challenger.

Democratic control of the Senate for the second half of Joe Biden’s presidency is all but certain after the crucial win of the Colorado Democrat, Cortez Masto.

When the last large batch of ballot results were released from Democrat-leaning Clark County late Saturday, Cortez Masto took a decisive lead over her election-denying Republican challenger Adam Laxalt. And when she was pronounced the winner, progressives breathed a long sigh of relief. We were waiting for the country to regain its sanity and repudiate the lies and misinformation of Trump and his associates.

The full story has yet to be written about how she was able to wrest victory from Laxalt, but if you look at the vote percentages coming in for Cortez Masto from rural Nevada over the last few days, they are surprisingly high given the overwhelming Republican registration there. Those critically important rural votes, added to the urban vote, pushed her over the top.

(Adam Laxalt’s grandfather Paul Laxalt was a beloved former governor and US senator from Nevada, whose family emigrated from the Basque country in the 1920s to raise sheep in the high desert of Northern Nevada.)

The Nevada Democratic establishment used a vaunted get-out-the-vote ground game in their campaign, and it was designed by the former Democratic Majority in the Senate.

Hundreds of volunteers from California flooded into Nevada to provide election help for the senator, who received a lot of support from progressive advocacy groups and individual backers.

The founder of Third Act, a new national group that focuses on people over 60 to work on climate justice, went to Nevada to meet with many older Nevadans just before the election. He was joined by renowned author Rebecca Solnit and Secretary of State candidate Cisco Aguilar at a “Defend Our Democracy” event in Reno.

Nevadan Senator Vicente Sisolak: Bringing the Greatest President to the November Voting Reinvigorated by QA Non-linked Marchant

Lombardo proclaimed the former president “the greatest president” a few days later after he expressed unhappiness with the comment. It looked like he was weak and beholden to Trump, but he kept their support and made them believe in him.

Many factors played into Sisolak’s defeat, some of them outside his control, including the global pandemic, which devastated Nevada’s tourism industry for months. Sisolak, to his credit, prioritized public health measures and saving lives while absorbing anger and resentment from Nevadans who valued their mask-avoiding liberty over protecting their neighbors.

The state’s unemployment system couldn’t keep up with the number of people suddenly unable to work because he closed the Las Vegas strip for months.

They kept an election-denier out of the all important post of secretary of state. In previous election years, that race would have been of back burner interest. But this year, flipping the seat into Democratic hands and away from meddling of the Republican challenger – QAnon-linked Marchant – was a top priority for many Democratic voters.

The governor-elect will have an opportunity to reform the state government. He may be in for a shock when he discovers just how woefully underpaid the state workforce is and its astronomical vacancy rates.