Call it a November surprise. Democrats enjoy a midterm defeat that looks like a victory, an overnight election that reverses the recent trend of US voters to punish the party in the White House. But along the way, they may have breathed new life into a new Big Lie: allegations of voter fraud, this time centered on Arizona. Republicans had a good night and were on track to win control of the House of Representatives, but the “red wave” they were hoping for never happened. That appears to include Arizona, where former TV anchor Kari Lake borrowed heavily from Donald Trump’s campaign playbook in her bid for governor. Despite trailing Secretary of State Katie Hobbs by more than 10 points, Lake is citing widespread reports of voting machine malfunction to suggest she was the victim of voter fraud. Who will control the Senate also remains an open question, with the battle between NFL running back Herschel Walker and Democratic incumbent Rep. Raphael Warnock likely heading into a December runoff. A narrow Republican margin of victory in the House, uncertainty in the Senate and new, unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud all point to continued chaos on Capitol Hill. And that, ultimately, may be the part of Tuesday’s midterm elections that ends up affecting Canada the most, said Eric Miller, president of the D.C.-based Rideau Potomac Strategy Group. “Even if the boom isn’t as big as anyone thought it would be, now you have a situation where the endless commentary in Canada — how the U.S. is headed for breakup, or a civil war, or can’t be trusted, and so on — will only get stronger,” Miller said. “The system is starting to not work as it should, there is no ability to deal with the big picture issues, there is no ability to pursue serious bilateral relations.” One clear result on Tuesday will have an immediate impact: the re-election of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the driving force behind the effort to shut down Canada’s Line 5 cross-border pipeline. Whitmer narrowly beat Republican challenger Tudor Dixon, a steel industry insider turned conservative commentator who sought to use Canada’s defense of Line 5 against her Democratic opponent. Even Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “the most radical environmentalist in the entire world,” is opposed to closing the pipeline, Dixon said during her discussion with Whitmer last month. The Michigan battle was just one of 506 gubernatorial, House and Senate races that came to fruition Tuesday in a midterm showdown that pollsters and pundits expected would be a chilling indictment of the Biden administration. It wasn’t to be — at least not on the scale Republicans had hoped. They were on track to regain control of the House, the only outcome most political pundits were confident in predicting, given the midterm voters’ traditional pattern of punishing the incumbent’s party. But disappointment at the scale of the victory was written on the face of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is widely expected to wrest the speaker’s baton from Nancy Pelosi if Republicans claim the majority. “It’s clear we’re going to take back the House,” McCarthy told supporters in D.C. “You’re out late, but when you wake up tomorrow, we’ll be in the majority and Nancy Pelosi will be in the minority.” Early on, Democrats managed to hold onto two House seats in Virginia, a state Republican Gov. Glenn Youngin won last year despite Biden’s landslide 10-point victory there in 2020. Then Kathy Hochul triumphed in her bid for a first full term as governor of New York, despite a strong Republican challenge. And in Pennsylvania, Lieut. John Fetterman, sidelined for much of the summer with a stroke that affected his speech and raised questions about his fitness for office, won a narrow but crucial victory over Dr. Mehmet Oz, another partner Trump. “I’m not really sure what to say right now,” a visibly humbled Fetterman, dressed in his trademark black hoodie, told supporters. “This campaign has always been about fighting for everyone who has ever been knocked down and getting back up.” In Arizona, a problem with voting machines immediately fueled accusations of election fraud, first by Trump on social media and later by Lake, as she urged supporters not to drop out of the race. Officials insisted that problems with the machines didn’t stop anyone from voting, but that didn’t stop Lake from insisting otherwise. “When we win, the first line of action is to restore election honesty in Arizona,” she told supporters as she trailed Democrat Katie Hobbs, the secretary of state, by 12 percentage points with half the polls reporting. “When we win – and I think it will be within hours – we will declare victory and get to work to reverse this – no more incompetence and no more corruption in Arizona elections.” Neck-and-neck races in battleground states had ensured that the question of whether Republicans could wrest control of the upper chamber away from Democrats would not be resolved immediately. In Ohio, venture capitalist and “Hillbilly Elegy” author JD Vance — another Republican with Trump’s stamp of approval — soundly defeated Congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat who had tried to distance himself from President Joe Biden. And in Wisconsin, Republican incumbent Ron Johnson had a narrow 40,000-vote lead over Democrat Mandela Barnes with about 98 percent of the vote counted. That, combined with Fetterman’s win, shifted the focus to Georgia, where Walker and Warnock spent the night trading a lead. With 95 percent of the vote, Warnock was ahead of Walker by just under 35,000 votes, but remained half a percentage point short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a repeat run-off next month. “We’re not sure if this journey is over tonight or if there’s still a bit of work to be done,” Warnock told his supporters. “Here’s what we know: we know that when the votes are counted from today’s election, we will have received more votes than my opponent.”
