Along with neighboring Arizona, Nevada was one of two battleground states where the Senate outcome remained up in the air long after Election Day as officials counted every last batch of ballots to determine the winner. A third key Senate race — the matchup between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and former football star Herschel Walker in Georgia — is headed to a Dec. 6 runoff after neither candidate secured the 50 percent of the vote needed to win outright. But Cortez Masto’s crucial victory in Nevada now gives Democrats 50 seats in the Senate, regardless of what happens in Georgia. In a 50-50 Senate, Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris gives the tiebreaker. Retaining the Senate despite this year’s high inflation — and a deep historical pattern of strong midterm backlash against the president’s party — ranks as one of the most surprising and consequential results of an election in which Democrats fared much better than expected. It also makes Joe Biden the first Democratic president since John F. Kennedy in 1962 to not only retain control of the Senate but possibly even extend his majority there. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, DN.V. and Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak at an election night party in Las Vegas on Nov. 8. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) While Laxalt narrowly led the vote count for much of the week, his rural firewall was ultimately not strong enough to withstand Cortez Masto’s two-to-one advantage among the tens of thousands of eleventh-hour mail-in voters in and around the Las Vegas and Reno whose ballots were counted last. With more than 95 percent of the vote counted, the Associated Press declared the race for Cortez Masto late Saturday. Her margin of victory was about half a percentage point, making Nevada in 2022 the closest contest for the Senate. It was a fitting end to a race that had been tied at the polls leading up to Election Day. When legendary Nevada Sen. Harry Reid announced his retirement in 2015, he tapped Cortez Masto—the state’s former attorney general—as his successor. She won Reid’s old seat the following year by 2.5 percentage points, becoming the first Latina senator in US history. The story continues With inflation hitting Nevada, a working-class state, national Democrats openly worried about Cortez Masto’s chances in 2022. Often described as a “work horse” rather than a “show horse,” the senator had struggled to raise her home profile again, despite helping provide pandemic relief for the state’s hospitality industry and reducing monthly insulin costs. Recent elections have shown Republicans gaining ground across the state, boosted in part by a shift to the right among Latino men. And no one knew which way the state’s growing independent electorate would blaze. Republican Senate candidate Adam Laxalt at a campaign event in Las Vegas on November 5. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images) For his part, Laxalt seemed almost destined to run. His grandfather was “Tall” Paul Laxalt, the widely admired Nevada governor and senator who was so close to President Ronald Reagan that the New York Times called him “First Friend.” His mother is Paul’s daughter Michelle, a lobbyist who was working as a Reagan operative when Adam was born in 1978. And in 2013, Michelle revealed that Adam, then 34, was the secret son of the longtime senator from New Mexico, Pete Domenici. Laxalt succeeded Cortez Masto as attorney general in 2016 and then launched an unsuccessful bid for governor two years later. In 2020 he embraced Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rigged and stolen and ran a seemingly endless campaign claiming that “thousands of illegal votes” had cast “grave doubt” on the Nevada results. (When Nevada’s Republican secretary of state reviewed 3,963 alleged election integrity violations filed by the state’s GOP, she found no evidence of widespread fraud.) Laxalt’s hope this year was that after locking up his party’s pro-Trump base in the primary — which he won by 20 percentage points — he could turn to the general election with soft-focus ads that portrayed him as the once awkward son of a single man. mother who overcame alcoholism to become the “protector” of his own young children. “I turned my life around,” she told the camera. “This taught me that helping others gives meaning to life.” Laxalt largely avoided the press. And he downplayed his support for a state referendum banning abortions after 13 weeks of pregnancy, saying the issue should remain up to each state. In Nevada — where a 1990 statute protects abortion rights from “legislative modification or repeal” up to 24 weeks of pregnancy — “that means the only people who can change Nevada’s abortion policies are Nevada voters.” , he said. But thanks in part to a massive $44 million war chest — and a relentless barrage of attack ads denouncing Laxalt as the “charming” scion of an “elite” family as well as “the proud face of the Big Lie in Nevada” who ” did it’s clear he wants to make abortion illegal” to start — Cortez Masto was able to continue. Preliminary exit polls show Cortez Masto winning Latinos 62% to 33% — much better than some polls had predicted, and almost exactly in line with Hillary Clinton’s margin there in 2016. The same polls showed also that Cortez Masto (48%) was beating Laxalt (45%) among independents, who make up about a third of the Nevada electorate. Typically, the president’s party loses independents by double-digit margins in midterm years.
